Heidegger And Metaphysical Aesthetics

The aim of this paper is to bring to light some of the fundamental differences between Heidegger’s approach to art and the traditional approach, and to do so within the context of Heidegger’s project of what he calls “overcoming metaphysics”

Convention And Difference

The claim that music is language may be oft repeated, but it remains wholly unenlightening unless a sufficient explanation of one of these terms has already been given. On the face of it, music is entirely dissimilar to natural language, at least when conceived functionally, the one being categorised primarily as an aesthetic object, the other first and foremost as a means of communication

Semiotics of Conscience

This chapter offers a long‐overdue semiotic analysis of the phenomenon of conscience. It is remarkable that such an analysis has not yet been attempted, because conscience has always been understood as something like a voice signing, and not just unimportantly, but as the voice of God. One could well have expected that an analysis of conscience would have been first on the semiotician’s tick list. Using Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis of conscience as a guide, it turns out that a simple Peircean analysis in terms of representamen, object and interpretant is at least a good way of opening the phenomenon up with the semiotician’s tools. My conclusions point to the uniqueness of the sign of conscience among all signs. For it is one sign where all three moments—representamen, object and interpretant—are the very same entity. Given the existential semiotic reduction—without remainder—of the subject to a structured network of signs, one can then glimpse the extraordinary conclusion that in the phenomenon of conscience we encounter the signing of semiosis itself—the sign of signs. It is no wonder, then, that it has been understood to be the voice of God. I finish by developing the ethical ramifications of my analysis for semiotics

The Existential Turn: Reappraising Being and Time’s Overcoming of Metaphysics

The task of this paper is to propose an answer to these relatedquestions. It amounts to an attempt to work through conceptually step by step Heidegger’s so called “overcoming of metaphysics”. It is true of course that the locution, “the overcoming of metaphysics”, does not appear in Being and Time. The discourse of the overcoming of metaphysics is held by Heidegger’s commentators to belong to a period post-dating the early work, after the so called Kehre. I shall stubbornly evade this knotty issue of Heidegger interpretation here. For my purposes it suffices merely if our understanding ofBeing and Time, its content, intent and consequence, can be deepened or expanded if it is read in the light of the task of overcoming metaphysics—or at least in the light of that task as it is to be conceived in the context I shall present here. What is to be understood by the phrase “the overcoming of metaphysics”