Finding uses for used-up words: Thinking Weltanschauung "after" Heidegger

Philosophy Today

Volumn 50, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 156-169

  Simmons, J Aaron ^a  

^a VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 60949836508     PISSN: 00318256     EISSN: 00318256     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/philtoday200650248     Document Type: Article

References (68)

1. For examples in science see, Liane Gabora, "Ideas Are Not Replicators but Minds Are," Biology and Philosophy 19 (January 2004): 127-43
2. Hugh G. Gauch Jr., "Public Theology and Scientific Method: Formulating Reasons That Count Across Worldviews," Philosophia Christi 4 (2002): 45-88
3. V. F. Turchin, The Inertia of Fear and the Scientific Worldview, trans. Guy Daniels (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981)
4. Richard DeWitt, Worldviews: An Introduction to the History and Philosophy of Science (Malden: Blackwell, 2004)
5. For examples in religion see, Peter S. Heslam, Creating a Christian Worldview: Abraham Kuyper's Lectures on Calvanism (Grand Rapids: W. B. Eerdmans, 1998)
6. Albert M. Wolters, Creation Regained: Biblical Basics for a Reformational Worldview (Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerdmans, 1985)
7. James W. Sire, Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2004)
8. Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live?: The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture (Old Tappon: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1976)
9. Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcey, How Now Shall We Live? (Wheaton: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 1999)
10. Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2004)
11. For ecology see, Ray Wilkie, "Wendell Berry's Conception of Knowledge - and His Communitarian, Ecological Worldview," Philosophical Studies in Education 34 (2003): 109-20
12. Mary Evelyn Tucker and John A. Grim, eds., Worldviews and Ecology (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1993)
13. Robert E. Ulanowicz, "Ecology, the Subversive Science?" Episteme 11 (July-December 2000): 137-52
14. Wim Zweers, "Participating with Nature: Outline for an Ecologisation of our Worldview," Environmental Values 11 (May 2002): 243-45
15. K. J. Korfiatis, "Habitat Templets and the Changing Worldview of Ecology," Biology and Philosophy 14 (July 1999): 375-93
16. For various sociological accounts see, Jos De Mul, "The Informatization of the Worldview," Information, Comunication, and Society 2 (1999): 604-29
17. Bennie J. Van der Walt, "Culture, Worldview, and Religion: A Perspective from the African Continent," Philosophia Reformata 66 (2001): 23-38
18. For examples in the philosophy of education see, Garth D. Benson, "Science Education from a Social Constructivist Position: A Worldview," Studies in Philosophy and Education 20 (Summer 2001): 443-52
19. Raymond Wilkie, "The Ecological/Communitarian Worldview of Wendell Berry: Its Implications for Educational Philosophy," Philosophical Studies in Education (1996): 112-21
20. See, Peter Kakol, "A General Theory of Worldviews Based on Madhyamika and Process Philosophies," Philosophy East and West 52 (April 2002): 207-23
21. Ran Lahav, "A Conceptual Framework for Philosophical Counseling: Worldview Interpretation," in Essays on Philosophical Counseling, ed., Ran Lahav (Lanham, MD: University Press of America: 1995)
22. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)
23. This point is fairly well acknowledged in the literature. For example, Jackie David Johns writes, "Worldviews are not universal. Every individual has a unique worldview comprised of his or her own matrix of visions" (79), and James W. Sire echoes this subjectivist element when he claims that, "everyone has a worldview" (16). However, when one goes beyond the intellectual assent to the individualistic characteristics and pushes towards worldviews in practice there emerges a much more rigorously defended universality which appeals to absolute truth and objective reality. So, Gregory R. Peterson will agree with the subjective multiplicity but then go on to claim that when we talk of "religious worldviews" they are characterized by three elements: they are "fundamental," "explanatory," and "global in character" (9). This move seems odd when we consider that it is the status of these three elements that presuppose a certain commitment to objectivity rather than subjectivity, and metanarratives rather than local stories. It is this tension between theory and practice-which-entails-another- theory that serves as the central concern for the continued usage of the rhetoric of worldview. Citations are respectively from: Johns, "Pentecostalism and the Postmodern Worldview," Journal of Pentecostal Theology 7 (1995): 73-96
24. Sire, The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog, 3rd Ed. (Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1997)
25. and Peterson, "Religion as Orienting Worldview," Zygon 36 (March 2001): 5-19
26. Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982)
27. "The Age of the World Picture," in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977)
28. Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). Hereafter, I will refer to these texts as BP, AWP, and Beiträge respectively
29. See also, Heidegger's Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 5th ed., trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997)
30. and The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984)
31. The play on the term "after" here should be obvious. In the first instance I intend "after" to mean a "going-beyond" or even "overcoming." And in the second, I mean "after" as "in the wake of," as in the idea of "following-after" someone. For a further consideration of the possible connotations of "after" see: David Wood, Thinking After Heidegger (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002)
32. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), frontispiece, xix. Hereafter, BT followed by section number and page number
33. Heidegger, Beiträge, Preface to the "Preview" section, 1
34. For a consideration of how the rejection of worldviews is formative on Heidegger's early thought see, Robert Bernasconi, "'The Double Concept of Philosophy' and the Place of Ethics in Being and Time," Research in Phenomenology 18 (1988): 41-57
35. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar, (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987), §26, 111
36. David Naugle, Worldview: The History of a Concept (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002), 59
37. The classic text in which Dilthey formulates his thinking on this subject is, "The Types of World Views and Their Unfoldment Within the Metaphysical Systems," which is included in Vol. VIII of his Gesammelte Schriften. The English version was published under the title: Dilthey's Philosophy of Existence: Introduction to Weltanschauungslehre, trans. William Kluback and Martin Weinbaum (Great Britain: Vision, 1957)
38. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984)
39. Dilthey, Philosophy of Existence, 22
40. Martin Heidegger, "Wilhelm Dilthey's Research and the Struggle for a Historical Worldview," trans. Charles Bambach, in Supplements: From the Earliest Essays to Being and Time and Beyond, ed., John van Buren (Albany: The State University of New York Press, 2002), 147-76
41. Karl Jaspers, Psychologie Der Weltanschauungen (Berlin: Verlag von Julius Springer, 1919). Unfortunately, this book has not been translated into English
42. Martin Heidegger, "Letter to Karl Jaspers - June 27, 1922," in The Heidegger-Jaspers Correspondence (1920- 1963), eds., Walter Biemel and Hans Saner, trans. Gary E. Aylesworth (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2003), 36
43. Martin Heidegger, "Comments on Karl Jaspers' Psychology of Worldviews," in Supplements
44. Karl Jaspers, "Letter to Martin Heidegger - July 2, 1922," in The Heidegger-Jaspers Correspondence, 37
45. Jaspers, Psychology of Worldviews, as quoted by Tom Rockmore in "Jaspers, Weltanschauung, and the Idea of Philosophy," in Karl Jaspers: On Philosophy of History and History of Philosophy, eds. Joseph W. Koterski, S.J., and Raymond J. Langley (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2003), 281
46. Karl Jaspers, Philosophy Vol. I, trans. E. B. Ashton (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969), 251
47. Rockmore, "Jaspers, Weltanschauung, and the Idea of Philosophy," 290ff
48. See, Oswald O. Schrag, Existence, Existenz, and Transcendence: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Karl Jaspers (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1971), 97-106
49. Jaspers, Philosophy, 252
50. Edmund Husserl, "Philosophy as Rigorous Science," in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy: Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man, trans. Quentin Lauer (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 136
51. David Carr, Phenomenology and the Problem of History: A Study of Husserl's Transcendental Philosophy, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 246
52. Robert Bemasconi makes a similar point when he notes that in The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, "Heidegger . . . explain[s] that a worldview is the taking up or inhabiting of a position in the sense of an existentiell stance" ("'The Double Concept of Philosophy' and the Place of Ethics in Being and Time," 44)
53. Heidegger, Basic Problems, §3, 11
54. Heidegger, Being and Time, §7, 24
55. John Macquarie notes that Sartre's appropriation of Heidegger, although mistaken, is not entirely a misreading of Being and Time, but rather something of a narrow reading of it. He writes, "if we confine our attention to what is said in Being and Time, it can be freely acknowledged that Sartre can hardly be blamed for reading the book in the way that he did." Heidegger and Christianity, (New York: Continuum, 1994), 38
56. Heidegger, Age of the World Picture, 127
57. Heidegger, "Comments on Karl Jaspers' Psychology of Worldviews," 84
58. On Heidegger's performativity see, David Wood, Thinking After Heidegger, esp. chapter 10, "The Performative Imperative: Reflections on Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy (From Eventuation)"
59. Susan M. Schoenbohm, "Reading Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy: An Orientation," in Companion to Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy, ed. Charles E. Scott, Susan M. Schoenbohm, Daniela Vallega-Neu, and Alejandro Vallega (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 15-31
60. and Richard Polt, "The Event of Enthinking the Event," also in Companion to Heidegger's Contributions to Phhilosophy, 81-104
61. William Wordsworth, "Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour," lines 25-26
62. As found in The Works of William Wordsworth (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 1994)
63. Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology," in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. Willilam Lovitt (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977)
64. Heidegger, Beiträge, §§81-82, 119-120
65. Hence, Cage's requirement that "4.33" only be performed by extremely talented and accomplished pianists. Were it to be framed in an alternative way - say in a classroom with a volunteer from the class "performing" it - the very performative content would evaporate
66. For an excellent discussion of Duchamp's relation to the philosophy of art see: Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981)
67. Heidegger, Question Concerning Technology, 28
68. That is, one guided by hospitality and invitation. See also Derrida's Adieu To Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999)