Based on a reading of K.E. Løgstrup’s The Ethical Demand and Emmanuel Levinas’ Totality and Infinity, the paper aims to show that it is respectively through trust and love, hospitality and friendship that the two thinkers envisage humans as being capable of realising unfulfillable and impossible ethical demands. It will be argued that they develop their ethical thinking along similar lines, yet, e [....]
Publicaciones
The question concerning tectonics as a response to the challenge of technology
The paper offers a historical and conceptual study of tectonics, a concept which Martin Heidegger hints at in Building Dwelling Thinking. The purpose is to clarify the concept of tectonics, which has barely been taken up by readers of Heidegger’s work, in order to rethink the concealed connection which it maintains to technique and raise the question whether it may contain an answer to the challen [....]
When the bile turns black: On the origins of melancholy
The purpose of the first part of the paper is to trace a precursor of melancholy back to Homer’s description of certain emotions which are congenial with rage (cholos or chole), and which are associated with the color black (melainos). Based on a systematic interpretation of these traces of melancholy in the earliest premedical history, the second part of the paper will shed new light on the broad [....]
Public space contested: Metropolitan squares as sites for urban commoning
Against the backdrop of the popular uprisings on squares around the world, surging on and off from 2008 to 2013, the present contribution offers a critical study of public squares as sites for contested space and urban commoning. Based on an elaborate understanding of differences and similarities between traditional forms of commoning in the open field system and new forms of urban commoning, the [....]
Measuring prowess: A philosophical interpretation of the sport contest
The paper offers an interpretation of pitting one’s strength and prowess against others as internal to sport competition. Historically, the majority of modern sport disciplines originated from physical activities and practices, in which two or more competitors gauge their strength and prowess in order to know who is the better. Despite the fact that pitting strength and measuring prowess remains c [....]
Hospitality and companionship: Friendship as an analogue for good alliances
Taking its starting point in an ancient understanding of hospitality and guest friendship, the paper offers a philosophical interpretation of the ethical dimension of alliances. Entering into an alliance presupposes certain ethical dispositions, first of all trust, which allies develop over time by offering each other testimonies of trustworthiness and by keeping promises. Insofar as the alliance [....]
Retrieving experience. On the phenomenology of experience in Hegel and Kierkegaard, Arendt and Gadamer
The purpose of the present contribution is to develop an understanding of experience as in need of being continuously uncovered and recovered in order to consolidate itself. Through a critical dialogue with modern phenomenological and hermeneutical traditions, this consolidation process will prove to be porous and discontinuous, as experience contains caesuras and limits, which break open and even [....]
Connecting ends with beginnings – Conceptual framework for a circular art of tectonics
Based on a broad understanding of the ancient arts of tectonics, the paper presents a conceptual framework for a circular art of modern tectonics. [....]