The purpose of this paper is twofold: First, it reconstructs Heidegger’s conception of time as pure self-affection of itself (Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 1990) asking a critical question about the insistence of space as exteriority, in general. Second, it turns to Derrida’s patient re-appropriation and deconstruction of self-affection through a reading of his own retrieval of the Kantbuch. I argue that Derrida’s conception of the formation of time and space is structurally inextricable from Heidegger’s, whilst radicalizing the division and difference implied in the latter’s early concept of time.

First,  I focus on Heidegger’s construction of time as pure self-affection, arguing that his exclusion of space from pure intuition is accompanied by the insistence of a movement which is inextricable from a figure of spatiality. Time is pure self-affection insofar as it forms itself independent of presence. This self-affection is analyzed as “going-out-of-itself-toward there,”— time is self-transcending, ek-static. This movement forms the horizon of objectivity, the possibility of presence, also called “play-space” (Spielraum). I ask whether time’s exit from and return to self (ek-stasis) does not already indicate the unity of time and space in pure intuition, contra Heidegger’s intention.

Thus, I turn to Derrida’s conception of time “rethought from différance in self-affection”. I begin from Derrida’s reading of self-affection and ecstatic temporality in his Heidegger lectures (1964–5) and his critique of the self-referentiality and unity of this structure despite the cut that articulates it as such. Then I turn to Voice and Phenomenon (1967), where Derrida, while explicitly reading Husserl, implicitly engages with Heidegger. Derrida reformulates the self-affection of time as spacing: time is divided in itself and thus welcomes exteriority in its interiority. Spacing, an auto-hetero-affection, repeats and interrupts ek-stasis." "

Fay Alafouzou is a PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy at Emory University. Her dissertation, The Time Is Out of Joint: Time and Synthesis in Derrida and Deleuze, examines the concept of time in these two French philosophers against the backdrop of Kantian and post-Kantian accounts of temporality, especially Heidegger. She is currently based in Berlin as an exchange fellow at Freie Universität Berlin.

“Only a god can still save us,” Heidegger said. I transpose the provocation to medicine: can only a god still heal us? If saving names preserving livability, and healing names reopening existence as meaningful, the question targets a limit of medicine. Drawing on Heidegger’s analysis of being-in-the-world and his critique of enframing, I argue that medicine can excel at repair yet remain hermeneutically fragile: it may restore function while failing to secure being understood and accompanied. Suffering is approached as a problem to manage rather than as a disclosure that calls for presence.

As Elaine Scarry argues in The Body in Pain (1985), pain can collapse speech toward an extra-linguistic cry. I claim this collapse is not only deprivation but disclosure: where language breaks, exposure to the other becomes unmistakable, and a being-with becomes possible—authentic insofar as it confronts thrownness and vulnerability without evasions. While hermeneutic phenomenology often privileges language, I develop the cry as communication prior to explanation through a phenomenological analysis of the patient’s address in pain. Clinically, however, it is translated into metrics, widening credibility gaps in which the patient’s word yields to procedure and expertise. Analgesia is indispensable; the point is not to preserve pain, but to show that disclosure makes the encounter high-stakes, opening possibilities of violation or genuine aid. Here “saving” becomes “healing”: the passage from exposure to accompaniment.

As a further articulation of this relational meaning, I draw on Salvifici Doloris (1984), where suffering is framed as a summons to love and solidarity. “God,” on my account, names not a supernatural agent but the relational event that can occur across the distance between I and you, as Levinas describes it: reaching the other without overriding their subjectivity, and being open without losing one’s own. Healing, accordingly, is not a return to innocence, but shared hope and peace within irreversible finitude.

Pablo Andreu is a Doctor of Philosophy, having completed his PhD at the University of Zaragoza (Spain) with a thesis on the phenomenology of pathological experience. His research interests lie in phenomenology and hermeneutics of medicine, focusing on illness, suffering, care, and the meaning of recovery. He is currently based in Dublin, where he lectures on the fundamentals of academic research with IBAT and ATU. His work explores how existential and cultural frameworks shape the medical encounter and the lived experience of health and illness in contemporary clinical contexts.

“The darkening of the world never reaches the light of beyng” – so begins Heidegger’s 1947 cycle of poems aus der Erfahrung des Denkens. This slim volume, written simultaneously at a time of great personal loss and uncertainty, amidst the rubble of the Second World War, and during the first rumblings of what would become the Cold War, espouses a view of the world as darkened or darkening. Such a theme first appears in Heidegger’s work in the depths of the Second World War, and would go on to be developed over the following two decades; during the Chinese Revolution, the Korean War, and the anxious post-war nuclear brinkmanship with the Soviet Union.

Yet, Heidegger meets this darkening of the world not with despair or pessimism but with hope and optimism. He develops and advocates for an attitude of a serene but watchful letting-be, which does not devolve into mere quietism (GA 77; GA 8; GA 7); he understand thinking as a form – indeed the most radical form – of action (GA 9); and he explains the need for patience during the darkest part of the night (GA 100).

It is exactly this triumvirate of attitudes to stormy and difficult times that is needed during the present age. For those living in Europe, a new darkness has been growing; with the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 many of the illusions of peace which had constituted the background to the post-war project of a European Community have been shattered. Now, with warnings of Russian hybrid-warfare and of further Russian invasions, the anxiety and uncertainty of the present European existence demands a radical solution. This paper suggests that in Heidegger such a solution exists.

Louise Baar is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Erfurt, Germany, working under Prof. Dr. Dr. Holger Zaborowski. In her thesis she examines the concept of peace in the lifework of Martin Heidegger. She is also co-director (with Dr. Alfred Denker) of the European Centre for Heidegger Studies.

When Martin Heidegger claimed that “only a god can save us,” he was diagnosing a techno-logic of the modern world that was hollowing out meaning, orientation, and care. Read fifty years on, this remark invites renewed reflection in light of a longer genealogy that begins with Nietzsche’s declaration of the death of God. Nietzsche’s diagnosis names not merely the collapse of theological belief, but the loss of a transcendental ground that once secured truth, value, and worldhood itself. Modernity, on this view, inherits a condition of profound disorientation, or the loss of locally significant meaning that once told us who we were. 

