This article follows a strand of ethical thought that weaves itself throughout Leo Tolstoy’s religious writings: the injunction of non-resistance. This ethical position has been described by some critics as a form of religious idolatry in Tolstoy’s work. I challenge that claim in this article by deploying the work of Emmanuel Levinas to provide much needed nuance to Tolstoy’s call for non-resistance. Via the ethical framework provided by Levinas, I contend that Tolstoy’s positions are built upon a conception of the (...) finite world that sees a proper comportment to finitude as the mode by which one engages the infinite. This ethical call is one that escapes satiation by demanding a ceaseless act of non-resistance—which is, for him, the essential kernel of the Christian message. Tolstoy’s God, I argue, is this infinite demand; something akin to an ethical claim that marks the subject—a mandate that is met when one enacts the ethical obligation of non-resistance. (shrink)

The 1929 confrontation between Heidegger and Cassirer in Davos (Switzerland) is pivotal for the history of the twentieth-century philosophy. The stake of that encounter was the appropriation of Kant’s legacy during the first half of the last century and the fate of Neo-Kantianism between the two World Wars. Since then, the “Davos disputation” has become controversial among researchers of the development of philosophical orientations in the twentieth century. Moreover, not only these researchers, but also the attendants of that dispute, express (...) opposite views on its outcome. Central at Davos was the issue of human finitude and transcendence within a Kantian framework. Although Kant addresses this issue most explicitly in his moral philosophy, the research of the Davos disputation tends to focus primarily on theoretical matters. The thesis revaluates Heidegger’s and Cassirer’s debate on human finitude and transcendence against the background of their written interpretations of Kant’s critical ethics. Heidegger’s reading of Kant’s conception of human finitude turns out to underestimate Kant’s views on the human potential for transcending, while Cassirer turns out to overestimate that potential by downplaying Kant’s arguments for ineluctable finitude. According to a moderate interpretative position, halfway between Heidegger’s and Cassirer’s, a finite being has, for Kant, a potential to transcend “within” – not “beyond” – finitude. (shrink)

In this paper, I will discuss the Heideggerian interpretation of death in relation with two fundamental structures of the existential analysis: understanding and state-of-mind . In the first part, I will highlight how the understanding opens the phenomenon of death as a possibility: this possibility will prove to be a specific imminence, in that it must be assumed by the Dasein in itself, as Dasein’s ownmost and non-relational possibility that cannot be outstripped. In the second part, I will analyse the (...) relation between death and the affectivity, emphasizing the contrast between the traditional position on this subject – which involves the philosophical neutralization of a natural fear of death – and Heidegger’s position, suggesting a dynamic tension between the fear and anxiety, where anxiety is not an annihilation of fear, but its existential radicalization. (shrink)

This article explores the consecutive modifications that phenomenology underwent in the works of Heidegger and Levinas. In particular, it discusses their importance for contemporary attempts to expand — and transcend — phenomenology in philosophy and the social sciences. Heidegger and Levinas responded to the problem of subjectivity — and intersubjectivity — in diametrically opposed ways and consequently the exposition of their thoughts involves focusing on conceptual dichotomies like finitude and infinity, time and eternity. Ultimately, it is argued that the (...) very conceptions of the human being that the two thinkers furnish under the guise of Dasein and Autrui reveal the impasses associated with western metaphysics and pave the path for the development of more adequate theorizations of subjectivity, radical otherness and communal being. (shrink)

