This book aims to develop an account of living together with difference which recognises the tension that we are inescapably with others - both human and non-human - but at the same time are always differing from and with those with whom we find ourselves. A concern for coexistence and questions over how we might live together have been raised and approached from a host of conceptual starting points in recent times, including via calls for a rethinking of communism today, (...) the articulation of forms of 'cosmopolitics' or 'pluralism', the re-figuring of understandings of ecology as dark or feminist, amongst others. This book responds to such questions of coexistence by developing what it calls a 'co-existential analytic'. In doing so, this book introduces a range of post-phenomenological thought which offers means for thinking about such questions of living together with difference. The thought of Emanuel Levinas on the face of the other, Jean-Luc Nancy on being as being-with, Roberto Esposito on the munis, and Michel Henry on pathic auto-affection are introduced and critically reflected upon in terms of what they offer for thinking about such coexistence. Alongside these conceptual starting points, a series of encounters - with cinema, everyday life, politics, and literature - are used to animate and illustration the discussion. Ultimately, the book argues for a 'spacing' of subjectivities with that world and those encountered within it. This book is intended primarily for researchers and postgraduate students interested in questions of identity, difference, and subjectivity. It will be of interest to those in the fields of social and cultural geography, sociology, social theory, and cultural studies. (shrink)

Phenomenologists or Continental thinkers argue for the subject-object continuum. For phenomenology, subjectivity is of the object, and object is for the subject. This book applies that continuum to the holistic foundations of work or specialization. The author devotes a chapter to each of eight cultural applications of the subject-object continuum. Chapter One examines the specialist-generalist continuum meaning specialization for general education. That continuum comprises the framework for the remaining seven chapters. Those seven include production for community, design for user, automation (...) for user, computing for society, taxation for society, information for manufacturing, and procedure for goal. These eight applications constitute the basis for a core curriculum. The core curriculum gives holistic meaning, order, or cosmos to all jobs and to all people. Cosmos is a Greek word meaning humanistic-scientific order, irreducible to physics. The core curriculum is fundamental cosmology. Each of the eight continuities follow in a logical, systematic manner from the analytic-subjective continuum meaning object for subjectivity. Phenomenology of education can become the human basis of a promising holistic logic, bringing together analytic and existential themes. (shrink)

This essay locates Jean-Luc Nancy's analyses, developed in relation to three invented terms, expeausition, excription, sexistence, in a threefold context: between Immanuel Kant on experience and Heidegger on existence; with Derrida on rethinking life and death ( lavielamort); and as a response to the alteration in phenomenology consequent on a transposition of key themes out of the German speaking context of the analyses of Husserl and Heidegger into the French language context of the French reception. An intensification ( survie) of (...) life forces may arrive in a ‘living on’ ( survivre) where thought processes only partially brought to expression in the lifetimes of their originators acquire precision and definition in moments of extremity, danger and horror, adding a fourth dimension to the initial three. (shrink)

Purpose. The article aims to comprehend the concept that has a serious anthropological meaning, – a "co-existential educational community" – which points at the real subject and object in the development of the educational reality, as well as to explicate its importance towards understanding the real way of addressing actually to the culture and its acquisition in the pedagogical process. Theoretical basis. To achieve this purpose, the method of categorical-reflexive analysis of texts and problems of real educational realities is (...) used; this allows to involve of such philosophical concepts as "sobornost", "all-unity", "culture" and distinguish their anthropological meaning. Under this approach, philosophical categories are able to appear as internal dimensions of the essence in the educational process, rather than a certain matrix, for which one or another theoretical or practical construction is adjusted. Originality. The originality of the article lies in the actualization of philosophical content in "sobornost" and "all-unity" concepts for philosophical-educational discourse and in solving the question on the real way of entering culture in the context of pedagogical communication. Conclusions. Addressing the idea of a co-existential educational community is able to oppose the widespread superficial notions of the so-called "educational environment" in the pedagogical and psychological literature and orient pedagogical theory and pedagogical practices on the real way of entering the individual into truly human forms of life. It is argued that the co-existential educational community can and should unfold not only "horizontally", but also "vertically", consciously integrating the high culture in itself as a culture of high. The authors emphasized the role of imagination in this process. Education can and should build co-existence with the culture of participants in pedagogical communication. It is with this approach that the education sector can emerge from the systemic crisis and actively oppose those trends in modern social life that increase alienation and depopulation. (shrink)

