Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Heidegger's phenomenology of boredom'

Creativity is a nebulous concept, lacking both clear articulations and common understandings of meaning. Due to a lack of clear alternatives the concept of creativity is increasingly becoming infused with economically driven vocabulary, associations, interests and ideologies. There is an immediate need to provide alternatives to the „creative economy‟ view of creativity, because of its insidious effect on educational institutions and practices and because it promotes a generally impoverished view of the meaning of creativity and of human potential. Reductionist thought; the tendency to understand concepts as separate and distinct from one another prevents us from easily conceptualising an experience such as creativity which involves the simultaneous experience of seemingly paradoxical elements such as individuality and unity, intellect and intuition and freedom and discipline. Democracy is a metaphor which can help to articulate and understand the paradoxical experience of creativity. Democracy stands for the potential to make meaning from the integrated exploration of individuality and of unity, which I argue is a fundamental dynamic of the creative experience. I further suggest that the essence of the creative experience is a democratic attunement to existence, in which subject and object, self and environment, intellect and intuition and freedom and discipline are experienced as in a democratic relationship with one another. This way of understanding creativity provides an alternative to the creative economy view. It implies some significant changes to traditional educational emphases, including a movement away from primarily individualistically oriented curricula and toward curricula and educational values which situate the individual within an integrated eco-system.

Detta är ett essäistiskt försök att fånga den flyktiga tråkigheten. Med fenomenologin som grund undersöks lärarens levda erfarenhet av tråkighet och hur den kommer till uttryck i hennes yrkesvardag. I skärningspunkten mellan två gestaltningar ur min lärarvardag, i filosofen Martin Heideggers tre former av tråkighet – uttråkad av, uttråkad med och djupgående tråkighet – och kultur- och utbildningsteoretisk forskning växer tre beskrivningar av 2020-talets lärare fram.  För det första består en del av lärarens yrkesvardag i att förhålla sig till en samtid där delar av hennes yrkespraktik digitaliserats och den administrativa bördan successivt ökat. Med utgångspunkt i litteraturvetaren Eran Dorfmans jämförelse mellan Heideggers uttråkad med och det Dorfman vill kalla för tråkighetsutmattning argumenterar jag för att tråkighetsutmattningen är en fjärde form av tråkighet. I det gestaltade mötet med kollegan Assar träder en lärarvardag fram som visar hur lärare dels verkar i ett tidsligt limbo där tiden är påträngande och ständigt beräknad, dels upplever en tomhet trots att vardagen hela tiden fylls med ett flöde av digital stimuli.  För det andra. Enligt Heidegger tvingar tråkigheten, framför allt den djupgående, oss till ett avbrott i vardagen och det han kallar för ”Mannet”, ett slags diffust ”de andra”. Den djupgående tråkigheten tvingar oss att lyssna till vårt autentiska jag och den vi skulle kunna vara. Sett ur en yrkespraktikers vardag undersöker jag hur relationen mellan tråkighet, ett autentiskt mer kreativt praktikerliv och min läraridentitet ser ut. Min undersökning visar bland annat att även om Mannet är starkt finns möjligheter till kreativa mikromotstånd för att värna om yrkesidentiteten. Men frågan är om motståndet är tillräckligt för att kunna nå en verklig autenticitet? Mot bakgrund av det som beskrivs i föregående avsnitt och i mötet med elever, kollegor och den egna läraridentiteten gör lärare etiska ställningstaganden. I det tredje avsnittet ges en beskrivning av relationen mellan tråkighet och de etiska ställningstaganden som lärare gör. Den bild som träder fram är komplex. Lärare gör många etiska val som ibland är motsägelsefulla. Som tidigare nämnts är Mannet starkt och för att lärare ska kunna värna om sin läraridentitet och göra kloka överväganden i mötet med elever – gestaltat i exemplet med eleven Pricken – behöver de gå samman för att bland annat kunna stå emot de krafter som förorsakar tråkighetsutmattning.
This is an essayistic attempt to capture the elusive boredom. With phenomenology as a basis, the teacher's lived experience of boredom and how it is expressed in her professional everyday life is examined. At the intersection of some compositions from my everyday life as a teacher, in the philosopher Martin Heidegger's three forms of boredom – bored by, bored with and profound boredom – and cultural and educational theoretical research, three descriptions of teachers of the 2020s emerged.                 Firstly, part of the teacher's professional everyday life consists of relating to a time where parts of her professional practice have been digitized and the administrative burden has gradually increased. Based on the literary scholar Eran Dorfman's reading of Heidegger's bored with and what Dorfman wants to call boredom-fatigue I argue that boredom-fatigue is a fourth form of boredom. In the described meeting with my colleague Assar, a teacher's everyday life emerges that shows how teachers work in a temporary limbo where time is intrusive and constantly calculated, and how they experience an emptiness even though everyday life is constantly filled with a flow of digital stimuli.                Secondly. According to Heidegger, boredom, especially the profound one, forces us to take a break from everyday life and what he calls “the They”, a kind of diffuse "the others". The profound boredom forces us to listen to our authentic selves and who we could be. Seen from the everyday life of a professional practitioner, I examine what the relationship between boredom, an authentically more creative practitioner life, and my teacher identity looks like. My study shows that even though “the They” is strong, there are opportunities for creative micro-resistance to, among other things, protect the professional identity. But the question is whether the resistance is sufficient to achieve true authenticity?                In the light of what is described in the previous sections and the encounters with students, colleagues, and one’s own teacher identity, teachers make ethical positions. The third section describes the relationship between boredom and the ethical positions that teachers make. The picture that emerges is complex. Teachers make many ethical choices that are sometimes contradictory. As previously mentioned, “the They” is strong and for teachers to be able to protect their teacher identity and make wise considerations in the encounters with students – for example with the student I call Pricken – they need to come together to be able to withstand the forces that cause boredom-fatigue.

