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)

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)

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)

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)

As finite human beings, we are dependent, limited, situated, and vulnerable, and our understanding of ourselves and the world is constantly facing boundaries and restrictions. This book explores how finitude's different dimensions, and its ambiguities, may be understood within the framework of Christian theological anthropology.

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

Quentin Meillassoux’s 2006 After Finitude offered a sharp critique of the phenomenological project, charging that phenomenology was one of the “two principal media” of correlationism—ultimately reducible to an “extreme idealism.” Meillassoux grounds this accusation in an account of givenness that presupposes that “every variety of givenness” finds its genesis within the positing of the subject. However, this critique fails to hit its mark precisely because it presupposes an account of intuitive givenness that is entirely foreign to the phenomenological project. (...) Quite against Meillassoux’s conflation of givenness, the world-for-us, and the positing subject—the very centre of the phenomenological project is the recognition that intuitive givenness cannot be reduced to the constructive activity of the subject. Givenness is marked by a heterogeneity; givenness refers to what is given to us, not to what emerges from us. (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)

À partir d’une certaine idée de la finitude, nous avons voulu simplement dénoncer le fantasme d’un monde sans frontières.

Desde Schopenhauer e Nietzsche até os nossos dias, através de interpretações de cunho ontoteológico, a análise transcendental do uso prático da razão é vista como momento em que a radicalidade da Crítica kantiana cederia espaço a uma introdução arbitrária da religião, revelando assim o motivo mais fundamental da filosofia de Kant. Uma análise apurada do “Apêndice à Crítica do Juízo teleológico” pode revelar, ao contrário, que o uso prático da razão não é entendido por Kant senão como momento em que (...) a finitude da razão se explicita mais radicalmente, deslocando conceitos da teologia para o interior da filosofia e revertendo a relação entre a racionalidade e a fé. (shrink)

Este artigo busca compreender qual o estatuto que a ideia de fundamento recebe na filosofia de Sartre enquanto uma ontologia existencial, isto é, enquanto uma filosofia que compreende o homem em sua finitude. Para isso, procura realizar uma análise da presença da Metafísica, sobretudo em O Ser e o Nada, com relação ao problema metafísico desenvolvido na obra: o surgimento do nada no ser. Por fim, procura, por meio desta análise, compreender o estatuto da finitude na mesma obra.

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...

Heidegger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929) turns on a reading of the productive imagination in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781). In siding with the imagination, Heidegger declares his dissent from the neo-Kantianism of his contemporaries. Yet, when Heidegger subsequently elaborates his philosophy of art in the 1930s, he is dismissive of the imagination altogether. His earlier partisanship was qualified. In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger treats the productive imagination of Kant’s critical (...) period as still a step short of Heidegger’s own problem of the time of finite human beings. German Idealism’s step past Kant is, for Heidegger, a step beyond, but in the wrong direction. The aesthetics of German Idealism builds on the unification of experience and conceptuality wrought by the productive imagination in its transcendental use, thereby inscribing in the work of art a neglect of finitude that Heidegger will dispute. If what Heidegger holds against the imagination is its transcendental use, the fully empirical concept of the imagination in Kant’s precritical writings invites reassessment in light of an engagement with finitude. I will show it has particular promise for rehabilitating the imagination in a Heideggerian philosophy of art. (shrink)

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)

El retorno del lenguaje conlleva la desaparición del hombre como figura cardinal del saber moderno. La muerte del hombre anunciada por Foucault está en estrecha relación con la muer-te de Dios anunciada por Nietzsche. El último hombre ha matado a Dios y debe responder ahora de su propia finitud. La obra de Foucault traza una historia crítica del pensamiento. Su escepticismo es una crítica del conocimiento. Foucault dudó de las verdades de cada época y de las verdades intemporales. En este (...) artículo trazo el recorrido del hombre en la obra fou-cauldiana y muestro que el escepticismo en Foucault deviene una herrramienta importante en su crítica del conocimiento. (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)

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.

This book explores what anyone interested in ethics can draw from Heidegger's thinking. Heidegger argues for the radical finitude of being. But finitude is not only an ontological matter; it is also located in ethical life. Moral matters are responses to finite limit-conditions, and ethics itself is finite in its modes of disclosure, appropriation, and performance. With Heidegger's help, Lawrence Hatab argues that ethics should be understood as the contingent engagement of basic practical questions, such as how should (...) human beings live? (shrink)

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 ...

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.

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)

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 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)

In this article Chris Higgins considers two works by Jean-Luc Nancy — “On Being Singular Plural” and “Why Are There Several Arts and Not Just One?” — in light of the formative task to do justice to the diverse dimensions of oneself given the offerings and demands of the world, a task made difficult by our finitude and the existence of incommensurable goods. While Nancy helps us appreciate the value pluralism animating the (liberal) arts, Higgins argues, Nancy himself shies (...) away from the full implications of his relational ontology. Rather than follow individual arts and artworks into the local habitations they open — accepting the anguish of the arbitrary as the price of our finite but fulsome excursions into the reticulated real — Nancy retreats to the level of a global account (if a lyrical one) of the local. (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)

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)

This article aims to analyze in Sartre's philosophy the relation between the subjectivities from the notion of understanding. Differentiating knowledge of understanding, Sartre proposes that by understanding it is possible to apprehend subjectivity without making it an objective knowledge. Although he points this in several of his studies is the conference on Kierkegaard that this thesis becomes more manifest. In this article we try to demonstrate that this thesis modifies a whole perception about the freedom, so that it as a (...) singularity has a transhistorical dimension, at the same time that it can only be taken, in its own finitude, by understanding. This thesis does not contradict those of the ontology, but, rightly, legitimates the Being as finitude. Finally, freedom is not denoted as an objective knowledge, but as an invitation to understanding ourselves. (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 ofGs 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)

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

In one of his last texts, Foucault defined his philosophical enterprise as an “analysis of the conditions in which certain relations between subject and object are formed or modified, insofar as they are constitutive of a possible knowledge”1, or again as “the manner in which the emergence of games of truth constituted, for a particular time and place and certain individuals, the historical a priori of a possible experience”2. Despite its eclipse during the genealogical period, the notion of the historical (...) a priori is thus reaffirmed as central by later Foucault. There is, however, an essential modification with respect to its archaeological problematisation: in The Order of Things, the various historical a priori were characterized by a specific relation between being and language, a relation in which the subject of knowledge did not always nor necessarily have a place. The Renaissance episteme was defined by the homogeneity of words and things, and its Classical counterpart, by the transparent distance between being and representation, which excluded any positioning for the subject (the “place of the king”). Thus within the archaeological configuration, only the contemporary historical a priori was characterized by the invention of a new position for the subject of knowledge, that of Man, which generated the Analytic of Finitude and ultimately resulted in the “anthropological sleep” criticised at the end of The Order of Things. So although later Foucault re-focuses his work around the notion of the historical a priori, he gives the notion a considerable twist whereby the conditions of truth saying are no longer referred back to an implicit connection between being and language, but to the various relations historically established between “modes of subjectivation”3 and “modes of objectification”4. Correspondingly, these relations are not to be analysed from discourse, as in archaeology, nor from the constituting structures of subjectivity, as in phenomenology, but genealogically, i.e.. (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)