Online research in philosophy

DEFINING THE LIMITS OF THE FIELD. Because 'consciousness and the body' is central to so many philosophical endeavors, I cannot provide a comprehensive survey of recent work. So we must begin by limiting the scope of our inquiry. First, we will concentrate on work done in English or translated into English, simply to ensure ease of access to the texts under examination. Second, we will concentrate on work done in the last 15 years or so, since the early 1990s. Third, we will concentrate on those philosophers who treat both consciousness and the body together. Thus we will not treat philosophers who look at body representations in culture, nor philosophers who examine socio-political bodily practices with minimal or no reference to consciousness. Finally, even with the philosophers we choose to treat, we cannot be comprehensive and will instead make representative choices among their works. With that being said, we will have a fairly liberal definition of continental philosophy, operationally defined as that which makes (non-exclusive) reference to the classic phenomenology of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. Thus we will include the radical..

Critical Heidegger brings together a selection of the best work on Martin Heidegger from a number of key commentators working in Europe. These new and classic essays, for the most part translated from German and French originals, are an essential guide to the current European reception of Heidegger and make available essays that have had considerable impact on English-language Heidegger studies.

There are many links between Kuki Shūzō and the French philosophy of the 1920s that treated the phenomenon of contingency. Examined are (1) the problem of time as it presented itself to French philosophers at the beginning of the twentieth century and its reception by Kuki as an Oriental philosopher and a Buddhist; (2) the problem of liberty and of existence in these French philosophers and in Buddhism; and (3) the phenomenon of the dream as a psychic and aesthetic phenomenon for Kuki and for the French philosophers in question.

The purpose of this article is to analyze the significance of the absence of the problem of living body in Heidegger's analytic of Dasein. In order to evaluate the occurrences of the problem of the body in Being and Time, I also refer to the context of some of Heidegger's later work where there is to be found a sketch of an ontological investigation of the living body. I analyze then in detail the scarce occurrences of body in the fundamental ontology, showing finally that the lack of a proper phenomenological examination of living body generates a series of conceptual difficulties for the problem of Dasein's death, precisely when the issue of dead body is at stake.

In Heidegger's Neglect of the Body, Kevin A. Aho suggests the critics largely fail to appreciate Heidegger's nuanced understanding of Dasein, which is not to be ...

Although Martin Heidegger is undeniably one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, among the philosophers who study his work we find considerable disagreement over what might seem to be basic issues: why is Heidegger important? What did his work do? This volume is an explicit response to these differences, and is unique in bringing together representatives of many different approaches to Heidegger's philosophy. Topics covered include Heidegger's place in the 'history of being', Heidegger and ethics, Heidegger and theology, and Heidegger and Nazi concepts of race. More generally, the contributors also address their respective visions of the nature of philosophy and the presuppositions which guide their understanding of Heidegger.

"French Interpretations of Heidegger undertakes a philosophical engagement with the work of the most significant and creative figures involved in the reception ...

In Being and Time, Heidegger explicitly defers any consideration of ourselves (Dasein) as embodied. I try to account for Heidegger's reluctance to talk about 'the body' in connection with his explication of Dasein, by arguing that doing so would be at odds with the kind of investigation his 'phenomenology of everydayness' is meant to be. That Heidegger omits discussion of the body in Being and Time might lead one to think of the human body in terms of the other categories Heidegger deploys: readiness-to-hand and presence-at-hand (Being and Time) and biological organisms (Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics). I argue that any such identification ought to be resisted, as these categories serve only to deprive our bodies of their specifically human dimension. Indeed, by surveying the failure of these categories as proper to the human body, we gain further insight into Heidegger's initial deferral: only given the existential analytic can one begin to offer a proper account of ourselves in bodily terms.

Martin Heidegger's impact on contemporary thought is massive and controversial. In France, the prestige of this German philosopher is such that contemporary French thought cannot be properly understood without reference to him. Heidegger and French Philosophy examines the reception of Heidegger's thought in France. Tom Rockmore argues that in the period after World War II, due to the peculiar nature of the humanist French philosophical tradition, Heidegger became the master thinker of French philosophy. Rockmore engages with the controversy over Heidegger's political affiliation with Nazism and the debate on how this commitment can be reconciled with his theory. Examining the relation between Heidegger's philosophy and his politics, the book contends that the French reception of Heidegger's thought--first as philosophical anthropology and later as postmetaphysical humanism--has been systematically mistaken.