This article explores the connection among woman, sex, and finitude. In stuying finitude, the argument follows the articulation of finitude with woman. In a first part, it discusses three “women” writers—Virginia Woolf, Simone De Beauvoir, and Hélène Cixous—to establish their thoughts on woman in terms of finitude. The three of them are identified as women and yet they problematized what to be a woman is. In tracing their thoughts on finitude and woman, sexual difference –the (...) body as enjoying emerges as an issue. Thus, in a second part, it discusses two seemingly opposed positions—Lacanian psychoanalysis, with Joan Copjec, and deconstruction, with Derrida—to think further about the question of woman, sexual difference, the “two,” and finitude. This study compares the Lacanian feminine side with the movement of deconstruction and establishes the necessity of thinking a “two” beyond the binary of phallogocentrism. My thesis is that thinking finitude with woman leads us to a non-oppositional two that correlates with sexual difference. The Lacanian feminine side, and Derrida’s deconstruction aim to think these two logics, delineating two sides: a male one (comparable with phallogocentrism) and a feminine side (comparable with the movement of deconstruction). If the male side considers finitude (death) as the limit of life, the feminine side opens to death and life, and the in-finitude of the undetermined and undecidable. In thinking finitude with woman, the knowledge of what to be a woman is, becomes undetermined and undecidable. (shrink)

In Heidegger’s lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology, finitude, not the infinite, is shown to be the site of ‘divine’ awareness of being. Heidegger uses the term ‘abandonment’ (Verlassenheit) to summarise the finitude that Hegel overlooked – abandonment being a theme that Heidegger had first developed in Sein und Zeit as Überlassenheit or ‘delivered over’. However, while abandonment counters the Hegelian absolute, where nothing is ever left out, it does not escape it, since the distress of finitude then becomes (...) what is essential or timeless. This realisation comes to Heidegger later, during his lectures on Nietzsche, where the notion of the abandonment of beings by Being (Seinsverlassenheit) conveys that, from the standpoint of Being, finitude is what is positively given in time rather than an essence that is recovered with the demise of the infinite. The ‘death of God’, in other words, thought from the side of Being rather than beings, is what first lets finitude be. Finally, I suggest that Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, which also exhibits affirmative rather than resentful atheism, develops the theme of abandonment in a very different register from Heidegger – as the end of every telos or work. Heidegger’s thought of abandonment, by contrast, remains tied to a task. (shrink)

This book explains how to read Plato, emphasizing the philosophic importance of the dramatic aspects of the dialogues, and showing that Plato is an ironic thinker and that his irony is deeply rooted in his philosophy.

Based on proposition 28 of Part I of Spinoza's Ethics, I argue that the idea of interdetermination set out there is formed by excluding indetermination and finalism. Spinoza conceives reality as an infinite network of singular interdeterminations without hierarchies or outside. From interdetermination itself the problem arises of what it means to be a finite mode of God. This problem, however, is more fully resolved through the notion of 'absolute necessity of relation'. Once we have these conceptual tools, we can (...) understand the way in which finitude and absoluteness merge in singular things, making them cognizable with objectivity. But just because all things are knowable, it does not mean that we can know them all. For the power of our understanding is also limited. Affirming the knowability of all things and the limitation of our capacity to know, Spinoza challenged both irrationalistic scepticism and the mistake of human thought for the infinite understanding of God. (shrink)

En su lectura de la Wissenschaftslehre de 1794, Heidegger acusa a Fichte de no ser capaz de concebir la finitud del conocimiento. El argumento esgrimido por Heidegger es que el rechazo fichteano de la noción de “cosa en sí” implica una negación de la ñnitud. En el presente trabajo se defiende la posición opuesta: Fichte no sólo reconoce enteramente la finitud del conocimiento, sino que la funda también en una dimensión práctica cercana a la noción de Heidegger de “cuidado”.

Este artigo tem por objetivo analisar a noção de finitude na obra de Sartre como base para a antropologia existencial desenvolvida nela. Perpassando desde O ser e o nada até as últimas entrevistas, discutimos tal tese a partir das análises, sobretudo, de Bornheim, Moutinho e Mészáros. Para isso, num primeiro momento discute a relação entre ser, finitude e negação. Num segundo momento, associamos a noção de finitude com a de singularidade e como por ela é estabelecida a (...) relação entre ontologia, história e psicanálise existencial. Por fim, afere ao jogo dos irredutíveis como a dinâmica própria que subjaz à antropologia existencial. (shrink)

O artigo tem como objetivo mostrar que o enunciado levinasiano de um outramente que ser se constrói a partir de uma posição estratégica que o conceito de intencionalidade assume na escrita de Levinas. A tomada de posição deste filósofo em relação ao tema da finitude implica, pode-se dizer, uma interpretação não-ontológica do conceito husserliano de intencionalidade.

