In 1935 Walter Benjamin wrote that “art’s fateful hour has struck” and that he had “captured its signature” in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproduction.” Less than a month after these words were written, Martin Heidegger gave a lecture entitled “The Origin of the Work of Art” in Freiburg. These two philosophical ref…[Read more]

This article offers an interpretation of the transition that occurs in Physics A.7, in which Aristotle establishes an important new role for form in accounting for ontological identity. It then turns to Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle’s conception of physis in order to show the dangers, both ontological and ethical, endemic to Hei…[Read more]

In order to suggest why Kant does not offer an explicit argument for the necessary connection between the synthesis of the imagination and the categories, this article argues that the productive imagination and the understanding are in fact two aspects of one and the same ability (Vermögen), and further, that their identity may be thought in such…[Read more]

By way of an analysis of Arendt’s defense of the public/private distinction in The Human Condition, this essay attempts to offer a re-interpretation of the status of the family as a realm where the categories of action and speech play a vital role. The traditional criteria for the establishment of the public/private distinction is grounded in an i…[Read more]

By investigating Levinas’ notion of the transcendence of the face to face against the backdrop of his own conception of traditional Western philosophy, the extent to which Levinas himself fails to transcend the very structure of western philosophy is elucidated.