The aim of this article is to investigate Martin Heidegger’s stance on science’s ability to uncover nature as it is in itself. While Hubert Dreyfus argues that Heidegger is a robust realist regarding the entities of natural sciences, based on an interpretation of Heidegger’s notion of anxiety, I will argue, to the contrary, that anxiety points us in the direction of a more primordial understanding of nature, which Heidegger names phusis. I will further argue that even though phusis cannot be equated with the nature of the natural sciences, that does not make the notion anti-scientiic, but rather non-scientiic. Understood this way, the natural scientiic conception of nature is a way to give meaning to something which is itself incom-prehensible.
Heidegger was an important inluence on Gadamer’s thought. And yet, while Heidegger argued that Western metaphysics from Plato onwards initiated a process of the forgetfulness of being, Gadamer has a far more sympathetic reading of Plato in which he emphasiz-es the importance of dialogue. In this article, I explore Gadamer’s reading of Plato, focussing on the notions of the beautiful and the good. I examine ways that Gadamer’s understanding of the beauti-ful and good relates to practice and point to connections that inform the practice of hermeneutics. I consider how the beautiful and good can be understood as supporting Gadamer’s key notion of dialogue and other aspects of his hermeneutics, such as providing practical resources related to understanding, the interplay between unity and difference, and solidarity.
The current crisis of plastic overaccumulation on a planetary scale reveals a toxic relationship with earth premised on the exploitation of natural resources. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s notion of amor mundi, this article argues that such a relationship relects a profound lack of care and love for one’s habitat. It examines two works of speculative iction that engage with the plastic crisis, highlighting how their suggestion to speculate from conditions of absence can foster new ethics of care and modes of becoming. In doing so, the article proposes that the plastic crisis invites acts of radical imagination capable of transcending existing infrastructures and cultivating a spirit of hope and love for the planet. A wholehearted love of the world requires thinking through unknown and unknowable conditions while remaining committed to the well-being of one’s habitat as a guiding principle.
The contradictions of catastrophe surround us. We are experiencing a collective confusion of feelings—between hope and despair, courage and fear, compassion and hostility, anxiety and apathy—and summon oppositional metaphors to understand the source of our confusion: light and dark, oasis and desert, good and evil, human and inhuman. The agonizing truth of catastrophe, gleaned from relections on the disasters of other times and places, is that it throws everything into stark relief. In the face of incomprehensible inhumanity, we suddenly know what it means to be human with a clarity we never knew before. It is this clarity—or in the words of Camus, “lucidity” in “the very midst of the desert”—that interests me; it guides my search for inspiration and solidarity in these dark times. Where might it lead us? —into new worlds that “unfold before us as we feel,” to borrow from Edith Stein. This may be the only way we can live with the truth of catastrophe: to create affective worlds with those who also long for what is good in the midst of cruelty and evil.
Amor mundi at present must learn to love through the dissolution of a dominant world without succumbing to the resentments and reactionary fears that might accompany such passage. This paper argues that Gilbert Simondon’s account of affect is relevant for this challenge. Functioning in relational mediation with reality prior to its consolidation into a normative lifeworld, Simondon’s affect clariies the dynamics of the present without providing a conclusive solution. The article begins discussing two key existential dynamics of betweenness: can we love a world while also letting it end, and can we think amor mundi without necessitating a single, univocal sense of world? The paper then turns to a detailed discussion of Si-mondon’s affect to establish how its key features respond to these problematics. Instead of a love of or for world, Simondon’s account points towards a love of relation.
The cosmopolitan thesis points to the historical necessity for Earth to become a political whole and for politics to become planetary at Earth scale. Putting aside whether there is a universal history that necessitates unitary global governance, what happens when political ontologies are scaled up to the planet? The cosmopolitan thesis scales to the Earth as a whole, which goes beyond traditional human-centric collective categories such as society, totality, and species-being. My aim here will be to evaluate how the Earth scale appears at key moments in political thought and action in the arguments of Kant, Marx, and Arendt, and how each assesses the cosmopolitan thesis whereby once politics reaches Earth scale, a new relationship between politics and the Earth ensues.