Hoje, chega ainda até mim a pergunta que Merleau-Ponty, em 1935, na École Normale Supérieure, fazia insistentemente a Desanti - 'Que é que tu te propões esclarecer com isso?' Como se a pergunta me fosse dirigida, tenho a impressão de responder que, nesta dissertação, pretendo tão só um pouco de luz sobre o mistério da morte. Tal como a percepção é um mistério, e cada um de nós vive no mundo no interior da fé perceptiva, assim o mistério da vida, (...) que nos permite a existência, envolve a si a esperança de que a morte seja aparência da dimensão do visível. (shrink)

This article inquires into the clinical figure of paranoia and its constitutive role in the articulation of the nation-state discourse in Europe, uncovering a central tension between a principle of integrity and a dualist spatial configuration. A conceptual distinction between ‘border’ (finis) and ‘frontier’ (limes) will help to expose the political effects of such a tension, unveiling the way in which a solid and striated organisation of space has been mobilised in the topographic antagonism of the nation, sustaining the phantasm (...) of a self-enclosed, self-sufficient finitude. (shrink)

The paper formulates and proves a strengthening of 'Frege's Theorem', which states that axioms for second-order arithmetic are derivable in second-order logic from Hume's Principle, which itself says that the number of Fs is the same as the number of Gs just in case the Fs and Gs are equinumerous. The improvement consists in restricting this claim to finite concepts, so that nothing is claimed about the circumstances under which infinite concepts have the same number. 'Finite Hume's Principle' also suffices (...) for the derivation of axioms for arithmetic and, indeed, is equivalent to a version of them, in the presence of Frege's definitions of the primitive expressions of the language of arithmetic. The philosophical significance of this result is also discussed. (shrink)

Western modernity was born with a revolution of limits. Western man, who has become the creator of his own destiny, has identified freedom with a conscious and systematic violation of the given conditions, with a future that constantly transcends the present. This modern condition is thus characterised by the fact that it is limited by boundaries that are mobile and can change. From this observation arises the paradoxical situation that growth today is inconceivable if it is not linked to a (...) scenario of scarcity, in contrast to premodern theological views based instead on the abundance of creation, the original richness of the world. Inspired by this vision of a sustainable world, ecological thinking today is immediately associated with a language of finitude. Degrowth, self-limitation, and resource efficiency, these are all terms associated with a universalist model of progress that seems to know no limits. This article argues that the world is doomed to its own inevitable end if sustainability is understood from the perspective of an economically sustainable future defined by the limits of capitalist management. If, on the other hand, we step out of this impoverished and economic perspective of the concept of limit and the condition of finitude, then we open ourselves to an ecocosmic perspective that understands the world as part of a cosmic diversity that cannot be contained within a more or less extended totality of resources. In this article, being finite is understood ecologically as being a non-self-sufficient part of the interrelated possibilities of worldmaking, not as an element of a set of individuals or things. (shrink)

The confusion surrounding Heidegger's account of death in Being and Time has led to severe criticisms, some of which dismiss his analysis as incoherent and obtuse. I argue that Heidegger's critics err by equating Heidegger's concept of death with our ordinary concept. As I show, Heidegger's concept of death is not the same as the ordinary meaning of the term, namely, the event that ends life. But nor does this concept merely denote the finitude of Dasein's possibilities or the (...) groundlessness of existence, as William Blattner and Hubert Dreyfus have suggested. Rather, I argue, the concept of death has to be understood both as temporal finitude and as finitude of possibility. I show how this reading addresses the criticisms directed at Heidegger's death analysis as well as solving textual problems generated by more limited interpretations of the concept. (shrink)

Human finitude and its implications have long been one of the central themes of Western philosophy. The essays gathered together in this volume explore various facets of this not altogether pleasing fact with which we must realistically come to terms.