This paper argues that contemporary algorithmic systems—particularly those governing attention, memory, and anticipation—function as false gods or quasi-transcendental authorities that promise order and certainty in the wake of this loss. Drawing on Bernard Stiegler’s account of technics, I show how algorithmic temporalization increasingly preempts human relation and value, offering predictive coherence at the cost of worldhood. 

To make this phenomenologically concrete, the paper turns to video games as a privileged site for examining algorithmic world-constitution. Video games provide fully articulated worlds governed by computational metaphysics: rule-bound temporalities, scripted possibilities, and prefabricated destinies. In the game world, the algorithm appears as a godlike world-constituting power which reveals in concentrated form the structure of algorithmic authority operative across modern life more broadly. 

The paper concludes by returning to the question of what kind of "god" could save us. I suggest that the proliferation of algorithmic quasi-gods marks not a solution to modern disorientation but its deepening. Rather, Heidegger's "god" is also the "saving power" mentioned in the Question Concerning Technology, which would be a transformed relationship with technics that reopens the possibility of meaningful worldhood and temporal orientation."

Aaron Bernstein is a Lecturer of Philosophy at Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville, Georgia, USA. He earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, in 2024. His research is mainly in the philosophy of technology and political philosophy, especially in the Continental tradition. He lives in Macon, Georgia, with his cat and his plants.

Fifty years after his death, Heideggerian thought remains a pillar of continental philosophy, as do notable critiques of his work. Yet one of the most penetrating and valuable critiques of Heidegger has remained underexamined: that of Michel Foucault in History of Madness. This paper reads History of Madness with Contributions to Philosophy to point to the political imperative that structures Heideggerian history yet is disavowed by Heidegger himself. This takes place through a comparison of the concepts unreason and beyng. 

Focusing on Heidegger’s the role of absence in Heideggerian history I argue that Heidegger’s attempt to think history at the level of Being depends upon the structural role of unreason. While Heidegger seeks to free historical thinking from metaphysical presence by attending to absence, the void, and mystery, his history of Being abstracts these phenomena from the historically contingent practices and institutions through which withdrawal becomes effective. Foucault’s History of Madness, I suggest, exposes this limitation not by rejecting Heideggerian history, but by radicalizing it.

Reading Foucault alongside Heidegger reveals a shared commitment to history as rupture rather than continuity, and to presence as conditioned by what recedes. However, Foucault insists that such withdrawal can only be grasped through concrete historical ensembles—figures, exclusions, and institutional divisions—rather than at the level of Being alone. Madness and unreason thus function not as marginal themes, but as ontological operators that make historical intelligibility possible.

I argue that acknowledging the structural role of unreason allows Heidegger’s history of Being to be thought more rigorously. Against readings that treat History of Madness as peripheral to Heidegger scholarship, this paper contends that Foucault’s early work offers a decisive intervention into the limits of beyng-historical thinking—one that remains urgent for contemporary debates about nihilism, politics, and the legacy of Heideggerian ontology.

Brig is a second year PhD student at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. He works on 20th century continental philosophy, particularly Heidegger and Foucault. His research focuses on the role that identity plays in contemporary politics and the ontological implications contained therein. He also works on feminism, Queer theoy, aesthetics, and psychoanalysis.

In the Spiegel interview, Heidegger gives us conflicting signals with regards to the ‘arrival’ of a ‘God.’ When this arrival is understood as indicating the possible thinking responses to the dominance of both technology and of Western metaphysical thought more generally, we see that on the one hand Heidegger is open to thinkers from “Russia or China”, i.e. the non-Western world, to play a part in the responses to the technological world. Yet, on the other hand he argues that any solution to this metaphysical technological dominance should come from where this problem has its provenance, i.e. the West. Given the numerous encounters of Heidegger himself with Asian thinkers and the subsequent development of the subfield in comparative philosophy of “Heidegger and Asia”, it is unsurprising that many scholars have seen important convergences between Heidegger and at least some aspects of Asian philosophy. Using the ideas of Auseinandersetzung (engagement, confrontation), Sammlung (Gathering), and the pair of das Selbe and das Gleiche (the Same and the Identical), I argue that although Heidegger himself was often reticent and even sceptical as to the possibilities of Asian thought, it is nonetheless in resonances with classical Daoism that we can find ideas and openings to fruitful intercultural philosophical engagement, especially when addressing Heidegger’s concerns surrounding technology. Classical Daoism, in the figures of Laozi and Zhuangzi, gives us avenues to address some of the criticisms of provinciality, nihilism, and romanticism, often levied against Heidegger.

Steven Burik is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Singapore Management University. He currently holds a Lee Kong Chian Research Fellowship. His research interests are in comparative philosophy, continental philosophy (Heidegger, Derrida), and Chinese philosophy (Daoism). He is the author of The End of Comparative Philosophy and the Task of Comparative Thinking: Heidegger, Derrida, and Daoism (SUNY), co-editor of Comparative Philosophy and Method: Contemporary Practices and Future Possibilities (Bloomsbury), and has published numerous articles, including in Philosophy East and West, Dao: a Journal of Comparative Philosophy, The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, and Comparative and Continental Philosophy. 

This talk seeks to examine the significance of the uncanny as a disruptive yet productive encounter with social normativity, drawing on Martin Heidegger’s work.

First, I discuss the sense in which for Dasein, normativity is a defining feature of being-in-the-world. It is not only pervasive and self-concealing, but an ungrounded ground. This poses the risk of stagnation, which requires a moment of discontinuity that the experience of the uncanny can provide. This establishes the relevance of the uncanny.

Heidegger uses the words uncanny/uncanniness to designate multiple issues: both of an episodic and essential nature. This ambiguity requires problematising, whereas the secondary literature arbitrarily prioritises one sense in favour of the other. 

In the second part of my talk, I approach this suggesting that the uncanny for Heidegger comprises three planks, a notion I borrow from Wrathall (2011) to emphasise how, while they make up a unified platform, each plank has distinguishing specific features:* Plank 1 Uncanny grounding: due to finitude, social norms fail to ground us in a way that keeps us safely tethered. We are uncanny because we ground our existence in something incapable of providing this grounding.* Plank 2 Instances of the uncanny: experiences wherein the purposiveness derived from social norms feels unsettling, producing a disposition to self-undermine.* Plank 3 The uncanniest of beings: we have the productive capacity to undermine norms (thereby undermining our own existnce) through our style of engagement in practices – unhomeliness is not a deficient mode.

