This chapter explores the approach of the Italian Thomist and Kierkegaard scholar, Fr. Cornelio Fabro (1911–1995), to move contemporary scholarly discussions toward consensus regarding the dialogue between Thomism and continental philosophy, which centers on the question of the meaning of being (esse) and contingency. The central observation is that what is now taken as the canonical Thomist view of creation and freedom is indebted to Fabro’s research on the metaphysics of participation. For Fabro, the forgetfulness of being that Heidegger rightly identifies loses its way with the forgetfulness of the act of being. By distinguishing esse from existentia with Fabro’s notion of participation and act of being (actus essendi), Fabro’s Thomism avoids Cartesian dualism and phenomenological monism, which opens a constructive dialogue with continental thought. Briefly rehearsing Fabro’s metaphysical distinction between factical existence (existentia) and being (esse) illuminates Fabro’s critical evaluation of continental thought as a speculative scheme of necessary emanation or pure immanence. The chapter concludes that the best way to approach this question is not to limit it to the empirical realm of factical existence (existentia) but rather to open up the existential question to the metaphysics of creation ex nihilo.

Chapter 2 examines three problems in Heidegger’s interpretations of Plato: the impasse of dialogue and dialectic, Heidegger’s disastrous and putatively Platonic politics, and the reductive approach to Plato’s metaphysics. First, I question his critique of Platonic dialectic by showing that it is already built into the matter as well as the way of writing in Plato’s texts. Second, I show that Heidegger’s ontologizing of political themes in Plato’s writings leads him to a catastrophic “ontological politics” wherein ethics and politics in their concrete sense are completely eclipsed by or absorbed into ontology. Third, I show that the interpretations that Heidegger offers to show that Plato allegedly occluded the original sense of truth and distorted the question of Being. A closer look at the relevant passages as well as other passages that Heidegger overlooked reveals a much more dynamic ontology than what Heidegger sees in Platonism understood as metaphysics. The concluding remarks of the chapter sketch the post-Heideggerian directions leading from these three problems to the Platonism of Gadamer, Strauss, and Krüger.

In addition to presenting the overarching argument and laying out the structure of the book, the introduction offers an interpretation of the Socratic reorientation of philosophy through a brief reading of both autobiographic passages in the Phaedo and the Apology. This intertextual interpretation reveals two things. First, Socrates thinks philosophers should turn to logoi, that is, broadly to human speeches and human language in order to inquire into Being. Second, this turn to human speeches is at once a turn to what humans usually discuss when they disagree, namely, human affairs and in particular questions related to the “most important things” such as justice and other virtues, the kalon, and, ultimately, the good. This agathological or ethical-political crux of the Socratic reorientation provides a roadmap along which I structure my interpretation of the post-Heideggerian Platonism of Strauss, Gadamer, and Krüger. The milestones of the second sailing thus understood are: dialogical writing and thinking, the confrontation between poetry and philosophy, the tension between philosophy and politics, and, finally, the ascent to Forms.

Lacan’s life spanned almost the entire twentieth century. He was acquainted with almost all the major figures of European philosophy during this time, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Martin Heidegger, and Jacques Derrida. He lived an intellectual life and profited from these philosophical interlocutors to develop his own thought. Typically, Lacan borrowed from other philosophers, but they did not avow any direct influence from him. The one exception is the Marxist Louis Althusser, who helped to find a home for Lacan’s seminar when he lost his previous site and who integrated Lacan’s thought into his Marxism. Lacan’s philosophy constantly changed throughout his life as he responded to new exigencies and to the developments of other thinkers.

Starts with phenomena patients report and discusses the interpretative challenge. Addresses two meanings of phenomenology: one from philosophy and one from descriptive psychopathology in medicine. Discusses the use some romantic psychiatrists have made of philosophical phenomenology to understand ‘the worlds’ of patients.

This chapter offers a reading of Ebrahim Moosa’s Al-Ghazālī and the Poetics of Imagination, which, through the concept of dihlīz, identifies “the Ghazālian secret” to overcoming false binaries, whether between Ghazālī and his peers or between Islam and the West, as the embrace of a liminal existence. Moosa renders the debate between Ghazālī and the Muslim philosophers (p. falāsifa) of his time as analogous to the contemporary struggle between post-imperialism and globalization. Although his reinterpretation of dihlīz opens new perspectives, we contend that his argument imposes postmodern precepts onto an Abbasid thinker. The historical Ghazālī conceived of the Abbasid Empire in terms of an unfolding divine will and so sought to empower it. Ultimately, we suggest that Moosa marshals Ghazālī to accord mysticism, which replaces objectivity as the “master” paradigm, higher epistemic value than modern reason. This does not correspond to the life and thought of the historical Ghazālī, whose priorities concerned guaranteeing the success of a state project to which he was existentially committed.

