The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy

In this paper, I shall focus first on Heidegger's attempt to tackle the problem of 'metaphysics' and his wish to transcend it. Then, I shall try to evaluate his thoughts about transcending metaphysics in connection with his interpretation of Nietzsche's anthropology, which he considers to be the highest achievement in metaphysics.

Higher education worldwide is affected by budget cuts and dwindling financial resources. Today, science and scholarship can only find broad recognition if their endeavors provide material success. If subjected to the rigours of the market, the humanities do not score favorably, and it seems that in the scale of profit-making disciplines philosophy ranks last. In order for academic philosophy to maintain itself in these times, two goals need to be pursued consistently: a) philosophy should address problems of practical concern — such as society's ethical, social, and even metaphysical needs — presenting them in a commonly accessible fashion; b) philosophers should draw material from other academic disciplines — linguistics, neurophysiology, archaeology, biology, psychology, mathematics, astronomy and other specializations — for their own speculation, taking advantage of the integrative functions of philosophy to promote the cooperation between all disciplines. The retreat of academic philosophy in our time is due in part to its faulty policy. Nevertheless, there is much evidence that philosophy as a common human activity will endure because it appeals to a fundamental need: to reconsider knowledge and to go on inquiring when empirical research has reached its limits.

The purpose of this article is to articulate Nietzsche's criticism of morality which is centered in his experience of the death of God and the end of the subject of Modernity. Nietzsche considers nihilism as a nihilism of morality, not of metaphysics: it is morality and its history that has given rise to nihilism in the Occident. That is why Nietzsche separates himself from metaphysics as well as from morality and science, which differs from Heidegger's reasons. According to Heidegger, Nietzsche places himself in a primal position in the history of metaphysics, by which he means the consummation (Vollendung) of metaphysics' nihilism, which Heidegger tries to transcend. On the one hand, Heidegger shows us how Nietzsche consummates the Platonic philosophy by inverting its principles. On the other, Nietzsche consummates the metaphysics of subjectivity. Consequently he conceives the thought of the will of power and of the eternal recurrence as the two last forms of the metaphysical categories of essence and existence respectively. On this ground it is possible to understand Nietzsche's and Heidegger's thought as the necessary first stage in the transition to Vattimo's postmodern philosophy and his notion of secularization.

Levinas depicts a pluralism of subjectivity older than consciousness and self-consciousness. He repudiates Heidegger's notion of solitude in order to explore the implications of the Husserlian pure I outside the subject. A hidden Good constitutes the Other in the self: a diremption not at the expense of the unity of the self. Levinas stands with Nietzsche on the side of life which requires and is capable of no justification whatsoever. But for Levinas the totality is ruptured by the thought that there is a unity of self undiminished by its immemorial responsibility for the Other, a unity of self beyond totality. This self containing the Other is the transcendence of the Ego otherwise immanent in Husserl's pure intentionality. Just here Levinas' thought is most perfectly distinguished from Sartre's notion of the transcendence of the Ego as complete exclusion from the immanence of intentionality. The pure I is otherwise than the Hegelian absolute Elastizität: incarnate and inspirited, the "self tight in its own skin." The transubstantiation of Ego to Other has not yet occurred to thought in Levinas, but what does occur here is the altersubstantiation of the I. The Other in the Same is an alteration of essence. It is precisely through thinking the contraction of [the modern] essence [of consciousness] that Levinas thinks otherwise than being, beyond essence, thinks "a thought profounder and 'older' than the cogito." Humanity signifies a "new image" of the Infinite in the preoriginary freedom by which the Self shows the Other mercy.

Heidegger is one of the few Western thinkers to have succeeded in going beyond the Western philosophic tradition. Because his radical criticism is believed to have fractured the foundations of modern philosophy, his thinking is usually at the center of the controversy between the defenders of the tradition and those who wish to break with it and start afresh. In the heat of this debate, the question of Heidegger's place in relation to that tradition in general and to Cartesianism in particular has been neglected. I wish to address the question by focusing on the major aspects of Heidegger's critique of Cartesian philosophy and the modern tradition. I will first show that the strength of his criticism lies in its all-encompassing penetration of the foundations of modern philosophy, running through both the ontological and epistemological channels. Ontologically, Heidegger presents a critique of subjectivism; epistemologically, he discredits the correspondence conception of truth and its underlying visual metaphor. I will then look at his view of history and the meaning of his concept of "overcoming" in order to show that his aim is not to destroy the tradition, but to provide a wider basis for it by rescuing forgotten elements imbedded in the tradition itself. Finally, I will show that in this process of "overcoming," Heidegger did not really depart from the tradition, but absorbed some of its basic tenets, as his concept of death echoes major elements of Cartesian doubt.

