Online research in philosophy

With a focus on the question of visuality in Heidegger's sustained involvement with Daoist and Zen thought, this paper discusses the interchange between Heidegger and Hisamatsu at a 1958 colloquium. In light of the key concerns – visuality, art, and the empty origin of manifestation – it interrogates three texts,The Origin of the Work of Art,Parmenides, andArt and Space,concerning visuality, the play of the glance, writing, space and place, and the Graeco-Asian though of phainesthai. In conclusion, it addresses the opening for a philosophical consideration of abstract painting that these analyses provide.

In this paper, we develop an analysis of unrealistic fiction that captures the everyday sense of ‘unrealistic’. On our view, unrealistic fictions are a species of inconsistent fictions, but fictions for which such inconsistency, given the supporting role we claim played by genre, needn’t be a critical defect. We first consider and reject an analysis of unrealistic fiction as fiction that depicts or describes unlikely events; we then develop our own account and make an initial statement of it: unrealistic fictions are those that invite us to believe something false. We further develop this account and restate it in terms of the notion of “import-export inconsistency.” That is, unrealistic fictions invite us to import certain propositions true in the actual world then invite us to export propositions entailing the negation of those imported. Finally, we consider whether for fiction being unrealistic is always an aesthetic flaw.

One of the central notions running through Heidegger’s oeuvre, early and late, is that of ‘world.’ By examining some issues and problems surrounding Heidegger’s statements relating to ‘world’ in his essay “The Origin of the Work of Art,” both aspects of Heidegger's broader trajectory of thought, as well as the workings of the artwork essay itself are thereby illuminated. Several, partially competing senses of ‘world’ are discovered in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” and their provenance traced to specific concerns of Heidegger. In a hermeneutic strategy of immanent critique, the artwork essay is shown to harbour the resources for its own deconstruction, and to do so precisely at certain aporetic textual points centred around the concept ‘world.’.

In his book, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, and especially in the “Excursus on Leveling the Genre Distinction between Philosophy and Literature” (pp. 185-210), Jürgen Habermas criticizes the work of Jacques Derrida. My aim in this paper is to show that this critique turns upon itself. Habermas accuses Derrida of effacing the distinctions between literature and philosophy. Derrida indeed works to subvert the distinction between fictional and argumentative writing, but in doing so he works with the genres he is mixing. It is Habermas’ own insistence on subordinating all genres to argumentative rationality that truly effaces these genre distinctions.

It is the aim of this paper to explicate the temporal phenomenon of “historicality” as related specifically to the work of art by reading Heidegger’s philosophy of the 1930s, as presented in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in relation to Being and Time (1927). There exists a critical link between the two works, which manifests in the relationship between the work of art, temporality, and the notion of authentic, historical Dasein as Being-in-the-world. This notion includes the understanding and reinterpretation of such concepts as “fate,” “heritage,” and “destiny,” as integral modes of Dasein’s “historicality.” The work of art for Heidegger, during the period after Being and Time, serves as a newfound source of truth (aletheia). As a powerful and legitimate mode of aletheuein, or movement into the open region of the “there,” art is the disclosure in which Being happens and is given to Dasein as historical. According to Heidegger, in its most profound manifestation, “great art” represents a cultural founding force, a temporal phenomenon, which facilitates Dasein’s movement into the work’s revelation of truth, serving as “the origin of a people’s authentic historical existence.”.

Reading Heidegger’s Being and Time, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” and the 1934-35 lecture courses Hölderlin’s Hymns“Germania” and “The Rhine,” the aim of this essay is twofold. First, the essay attempts to elucidate the manner in which the work of art functions as a superlative event of “truth-happening” (aletheia), which facilitates the movement of Dasein into the truth of Being as a legitimate member of a community, serving as, “the origin of a people’s authentic historical existence.”1 Second, it explains why this notion of art as the historical manifestation of Being is crucial to understanding the shift, or “turn,” (Kehre) in Heidegger’s philosophy of the 1930s and 1940s, i.e., it examines the philosophical problems Heidegger rectified when moving from Being and Time, and the conceptual-linguistic constraints of metaphysics and the subject-centered model of Dasein, to the later works on art and poetry.

In this essay I call attention to the fact that there is a work of art in Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art,” and yet almost no one talks about it: the C. F. Meyer poem “Roman Fountain.” This critical silence is all the more ironic, since (1) it is a self-sufficient artwork, and not just described or mentioned in the text; and (2) the poem’s fountain, as man-made spring, seems to speak to—if not speak of—Heidegger’s thesis concerning the Ur-sprung of the artwork itself. I argue that the poem illuminates a central problem or question concerning the status of art as mimesis, and I suggest that the reason why this poem tends to be overlooked amid the “obsessive” critical attention that it otherwise attracts can be found within the essay itself.

This essay argues that R.G. Collingwood's remarks about genre are implausible, and that they stem, despite their apparent origin in his wider account of art, from his failure to take some of his own most important insights seriously enough. Some possible reasons for that failure are suggested; and it is shown that, once the relevant insights are given their proper weight, Collingwood's account commands the resources from which a plausible story about genre might have been constructed. To this extent, the present essay constitutes a defence of Collingwood's philosophy of art.