I then explain how the three planks make up a unified structure. I conclude that all planks provide different ways of understanding how homelessness is essential to being-at-home in the world, and has a freeing effect. Yet, while Plank 2 relates to ontic uncanniness, Planks 1 and 3 make up the existential structure of the uncanny. This suggests that the later writings add new insights, become more complex, while requiring the ones from previous works to be understandable.

Mihnea recently completed his doctoral dissertation at Freie Universität Berlin. This dealt with the question of personal identity over time, seeking to assess the appropriateness of this question and its philosophical assumptions with regard to agency and temporality. In this he engaged with the work of Derek Parfit, Christine Korsgaard and, most extensively, Martin Heidegger. Currently, he is developing a research project at the crossroads of aesthetics, philosophy of emotion and metaphysics on the uncanny. In the previous academic year he also worked on a side project on the European New Right.

Heidegger’s discussion of death in Being and Time remains controversial on at least two fronts. The first controversy concerns the topic of Heidegger’s discussion. Many commentators take it that, despite appearances, Heidegger’s discussion of death is not about anything related to what we ordinarily think of as death or dying, being instead about something like a collapse of self-understanding. Call these ‘world collapse’ readings of Heidegger on death (see Blattner 1994; Haugeland 2000; White 2005; Thomson 2013, 2024; Käufer 2015). Others hold that Heidegger is indeed interested in our mortality as this is ordinarily understood. Call these ‘ordinary’ readings of Heidegger on death (see Mulhall 2005; Hoffman 2006; Richardson 2012; Dahlstrom 2015; McManus 2015; Wrathall 2025). Second, critics have expressed significant doubts about the philosophical value of Heidegger’s discussion of death (see Edwards 1975 and Philipse 1998). My aim in this paper is to focus on the first of these controversies, but I address the second as well. I argue that there is decisive evidence that Heideggerian death is indeed essentially related to our mortality as ordinarily understood. I begin by describing two puzzles that have led commentators to suppose that Heidegger must have a non-ordinary sense of ‘death’ in mind. I then reconstruct and criticize the ‘world collapse’ reading of Heidegger on death. Next, I offer my positive account of Heideggerian death, one that makes sense of the two puzzles mentioned above. On my reading, death is Dasein’s no longer being in the world, which is distinct from the event of demise and is a possibility in the existential sense. Finally, I consider and respond to potential objections, showing that my account avoids issues pertaining to recent ‘ordinary’ readings and does not commit Heidegger to claims that are obviously false, trivial, incoherent, or inconsistent with his wider philosophical commitments.

Daniel J. Cohen is a PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. He is mostly interested in the history of modern European philosophy, focusing especially on post-Kantian philosophy and phenomenology. Currently, he is writing a dissertation on Heidegger’s commitment to both ontological idealism and ontic realism that situates Heidegger’s views within the work of his predecessors. He is also working on projects concerning Heidegger’s views on cognition, Heidegger’s conception of death, and Heidegger’s place in the history of category theory. Other philosophical interests include Kant’s philosophy, Husserl’s philosophy, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics.

What “drive” (Trieb) can mean for the lived experience of human beings, given that drives are, on Heidegger’s account, features of animality rather than of Dasein? Heidegger famously denies that human beings are animals, arguing that Dasein’s care-structure is irreducible to biological or naturalistic terms (GA 29/30). Nevertheless, it is difficult to deny that we often experience ourselves as being driven toward activity or inactivity: sometimes in the form of specific bodily drives, sometimes in more abstract tendencies such as curiosity and wanderlust, and more generally as being embedded in a continuously lived striving. This paper accordingly asks whether Heidegger’s thought can successfully account for this form of self-experience without collapsing Dasein back into animal life.

I begin by examining Heidegger’s conception of drive as a fundamental self-propulsive impulse (GA 26) and as a force that animates and regulates the capabilities of animals (GA 29/30). As has been noted by commentators such as Derrida (2008), Engelland (2018), and Farrell Krell (1992), Heidegger’s analysis of life is shot through with ambiguities, and I demonstrate that the related concept of drive likewise oscillates between a fixed range of possible achievements and a dynamism that resists reduction to mathematical or instrumental explanations. 

Building on this ambiguity, I then argue for a phenomenological conception of drive that goes beyond Heidegger’s explicit position while remaining grounded in his insights. Drawing on Heidegger’s characterization of drive in non-present-at-hand terms (GA 29/30, 335), alongside his exclusion of animal drive from human agency, I develop a model of drive that is neither sheer biological instinct nor tied to acts of willing. What emerges is a conception of drive that anchors non-reflective human activity in a creative pull – one that is not oriented toward preordained ends, but is constitutively open to new possibilities.

Noam Cohen is a Visiting Researcher at the Section for Phenomenological Psychopathology and Psychotherapy in the Department of General Psychiatry at Heidelberg University. Previously, he was a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University. His research explores selfhood, sociality, and drives, engaging both historical and contemporary philosophy, with a specialization in phenomenology and ancient philosophy. He is currently working on a project investigating the lived experience of instincts and drives, and their role in grounding personal identity. His work has appeared in journals such as Inquiry and Human Studies, and his book Heidegger on Sociality is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.

In the appendix to §10 of The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic (1928), Heidegger introduces the notion of metontology (Metontologie) to name the ontic domain to which fundamental ontology must return – as its point of origin – if it is to account for “beings as a whole.” Metontology is presented as a “new investigation” belonging to the very essence of ontology, arising from ontology’s “self-overturning” (Umschlag), its μεταβολή back toward its origin. Heidegger characterizes it as a radicalization of fundamental ontology: once we attain a complete understanding of being, we recognize that the problem of being becomes visible only when a possible totality of beings is already given.

Heidegger states that it is within metontological-existentiell questioning that the question of ethics can be posed for the first time. This claim has encouraged scholars to treat metontology as an announcement of an ethical dimension in Heidegger’s thought. Yet the term disappears immediately after this appendix, which has led many interpreters to focus primarily on Heidegger’s early texts when addressing the ethical implications opened by metontology.