This thesis offers a genealogical-exegetical account of Heidegger's phenomenology of mood (Stimmung), focusing on his Freiburg and Marburg lectures from 1919 to 1925. In Being and Time, moods manifest the transcendental factical ground of “thrownness” (Geworfenheit) in which an understanding of Being is constituted. However, throughout Heidegger's work, moods have operated as the ground for disclosure, the origin of authentic ontological understanding, the defining character of each historical epoch and as the enactmental urgency that will bring about an ‘other' beginning. This thesis contextualizes Heidegger's accounts of mood within the broader phenomenological project concerning the constitution and grounding of meaning. The first part of the thesis examines the neo-Kantian challenges to philosophy as well as Husserl's response. It further explores the problems Heidegger identifies in Husserl's phenomenology and shows how Heidegger offers a grounding of phenomenological understanding in lived experience, in order to provide a concrete account of a phenomenological “beginning” (Anfang). Heidegger's turn to affects constitutes a radicalization, rather than a repudiation, of Husserlian insights. The second part of the thesis explores Heidegger's earliest accounts of affective phenomena in his interpretations of St. Augustine and Aristotle, where the terminology of Being and Time is developed for the first time. This involves an analysis of Heidegger's accounts of love (Liebe) and joy (Freude) as they figure in the 1920 lecture course Phenomenology of Religious Experience, and analyses the emergence of Angst and other grounding moods (Grundstimmungen). The thesis then looks at Heidegger's early interpretation of Plato and Aristotle in the lecture courses immediately prior to Being and Time, where the technical notion of disposition (Befindlichkeit) emerges, as well as his first analysis of fear (Furcht).