Heidegger's main question, the question of Being concerning human facticity, struggles to uncover the original ground to which humans belong, a ground from which modern society tends to uproot itself through the dominance of calculative and representational thinking. What is most dangerous for Heidegger about this process is that the original ground of humans and beings in general might be covered and forgotten to the extent that humans lose completely the sense of what they truly need. The task of philosophy is to help bring back humans and beings in general to the place which they originally belong, i.e., to their most fulfilled way of being which is their proper or own [das Eigene, eigen]. The term "En-own-ment" or "Ap-propri-ation" [Er-eign-is] — the key word in Heidegger's thinking since the 1930's — marks his attempt to think more originally than metaphysics the relation between Being and humans in terms of the being "enowned" of humans through Being and in terms of the belonging of humans to Being. I will rethink the question of this relation in reference to two of Heidegger's writings, and will focus on his struggle for a proper language which would be able to say what essentially remains concealed in metaphysical language: the truth (or ground) or Being as Ereignis.

This paper is a comparative study of Hartshorne's neoclassical reconsideration of the notion of the Absolute based on his Whiteheadian vision of the divine relativity, and Nishida's attempt at redefining the same notion against the background of what he calls the philosophy of "place" (Jpn., basho) of absolute Nothingness or Buddhist Emptiness. By reconsidering the notion of the Absolute, Hartshorne has come up with the standpoint of "Surrelativism," and Nishida's attempt has resulted in the standpoint of "absolute dialectic as guided by the principle of the self-identity of absolute contradictions."

Habida cuenta de los intensos debates de los años '60 y '70, al interior de la tradición anglosajona en filosofía de la ciencia, y que minaron los postulados más básicos de la Concepción Heredada, apareció la necesidad de explicar el desarrollo de la ciencia en la historia, es decir el despliegue mismo de la racionalidad científica. Las epistemologías evolucionistas constituyen uno de esos intentos, aunque de su analogía con la teoría de la evolución biológica surge como problema el desajuste de explicar una empresa teleológica (la de la ciencia) mediante un modelo no teleológico (el de la evolución de las especies). En este trabajo se realiza un polemica imaginaria entre un epistemólogo evolucionista (Popper) y otro que no lo es (Kuhn) respecto de la cuestión del progreso de la ciencia: el primero, comprometido ontológicamente con un punto de vista evolucionista, mientras que el segundo realiza sólo una analogía.

Más que una pregunta sobre qué sea la filosofía o cuál sea su función, planteo la pregunta ¿cuál debe ser la actitud del filósofo? La requesta a esta pregunta nos premitirá descubrir el secreto y el centro de toda filosofía, sentido que como decía Geroult "construye en acuerdo consigo misma y en reacción contra sí misma." Toda filosofía es una lectura del sentido y la cosa misma sólo es el hogar virtual de sus formulaciones convergentes. El posmodernismo y su versión clásica el escepticismo, han puesto en duda desde siempre que la filosofía tenga una razón de ser, más aún, que tenga una misión; pero no sólo la filosofía "sospecha" de sí misma, la acompañan en ese camino las ciencias en general y la técnica. ¿Podemos seguir hablando de la verdad y lo verdadero sin titubear? La propuesta de este trabajo es que la filosofía busque en lo ambiguo "una nueva experiencia de nuestra condicion," en que el sentido no sea sólo el correlato de una operacion reflexiva sino que provenga del "cuerpo" como "nudo de significaciones vivas," fundante de lo que podríamos llamar "evidencias naturales."

Philosophy as paideia is shown here as a resignification of tragedy as paideia in consonance with several contemporary thinkers. In this philosophical reading of tragedy, noted as the confirmation of an êthos starting from páthos, the experience of suffering is a privileged instance of learning which generates a peculiar wisdom — anagnórisis. Its appropriation gives occasion for a deep conversion that may take place as salvation. Moreover, the tragical paideía is — in the case of Antígone — an exemplary surpassing of violence towards justice, and the surpassing of justice in the paradigm of friendship and human solidarity. From Antígone, it is possible to throw light on the ethical life (Sittlichkeit), so as to see it as did Hegel. In it there is already a constellation of tensions provoked by the connected incidence of destiny and the action of human liberty. This constitutes the tragical conflict which shakes the home or family, the pólis, the phýsis and questions of justice and destiny, in order to recover them, perhaps, at a higher level of love and friendship. But above all, Antígone presents an alternative to paideía because she speaks and acts from alterity, from the brother or sister as the other absent, and so allows the other side to emerge, the other side imperfectly seen until now as an obscure, unconscious, underground — the other that one tends to forget and avoid — the excluded, the nothing as mystery of being, the kingdom of shadows that exalts the limits of light-figures, the female principle as the gravity-force of the male principle, femininity as 'irony of the community.'