A fundamental theme in Gilbert Meilaender’s work on bioethical issues is the relationship between the ethical claims of finitude and of freedom. This article identifies two ways in which Meilaender articulates this relationship and proposes a third way which avoids the limitations of the first two ways while serving Meilaender’s purpose, which is to redress what he sees as an imbalance in favor of the claims of freedom over those of finitude in contemporary biomedicine and bioethics. The article (...) ends by suggesting that Meilaender’s purpose would be best served by avoiding tensions between finitude and freedom as the third way does. (shrink)

This article aims to analyze the problem of totality in Sartre in its relation with finitude. We begin with the problem of ontological solitude by which we analyze Being as the exteriority of indifference and the event of the it-self or ontological act. Postulating this event as a process of singularization and the life of the individual, we show how the finitude affects totality as totalization and singularization. Image condensed by the singular universal, the finitude, then, is (...) not taken as an isolated totality, but is understood by its opening of the human in the singularization of a life. (shrink)

The paper discusses Anselm's account of human finitude and freedom through his discussion of what it means to receive what we have from God in De casu diaboli. The essay argues that Anselm is considering the same issue as Jean Paul Sartre in his account of receiving a gift as incompatible with freedom. De casu diaboli takes up this same question, asking about how the finite will can be free, which requires that it have something per se, when there (...) is nothing, as St. Paul asserted in Romans, that we have not received. Anselm's notion that we have two wills, one for benefit or advantage, and one for justice, allows for something to come per se from the individual who wills and also accounts for the willing of the good angels as the acceptance of what they are and have as received and, hence, as finite. The essay concludes with reflection on Sartre and Camus's The Plague taking as the central ethical and existential problem of human life, as Anselm does, the problem of finitude, and comparing their responses. (shrink)

This response article argues that the question of “extrahuman relations” obtains on not just one level but two. It is not just a question of our relations to nonhuman forms of life—such as, for example, the embodiment and finitude we share with other beings. It's also a question of a second form of finitude that obtains in our prosthetic subjection to any semiotic system whatsoever that makes possible “our” concepts, “our” recognition and articulation of our “nonhuman relations” in (...) the first place. By examining the bird poems of Wallace Stevens, I demonstrate that with the question of extrahuman relations we are always talking, in other words, not about a thematics but about a technics of address. (shrink)

Eric Weil, Karl Jaspers e Martin Heidegger são três filósofos alemães, um deles, judeu: Weil apresenta na categoria do finito uma possibilidade entre os discursos filosóficos que compreende Heidegger e Jaspers. O presente artigo propõe uma compreensão parcial de Jaspers e Heidegger por meio da categoria do finito weiliana e da retomada operada por essa possibilidade do discurso – a finitude – da categoria da obra, cuja fenomenologia é o nazismo. Para esse objetivo, dividiu-se o artigo em três seções, (...) seguidas de uma introdução. Na Introdução apresentamos a relação entre os três pensadores dada por meio de dois textos de Weil. Também elencamos os motivos da escolha das obras de Heidegger e Jaspers que serão discutidas. A primeira seção do artigo contém uma apresentação dos conceitos weilianos que são a base para as seções seguintes. Na segunda seção, esses conceitos são cotejados com o pensamento heideggeriano. Na terceira seção, aplicamos o mesmo método ao pensar de Jaspers, mostrando as limitações que o pensamento de Heidegger encontra no plano político. Encerramos com um pequeno balanço da discussão. (shrink)