Against this tendency, some authors argue that metontology continues to shape Heidegger’s work after 1928. In the same spirit, I have already argued that the disappearance of metontology does not mean that the concern for the ontic it designates vanishes from Heidegger’s thinking. This opens new possibilities for addressing the question of ethics in the late stage of this author

In this paper, I want to examine how the concern for the ontic implied in the (dis)appearance of metontology illuminates Heidegger’s approach to ethics in his later texts. My guiding hypothesis is that such an approach seeks a more originary relation to what is given in everyday experience than modern representational thinking allows, requiring a transformation of our comportment that results in a de-deification of the human.

I studied Philosophy at the University of Chile and obtained my degree in 2002. From day one, I was interested in Heidegger’s thought.I then completed an MSt in Theology and a DPhil in Philosophy at the University of Oxford.I am currently the Director of the Department of Philosophy in the Faculty of Liberal Arts at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Chile.A few months ago, I was elected President of the Ibero-American Society for Heidegger Studies (SIEH) for the 2026–2027 term, and I will therefore lead the SIEH 2027 Congress on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Being and Time.

Fifty years after Heidegger’s death, his critique of the "Enframing" (Gestell) of modern institutions remains a vital lens for interrogating the contemporary university. In the context of sexual harassment, the institution often functions as a system of "standing reserve," where student experiences are reduced to liability management and policy compliance. This paper asks: how can the lived reality of the survivor be recovered through a process of Aletheia (unconcealment)?

Drawing on a doctoral study of 27 women students in the UK, I present a hermeneutic phenomenological analysis of harassment as a fundamental disruption of Dasein’s "being-in-the-world". I utilize the concepts of Geworfenheit (Thrownness) and Stimmung (Mood) to interpret how harassment instigates a "coercive mood" that fundamentally alters how the campus is disclosed (Erschlossenheit) to the survivor.

The paper focuses on the "walking interview" (n=13) as a specific phenomenological method of discovery. I argue that moving through the physical campus - navigating the offices and corridors where harassment occurred - facilitates a "spatialised Aletheia". Through participant testimony of "embodied knowing" - such as a pre-reflective "tingling" in the chest - I demonstrate how the body discloses threat before institutional categorisation. Finally, I reflect on the researcher’s own "self-unconcealment" within the hermeneutic circle, where the analytical journey led to a transformative disclosure of neurodivergence. I propose that phenomenology’s commitment to Sorge (Care) offers a "saving power" by unconcealing existential truths hidden by the institutional gaze.

Naomi Davis is a Doctoral Researcher specialising in feminist phenomenology at Southampton Solent University. Her work investigates the "coercive moods" and "spatialised thrownness" of sexual harassment in Higher Education. She co-authored "The Body, Male Gaze and Sexual Harassment in Higher Education" in Questioning Gender Politics (2024) and has evaluated school-based interventions on violence against women and girls. Her methodology utilises walking interviews to explore the "hermeneutic lag" between embodied sensation and institutional narrative. She is committed to a reflexive research practice that views the analytical journey as a site of self-unconcealment.

I: In the last years of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche famously declared god is dead, the death of god. Or at least, these words and this idea would very soon become famous. 

II: No one would have believed that any modern philosopher or writer – in the wake of Nietzsche – let alone one steeped in Nietzsche’s work – would or could gainsay such a declaration. Let alone think we need, or should even want, a god, any god, to save us.

III: However, perhaps we should not be so hasty. Perhaps we can see a way to read Nietzsche so that the death of god, that god is dead, is but a moment in the systole and diastole of history. 

IV: For, the gods have died twice in Nietzsche’s philosophy.

V: The second time was the philosophical proposal mentioned above, announced during Nietzsche’s middle period in the original edition of The Gay Science (1882: §108; §125). This would be repeated with vigour in the ‘Prologue’ of his subsequent work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883: §P2), and (in the wake of the Zarathustra books) appear as the first passage in the fifth chapter added to an expanded and reissued Gay Science (1887): ‘How to understand our cheerfulness’ (§343).

VI: The first time – some ten years earlier – and in Nietzsche’s first book – was under very different theoretical circumstances. In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche saw Attic drama of some 2500 years ago arising through the tension between the forces of nature embodied by the god Apollo and the god Dionysus. Here tragedy justifies the world and existence (§5). But the rise of philosophy – Socrates and the post-Socratics – killed tragedy: killed Apollo, killed Dionysus. In this narrative, nonetheless, the death of tragedy allows for the hope of a rebirth…

VII: Returning to the death of tragedy gives us an alternative way to approach the death of god. One indeed echoed in Nietzsche’s final works. For the name of Dionysus returns.

David Deamer writes on cinema, culture, and philosophy. He is the author of some essays as well as a couple of books – Deleuze’s Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images and Deleuze, Japanese Cinema and the Atom Bomb. Deamer is an independent scholar, was lecturer in film-philosophy for twenty years at Manchester Metropolitan University, now works at Stepping Hill Hospital, and heads up engagement and events for the British Society for Phenomenology. He's currently working on a book on Nietzsche and cinema.

The focus of this paper is Heidegger’s lecture “On the Basic Disposition of Knowledge” (summer semester 1939), first published in 2020 in GA 80.2. In this text, Heidegger problematizes the scientific disposition as a lack of mindfulness (Besinnungslosigkeit). This lack of mindfulness is, in turn, characterized as a disturbance and forgetting of the original disposition that, in Plato and Aristotle, is named in Greek thaumazein. In the advanced form of occidental knowledge, shaped by techne, the remembrance of wonder at beings (Erstaunen) is no longer possible. Instead, the abandonment of Being (Seinsverlassenheit) becomes accessible only through another disposition: terror (Entsetzen). The paper argues that these distinctions between basic dispositions (curiositas, thaumazein, and terror) can be understood only by focusing on Heidegger’s concept of withdrawal (Entzug). In Heidegger’s words, one must “take it seriously that Being withdraws from beings” (Basic Questions of Philosophy, p. 163). On this basis, curiosity blocks the experience of withdrawal, thaumazein names the beginning of philosophy but cannot be repeated today, and it is terror that discloses the abandonment of Being.