The preoccupation with the "historicity" of thought and existence is central to thehermeneutic-phenomenological branch of modern philosophy. Its foremostrepresentative is Martin Heidegger, who in his main work Sein und Zeit (1927)developed a theory of historicity, according to which human beings not only exist inhistory, but are themselves historical. In subsequent writings Heidegger argued thatnot only man, but also truth and being, must be understood "historically" in aparticular sense. The meaning and the impHcations of Heidegger's "historicization" ofphilosophy are here analyzed along two parallel tracks: as a theory of the conditions ofphilosophical understanding; second, as an incentive to new ways of respondingphilosophically to these conditions. The study focuses on the sense of belongingwhich Heidegger assigns to historicity, as a dialogical relation to an enigmatic originthat cannot be exhaustively articulated, but to which understanding must neverthelessrespond in repetition and critique. The idea of the "hermeneutic situation," and what itmeans to occupy such a situation, is shown to be central in this regard. Heidegger's"historicization" of the philosophical territory is inte reted as an exemplary attempt topreserve philosophy as a quest for "origins" in the explicit recognition of theinterminable historical mediation of thinking. His approach leads to a criticalquestioning of fundamental philosophical distinctions, such as the temporal and theeternal, the absolute and the relative, subject and object, and of truth as correspondence.Eventually he is led to question the ability of language to express thehistoricity of thought and of being, which can only be indicated by means of conceptssuch as "moment" (Augenblick) and "event" (Ereignis). In seven chapters the themeof historicity is explored from different angles, which together provide a guide toHeidegger's path from a philosophy of life to a thinking of being in the "otherbeginning." The study covers the full range of his writings, but it emphasizes thedevelopment from the earliest lectures, over Sein und Zeit, to the second major work,Beiträge zur Philosophie (1938, published posthumously in 1989).

Ghanaian women experiencing infertility problem, have been seeking invitro fertilisation treatment in the quest for motherhood, however there is a dearth in the nursing studies researching this phenomenon. It appears that the concept and meanings of infertility is inadequately explored from the perspective of women experiences following unsuccessful invitro fertilisation treatment. In particular, it is vital to be knowledgeable about the challenges women encounter when undergoing IVF treatment and following unsuccessful procedure. The study sought to gain a deeper knowledge and to understand the meanings women struggling with infertility and its treatment experience and how invitro fertilisation treatment failure affects women in their everyday life. To unearth the women perception and meaning attributed to their experiences of unsuccessful infertility treatment, Heidegger's philosophy of phenomenology underpinned this study. A semistructured opening question and further probing questions were used to gather information which was reduced to sub-themes and main themes which captured the participant's lived experiences of unsuccessful invitro fertilisation treatment. I adopted van Manen's (1990) six steps of research activities as a structure to unravel the participants' phenomenological conversations. Applying Heidegger's concept of the three modes of existence (Existenze): authenticity, inauthenticity and undifferentiatedness, four major themes were identified: 1. Seeking wholistic and authentic care- authenticity 2. Facing up to the Angst- inauthenticity 3. The vulnerable self - inauthenticity 4. Living with infertility (being-in-the-world-of-motherless) - undifferentiatedness The participants' phenomenological conversations and their stories have revealed a range of challenges Ghanaian women who seek invitro fertilisation treatment go through. The study contribute significantly by giving insight to the painful experiences Ghanaian women go through when seeking invitro fertilisation treatment and has given a voice to how assisted reproductive technologies are currently experienced in the Ghanaian context. From the women's narrative, it appeared that their emotional and informational needs were not being met and were not being cared for as expected. The findings provide some direction regarding the needs of women experiencing infertility for information, support and advocacy in their pursuit of assisted reproductive technology services in Ghana. There is a critical need to simplify invitro fertilisation treatment and provision of safe, affordable procedure so that the average Ghanaian women can access it.

This thesis argues that Heidegger’s thought offers crucial insights into the structural challenges that modernity poses to being an ethical and religious person. I argue that these difficulties come down to an instrumentalist conception of truth, a denial or repression of finitude as the condition of meaningfulness, and a philosophical anthropology that is both too subjectivistic and too objectivistic. Yet while Heidegger was good on the diagnosis, he was reluctant to give more than digressive and opaque prescriptions to these problems. My thesis seeks to respond to this lacuna by putting Heidegger’s critical observations in the service of articulating a positive religious ethics. To that end, it seeks to locate—as well as redefine from an ontological perspective—the human dispositions and practices that expose truth in a non-instrumental light, that show finitude as a positive condition of meaningfulness, and that reveal the essence of the human being in non-subjectivist and non- objectivist terms. I argue that these include listening and gratitude—dispositions and practices I claim should form the backbone of any religious ethics, and yet which I also claim should not be limited to those who believe in a personal, theistic God. My thesis contributes to the fields of modern theology and Heidegger Studies in four ways. First, it shows that Heidegger’s critics (such as Levinas and Adorno) are wrong to oppose ontology to ethics. Second, it shows that Heidegger’s critics (such as Marion and Jonas) are wrong to oppose ontology to theology. Third, it shows that Heidegger’s own ambivalence about the ethical and theological relevance of his thought allows for the development of a deeply ethical and theological posture. And fourth, it offers a unique, post-Heideggerian interpretation of gratitude, one in which it is understood as a structure of Dasein that is both “always already” and “not yet” operative.