The present article aims to provide an original interpretation of Jan Patočka’s philosophy of history starting from the consideration of the debt it holds with Heidegger’s thought, in particular with the existential analytic of Being and time. Of Heidegger’s analytics, in fact, Patočka grasps and assumes with great radicality and originality the peculiar ‘modal logic’, according to which the existential dimension of closure, inauthenticity and estrangement from oneself is not opposed ‘frontally’ to that of openness, authenticity and (...) nearness to oneself of existence, being rather co-owned by it in the form of a privative modalization. We have therefore aimed to show how such a scheme is the one by which Patočka, in his Heretical Essays, interprets the whole adventure of Western history starting from its ‘emersion’ in ancient Greece. In particular, thanks to such a reconstruction we were able to shed light on the position of the phenomenon of work in Patočka’s philosophy: the Patočkian conception of work, understood as an obstacle par excellence to authentic historical existence, represents not only the true stakes of the comparison of the phenomenological- existential line in which Patočka is inserted with a Marxist theory of alienation; starting from here, moreover, it is potentially a clearer framework of the Patočkian genealogy of Western civilization and its form of subjectivity in relation to the approach of other genealogical philosophies of the last century. (shrink)

By virtue of the originality and depth of its thought, Emmanuel Levinas’s masterpiece, _Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, _is destined to endure as one of the great works of philosophy. It is an essential text for understanding Levinas’s discussion of “the Other,” yet it is known as a “difficult” book. Modeled after Norman Kemp Smith’s commentary on _Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Levinas’s Existential Analytic _guides both new and experienced readers through Levinas’s text. James R. Mensch (...) explicates Levinas’s arguments and shows their historical referents, particularly with regard to Heidegger, Husserl, and Derrida. Students using this book alongside _Totality and Infinity _will be able to follow its arguments and grasp the subtle phenomenological analyses that fill it. (shrink)

In the discussion of global ethics, philosophical ethics risks losing its distinct theoretical horizons. This predicament arises primarily from philosophy's failure to anchor its own object and to provide a rational basis for global justice from within its current confined theoretical paradigm. Against this background, this paper will first prioritize global co-existence as the primary concern of global ethics, then propose ontological co-existence justice as its foundational principle, and finally argue that the normative validity of co-existence justice is predicated on (...) the nations fulfilling the critical requirements of modern civilization, namely, the advancement of individual freedom. (shrink)

In the discussion of global ethics, philosophical ethics risks losing its distinct theoretical horizons. This predicament arises primarily from philosophy's failure to anchor its own object and to provide a rational basis for global justice from within its current confined theoretical paradigm. Against this background, this paper will first prioritize global co-existence as the primary concern of global ethics, then propose ontological co-existence justice as its foundational principle, and finally argue that the normative validity of co-existence justice is predicated on (...) the nations fulfilling the critical requirements of modern civilization, namely, the advancement of individual freedom. (shrink)

Existentially, Igbo-African metaphysics swivels around ethics, morality, justice, and medicine. This state of being is evident in their credo on the ontology of the deities, which they see as a strategic variable in their hierarchy of beings and a critical agent in their quest for sane, responsible, peaceful existence and co- existence. Based on these premises, this paper interrogated these variables to establish the symmetry between them. In doing this, this research employed the critical analytic cum existential model (...) in its analysis. After which, it became palpable that the existence and ontology of the deities accentuates the mode of operation of the Igbo-African and from that position; it was blatant that the communal life of the Igbo-African makes African metaphysics a lived-metaphysics or what I have called anthropologised-metaphysics. (shrink)