A partir de la contraposición entre la filosofía dogmática o patológica y la filosofía positiva, entendida como práctica de estudio y crítica del lenguaje guiada por un objetivo terapéutico, es el propósito de este trabajo desplegar los aspectos pedagógicos contenidos en este último concepto, tal como se presenta en los último trabajos del filósofo austríaco, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Para esto se identifican primero, y se analizan después, los distintos terapéuticas, destinados, en un primer momento, a acompañer al discípulo-lector en la búsqueda de la salida del laberinto de significados en el que estamos cautivos; y en un segundo momento, a guiarlo en el proceso de modificación de la dirección de la mirada que permite establecer las conexiones entre los diferentes juegos de lenguaje y entre estos y las formas de vida que le corresponden, y que Wittgenstein denomina 'visión sinóptica.'

I call the union of cybernetics and systems theory 'Systems Cybernetics.' Cybernetics and systems theory might be thought of a major source of today's striking development in cyber-technology, the science of complex adaptive systems, and so on. Since their genesis about the middle of this century, these two have gradually come to be connected with each other such that they have now formed an integrative theory which can be called Systems Cybernetics. This article pays attention to its aspects which are often overlooked, but which have profound significance for contemporary philosophy and our handling of various problems posed by modern societies. I insist that the dominant factors of European modernization are primarily economic and technological, though modernity has often been characterized by philosophical and scientific rationalism. I also insist that there are several problems which deserve particular attention but are made invisible by the economic and technological inclination of the modern mind. In such a context, the problem of reductionism in modern science and the concept of subject detached from its surroundings are discussed. In order to cope with these problems, main theories of System Cybernetics are applied. Post-modern System Cybernetics — which will be illustrated — is also expected to play an active part.

The Philosophical Investigations is an inherently pedagogical work. Wittgenstein claims throughout his later writings to be teaching a method and this method is both philosophical and pedagogical. It is the claim of this paper that if we do not take Wittgenstein's methodological claim seriously, we do not engage with the text in the manner for which it was written. Consequently, we begin and end in the wrong places and the text becomes (in the words of Wittgenstein) 'variously misunderstood, more or less mangled and watered-down.' §1 is philosophically and pedagogically complex. It presents the philosophical problems to which Wittgenstein will respond in the text which follows and it also, significantly, presents their solution. An investigation of the philosophical and pedagogical questions raised in the opening remark of the Investigations will demonstrate that we have not yet begun to use Wittgenstein's method and his writings to their full potential.

This essay is primarily an analysis of Heidegger's Was Heisst Denken? I aim to provide a thematic unity for this enigmatic text, thereby rendering Heidegger's thoughts on thinking more available to those investigating the nature of human rationality and thinking. The procedure is to gather together some of the sundry themes and puzzling features resolved by unpacking this sentence: 'Most thought-provoking in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.' The chief results of this study include the establishment of a global logic to the text, the identification of 'beingthoughtful' as the proper phenomenon to be studied, and receptivity ('listening for what calls for thinking') as the distinguishing mark of the thoughtful.

This paper is concerned with some of the differences between philosophy and contemporary science, and with the significance of these differences for the question of the nature of philosophy. Differences of particular interest here are ones that tend to be concealed and ignored through the influence of the professionalist attitudes of contemporary science, an influence that manifests itself in the prevailing normative attitude to the vocabularies and linguistic practices of professional philosophy. It is argued that this normative attitude is questionable in the light of a feature that we take to be essential to philosophy: always being open to the question of its own nature and task.

Of all the German idealists, Sartre refers the least to Fichte-so little in fact that there have been long-standing suspicions that he was not even familiar with Fichte's writings. It is perhaps ironic, then, that Fichte's writings are as helpful as they are for clarifying Sartre's views, especially his views on subjectivity and inter-subjectivity. Here I want to look closely at a key concept in Fichte's mature writings: the concept of the Anstoss, a concept which Dan Breazeale has called "Fichte's original insight." Fichte introduces the Anstoss, or "check," to explain why the I posits the world as it does. In effect, the Anstoss is the occasion of the facticity of the I. I will show that his concept can be uniquely helpful in understanding the role the body plays in Sartre's theory of inter-subjectivity. The importance of Sartre's account of the body for his theory of subjectivity and inter-subjectivity has been chronically underappreciated by his interpreters; this comparison is the beginning of an attempt to rectify that. In turn the concept of the Anstoss provides a means for analyzing the necessary differences between any Sartrean and Fichtean ethics based on their respective accounts of inter-subjectivity.