The Secular Frontier

“a mortal can only start from here, from his mortality.  His possible belief in immortality, his irresistible interest in the beyond, in gods and spirits, what makes survival structure every instant in a kind of irreducible torsion, the torsion of ... Read Article

(Jacques Derrida, wiki) (Martin Heidegger, wiki) These are my notes for an upcoming study of Heidegger's Being and Time and Derrida's response. I focus on philosophy of death and Derrida's books The Gift of Death, On the Name, and Aporias. ... Read Article

Nietzsche argued that early Jews and Greeks were fundamentally "attached to life" and paid little attention to ideas of a personal afterlife or postmortem rewards and punishments. In his 1881 work Daybreak (specifically Section 72), Nietzsche contrasts th ... Read Article

Derrida notes no context, such as death, “can determine meaning to the point of exhaustiveness (Derrida, 9).”  Derrida connects this to the notion of aporia, a block in the path of appropriation that elicits wonder/thaumazein, something “fascinatin ... Read Article

In Derrida’s Aporias, he says regarding Seneca and death “Seneca describes the absolute imminence, the imminence of death at every instant.  This imminence of disappearance that is by essence premature seals the union of the possible and the impo ... Read Article

Αἰὼν παῖς ἐστι παίζων πεσσεύων· παιδὸς ἡ βασιληίη. "The aeon (The Geschick of being) is a child at play, playing at draughts; dominion is the child's" (that is to say, dominion over being as a whole). Herac ... Read Article

This will be my last series on Derrida and Death and I will be looking at his book APORIAS. Here's a little context for making sense of the series: Friedrich Nietzsche discusses ancient Greek "proofs" of the soul's immortality primarily to critique th ... Read Article

Derrida says Philosophical thinking is usually thought as taking up a guiding thread in a text  (e.g., negative theology) provisionally, and seeing what we can do with it (Sauf le nom, 62).  It concludes by going “back, then once more, briefly ... Read Article

I’m beginning my last two blog series on Jacques Derrida.  Previously I looked at his book The Gift of Death and essay Sauf le nom, and now I will be looking at his essay khora, which looks at Plato’s Timaeus.  In my last series I will look ... Read Article

We’ve been thinking about apophasis/negative theology, a way of approaching God without attributing things to him.  This was popularized by the Christian mystic tradition.  Angelus Silesius mentions the heart becoming the Mount of Olives in Bo ... Read Article

(free AI image) "19 Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, 20 but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do ... Read Article

The unknown God of negative theology (not this, not that) is a singularity that overflows attempts a generalizing with an essence, overflowing opposites like thing/non thing, being/ non being – transcending all theological attributes (Derrida, Sauf le n ... Read Article

We’ve been thinking about negative theology / apophatic theology with Derrida’s Sauf le nom, the idea of characterizing the divine by negating predicates: wise without wisdom, powerful without power.  It is a kind of language/translating.  I ... Read Article

Derrida’s Sauf le nom (Post-Scriptum) begins with a look at apophatic theology (negative theology) and Augustine’s Confessions.  Apophatic theology is the idea that we approach God, not through attribution (e.g., God is all-powerful), but through que ... Read Article

Martin Heidegger did his major study lecture course on Plato's Sophist around the same time as Being and Time, and a major focus is Antisthenes on the question of naming. Let's approach this obliquely with the question on the sciences. Academic fields ... Read Article

Heidegger uses the term phenomenology in Hegel’s sense as "uncovering what is hidden" though always already there inconspicuously: making conspicuous. Hegel says the tearing of the sock phenomenalizes the Category of Unity, "as" a lost-Unity. Hegel, ... Read Article

I've been thinking about Jacques Derrida and deconstruction in previous posts, so I'd like to contrast Derrida with Heidegger briefly “In order to understand, Heidegger says, one must see phenomenologically. He thus invites us to the first exercise ... Read Article

Heidegger talks about the passivity and receptivity of essential thinking, not something the result of your effort.  In German this is “Es Gibt,” “there is” or literally “it gives.”  For example, you might try in futility for hours to solve ... Read Article

One of the striking things about Paul’s letters is they sound like Papal missives or decrees. Paul was a self-made man from Tarsus and a self-proclaimed apostle. But his long and weighty letters make him sound like a Roman provincial administrator. In ... Read Article

Heidegger notes in the history of philosophy as metaphysics from Plato to Nietzsche the central “world” or context the questions are being interrogated in are that of Being, which made scientific reasoning possible. The Greek word for Being, ousia, wh ... Read Article

What I would like to do below is read some key passages from the beginning of chapter two and then illuminate them with some thoughts on Heidegger, Derrida, and AI.  Derrida says: What we are here calling the apprehension of death refers as much ... Read Article

Previous Post New Blog Post Series: Jacques Derrida and the Philosophy of Death One of the great mysteries of philosophy’s contact with religion and death since Kierkegaard is the story of Abraham being told by God to sacrifice his son Isaac. Ther ... Read Article

In the last series I talked in good Heideggerian fashion about how our stance/being toward death is going to establish the way in which the human condition unfolds for us. For example, I summarized that: Death is such a wonderful topic in Philosophy, ... Read Article

Previously: The Meaning of Life Through Death What’s the Point of the Bible? (2/2) What’s the Point of the Bible: Causing Anagnorisis in the Reader (CONCLUSION) What’s the Point of the Bible: What is Faith?  It’s not What you Thin ... Read Article

Previously: The Meaning of Life Through Death What’s the Point of the Bible? (2/2) What’s the Point of the Bible: Causing Anagnorisis in the Reader (CONCLUSION) What’s the Point of the Bible: What is Faith?  It’s not What you Think ... Read Article