To the limited extent that Arendt’s stance on Heidegger has been studied in relation to her thinking on guilt, the focus has been on her outright repudiation of Heidegger’s controversial ontologization of guilt. However, that Arendt does not simply repudiate Heidegger’s account of guilt becomes clear if we recognize that she deals with guilt, albeit less explicitly, in her theory of political action, particularly in her notion of “trespassing” as a specifically political form of harm. In this context, Arendt appropriates (...) key features of Heidegger’s account. I argue that, in doing so, she transfers Heideggerian features into a political framework, insisting that they proceed not from individual existential indebtedness but from political intersubjectivity, or what she polemically – with a redefined Heideggerian term – calls the “with-world” (Mitwelt). This politicization testifies to Arendt’s overall approach to Heidegger’s existential analytic: a critical-transformative appropriation through her signature concepts of action and plurality. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger has been one of the most influential but also criticized philosophers of the XX century. With Being and Time (1927) he sets apart his existential analytic from psychology as well as from anthropology and from the other human sciences that deny the ontological foundation, overcoming the Cartesian dualism in search of the ontological unit of an articulated multiplicity, as human being is. Heidegger’s Dasein Analytic defines the fundamental structures of Dasein such as being-in-the-world, a unitary (...) structure that discloses the worldhood of the world; the modes of being (Seinsweisen), such as fear (Furcht) and anxiety (Angst); and the relationship between existence and time. In his existential analytic, anxiety is one of the fundamental moods (Grundbefindlichkeit) and it plays a pivotal role in the relationship of Dasein with time and world. The paper firstly focuses on the modes of being, underling the importance of anxiety for the constitution of human being; secondly, it is shown the relationship between anxiety and world, and anxiety and time: rejecting both the Aristotelian description of time, as a sequence of moments that informs our common understanding of time, and the Augustine’s mental account of inner time, Heidegger considers temporality under a transcendental point of view. Temporality is ek-static, it is a process through which human being comes toward and back to itself, letting itself encounter the world and the entities. The transcendental interpretation of time provided by Heidegger may give its important contribution in psychopathology. (shrink)

In this moderate realist account of the whole range of issues facing contemporary analytic philosophy, J. K. Swindler aims to fill the gap in the literature between extreme realism and extreme nominalism. He discusses such fundamental concepts as existence, property, universality, individual, and necessity; analyzes the paradoxes of negative existentials and the substitutivity of co-referential terms; and defends objectivity in philosophy. The study moves through three phases: first, an argument that objective philosophical truth is attainable; second, an extended realist (...) analysis of fundamental ontological concepts; and finally, a demonstration of advantages of this ontology over leading alternatives. Weaving: An Analysis of the Constitution of Objects will be of interest to all philosophers working in contemporary philosophy, philosophy of language, logic, and metaphysics, and will serve as an excellent text for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in metaphysics. (shrink)

In this article I chronicle the emergence of two interrelated themes that crystallized in my investigations of emotional trauma during the more than 16 years that followed my own experience of traumatic loss. One pertains to the context-embeddedness of emotional trauma and the other to the claim that the possibility of emotional trauma is built into our existential constitution. I find a reconciliation and synthesis of these two themes—trauma’s contextuality and its existentiality—in the recognition of the bonds of deep (...) emotional attunement we can form with one another in virtue of our common finitude. (shrink)

The irreducibility thesis -- The facticity of practices -- Constructing practice theory through double hermeneutics -- The trans-subjectivity of social practices -- The dialogical self as thrown projection in practices -- Epilogue -- Bibliography -- Index.

There have been many (and good) analyses of the Spanish left-populist party Podemos (2014-16) in terms of ideology, politics and class. However, this chapter focuses on an almost completely neglected dimension of its rise and fall: temporality. Firmly based on Nietzsche’s distinction in the Second Untimely Meditation between three “species of history” –the antiquarian, the critic and the monumental–, and moving on to Heidegger’s reinterpretation, which sees it as corresponding to the three “ecstatic times” –past, present and future–, the following (...) chapter applies this framework of analysis to the realm of politics by creating three different characters which may explain its relationship with time: the nostalgic (past), the opportunist (present) and the utopian (future). Through a detailed analysis of Podemos as a case study, the following chapter proposes that its internal conflict between the followers of Pablo Iglesias, Íñigo Errejón and the Anticapitalist Left cannot be only explained by recourse to the traditional categories of ideology, politics and class, but also more fundamentally as a dispute over time itself, in which the pablistas represented the primacy of the past (nostalgia), the errejonistas, the present (opportunity), and the anticapitalistas, the future (utopia). Since these three characters are equally one-sided if taken separately, this chapter ends with an attempt at a reconciliation of the three ecstatic times in a political reformulation of being-as-a-whole-within-time-ness. (shrink)

En los reproches que José Ortega y Gasset le hace a Martin Heidegger sobre el problema del ser, al afirmar que este no puede ser un ciego punto de partida, una creencia, se evidencia la distancia entre dos perspectivas unidas por el horizonte real que pretenden explorar: la vida humana. Sin embargo,..