In what is undoubtedly the most thorough and most sympathetic examination of Heidegger's later thought, Joan Stambaugh guides the reader through the density of multiple approaches to a postmetaphysical, poetic expression of the finitude of Being. Sifting her way through difficult and obscure formulations of the "open," "the strife between concealing and unconcealing," the distinction between what may be called relative nihilism and absolute nihilism, Heidegger's quarrel with Rilke's image of "the open" as infinite, and the theme of the (...) "presencing of the clearing for self-concealing" in the as yet untranslated work Beiträge, Stambaugh offers running commentary, exposition, and interpretation on texts that are both unique and strange. Throughout, Heidegger's suggestion that Ereignis should properly be rendered as "appropriation" is followed and the "need" that Being has for Dasein's response to its "presencing" is emphasized. (shrink)

Este artículo pretende ilustrar la esencia metaética del gnosticismo. En concreto, el rasgo clave del gnosticismo se identifica con la creencia en la ecuación de finitud y mal, es decir, con la definición del mal como "ausencia de bien" (en lugar de "privación de bien"). El ensayo también pretende mostrar cómo esta concepción del mal subyace a una serie de posturas filosóficas y políticas contemporáneas, centrándose en particular en la esencia gnóstica del transhumanismo. En conclusión, se intenta exponer el carácter (...) contradictorio de este gnosticismo "moderno", frente a la coherencia metaética de la escatología cristiana clásica. (shrink)

The chapter approaches the hermeneutic concept of experience introduced by Hans-Georg Gadamer in Truth and Method (1960) from the perspective of the conceptual history of experience in the Western philosophical tradition. Through an overview of the concept and the epistemological function of experience (empeiria, experientia, Erfahrung) in Aristotle, Francis Bacon, and Hegel, it is shown that the tradition has considered experience first and foremost in methodological terms, that is, as a pathway towards a form of scientific knowledge that is itself (...) increasingly immune to experience. Science strives “beyond” experience because of the limitations inherent in the fundamentally contingent, singular, and negative character of experience: experience comes to us through unpredictable chance encounters and in singular situations and negates, tests, or “imperils” previous knowledge, thereby transforming it. By contrast, philosophical hermeneutics rethinks experience precisely in terms of these limitations. In the hermeneutic approach articulated by Gadamer and Claude Romano, experience is an encounter with the irreducible finitude and historical situatedness of one’s understanding and conceptual framework, an encounter with an otherness that puts our preunderstanding to test and requires us to revise it. Hermeneutic experience is thus a singular event that irreparably transforms us. (shrink)

In this paper, I take Philip Rossi’s robust interpretation of critique as an interpretive guide for thinking generally about how to interpret Kant’s texts. I reflect first upon what might appear to be a minor technical issue: how best to translate the term Fähigheit when Kant utilizes it in reference to the human experience of pleasure and displeasure. Reflection upon this technical issue will, however, end up being a case study in how important it is when we are interpreting Kant’s (...) texts to have Rossi’s focus on human finitude in the background. The terrain for these reflections on human finitude will be the realm of feelings of pleasure and displeasure. And the result will be that, counter to recent interpreters, like Elizondo, who have suggested that Kant could welcome a thoroughly active conception of rational feeling, we must instead, as guided by Kant’s commitment to human finitude, remember that every feeling for Kant—even the most rational of feelings, like the moral feeling of respect, or the pleasure he notes that we take in the proper functioning of one’s virtuous rational self—must be understood within the purview and constraints of the finite and sensibly-affected human being. I hope, then, that this brief reflection can be taken as one small piece of that larger story Rossi so aptly describes in his book, the story which answers the question of “What is critique?” in a way that insists upon but also simultaneously celebrates the centrality of finitude in human existence. (shrink)

_Suggests that a full acceptance of the finitude of existence can lead to the affirmation of God._.

Suggests that a full acceptance of the finitude of existence can lead to the affirmation of God.

