Anaximander

In the lead article, Vardoulakis argues that Heidegger elides and occludes animportant difference between two senses of what it means for something to becalculable. On the one hand, there is‘that which can be calculated with somecertainty’, which Vardoulakis dubs the‘calculated’. On the other, there is‘calculating’, the process of proceeding‘even though we know that such acalculation can never be certain or secure as it lacks a determinate measurement’.Iwant to suggest, however, that such a distinction does play a significant role inHeidegger’s work, (...) albeit in an unexpected place: his analyses of time. I will traceout what I consider to be two likely manifestations of the different senses of thecalculable. Turningfirst toBeing and Time, I will propose that we can read therelationship between world-time and now-time through this lens. For Heidegger,the pernicious factor that gives rise to the ordinary conception of time is not time’scalculability as such, but rather the dominance of what Vardoulakis calls thecalculated. Secondly, I want to draw out the role that the dynamic betweencalculating and calculated can be seen to play in Heidegger’s analyses of theAnaximander fragment, especially the way he distinguishes time’s‘allocationcharacter’(Zuweisungscharakter) from mere‘numerability’. (shrink)

The author is concerned with resurrecting the political doctrines which supported the Greek democracies. He finds them in the Greek anthropologists, Anaximander, Anaxagoras, Archelaus, and Democritus, and in Protagoras and Antiphon. Their empirical approach to history produced a body of thought suggestive of Hume and Dewey which was both democratic in character and liberal in temper. Furthermore, this position was until now obscured by the Platonic and Aristotelian concern with authority and law and with the essential nature of the individual--the (...) source of later "inalienable rights" doctrines.--R. P. (shrink)