Online research in philosophy

In Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory between Past and Future , Nikolas Kompridis proposes a new model of critique for critical theory based on the unlikely alliance he constructs between Habermas and Heidegger while seeking to avoid the philosophical shortcomings of both. Focusing on his accounts of ‘receptivity’, arguably the central concept in his new model of critique, I argue sympathetically that although his rejection of some and appropriation of certain features of Habermas' theory serve his philosophical aims, his allegiance to Heidegger’s ontology would thwart his interest in receptivity as an alternative model of critique stressing the interpretation of meaning and learning over validity and rationality. Kompridis must be attentive to the conditions that enable or constrain receptivity, yet this is a theoretical move unavailable to him within his Heideggerian framework. To secure the work learning performs in his critical model Kompridis must relinquish ontology and cultivate an approach situating receptivity in the political and socially contingent contexts in which it is conditioned.

Even though the concept of a 'validity claim' is central to Habermas's theory of communicative action, he has never given a precise definition of the term. He has stated only that truth is a type of validity claim, and that rightness and sincerity are analogous to truth. This paper explores the basis of this analogy, arguing that rightness and sincerity must share at least two characteristics with the truth predicate: each must be the designated value in an appropriate system of logic, and each must serve as the 'central notion' in a theory of meaning for some corresponding class of speech acts. It is these two characteristics that establish the internal connec tion between understanding and justification that Habermas's more general project requires. However, there is an unnoticed tension between these two characteristics, since the relative autonomy of linguistic meaning from specific contexts of use appears to require that speech acts be governed by a uniform logic, and thus by a single validity claim. Key Words: communicative action • - Habermas • - pragmatics • - speech act theory • - truth • - validity claim.

In his essay The Origin of the Work of Art, Martin Heidegger discusses three examples of artworks: a painting by Van Gogh of peasant shoes, a poem about a Roman fountain, and a Greek temple. The new entry on Heidegger’s aesthetics in the Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy, written by Iain Thomson, focuses on this essay, and Van Gogh’s painting in particular. It argues that Heidegger uses Van Gogh’s painting to set art, as the happening of truth, in relation to ‘nothing’, which is a key term in Heidegger’s essays leading up to The Origin of the Work of Art. This paper extends a similar analysis to the Greek temple as a way of offering an exposition of Heidegger’s concerns in the essay. It begins by briefly outlining Thomson’s argument that Heidegger relates Van Gogh’s painting to ‘nothing’, and indicating the way this argument can be extended to the Greek temple. It then discusses three ways in which ‘nothing’ can open up the significance of the temple as a work of art in which truth happens: (1) it is not concerned with objective representation; (2) it depicts the primal strife of earth and world, concealing and unconcealing; (3) it is fundamentally historical.

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.”.

This paper discusses Heidegger's 1931-32 lecture course on The Essence of Truth. It argues that Heidegger read Platonic ideas, not only as stage-setting for the western philosophical tradition's privileging of conceptualization over practice, and its correlative treatment of truth as correctness, but also as an early attempt to work through truth as the fundamental experience of unhiddenness. Wrathall shows how several of Heidegger's more-famous claims about truth, e.g. that propositional truth is grounded in truth as world-disclosure, and including Heidegger's critique of the self-evidence of truth as correspondence, are first revealed in a powerful (if iconoclastic) reading of Plato.