Much of the criticism Heidegger has drawn from realism, from postmodernism and even existentialism, as well from the anti-Nazi protests on his philosophy, could be diluted if a defaulted connection was made between Heidegger's metaphysics and the Greeks. Being and Time drafted the blueprint of the origin of predication and world-disclosure from the primordial intuition of the limitations of action in the face of human finitude. This existential reprioritization forced a radical reversal of primacy from nature to culture, having assumed the absolute objectivity of some original world determinacy, the phenomenological structure of which, nevertheless, was never produced in Heidegger’s seminal work or thereafter. Existentialism has thus been downplayed as a counterintuitive, fanciful hypothesis, and will remain so for as long as horizontal temporality has not made itself available to itself as a negated object of perception in the horizon of disclosure. The objectified subjectivity of Dasein’s cultural bias should be demonstrable, if there is indeed a determinant even firmer and “causally prior” to the object of perception in reified nature. And the theory of freedom that is existentialism will remain a “theory” with a private definition of the term, if both the phenomenological structures of the “objectification” of subjectivity have not appeared: first as the objectivity of freedom that is absolute and universal, but no less than as the object that frees made up from nothing other than the absolute and universal objectivity of freedom. Heidegger must have felt this most pressing shortcoming in his metaphysics, because in a later monumental work, The Origin of the Work of Art, he avowed of such an object that is both the programmatic manifesto of freedom, and frees, pointing to the Greek Doric temple. He must have realized that the highest objectification of Dasein’s volatile subjectivity was somehow of “Greek” origin, and as I will argue, in this assumption alone he was right. But his proof was premised therein in an incomplete, trivial and self-contradictory way that left exposed to counter-entrenchment his arguments over both the attribution of the origin of reality, and consequently also its subjective constitution. From this point on, existentialism has remained doggedly problematic, if not inconsequential, in being unconnected to its bloodline, that is, phenomenology, and inasmuch as Heidegger’s incomplete metaphysics has remained unconnected to his miscued art theory. My hermeneutic method seeks this elusive, twofold objectification of subjectivity, in order to justify existentialism by simultaneously making the missing connections between Heidegger and the Greeks, and between Being and Time and The Origin of the Work of Art. The connections I am suggesting are both necessary and possible, provided that Heidegger’s theory of art is modified to grant monumental statuary its due hermeneutic primacy. Heidegger attributed the disclosure of world in truth-as-untruth to poetry and architecture, while Gadamer, who advanced Heidegger’s phenomenology to the currently predominant hermeneutic theory, also gave primacy to poetry and architecture. Their mistake is critical, because, as I will argue, Greek statuary is the patent twofold objectification of Dasein’s existential analytic, it is the convergence point of evidence to infer Heidegger’s missing theory of embodiment, and it is the ultimate origin of Western metaphysics. Current theories of embodiment, including Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological case from where a missing dialogue has been attempted to derive Heidegger's theory of embodiment, typically confine themselves to Dasein’s ontological and ontic corporeality. I suggest that such theories should have addressed the necessity of the structures of Reason to incarnate themselves as the fundamental ontological prescriptions of perception. To address the necessity of this incarnation in monumental art as a primordial world disclosure, is to explore in this work a previously untapped tripartite hermeneutic conjecture, where theory of art and theory of embodiment are already theories of perception. My hermeneutic hypothesis adheres to, corroborates and advances basic phenomenological principles, to show how Dasein’s embodied structures in the exclusivity of Greek statuary have so far been misunderstood, decontextualized, and begged the question, accordingly as a “mystery” (Hegel), as “godly” (von Humboldt), as a “misunderstanding” (Buschor), or as “Greek naturalism” (art historians). Special attention will be paid to works such as the Laokoön Group, the Ptoan Apollo, the Blond Youth, the Zeus of Artemision and the Gigantomachy. I argue that these cultural fossils provide the most reliable grounds for a thorough commentary to Heidegger’s implied theory of embodiment, because they manifest as the art which relates most intimately to the instrumental modality through which the being-towards-death makes itself phenomenologically available to itself as the negation of the negation to live. Additionally, and in a postmodern world of academic wars that have claimed every aspect of Greek culture as stolen from other great civilizations, such solely uncontested cultural fossils are arguably the unsolicited proof classicists have been unable to produce regarding the exclusively Greek origin of Western metaphysics. The most consequential thrust of this work seeks to revitalize Heidegger’s claim regarding the origin and the chronology of world against competing alternatives such as Christian metaphysics, science’s Big Bang Theory, or the emasculated feminist case regarding the metaphysical primacy of the womb. The ultimate contribution this work aspires to, is the empowering of a presently stalled paradigm shift from the scientific to an existential-phenomenological world view. This shift would be akin to the one which procured with the advent of the Enlightenment between science and religion - a clash still raging in education – where further progress now demands that humanity leaves behind the disguised alienation which Heidegger himself coined as “the dictatorship of science.”

