School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemThe imperative to see the whole( 2007)The Eleatic advance over Homeric epic was to bring the phenomenon of the finitude of existence into view in terms of logos and not just mythos. In seeing that being is bound to appearance not accidentally but in essence, Parmenides confronts limits of thought which are destined for modern resurgence in the wake of the epochal dominance of the Platonic understanding of the meaning of being. The phenomenon of radical finitude reappears in the philosophy of Leibniz, shaped in part by Europe's more or less sudden discovery of Chinese culture, a culture no less ancient than its own existing on the other side of a world, the whole of which had finally been appreciated to be a globe. The European debates concerning the nature of Chinese thought reveal a struggle in the Western imagination to come to terms with this discovery, fundamental enough to be described as a "re-orientation of the occident." This reorientation leads inexorably to Kant's epochal realisation of the role of transcendental imagination in the constitution of temporality, which is an understanding of limitation constituting a confrontation with the limits of thought no less radical than Parmenides'. Having thus traced a path through philosophy's history of attempts to understand the imperative to see the whole, Heidegger's phenomenology of human finitude recounts this history in order to enable a realization of the historicity of the meaning of being itself, and is thus a project of the retrieval of these meanings, which have unfolded throughout the history of philosophy. Apprehending our own modern understanding of being in terms of production, I follow Heidegger as he attempts to think his way first back into the pre-modern understanding of being as creation, and then back again into the pre-Socratic experience of being as a balance (kosmos) of absence and presence, revealing and concealing. But this path of retrieval is found to converge not upon a pure origin in Parmenides, but rather to lead to the thought of the operation of mixture in the source of our metaphysics, and in particular upon the mixed contrasts arising in the epochal crossing of Ancient Greek and Anglo-Saxon cultures from which modern Germanic languages have arisen. The significance of that fundamental fold in the history of thought mirrors the significance of the fold still underway for us today, as Western philosophy continues to come to terms with Eastern ways of thinking about being, and a cultural interaction takes place whose significance for the future is destined to become as consequential as the meeting of the Classical and Anglo-Saxon worlds in first-century Britain has been for us.
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ItemDelineating finitude : Heidegger on the essence of truth( 2003)In this thesis I argue that, fundamentally, Heidegger's method of inquiry into the essence of truth is the same as that which he attributes to Plato and Aristotle, and this despite a surface critique of Plato's exoteric rhetoric. My argument focuses on two Heideggerian texts on truth: Being and Time section 44, entitled "Dasein Disclosedness and Truth" and "On the Essence of Truth". For both texts I show Heidegger engaging in a 'deconstructive retrieval' of the distinction between praxis [action] and poiesis [production], along with how this relates to the essence of truth. My argument draws on the considerable secondary literature concerning the Aristotelean roots of Heidegger's Being and Time (authors include, Kisiel T., Tamineaux J., Sheehan T., McNiell W., Bernasconi R.,). It seeks to extend this field by showing how Plato's dialogues play a fundamental role in establishing the key concepts of his reading of Aristotle. In his 1925 lectures on Plato's Sophist, Heidegger justifies his use of Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics as an introduction to Plato's Sophist and Theatetus with a basic tenet of hermeneutics: "from the clear to the obscure", i.e. from Aristotle to Plato. My hypothesis is that he continues to think the relation between Aristotle and Plato in that way, at least during the late twenties and thirties. So, where most current literature holds Heidegger to be opposed to Plato, especially on the question of truth, I seek to show that there is substantial underlying agreement. In particular, I argue that in the essay "On the Essence of Truth" Heidegger implicitly imitates features of the cave allegory from Plato's Republic, including a technique he finds in Plato, which he calls "the saying of a turning."