To place this claim in context, the paper offers a short sketch of Heidegger’s critique of curiositas, based on his Augustinian reception in the Natorp report (“Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation”) and in Being and Time (§ 36). It then draws on his account of thaumazein in Basic Questions of Philosophy (GA 45) and finally briefly turns to Contributions to Philosophy, where Heidegger develops the disposition of the other beginning in three stages: shock (Erschrecken), restraint (Verhaltenheit), and diffidence (Scheu).

Marcel Dubovec is affiliated with the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University in Prague. His work sits at the intersection of Heidegger studies, phenomenology, and ancient philosophy. He has published a monograph on Heidegger (Togga, 2020) and recently an article on Plato and the history of wonder, “The Ontology of Wonder: Why Plato Lets Thales Fall” (Philosophies, 2026).

During the infamous 1966 Der Speigel interview, Heidegger pronounced philosophy to be at an end, having become calculation (Berechnung), after which there is only cybernetics (GA.16.674). The ‘end’ in question became “the triumph of the manipulable arrangement (steuerbaren Einrichtung) of a scientific-technological world and of the social order proper to this world.” (GA.14.73) For Heidegger this technologized modernity is a nihilism of the exponential increase and rule of machination (Machenschaft), which culminates with the estrangement of human beings from their home, i.e. Being. The actual ‘end’ of philosophy is essentially ‘homelessness’ (Heimatlosigkeit), and what comes afterward is a groundless recursive feedback-loop where scientifically formed information is endlessly processed and reconfigured through analyses of itself and its relations, in short, cybernetics and data-analytics. Thus, by circuitous routes, the question of cybernetics becomes a metaphysical question, and metaphysics itself becomes a technological question.

Even if this state-of-affairs is entirely true, does Heidegger’s own late thinking comprise a real answer to the threat of this technologized nihilism? And within this, does technology itself have a metaphysical significance or presence irreducible to such calculative instrumentalism? This paper attempts to answer these questions, rooting its reflections in Heidegger’s understanding of technology in his late thought, and some of its subsequent philosophical interlocutors. Our analysis moves from a redefinition of technology as promise, a space of pure potentiality, to an account of the aporia within this definition. To speak of ‘promise of technology’ means reckoning with its production of both alienation and communality. While technology alienates through distancing it also creates conditions for an ever-increasing commune. The human animal is thus irreducibly yet paradoxically bound up with technology, since this creative dichotomy is also an exponential increase in destructive capability, which always threatens to destroy the very possibilities of technology itself.

Max K. Feenan is an Irish PhD candidate approaching the end of his dissertation, currently a Visting Student Researcher at the University of Cambridge. The dissertation is entitled “Moments of Eternity: The Idea of Geschichtlichkeit in the Late-Philosophy of Friedrich Schelling” being completed under Professor Joseph Cohen at University College Dublin (UCD). He is a specialist in German Idealism, especially that of Schelling and Hegel, and in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. More broadly, his research focuses on metaphysics and the intersection of philosophy with history, religion and politics. 

Fifty years after Der Spiegel published Heidegger’s provocation—“Only a God can save us”—the question is less whether a “God” still exists than what saving could mean under the phenomenological demand to describe how meaning is given (or withheld) in experience. This paper stages a three-way conversation among Kierkegaard, Husserl, and Heidegger to argue that the contemporary crisis Heidegger diagnoses (often read through technology, political paralysis, and the exhaustion of metaphysics) can be re-framed as a crisis of givenness: the modern self increasingly experiences itself as self-positing, while the possibility of receiving oneself “from elsewhere” becomes phenomenologically unintelligible.

First, I reconstruct Kierkegaard’s phenomenology of selfhood as a negative self-givenness: the self is not a stable object but a “relation that relates itself to itself,” disclosed through despair as an incompleteness that points beyond itself; crucially, the “given self” is not a positive gift but emerges passively “before God,” as task and demand rather than possession. Second, I show how Husserl’s account of self-constitution—especially the turn to genesis and the horizon of “transcendental subjectivity” as the “universe of possible sense”—opens a space where “God” is neither straightforwardly excluded nor securely given; divinity is bracketed as transcendent, yet reappears as teleology and ultimate sense. Third, I read Heidegger’s retrieval (Wiederholung) and his later call for another beginning as a secularization of Kierkegaardian inwardness: “saving” names a transformation in how the self is claimed by truth, without the explicit theological grammar Kierkegaard insists upon.

I conclude by proposing “divine-givenness” as a phenomenological test for whether Heidegger’s hoped-for “God” can be more than a poetic placeholder: it must be thinkable as an event that re-forms selfhood from receptivity, not mastery—thereby reshaping ethics and responsibility within technological modernity.

I am a second year Master's student at Boston college. My research interests are phenomenology, continental philosophy, and the history of philosophy. I am interested in the themes of selfhood, intentionality, and worldhood. 

In its essence, war is typically conceived as the reciprocity of hostile intentions between groups which results in fighting/mortal contest (consider Clausewitz’ classic definition in his On War). This conception, however, is existentially superficial insofar as it takes for granted the possibility of “hostile intentionality” (i.e., “enmity”) at its core; to use Heidegger’s terms, it amounts to an “ontical” conception of war which fails to ontologically problematize and clarify the being-of-war as such. To remedy this, this paper proposes a phenomenological-existentialist conception of the essence of war as Being-against – a term which inverts Heidegger’s notion of Being-with to understand the mutually constitutive nature of enmity/enemies. I proceed as follows. First, I conduct a phenomenological reduction of war by showing that the being-of-war is insofar as it is-for-us. As such, I reason that war’s being is our doing and that we are its being. Second, I theorize the essence of war (in its being-for-us) as Being-against. Here, I argue that war is insofar as beings such as we are realize our inalienable possibility of reciprocally and dialectically regarding and constituting one another as enemies. Third, I broadly contextualize the horror of war in relation to the existential gratification which Being-against potentially—and tragically—facilitates; thereby, I offer an explanation of the tendency towards war in human history. I end with two concluding remarks: (1) that any pacifism must take the possibility/gratifying tendency of Being-against seriously if it is to achieve its ends; and (2) that, at this critical historical juncture, we must pressingly question whether robots and Artificial Intelligences might also Be-against (whether in our likeness or in some other conceivable fashion).

