Summary 1/2010

MARKKU KOIVUSALO: The Death of Man I. Human Sciences without Man. The article explores the theme of death of man in the French Thought of the 60’s and especially in Michel Foucault’s book  Les Mots et les Choses. The book as the event of thought is explored in its relation to the discursive fields  (philosophical, methodological, scientific, historical)  that constituted the conditions of possibility of its own discourse. The book is also related to Foucault’s overall project of Kantian-Nietzschean critical philosophy. Here the book is seen as a special experien­ce of order, which became transformative experience for Foucault’s own thought and set it to move towards a new form of critical history of thought.

PAJARI RÄSÄNEN: Abraham’s Irony, Allegory, and the Origin of Literature. ”Irony implies the individual’s incommensurabi­lity with reality,” writes Kierkegaard, while some twenty-odd pages earlier he has stated that the love of God ”is incommensurable with the whole of reality.” To point out such a parallel between incommensurabilities is, I hope, not just an ”infernal or diabolical” way of reading Fear and Trembling, since the irony of Abraham is indeed bound with a double bind: the world and its ethical demands on the one hand, and on the other, God’s love demanding a leap of faith, a leap beyond ethics. Literature has its origin in this breath-taking situation, an experience of infinite responsibility manifested in a form of irresponsibility.

JAAKKO KUOSMANEN: Value Pluralism as a Moral Foundation of Liberalism. In the article I will examine the interconnection between value pluralism and liberalism. I will outline the prescriptive dimension of value plura­lism, and contend that, as such, this dimension does not entail extensive normative conclusions regarding the basic structuring of societies. I will argue, however, that a normative connection can be made between positive liberty and value pluralism. Thus, value pluralism can function as a normative foundation for liberalism. I will conclude by claiming that value pluralism is not, in the end, a more controversial foundation for liberalism than Rawlsian political liberalism.

Summary 2/2010

JUSSI BACKMAN: An Introduction to Martin Heidegger’s 1935 Lecture Course. The article serves as an introduction to the newly published Finnish translation of Martin Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics. I first discuss the respective historical situations in which these lectures were originally delivered (1935) and first published (1953), arguing that they can be read as an indirect account of Heidegger’s relationship to National Socialism after his rectorate (1933–34), and also as a contemporary document of the possibilities and necessities of philosophizing under the Third Reich.  I then delineate the central importance of these lectures as signaling the ”reversal” (Kehre) undertaken by Heidegger’s thinking after Being and Time (1927) and concluding in a programmatic outline of the central questions of Heidegger’s later thought.

MIIKA LUOTO: History and Finitude. On Heidegger’s Thought of Being. In Heideg­ger’s thought, the question of being is indissociable from the question of history: the very question of being comes from the history of philosophy which now shows itself as the history of the oblivion of being. In order to address the relation between being and history, Being and Time tries to clarify the historicity of existence by showing its origin in finitude. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics further develops the idea of original finitude as the exigency of the understanding of being and shows how finitude, which is more original than human being, makes possible an ontological crea­tivity. In Introduction to Metaphysics, the finitude of existence is further developed, under the motif of exigency, as the very happening of humanity in its uncanniness. For Heidegger, history eventually means the arrival of being by which human being is at once doomed to being constantly in exigency and also opened to its creative possibilities.

MARKO GYLÉN: Possibility and not. Heideg­ger’s, Nancy’s, and Figal’s different emphases of freedom of being. Thinking of freedom is central in Heidegger’s philosop­hy, although not always explicitly. Both Jean-Luc Nancy and Günter Figal have no­ted this. However, their somewhat different interpretations of Heidegger’s thinking of freedom, although essential, seem to have some problems. Stemming from this situation, the present article tries to show how freedom works in temporality of being, in the cavernous, abyssal opening of possibilities in the coming moment, and thus in the truth of being. It takes Heidegger’s Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) as its guideline, and ends up re-reading the concept of Lichtung as the core of Heidegger’s thinking of freedom.

ANNIKKI NIKU: ”I will that you be”. Care and Love in Heidegger´s Thought. This artic­le calls out two triads in Heidegger’s thinking: anxiety-care-death as the foundation of Dasein’s unity and suffering-love-death as the “unfounded foundation” (abyss) of Being. The connections and differences between these triads show Heidegger’s thinking as a continuous trail, on which the limits of philosophy are tested, especially with regard to poetry. The trail leaves some questions open for our time. Perhaps precisely there is the power of Heidegger’s work.