The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) can be used to determine co-author responsibility for a scientific paper describing collaborative research. The objective is to deter scientific fraud by holding co-authors accountable for their individual contributions. A hiearchical model of the research presented in a paper can be created by dividing it into primary and secondary elements. The co-authors then determine the contributions of the primary and secondary elements to the work as a whole as well as their own individual contributions. (...) They can use the results to determine authorship order. (shrink)

The irreducibility thesis -- The facticity of practices -- Constructing practice theory through double hermeneutics -- The trans-subjectivity of social practices -- The dialogical self as thrown projection in practices -- Epilogue -- Bibliography -- Index.

Assuming that every set is constructible, we find a${\text{\Pi }}_1^1 $maximal cofinitary group of permutations of$\mathbb{N}$which is indestructible by Cohen forcing. Thus we show that the existence of such groups is consistent with arbitrarily large continuum. Our method also gives a new proof, inspired by the forcing method, of Kastermans’ result that there exists a${\text{\Pi }}_1^1 $maximal cofinitary group inL.

Background In research on co-creation in nursing, a caring manner can be used to create opportunities for the patient to reach vital goals and thereby increase the patient’s quality of life in palliative home care. This can be described as an ethical cornerstone and the goal of palliative care. Nurses must be extra sensitive to patients’ and their relatives’ needs with regard to ethical and existential issues and situations in home care encounters, especially at the end of life. Aim (...) The aim of this study was to explore nurses’ experiences of dealing with ethical and existential issues through co-creation at the end of life in palliative home care. Research design, participants, and research context The material consisted of texts from interviews with 12 nurses in a home care context. A hermeneutical approach was used, and the method was inspired by a thematic analysis. Ethical considerations Informed consent was sought from the participants regarding study participation and the storage and handling of data for research purposes. Ethical permission to conduct the study was given from organizations that participated in this study. Findings A main theme and four subthemes emerged. The main theme was “Deep co-creative relationships are needed to manage ethical and existential issues at the end of life.” A model was created to display the findings and relations between ethical issues and situations and the need for a deep trustful caring relationship to solve problems in palliative home care. Discussion Together, the themes can be considered as a tool for learning and dealing with ethical and existential issues at the end of life in home care. The themes can also be seen as a part of nurses’ ethical competence within this context. Conclusion The quality of life at the end of life can be improved through co-creation, despite difficult ethical and existential issues. Future research should focus on co-creation from the patients’ perspective. (shrink)

The moral experience is a reality in every social and cultural life, with variations being in the interpretations given to experience. A people’s value system defines their identity. Consequently, this paper interrogates an example of an African theory of moral value against a moral developmental model, using the philosophical, expositional, analytical and comparative methods. The reflections in this paper focus on the Yoruba cultural context in Nigeria. The paper posits a relationship between a moral value system and development. It argues (...) that the inability of the Nigerian state to attain enviable developmental status can be attributed to moral decadence, apart from inept leadership, ethnicity, antagonism, endless vendetta, political jingoism and cultural sub-nationalism. Since the goal of morality is peaceful co-existence, harmonious interaction, social cohesion and character development, the paper argues that Omoluabi traits can be appropriated to tackle moral problems and questions in contemporary Nigerian society. It concludes that the cultural heritage of Omoluabi can serve as a corpus of raw material for contemporary moral life, and contribute to tackling existential, moral and developmental challenges. (shrink)

From Parmenides to the present, philosophers have been attracted by characterizations of being as being uttered or utterable, formulated or formulable. But what for Parmenides was presumably a valid co-entailment between antecedently understood concepts reappears in contemporary thought as a proffered explication of what it is to be. Without presuming to discredit Parmenidean views in general, my purpose here is to examine certain members of a modern family of theories of existence that fall into place around Quine’s. Depending on the (...) methodology of explication espoused, the theories in this family are either semantic commentaries on ideal languages, or they are themselves interpreted formalized languages. The former may be called, after Quine, theories of ontological commitment. The theories of the latter sort I wish to consider are called, after Karel Lambert, free logics, i.e., logic systems the singular terms of which are free of existential import. My conclusion about theories of both kinds is that, while unexceptionable on their own terms, from a broader point of view they beg the question of what it is to be. In arguing that these theories thus fail to clarify the concept of existence, I believe I am not so much propounding a new insight as articulating an objection many thinkers have felt in the face of views akin to Quine’s. (shrink)