Mark Gilks is an independent and interdisciplinary researcher currently based in Western Canada. He has a PhD in political science, but his real passion is philosophy, particularly existentialist phenomenology. His current research focus is to convert his doctoral thesis into a monograph. This book, titled A Phenomenology of War, will offer the first substantive theory of war from an existentialist-phenomenology perspective. His previous work has been published in both philosophy and social science journals – including the British Journal of Aesthetics and the Review of International Studies.

The cultural shift after Heidegger only makes his warning feel sharper: “Only a God can save us.” The secular world that promised emancipation has left a huge void. Attempts to fill it keep resurfacing, whether with the counter-cultural 1960s or with the various meditative practices popular today. The “death of God” did not free us from religion; it scattered the religious impulse into countless substitutes.

Recently, though, the pendulum has moved again. Older forms of Christianity, especially Catholic and Orthodox, are drawing renewed attention. Whether this is another reactive attempt to escape cultural exhaustion or the seed of a more genuine faith is not yet clear. The critiques of religion offered by Nietzsche and Heidegger matter here, not because they destroy Christianity, but because they expose the forms of religiosity that no longer persuade. Heidegger himself cautions, in Holzwege, that opposing theology does not necessarily mean rejecting faith.

That distinction opens space for a re-examination rather than a rejection. Drawing on Christos Yannaras’s On the Absence and Unknowability of God, I suggest that within Christianity, there are resources for a sense of God as living and personal, rather than reduced to an abstract concept. This may provide a way of addressing the crisis of meaning without collapsing into either reactionary restoration or secular substitutes for the sacred.

I am a graduate student at DePaul. I had studied before in various universities across different countries. I have done my BA in Georgia, at Ilia State University. I did MA in Wuppertal, Germany and in Prague, Czechia as the part of larger Europhilosophie Erasmus Mundus Program. And I did one year of ReMa at KU Leuven. My research mostly focuses on phenomenology, existentialism, and philosophy of religion.

Bernard Stiegler was profoundly influenced by Heidegger (among others). But he relied on specific interpretations of Heidegger. In this paper, I will analyze Stiegler’s two phases in his interpretation of Heidegger, and argue that while his revised interpretation is more accurate with respect to the late Heidegger, it relies on a misrepresentation of the early Heidegger.

For most of his life, Stiegler interpreted Heideggerian Ereignis in total opposition to Gestell. He thought that it was precisely this opposition that stopped Heidegger from thinking that Ereignis involves technology (Stiegler, 2018, p. 251), and that it can be thought from within technics.[1] It is for this reason, Stiegler argued, that Heidegger ruled out the possibility to think with technological concepts, According to Stiegler, Heidegger missed the way his own thought presupposes technological thought, thus failing to reach the conclusion that it is through an encounter with technological conceptualization that new possibilities for thought can emerge. What Heidegger had missed, according to Stiegler, was that Gelassenheit presupposes Gestell, and that we can go from within the latter to the former.

Stiegler ended up revising this position. Specifically, he came to realize that in his late work Heidegger did intimate that the very essence of modern technology also harbors “the saving power”, and thus a certain affirmation of technology is involved in the transition.

But Stiegler is wrong in believing that Heidegger’s later work on technology is markedly different to the existential analytic in his earlier work. According to Stiegler, in the early Heidegger every prospect for forming a new horizon is inscribed within the originary ordeal of abandonment, which remains structurally hidden, denied and forgotten.

It is my contention that this misconstrues certain aspects of BT (and FCM), in that he relies on an interpretation that posits authenticity and das Man as mutually exclusive, failing to see how authenticity (1) emerges from within inauthenticity, and (2) how authenticity is not an existential modality that entirely banishes once and for all aspects of the intelligibility of inauthenticity and das Man, as if authenticity does not reengage with Zuhandenheit and Vorhandenheit.

[1] Stiegler, B. The Neganthropocene. Edited, translated, and with an introduction by Daniel Ross, Open Humanities Press, London, 2018.

I am an Associate Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Nicosia. I received my PhD in Philosophy (Sussex) in 2015 for a thesis titled The Emergence of Mood in Heidegger’s Phenomenology. I was an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Dublin and a recipient of a DAAD research scholarship at Freie Universität Berlin. I have also held research positions at the University of Sofia and at the University of Cyprus. I have published widely on phenomenology and have (co-)edited several books, including Heidegger on Affect (Palgrave, 2019), and Heidegger on Technology (Routledge, 2018).

Heidegger’s oft-cited claim that “only a god can save us” is frequently read either as a theological provocation or as a gesture of philosophical despair. This paper resists both interpretations. Each, in different ways, remains bound to a metaphysical apparatus that either renounces responsibility or collapses into nihilism. Instead, the paper argues that what remains saving in Heidegger’s later thought is not a transcendent deity but language itself, wrested from the grip of instrumental reason. At stake in Heidegger’s question is not the arrival of a god, but the more originary problem of dwelling (Wohnen): how could there ever be an abode fit for the divine if no radiance first shines within beings themselves? The divine, on this view, can only appear where human beings have learned again how to prepare a world—one no longer reduced to calculation, resource, and control. In “What Poets Are For?”, Heidegger names this historical condition the world’s night: the reign of calculative thinking and technological enframing (Gestell). Midnight marks not merely concealment, but the extremity of forgetfulness—the loss of dwelling as a mode of being. Against this backdrop, the paper argues that Heidegger’s later philosophy and T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets articulate a shared insight: poetic language has the capacity to suspend mastery and re-attune human existence to the rhythms of the earth. Reading Heidegger alongside Four Quartets, the paper shows how the saving power of language lies in its ability to become a site of dwelling rather than representation. In “The Dry Salvages,” the river streams, carries, and remembers; it is not an object to be mastered but a temporal event that gathers history and loss. In “Burnt Norton,” the rose garden nurtures and gathers, holding open a space where presence is measured rather than consumed. In both cases, Eliot’s verbs enact dwelling rather than domination, refusing the logic of standing-reserve (Bestand). Poetic language thus performs what Heidegger calls Gelassenheit: a letting-be that grounds responsibility not in moral command but in attentiveness. Responsibility emerges from linguistic exposure to the world—from silence, measure, and restraint. If anything can still “save” us amid ecological and existential crisis, it is this fragile capacity of language to interrupt domination and restore care between humans and the earth.

