Philosophy

Episode 78: The Concretization of Apprehension

We read about how the first beginning experiences the truth of beings while the other beginning experiences the truth of beyng, and we discuss the differences. Heidegger counsels not to gauge or interpret the primordiality of beginnings according to their starting point or advancements and highlights the guideline and anticipatory grasp of thought as instrumental…

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Episode 77: How Few Understand Negation

In section 90, we read about negation, and how it is too frequently taken to mean sheer rejection, dismissal, disparagement, or disintegration. In short, negation is logically neutered into the “not.” Heidegger urges us to think of negation as a leaping away into the Da (or there) of Dasein, and thus to be a kind…

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Episode 76: The Genuine Overcoming of Nihilism

In sections 87-89 we read of establishing a history of metaphysics that enables the realization that “refusal pertains intrinsically to the essence of beyng,” of taking thinking back into the grounding of Dasein, and of the “long periods of solitudes and the stillest raptures at the fireside of beyng” that the transitional ones must undertake….

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Episode 75: The Logic Gamer Grind

In sections 85 and 86 of Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) we read of the four “extensions” of metaphysics that lead to our ingrained thinking about being and beyng. Primary among these is the compulsion to make beingness present and relate to it as presence, which culminates in a host of symptoms and effects….

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Episode 74: The End of Metaphysics

Reading thru the middle of section 85 of Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) we wade through meditations on the overcoming of metaphysics, or “the knowledge of the ‘being’ of beings.” This leads to a variety of musings on how liberalism is the real world manifestation of the metaphysical heritage, so the process of ending…

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Episode 73: Logic as Powerless Thinking

We begin a new super section of the book, 3: The Interplay, and read about the forms of historical meditation, the passing of the ball from the first to the other beginning, and logic as a vestige of the powerlessness of thinking. This gives rise to discussions on how to free thought of logic, or…

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Episode 72: The Ineptitude of Exactitude

In the final passages of section 80, Heidegger asks, “what is ‘more sure’: the immediate, naive description or the exact experiment?,” and then answers, “the former, because there theory is presupposed ‘less’.” Discussing this startling proposition, we conclude super section 2, The Resonating. Along the way we discuss “teaching to the test,” liberal education’s failure…

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Episode 71: What Not To Look At?

In sections 78 and 79 we read of the transformation of experience into a mathematico-rational measuring experiment opposed to “arbitrary, merely curiosity-motivated exploration of an indeterminately represented domain.” We spin off from these speculations to look at how the liberal/non-liberal dichotomy involves different perspectives on freedom of speech and law and order on a gradient…

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Episode 70: Experience as Experiment

In sections 77 and 78 we read of the ways in which experience and experiment inter-relate on a spectrum via anticipatory grasping, a desire for an exposition of regulatory, testing, inputting, placing objects in temptation, and the establishment of an essential objective domain accessible only through quantitative rules. We then discuss how anxiety plays into…

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Episode 69: All the Substance Sucked Out

We finally conclude section 76 with a short section about newspaper science (the humanities) and machine science (the natural sciences). Heidegger states that “newspaper and machine are meant here…as the impelling modes of that final objectification…which sucks all the substantiveness out of beings, leaving them mere occasions for lived experience.” After parsing this all out,…

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