Much of the English-language reception of Heidegger’s early thinking about language and speech —at least among readers influenced by the tradition of analytic philosophy—is organized around two interpretive devices. The first device is a distinction between “instrumental” and “constitutive” conceptions of language.1 An instrumental conception of language treats words as means by which humans represent fundamentally independent facts. According to this view, individual speech acts involve the use of conventional signs as tools for representing the world and expressing mental states. (...) The constitutive conception of language, by contrast, views language as in some manner conditioning or determining... (shrink)

I argue in this paper that Mountaintop Removal (MTR) is part of what I call “ecological violence.” Whereas the common conception of violence perceives it as harm directly inflicted against an individual by a person or group, I seek to illuminate a form of violence that operates in the complex interrelation between people and the environing world they disclose through their practices. Ecological violence, as I understand it, is ecological in that it concerns the practices through which humans understand and (...) uncover beings in their surrounding environments. It is violent in that it is concerned with practices that sever people and other beings from the relations necessary for their authentic being. MTR, I argue, is violent in just this sense. To make sense of the concept of “ecological violence” I draw on the philosophies of Martin Heidegger and György Lukács. (shrink)

Brandon Absher demonstrates that the neoliberalization of higher education has led to a paradigm shift in contemporary philosophy in the United States. Neoliberal philosophy aims to produce human capital and profitable knowledge.