Dr. Omar Hansali is a Lecturer in Philosophy and Literature at the Faculty of Languages, Arts, and Human Sciences, Ait Melloul, Morocco. His research spans phenomenology, ethics, hermeneutics, and modernist poetics, with a focus on dwelling, finitude, and responsibility. He is a member of the Moroccan Association of Comparative Literature. His work brings continental philosophy into dialogue with literary modernism, examining how language and poetic form disclose ethical relations beyond normative systems. He has published on T. S. Eliot and Heidegger, including studies of unhomeliness, death, and dwelling.

"Humanity and the earth of human beings have not yet been discovered." / "Unerschoepft und unentdeckt ist immer noch Mensch und Menschen –Erde." - Nietzsche Also Sprach Zarathustra I: von der schenkenden Tugend  KSA 4: 100

Heidegger’s lectures Was Heisst Denken? (1951-52), the first and last delivered by him at the University of Freiburg, after his reinstatement, were published in German in 1954, by Max Niemeyer Verlag, and translated into English already in 1968, as What is called thinking?  The title of my proposal intimates a shift of inflection, as a consequence of reading Heidegger in the company of Jean-Luc Nancy, who by chance as a child was part of the French occupation of Southwest Germany, under which Heidegger lost his licence to teach.

Nancy reports himself as, at first, underwhelmed by Heidegger’s writings, changing his view through exposure to readings by, variously, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. There are three shared themes: Heidegger’s reading of Hoelderlin, on a break, or caesura, constituting a distinctive new epoch of danger; various reinscriptions of Mallarmé’s ‘livre à venir’, responding to Heidegger’s distinction between an open and a pre-inscribed future; and a notion of reading as infinite conversation (entretien infini).

Within this shared context, the paper will explore two features of Nancy’s responses to Heidegger: his focus on the vanishing of the theme, Mitsein, in Being and Time (1927), and his rewriting of the call to rethink thinking. Three texts by Nancy develop the former feature:  Le Partage des Voix (1991, 1982); his thesis from 1987, L’experience de la liberté (1993, 1988) and Etre singulier pluriel (2000, 1996), with its decisive opening citation from Nietzsche, with which this proposal opens.

The rewriting of the call for thinking arrives in a movement from a finite thinking, the focus in his 1990 collection of essays, Une pensée finie, to that of the 2001 collection, La pensée dérobée, thinking stripped bare. In the latter, Nancy combines responses to Nietzsche, to Heidegger and to Bataille to reveal a role for thought as disguising and masking, rather than illuminating a current condition of crisis. Heidegger’s call of conscience is to be displaced in favour of a call to strip thinking of its pretensions to overview and mastery.

Professor Emerita Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University. Professor Hodge is the author of Derrida and Time (2010) and Heidegger and Ethics (1995).

Despite considerable interest in Heidegger’s critique of technology, comparatively little attention has been directed towards his positive project. This is especially true of perhaps his most obscure writings, namely his quasi-religious references to the gods, the holy and the hint and yet it is also these concerns which command much of his thinking in the late 1930s and early 1940s. To help redress this imbalance, this paper seeks to clarify Heidegger’s account of religious experience in the form of the look (Blick) of the gods. As part of this, the paper builds upon William McNeil’s (1999) interpretation of the Heideggerian look as that which reveals the concealed aspect of an entity in its self-emergence. Though partly accurate, I argue this view only captures a specifically Greek experience of the divine, an experience which I contend is no longer available to us due to the technological domination of entities. 

Accordingly, in the present age I suggest the look is likely to emerge in the form of a limit-situation of what might loosely be called ‘divine otherness.’ By this, I mean to say the look of the gods is an experience of radical alterity in which the Other entirely refuses to reveal itself and thereby confounds every possible form of understanding. I suggest one possible way in which this ineffable sense of otherness might show up is by experiencing oneself as being-looked-at by the Other in a way that is analogous to Sartre’s treatment of the look in Being and Nothingness. With this, the paper briefly concludes by relating the look of gods to Heidegger’s deeper reflections surrounding Ereignis and the overcoming of technology.

Reuben is a PhD student at Hertford College, University of Oxford. His doctoral research focuses on Heidegger’s notion of the holy as developed through his confrontation with Friedrich Hölderlin's poetry in the 1930s and 1940s. As part of this, his research covers how Heidegger’s religious thinking intersects with his broader philosophical project of overcoming the problems of technology.

This paper advances a systematic interpretation of Heidegger's notion of “originary action” (Urhandlung) as a decisive break with both the traditional theory–practice distinction and the conventional subjective and volitional concept of action. Whilst Heidegger's concept of “originary ethics” (ursprüngliche Ethik) has been widely discussed in the literature, his concept of “originary action” has received surprisingly little sustained attention, despite first emerging in his 1928 lectures and resurfacing throughout his later reflections on thinking, attentiveness, and responsiveness. This neglect represents a significant gap in Heidegger scholarship, and addressing it reveals dimensions of his thought that remain underexplored.

Against readings that construe Heidegger's critique of theory as an endorsement of the primacy of practice, the paper argues that the displacement of theory is not compensated by a turn to skillful coping and practical competence. What is at stake instead is a more originary sense of acting that suspends the opposition between activity and passivity, replacing it with a structure of restraint and responsivity.

 The central claim is that Heidegger reconceives action in a more original sense as a bringing to completion (Vollbringen) that neither produces effects nor realizes prior intentions. Here action is no longer defined by the execution of the will or the pursuit of ends. Instead, it names a responsive orientation in which the human being is claimed by what gives orientation. Thinking is thus not a propaedeutic to action, nor reflective accompaniment, but an enactment that precedes and conditions both theoretical cognition and practical activity.

The paper concludes by asking how originary action might be brought together with originary ethics, exploring how originary action opens the space for an ethics prior to moral calculation and justification. This is an ethics not of conduct but of bearing and responsibility that does not collapse into quietism or moral indeterminacy.

Dr Niall Keane is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of the West of England, Bristol. His research works within phenomenology and hermeneutics, with particular emphasis on Heidegger, Gadamer, Arendt, and phenomenological psychiatry. He has published widely in leading journals and edited volumes, and is co-author of The Gadamer Dictionary and co-editor of The Blackwell Companion to Hermeneutics. Keane is co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology (JBSP). He is currently completing book projects on Heidegger and Gadamer with CUP, and another on the phenomenology of radical relationality in psychotherapeutic contexts with Routledge.