Many midcentury continental philosophers, most notably Martin Heidegger (1889--1976), were skeptical about and critical of using technology to mediate human activities. Telephones and computers not only simplify communication, they transform communication (and humans along with it). Postphenomenology is an emerging qualitative research group that examines the transformation of humans by technology. Led by the American philosopher Don Idhe, postphenomenologists maintain that this change is neither bad nor good. Martin Heidegger, however, around whom new and exciting healthcare research is being done, would disagree. There is no discovery without a simultaneous covering. The authors examine whether something of importance is, indeed, covered up when qualitative researchers rely on technology. A three-year international qualitative study on PTSD with active-duty military, which relied heavily on technology, is used to examine the strengths and weaknesses of combining technology with phenomenological healthcare research.

This essay traces a tradition of what is here called ‘deathwriting’ as it stretches from Emily Dickinson, to Franz Kafka, to Samuel Beckett, to Cormac McCarthy. The work of all these writers, the essay argues, is driven by the urge to give a poetic form to the experience of death, to make death thinkable and narratable. Alongside this tradition of deathwriting, and interwoven with it, one can discern too, a fascination with ‘blind seeing’, an attempt to make darkness visible, or to overcome the distinction between the light and the dark, the visible and the invisible. In reading the connection between deathwriting and blind seeing as it runs from Dickinson to the contemporary, the essay argues that these writers allow us to glimpse a differently constituted relationship between the living and the dead, and between the perceptible and the imperceptible. At a contemporary moment when it has become urgent to rethink our apparatuses for world picturing, with the emergence of the Anthropocene as a critical context for all of our imaginings, the essay offers this history of deathwriting as a radically different way of seeing, without the aid of human light.

This chapter explores the connections between ethics, the phenomenological (and hermeneutical) traditions, and education. It focuses on the idea of the subject, showing phenomenology’s contrast with the modernist picture of the autonomous subject. The chapter first briefly traces the idea of the subject in phenomenology through four representative figures – Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Levinas – and then sketches their approaches to ethics. Then it pivots to four ethical concepts in philosophy of education in this tradition – understanding, risk, subjectification, and responsibility – by connecting them to phenomenological tradition’s broad conception of the subject. The chapter brings into relief the contribution phenomenology makes to envisioning living well together and human flourishing, and education’s role in fostering ethical subjects that would enact such societies.

This chapter uses Heidegger’s and Arendt’s joint reading in 1925 of Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain (1924) to argue that Heidegger’s lived literary practice in the 1920s does not match the invocations of poetic specialness that the philosopher theorizes from the mid 1930s onwards. Drawing on Heidegger’s letters to Arendt, as well as on the lecture courses from the mid 1920s which Heidegger used to clarify the arguments that became Being and Time, the chapter reconstructs Heidegger’s response to Mann’s novel. The episode suggests a counterfactual alternative mode of Heideggerian literary reading. Mann’s novel, as a model to think with, emphasizes the exchange with others and the competing discourses that resist grounding in a more fundamental viewpoint, such as the phenomenological ontology of the early Heidegger or the “thinking” of the later Heidegger. At the same time, the reading of Mann allows us to re-contextualize Heidegger’s engagement with his scientific and philosophical contemporaries, such as Einstein, Bergson, and Russell.

After an introductory discussion about Mann’s and Heidegger’s direct comments about each other, I explore how Mann and Heidegger are situated with regard to what has been called conservative revolution. Mann not only helped to gain currency for the concept of conservative revolution, but he also defended it against what he considered its right-wing and/or fascist spoilers, before eventually providing a thorough criticism of it in his Doctor Faustus. Heidegger’s recently published Black Notebooks show that in the 1930s and 1940s his thought veered towards the direction of conservative revolution, as described in Mann’s novel. To complement the understanding of conservative revolution, I also draw on Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s seminal speech from 1927, which helps to determine how much Heidegger’s philosophy partakes of the spirit of conservative revolution in Germany.

This is the first of three chapters to unpack Baeck’s confrontation with the rise of Nazism. It details the Nazi ideology as grounded in race and space, and the idea of a national community (Volksgemeinschaft) in which the Jews had no place. Baeck needed to respond to it as a thinker and community leader, having been chosen to lead the efforts of the Central Association of Jews in Germany. His political activities and writings show an insistence on Judaism’s lasting value, for Jews and the world. The chapter offers a close reading of a pastoral letter Baeck sent for Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, which in 1935 fell shortly after Nuremberg Laws. In his search for explanations of antisemitism in the mid-1930, Baeck returned to earlier ideas of Jewish existence as precarious, turning to surprising sources such as Martin Heidegger, at the time already affiliated with the Nazi party, and Karl Barth’s commentary on the scene of the crucifixion in Matthias Grünewald’s magnificent Isenheim altar.