In this work I present both a historical and philosophical argument. First, I use Martin Heidegger's early interest in the argument that concepts are furnished to the mind directly by experience, as found in Edmund Husserl's categorial intuition and Emil Lask's principle of the material determination of form, to build an interpretation of Being and Time and "The Origin of the Work of Art" which provides a unified understanding of Heidegger's consistent underlying position throughout his career as one of realist historicism. My interpretation of Heidegger as a realist historicist rejects the reading of Being and Time as a transcendental project and the claim that Heidegger, like Kant, has an abstractionist view of concept formation. Rather, for the realist historicist, our modes of relating to things, even the supposedly conceptual, have the form of engaged historical practices. These practices are understood as arising from the things they concern rather than being subjectively abstracted from, or imposed upon, them. This view furnishes us with an understanding of art as a key type of historical event through which practices arise or are changed. This position necessitates, however, a rejection of any a-historical universal knowledge and reveals the substantialist assumptions that underlie such claims to knowledge. I then apply this new reading of Heidegger to the debate between Hubert Dreyfus and John McDowell concerning the nature of skillful coping. I show that Dreyfus' embodied non-conceptual understanding of skill acquisition fails to take seriously the centrality of membership in a historical community while McDowell's position fails to appreciate that practices and not concepts are primary.

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A pesquisa se empenha em analisar a fenomenologia da morte em Emmanuel Lévinas. Em Martin Heidegger, principal autor com o qual dialoga Lévinas, a morte é vista não como um fenômeno da vida, mas como um modo de ser do Dasein e que pode ser antecipada (vorlaufende Entschlossenheit), possibilitando o destrancamento do impessoal (das Man) e uma possível resignificação da existência inautêntica face a angústia da nadificação. Lévinas, no seu esforço de desontologizar a filosofia, vê a morte como um evento que afronta o presente do sujeito inter-essado (intéressement). Ao contrário da atracção existencial na qual a finitude está posta na Analítica Existencial, a morte, em Lévinas, é posta no exterior da existência, realizando-se como um anti-projeto. A morte é um enigma, uma experiência inexperienciável, uma alteridade estranha que dissipa os poderes compreensivos do sujeito, torna-o passivo, delineia os limites da razão e restringe a capacidade de antecipação à possibilidade mais radical da existência. Deste modo, acredita Lévinas, a morte do outro a “morte primeira”, uma experiência moral concreta, mais impactante do que os poderes da morte própria. O filósofo francês tem a morte como afecção do outro no Mesmo. Assim, é possível afirmar que morremos na morte de outrem. Angustiamo-nos por não possuirmos respostas (a não-resposta, o sem-resposta), por estarmos diante de um enigma absoluto que só temos a possibilidade de “sofrê-lo”, porque outros morrem junto e nem se pode “morrer por eles”, nem morrer a própria morte e nem ser dono de qualquer poder de decisão, a não ser que ela se aproxime, se avizinhe (voisinage). A essência da morte é o seu caráter de eterno futuro. Constitui-se, desta maneira, uma grandiosa metonímia na existência. Não a minha morte, mas a morte do outro é a morte primeira, pois é esse evento que me inicia e continua re-lembrando que sou mortal, pois não me apercebo desse fato todo o tempo. O acesso a mortalidade, a minha mortalidade, faz-se, desde Lévinas, via experiência da morte de outro. A angústia que me toma não é fundamental, prima, é um “sentimento” a posteriori que nesta etapa posterior irá me angustiar profundamente e de forma singular.
