Online research in philosophy

I criticize John Tallmadge’s attempt to derive an environmental ethic from Buber’s suggestion that we can enter into I-Thou relations with nature. I-Thou relations flourish only with beings who enter into dialogue with us, viz. human beings, and we can value other natural kinds without anthropomorphizing them.

Part I Describing and Prescribing He to whom thou was sent for ease, being by name Legality, is the son of the Bond-woman . . . how canst thou expect by ...

My aim in this article is to analyse the incrimination of ontology and ontological manifestations in reason, articulated speech and social order and argue that such an incrimination, which is characteristic of traditional philosophy, can be explained as a phenomenon of onto-theology. Then I demonstrate that the ideas of Levinas - and to some degree the Derridean response to them - suffer from residues of onto-theology to the extent that they preserve and promote the assumption that ontology is essentially violent. I claim that the Levinasian priority of ethics over ontology and the Derridean treatment of the opposition ‘ethics vs ontology’ rest on an epochal understanding of being. Such an understanding arrests time and echoes old religious doctrines that traditional philosophy preserved in a secular form and handed down to contemporary philosophical thinking. By charging Levinasian and Derridean ideas with onto-theology, I unveil what I consider to be one of the last dogmas of Occidental thought, i.e. the assumption that self-interest and violence are somehow endemic in the human condition. I suggest that we overcome this assumption, if we truly wish to view the I-Thou relation Other-wise. Key Words: Derrida • ethics • evil • Fall • Hegel • Heidegger • I-Thou • Kant • Kierkegaard • Levinas • ontology • onto-theology.

In an ω1-saturated nonstandard universe a cut is an initial segment of the hyperintegers which is closed under addition. Keisler and Leth in [KL] introduced, for each given cut U, a corresponding U-topology on the hyperintegers by letting O be U-open if for any x ∈ O there is a y greater than all the elements in U such that the interval $\lbrack x - y, x + y\rbrack \subseteq O$ . Let U be a cut in a hyperfinite time line H, which is a hyperfinite initial segment of the hyperintegers. The U-monad topology of H is the quotient topology of the U-topological space H modulo U. In this paper we answer a question of Keisler and Leth about the U-monad topologies by showing that when H is κ-saturated and has cardinality κ, (1) if the coinitiality of U1 is uncountable, then the U1-monad topology and the U2-monad topology are homeomorphic iff both U1 and U2 have the same coinitiality; and (2) H can produce exactly three different U-monad topologies (up to homeomorphism) for those U's with countable coinitiality. As a corollary H can produce exactly four different U-monad topologies if the cardinality of H is ω1.

Machine generated contents note: PART I: HEIDEGGER'S FUNDAMENTAL -- ONTOLOGY OF DASEIN -- Section A: Being and Time -- 1 Dasein and the World -- 2 Dasein's Being-in, Care, and Truth -- 3 Dasein and Temporality -- Section B: Heidegger's Rejection of the I-Thou -- 4 Phenomenology and Dasein -- 5 Heidegger's First Critique of the I-Thou -- 6 The I-Thou in Heidegger's Study of Kant -- 7 Metaphysics and Logic -- PART II: BUBER'S I-THOU -- Section A: I and Thou -- 8 First Presentation of the I-Thou -- 9 Living the I-Thou -- Section B: Beyond I and Thou -- 10 The I-Thou and Dialogue -- 11 Buber's Critique of Heidegger -- 12 Conclusion and Some Implications -- Selected Bibliography -- Index.

: In his book Monad and Thou: Phenomenological Ontology of the Human Being, Japanese philosopher Hiroshi Kojima proposes to redefine the I-Thou relation, first extensively investigated by Martin Buber, and to reconcile the notions of ‘individuality’ and ‘community’ in terms of his new phenomenological ontology of the human being as monad. In this essay, Kojima’s ideas are examined concerning the monad and intersubjectivity, and it is shown how these ideas can be extended and brought to bear on issues concerning human encounters with the environment and, in particular, to nonhuman animals.