This article explores the strategies available for defending Aquinas’s view of existence in the context of contemporary analytic philosophy. The rival view of existence prevalent among contemporary analytic philosophers is subject to serious objections. At the same time, the main contemporary analytic objections to Aquinas’s view can be adequately answered. The widespread use of “exist(s)” to ascribe existence to individuals and objects provides good reason to think that such use makes sense, and analogies like those of Aquinas (...) can help to illustrate the commonsense meaning of “exist(s)” to those who doubt it. The truth of Aquinas’s view of existence as a real property of individuals or objects can be defended at least in principle by appealing to its descriptive and explanatory usefulness. In addition to Aquinas’s own uses of it, there are a number of areas in contemporary analytic metaphysics where his view of existence could likely be of use, such as contemporary essentialism, substance-attribute ontology, and the revival of ontological pluralism. (shrink)

The set of complete groups is a complete co-analytic subset of the standard Borel space of countably infinite groups.

We show that the existence of a ${\Pi^1_1}$ -definable mad family is consistent with the existence of a ${\Delta^{1}_{3}}$ -definable well-order of the reals and ${\mathfrak{b}=\mathfrak{c}=\aleph_3}$.

We prove that if V = L then there is a $\Pi _{1}^{1}$ maximal orthogonal (i.e., mutually singular) set of measures on Cantor space. This provides a natural counterpoint to the well-known theorem of Preiss and Rataj [16] that no analytic set of measures can be maximal orthogonal.

Throughout much of the 20th Century, the relationship between analytic and continental philosophy has been one of disinterest, caution or hostility. Recent debates in philosophy have highlighted some of the similarities between the two approaches and even envisaged a post-continental and post-analytic philosophy. -/- Opening with a history of key encounters between philosophers of opposing camps since the late 19th Century - from Frege and Husserl to Derrida and Searle - the book goes on to explore in detail (...) the main methodological differences between the two approaches. This covers a very wide range of topics, from issues of style and clarity of exposition to formal methods arising from logic and probability theory. The final section presents a balanced critique of the two schools’ approaches to key issues such as Time, Truth, Subjectivity, Mind and Body, Language and Meaning, and Ethics. -/- Analytic Versus Continental is the first sustained analysis of both approaches to philosophy, examining the limits and possibilities of each. It provides a clear overview of a much-disputed history and, in highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of both traditions, also offers future directions for both continental and analytic philosophy. (shrink)

Richard Stanley Peters was one of the founding fathers of analytic philosophy of education in the twentieth century. After reviewing Peters’ disentanglement of the ambiguities of liberal education, I reconstruct his view on the status and the existential foundations of the humanities. What emerges from my reconstruction is an original justificatory argument for the value of liberal education as general education in the sense of initiation into the heritage of the humanities. To close, I evaluate the scope and (...) power of this argument from the existential concern of the humanities. (shrink)

Climate change is often described as an existential risk to the human species, but this terminology has generally been avoided in the climate-justice literature in analytic philosophy. I investigate the source of this disconnect and explore the prospects for incorporating the idea of climate change as an existential risk into debates about climate justice. The concept of existential risk does not feature prominently in these discussions, I suggest, because assumptions that structure ‘ideal’ accounts of climate justice (...) ensure that the prospect of climate change as an extinction-level threat does not arise. Given persistent noncompliance with mitigation duties, however, we have reason to revisit these assumptions. I argue that the most promising way for theories of climate justice to account for the significance of existential risk is to look to the practices of protest and resistance in which a concern about extinction or global catastrophe is frequently given expression. (shrink)

In this article, I present a critique of Robert Geraci's Apocalyptic artificial intelligence (AI) discourse, drawing attention to certain shortcomings which become apparent when the analytical lens shifts from religion to the race–religion nexus. Building on earlier work, I explore the phenomenon of existential risk associated with Apocalyptic AI in relation to “White Crisis,” a modern racial phenomenon with premodern religious origins. Adopting a critical race theoretical and decolonial perspective, I argue that all three phenomena are entangled and they (...) should be understood as a strategy, albeit perhaps merely rhetorical, for maintaining white hegemony under nonwhite contestation. I further suggest that this claim can be shown to be supported by the disclosure of continuity through change in the long‐durée entanglement of race and religion associated with the establishment, maintenance, expansion, and refinement of the modern/colonial world system if and when such phenomena are understood as iterative shifts in a programmatic trajectory of domination which might usefully be framed as “algorithmic racism.”. (shrink)