The following thesis explores the notion of truth as developed in the work of Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin. Contrary to the position adopted by many commentators, who seek to drive a wedge between Heidegger's unorthodox phenomenology and the resolutely non -phenomenological Benjamin, I shall want to show how both begin with a rigorously Husserlian conception of truth as an intuition of essence in order, finally, to deviate from it. I argue that, for neither one, can truth be merely one problem or issue taken up by a thinking secure in itself. Rather, from its most classical determination in, for example, the Metaphysics as έπιστήμη της άληθείας, the way in which truth has been determined has itself determined the very project of philosophy. Yet whilst the trajectory of both Heidegger and Benjamin's work can thus be determined in large measure by the question of truth, both are also concerned to re-orient that question in a direction that renders problematic Aristotle's implicit connection of truth to knowledge and knowledge to intuition and presence. I argue that their respective challenges to the location of truth in the act of knowing -a challenge made each time by way of an analytical regression from a propositional understanding of truth (Satzwahrheit) to intuitive truth (Anschauungs-wahrheit) to, finally, its more original character as disclosedness (Erschlossenheit) - remain thoroughly phenomenological before showing how it is in the work of art, and in tragedy in particular, that each one finds the resources for a still more radical understanding of truth. Not in the cognitivist sense that art makes truth claims about the world, but in the sense that it is with the work of art that the historical act of disclosure and world -constitution that Benjamin and Heidegger call truth is most emphatically made.

Heidegger is against the modern tradition of philosophical “aesthetics” because he is for the true “work of art” which, he argues, the aesthetic approach to art eclipses. Heidegger's critique of aesthetics and his advocacy of art thus form a complementary whole. Section 1 orients the reader by providing a brief overview of Heidegger's philosophical stand against aesthetics, for art . Section 2 explains Heidegger's philosophical critique of aesthetics, showing why he thinks aesthetics follows from modern “subjectivism” and leads to late-modern “enframing,” historical worldviews Heidegger seeks to transcend from within—in part by way of his phenomenological interpretations of art. Section 3 clarifies this attempt to transcend modern aesthetics from within, focusing on the way Heidegger seeks to build a phenomenological bridge from a particular (“ontic”) work of art by Vincent van Gogh to the ontological truth of art in general. In this way, as we will see, Heidegger seeks to show how art can help lead us into a genuinely meaningful postmodern age. Section 4 concludes by explaining how this understanding of Heidegger's project allows us to resolve the longstanding controversy surrounding his interpretation of Van Gogh.

Machine generated contents note: Part I. Truth and Disclosure: 1. Unconcealment; 2. The conditions of truth in Heidegger and Davidson; 3. On the 'existential positivity of our ability to be deceived'; 4. Heidegger on Plato, truth, and unconcealment: the 1931-32 lecture on The Essence of Truth; Part II. Language: 5. Social constraints on conversational content: Heidegger on Rede and Gerede; 6. Conversation, language, saying and showing; 7. The revealed word and world disclosure: Heidegger and Pascal on the phenomenology of religious faith; Part III. Historical Worlds: 8. Philosophers, thinkers, and Heidegger's place in the history of being; 9. Between the earth and the sky: Heidegger on life after the death of God; 10. Nietzsche and the metaphysics of truth.

Lambert Zuidervaart challenges current intellectual trends by proposing a new hermeneutic theory of artistic truth, engaging with both analytic and continental philosophies and clarifying the contemporary cultural scene. Although it is unfashionable to talk about artistic truth, its issues have not disappeared. Indeed, questions concerning the role of the artist in society, the relationship between art and knowledge, and the validity of cultural interpretation have actually intensified.

Contemporary philosophical stances toward `artistic truth' derive from Kant's aesthetics. Whereas philosophers who share Kant's emphasis on aesthetic validity discount art's capacity for truth, philosophers who share Hegel's critique of Kant render artistic truth inaccessible. This essay proposes a critical hermeneutic account of aesthetic validity that supports a non-esoteric notion of artistic truth. Using Gadamer and Adorno to read Kant through Hegelian eyes, I reconstruct the aesthetic dimension from three polarities in modern Western societies. Then I describe aesthetic validity as an horizon of imaginative cogency governing the exploration, presentation and creative interpretation of aesthetic signs. The essay argues that aesthetic processes, so construed, are crucial to cultural pathfinding, and that aesthetic validity-claims in art talk contribute significantly to this pursuit. Aesthetic validity, cultural orientation and art talk constitute the hermeneutical matrix from which questions of artistic truth emerge. Key Words: Theodor W. Adorno • aesthetics • art • Hans-Georg Gadamer • Jürgen Habermas • hermeneutics • imagination • Immanuel Kant • language • validity.