It is argued that the social significance of nanotechnologies should be understood in terms of the politics and ethics of uncertainty. This means that the uncertainties surrounding the present and future development of nanotechnologies should not be interpreted, first and foremost, in terms of concepts of risk. It is argued that risk, as a way of managing uncertain futures, has a particular historical genealogy, and as such implies a specific politics and ethics. It is proposed, instead, that the concepts of (...) contingency and of finitude must be central to any understanding of the ethical significance of nanotechnologies, as these concepts can be used to understand the basis of recent work in science and technology studies, and the sociology of knowledge more widely, which details the multi-dimensional social nature of technological uncertainty. (shrink)

El artículo parte de la distinción poliana entre ser creado y ser increado y expone, a partir de ahí, la distinción Dios-criatura que permite el estudio metafisico de la finitud. En un segundo momento se aproxima a la interpretación que L. Polo ha dado de M. Eckhart en lo que se refiere al estatuto ontológico de lo finito; para este asunto, se acerca a la comprensión de la criatura en el Logos creador, cuestión que es tratada, con sus diferencias respectivas, (...) en Tomás de Aquino, Eckhart y Leonardo Polo. (shrink)

L’objectif de cette contribution est de montrer de quelle façon la phénoménologie de Renaud Barbaras permet de faire droit à ce que l’on peut définir comme la finitude radicale de la manifestation. Si, chez Barbaras, la finitude constitutive de toute manifestation est radicale, c’est dans la mesure où elle est elle-même finie, c’est-à-dire habitée par une indétermination originaire. L’inachèvement constitutif de toute manifestation est lui-même inachevé. Il y a un polymorphisme de la finitude...

Stambaugh (philosophy, City U. of New York) elucidates one of the central themes in the work of German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), based on her talks with him, and on her extensive study of his works, several of which she has ...

ABSTRACTThis article examines Heidegger's assessment of negativity and finitude in the late 1930s and his enlargement of these issues in the name of a leap from one type of philosophy, one type of beginning, to a wholly other beginning. The guiding concerns of this article are negativity, finitude and the leap, and how these overlapping concerns coalesce around Heidegger's attempts to move towards a wholly other type of philosophy; in fact, one which no longer understands itself to be (...) philosophy at all. The article concludes with a discussion of the role of death, sacrifice, and mourning in Heidegger's thought in the 1930s. (shrink)

What does it mean to experience and engage in religious ritual? How does liturgy structure time and space? How do our bodies move within liturgy, and what impact does it have on our senses? How does the experience of ritual affect us and shape our emotions or dispositions? How is liturgy experienced as a communal event, and how does it form the identity of those who participate in it? Welcoming Finitude explores these broader questions about religious experience by focusing (...) on the manifestation of liturgical experience in the Eastern Christian tradition. Drawing on the methodological tools of contemporary phenomenology and on insights from liturgical theology, the book constitutes a philosophical exploration of Orthodox liturgical experience. (shrink)

This article aims to analyze in Sartre's philosophy the notion of personalization. Inserted in the framework of existential psychoanalysis, this notion elucidates about the original choice and the existential project. Since his first works, Sartre has presented an impersonal transcendental conscience, so that freedom as nadification is independent of psychic life. We want to demonstrate that from the development of existential psychoanalysis freedom is not separated from the notion of personalization, but presupposes it due to the finitude condition of (...) freedom. In this case, although it presupposes an impersonal transcendental field, freedom can only be apprehended concretely through personalization. This presupposes a necessary relationship between ontology and existential psychoanalysis in the elucidation of freedom, history, and the man. (shrink)

This book integrates pragmatism and transcendental philosophy in examining the most serious problem defining the human condition, death and mortality. Its analysis of human limits and finitude is intended to be relevant to the concerns of philosophers specializing in, for example, transcendental philosophy, philosophical anthropology, pragmatism, Wittgenstein, and the philosophy of religion. Mortality is studied as providing a necessary framework within which questions concerning the meaningfulness or meaninglessness of human life become possible.