The present research analyses the phenomenology of death in Emmanuel Lévinas. According to Martin Heidegger, the main philosopher with whom Lévinas develops a dialogue, death is not seen as a phenomenon of life but as a way of being of Dasein which can be anticipated (vorlaufende Entschlossenheit) in order to operate the dissolution of the they-self (das Man) and a possible reframing of inauthentic existence in view of the angst of nihilation. In his effort of de-ontologizing philosophy, Levinás understands death as an event that takes down the present of the interestedness (intéressement) subject. Unlike the existential attraction in which finitude is posited in the Existential Analytic, Levinás claims that death is posited in the exterior of existence and that it is actualized as an anti-project. Death is a riddle. It is an inexplicable experience, an strange otherness that consumes the comprehensive powers of the subject; it makes it passive, draws the boundaries of reason and restricts the capacity to anticipate the most radical possibility of existence. Thus, Levinás believes that the death of the other is a “first death”, a concrete moral experience even more startling than the powers of death proper. The French philosopher conceives death as affection of the other in the Same. Therefore, it is possible to say that we die in the death of the other. We agonize in not having answers (a non-answer, the without-answer). We agonize in facing an absolute riddle and because others die along and one can neither “die for them” nor die one’s own death; neither one can be the owner of any power of decision, unless she approaches and take a voisinage (neighborliness). The essence of death lies in its feature as an eternal future. This way death configures a great metonymy of existence. It is not my death but the death of the other that is the first death. Such event introduces and reminds me to the fact that I am mortal. I am not constantly aware of mortality. The access to it – to my mortality, is given by the experience of death of the other. The angst that overcomes me is not fundamental. Instead, it is an a posteriori “feeling” which will constitute me as a singularity in this ulterior moment.

This essay aims to shed light upon the philosophical dignity of Edith Stein’s critique of the early Heideggerian conception of sociality in her text ”Martin Heideggers Existenzphilosophie”, from 1936. I will argue that Stein’s critique of Heidegger’s concept of sociality comes to be substantiated through her existential-philosophical approach to his understanding of the transcendent character of Dasein. By objecting to Heidegger’s definition of Dasein as ecstatic temporality, Stein points out his inattentiveness to authentic otherness in Being and Time, which reaches out into a problem surrounding Mitsein. I will further demonstrate how Stein, by ascribing to Dasein an enduring and sustaining quality in the midst of ecstasy, uses Heidegger’s concept of Dasein in order to formulate her own social ontology.

Optimists used to suggest that the anonymity of the internet allows people to interact without prejudices about race, sex, or age. Although some websites still foster anonymous communication, their popularity pales in comparison with sites like Facebook that foreground identifying characteristics. These social network sites claim to enrich their users’ lives by cultivating connections, but they sometimes have the opposite effect. Given the widespread and growing use of social media, my research poses the following questions: Does a particular form of (dis)engagement with the world flow from the reduction of the person to a profile? Does this (dis)engagement extend beyond social media, possibly into the way that we understand the world as such? What can we conclude about the broader theoretical framework in which an analysis of social media might be couched? I answer these questions through Martin Heidegger’s work, which provides the theoretical orientation for the dissertation as a whole. Noting that history informs the way that he understands ontology (Chapter One), I argue that the social changes that are accompanying the spread of the internet suggest modifications to his characterizations of boredom (Chapter Two) and technology (Chapter Three). I then turn to three emblematic social media sites – Facebook, which renders its users connected and identifiable (Chapter Four); Reddit, which gathers its users into a pseudonymous community of common interest (Chapter Five); and 4chan, which demands that its users engage in an anonymous fashion (Chapter Six) – and analyze them using the framework developed above while drawing from them to alter that framework further. I claim that although the patterns of use apparent on these sites differ, they all express different aspects of the mood that holds sway over the internet. Social media is both the cause of, and solution to, boredom, and it is shaping a generalized mood that is coming to seem ontological in its purchase.
Graduate