The Matrix raises several familiar philosophical problems in such new ways that students all over the country are assigning it to their philosophy professors. In so doing, they have offered us a great opportunity to illustrate some of the basic insights of existential phenomenology. The Matrix might seem to renew Descartes’s worry that, since all we ever experience are our own inner mental states, we might, for all we could tell, be living in an illusion created by a malicious (...) demon. In that case, most of our beliefs about reality would be false. But there is a way of understanding The Matrix that denies the mediation of mental states and shows those living in the Matrix to be in direct touch with Matrix reality. The Matrix world is public and objective, not a private subjective dream. Still, there is clearly a sense in which the Matrix world, while not merely mental, is not real either. There is after all a demon—the AI intelligences and their computer—that has in some sense fooled all those who accept the reality of the Matrix world. Thus, the film’s account of our situation is even more disturbing than Descartes’s claim that we are each confined to our own mind. The Matrix world is a vivid illustration of Descartes’s additional prescient claim that we could never be in direct touch with the real world because we are all what we would now call brains in vats. (shrink)

This ontological investigation is mediated via multifaceted phenomenological analytics and existential mediations over the architectural mode of being at home in solitary quarantine under communal global lockdowns. The present line of inquiry is undertaken by way of probing the attuned metamorphoses in solitude of the lived experiencing of the intertwined phenomena of space-time, embodiment-in-the-flesh versus being-with-others via cybernetic and telecommunication technologies, dwelling amidst things and paraphernalia, and the underlying affectivities of the mode of being-toward-death.

Climate change is widely recognized as a major risk to societies and natural ecosystems but the high end of the risk, i.e., where risks become existential, is poorly framed, defined, and analyzed in the scientific literature. This gap is at odds with the fundamental relevance of existential risks for humanity, and it also limits the ability of scientific communities to engage with emerging debates and narratives about the existential dimension of climate change that have recently gained considerable (...) traction. This paper intends to address this gap by scoping and defining existential risks related to climate change. We first review the context of existential risks and climate change, drawing on research in fields on global catastrophic risks, and on key risks and the so-called Reasons for Concern in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. We also consider how existential risks are framed in the civil society climate movement as well as what can be learned in this respect from the COVID-19 crisis. To better frame existential risks in the context of climate change, we propose to define them as those risks that threaten the existence of a subject, where this subject can be an individual person, a community, or nation state or humanity. The threat to their existence is defined by two levels of severity: conditions that threaten (1) survival and (2) basic human needs. A third level, well-being, is commonly not part of the space of existential risks. Our definition covers a range of different scales, which leads us into further defining six analytical dimensions: physical and social processes involved, systems affected, magnitude, spatial scale, timing, and probability of occurrence. In conclusion, we suggest that a clearer and more precise definition and framing of existential risks of climate change such as we offer here facilitates scientific analysis as well societal and political discourse and action. (shrink)

Existential gratitude-gratitude for one's very existence or life as a whole-is pervasive across the most influential human, cultural and religious traditions. Weaving together analytic and continental, as well as non-western and historical philosophical perspectives, this volume explores the nexus of gratitude, existence and God as an inter-subjective phenomenon for the first time. A team of leading scholars introduce existential gratitude as a perennially and characteristically human phenomenon, central to the distinctive life of our species. Attention is given (...) to the conditions under which existence itself might be construed as having a gift-like or otherwise gratitude-inducing character. Drawing on a diversity of perspectives, chapters mark out new territory in philosophical inquiry, addressing whether and in what sense we ought to be grateful for our very existence. By analysing gratitude, this collection makes a novel contribution to the discourse on moral emotions, phenomenology, anti-natalism and theology. (shrink)

This paper attempts to show how Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological interpretation of Aristotle’s theory of rhetoric can be interpreted usefully to understand the existential dimension of communication. Heidegger’s treatment of communication as a phenomenon is ontologically broader as he locates it within the existential analytics of Dasein. Taking Heidegger’s 1924 Marburg lecture, Being and Time and other texts dealing with the problem of the being of language as theoretical sources, this study first presents the importance of Heidegger’s conception of (...) rhetoric and then shows how this throws light on the ontological aspects of communication as such. Human beings in their basic mode of existence as being-in-the-world and speaking-with-one-another is always already in communication through language. If rhetoric is a way of having the existential view about how matters present themselves in a particular manner by virtue of speaking about it with-one-another, then it is in the region of the doxa of people. Further, how existential communication works in our concrete life is demonstrated through a rhetorical analysis of the film Blow-Up. (shrink)