This thesis is an investigation of Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis of religion. The author argues that Heidegger’s thought opens the way for descriptive conceptual analysis of religious experience and its object without undue theoretical distortion or reduction. Heidegger dismantles uncritical distortions of religious life under “scientific” rationality and objectivity. While the self-understanding implicit in religious practice is certainly transformed through Heidegger’s own philosophical analysis, philosophy undergoes its own transformation through thinking encounter with religious life. Philosophy cannot produce an objectively neutral, universal analysis of religion, but must in its own way participate in the object of religious life. The wonder and awe at the manifestation of being which gives rise to philosophical questioning finds orientation in poetic and revelatory sources of inspiration whose content exceeds conceptual grasp. Philosophical questioning brings thought to the paradoxes at the limits of our understanding of language and human experience. Philosophy cannot conceive of the origin systematically. But religious attunement to the origin, aided by the prophetic utterances of the poet, then enables philosophical speculation as to the highest form of human flourishing. The author concludes by calling into question interpretations of Heidegger’s phenomenology of religion in the work of Jean-Luc Marion and John D. Caputo. These remains bound up in part with the philosophical project for transcendental analysis of universal religion. Drawing on the hermeneutic phenomenology of Hans-Georg Gadamer and the philosophical theology of John Milbank and William Desmond, the author sketches an alternative reading of Heidegger’s critique of the Western metaphysical tradition and philosophical retrieval of religion in light of the notion of incarnation, arguing that this alternative offers a better phenomenological account of religion as such.

Thesis (M. A.)--University of Alberta, 2010.
Title from pdf file main screen (viewed on April 9, 2010). A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, [Department of] Philosophy, University of Alberta. Includes bibliographical references.

Much neglected is Heidegger's latter work in favor of the fundamental ontology of Being and Time. Consequentially, conceptions of Heidegger's question of Being are oftentimes misconceived. Currently three main models have been proposed: (1) existential phenomenology, exemplified by Joseph Langan in the 1950s; (2) the popular thought of Being model in the 1960s as developed by William Richardson; (3) and in counter distinction to these unified models Joseph Kockelmans offers in the 1970s the many ways model, touting the end of systems. These misconstruals have spawned much Heideggerian dialogue, and in recent years, has had its effect upon Western continental scholarship from structuralism to post-structuralism. <br>Rather than usual conceptual models, this dissertation proposes a new model of Heideggerian scholarship seen through the lens of "Being as Saying." Neither mystical nor incomprehensible Heidegger's; unique linguistic turn negotiates the inadequacies of modern conceptions of the subject, object and cognition. Through a careful reading of Heidegger's work from 1949-1976, I trace Heidegger's utter reliance upon language as the way-making of Being, "Sprache als Be-wëgen." More originary than ordinary language, Heidegger's Being as Saying arises from Nietzsche's insights on nihilism. For Heidegger Being is no-thing, and as such reveals itself as unconcealment. We hear it as a deep, unsettling silence. From Being's two-fold character of concealing and revealing and humanity's subsequent discomfit, we derive all forms of communication, including thought and logic, even our world as a response to, and evasion from this pervasive silence. <br>Most notably Heidegger unseats the preeminent stature of thought and subject, only to reincorporate them within language. To achieve this he develops notions of Ereignis and Geviert, at once simple and complex, by which Being manifests itself, no longer through Dasein as prime discloser, but through a crossing of four regions. What emerges is a dynamic gathering-as-separated dialogue, a far richer, relational understanding of the world and the person. Heidegger's new way can best be described as a phenomenology of the inapparent, wherein Being and humanity are in a relational dialogue of unconcealing and revealing. With this insight we can reengage the Western philosophical tradition meditatively.
McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts
Philosophy
PhD
Dissertation