In this paper, I will discuss Edith Stein’s critique of Heidegger’s Being and Time (BT) and her pedagogical theory that she develops based on this critique. This discussion illuminates the discussion of BT among the contemporaries of Heidegger – especially the former students of Husserl – while also providing an example of trying to apply Heidegger’s ontology on one of the most important parts of human life, educating the younger generations. 

As I will show, Stein contrasts the analysis of Dasein in Heidegger’s BT with Christian theology and ponders on the possibilities of utilizing Heidegger’s analysis in theory of education. She accuses Heidegger of nihilism based on the idea that Dasein is fundamentally groundless and argues for taking the Christian – or at least Humanist (which may be secular) – view of human nature to be the ground for educational theory and activity instead of the Heideggerian ontology. I will argue that while Stein’s argument is essentialist and thus problematic, her discussion of Heidegger reveals the more general fact that educational theories often – if not always – have at least an implicit view of human nature which is then applied to a theory of how to raise and educate the younger generations. Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein hints towards the question whether an educational philosophy without a somewhat essentialist view of human nature were possible. 

I will mainly analyse passages in three of Stein’s works – Endliches und ewiges Sein (ESGA 11-12), Potenz und Akt (ESGA 10), and her Münster lectures (1932-1933), published as Der Aufbau der menschlichen Person (ESGA 14) – in contrast to the relevant passages in Heidegger’s Being and Time. I will also provide a general introduction to philosophy of education regarding the implicit view of human nature, with examples from contemporary discussion and history, such as Rousseau and Dewey.

Minna-Kerttu M. Kekki is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Her academic background is multidisciplinary, consisting of philosophy, education, and history. Since 2023, she has worked mainly on Edith Stein. Her previous project on media-based public sphere included the publication of a book called “The Potential of Public Discussion in Media: Philosophy of Democracy and Misinformation” (Palgrave, 2024). She has also published on collective memory, nationalism, and the history of Finno-Ugric peoples.

This paper will explore the ways in which the work of Heidegger can elucidate the phenomenon of addiction. Although Heidegger does not explicitly thematize addiction in its clinical dimension, scholars have utilized his work to illuminate the temporality of addictive experiences. Building on these contributions, our paper will draw on Heidegger’s idiosyncratic interpretation of Kant to shed light on another important contribution that his work can make in the field of addiction research. We will particularly focus on Heidegger’s claim that transcendental  imagination is closely tied to original temporality which he –  similarly to Husserl – understands as a fundamental condition of lived experience. Following Heidegger we argue that imagination should be seen as coinciding with temporality and it thus relates to our capacity to open worlds into which we may venture. On the basis of this argument, and by drawing on clinical insights, we attempt to illuminate the phenomenon of ‘restricted imagination’ often observed in people recovering from addiction. We argue that the cycle of addiction does not mark a collapse of the structural capacity to imagine but an extreme narrowing of its scope. Indicative of a functioning imagination is the way that people with addiction re-appropriate social and physical spaces and objects. Having shown that imagination remains active in addiction, we argue that the process of recovery can be experienced as an existential crisis in the sense that one’s habitual way of practicing their imagination is now recognized as deleterious and as something to be avoided. When the worlding of addiction is removed during recovery, one is left with a structural capacity for imagination that lacks a world to which they can meaningfully relate to. 

Ryan Kemp, PhD the Director of Therapies at the Central & North West London (CNWL) NHS Foundation Trust, Honorary Professor of Clinical Practice at Brunel University, London. Previously he was the chair of the Faculty of Addiction in the British Psychological Society and has a wide range of clinical experience including drugs, alcohol, gambling, and technology-based addictions.

The concept of authenticity is crucial for feminist liberation. If we do not know who we are and what we want, this makes it hard to know ‘how to struggle and whom to struggle against’ (Bartky, Femininity and Domination 1990). In this paper, I argue that Heidegger’s notion of authenticity is particularly apt for feminist social projects because of its anti-essentialist commitments, and Heidegger’s characterisation of authentic resoluteness as rooted in a responsiveness to one’s concrete situation. Unlike mainstream understandings, Heideggerean authenticity does not rely on an idea of a ‘true’ or underlying self, notions which are problematic for feminism because they risk endorsing essentialist understandings of gender that have historically been used to justify women’s subordinate social position. Instead, to understand oneself authentically is to understand oneself as Dasein. That is, to express in our way of Being that what we essentially are is ‘Being-possible’ (SZ, 144), and crucially that we have no essence other than our existence (SZ, 42). Authenticity, I argue, can thus be seen as a project of self-construction: a grasp of our ability to become something we are not yet, which is an essential aspect of feminist liberation. However, this ‘Being-possible’ is not unmoored from the reality of our current situation. Heidegger’s characterisation of authentic resoluteness ensures that authenticity is rooted in, and built out of, a clear understanding of what and how we are now, in a way that furnishes us with genuine possibilities for ‘taking action’ (SZ, 300). Building on these ideas in relation to feminist work on freedom, self-responsibility and liberation (Beauvoir, Bartky, Marilyn Frye), I articulate a Feminist-Heideggerean account of authenticity, not simply as an intellectual or imaginative exercise, but as a practical, engaged and responsive mode of Being-in-the-world by which we can come to transform both ourselves and our situation.

Charlotte Knowles is an Assistant Professor in Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Her work focuses primarily on phenomenolgoy (particualrly Heidegger and Beauvoir) and feminist philosophy. She has published on Heidegger, often from a feminist perspective, in multiple venues including The Monist, Inquiry, and The European Journal of Philosophy, as well as contributing chapters to edited collections on Heidegger, including most recently, Being and Time: A Critical Guide (CUP, 2025) and The Oxford Handbook of Heidegger (OUP, forthcoming 2027). Charlotte is co-editor in chief of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy.

Heidegger’s account of technology can be confusing. On the one hand, he characterises the age of technology as “the highest danger”, at “the outermost edge of a fall” (GA 7, 27f). On the other hand, he claims that this danger has an important positive role to play within his project, repeatedly pointing us to Hölderlin’s poem Patmos (“But where the Danger is, grows/ That which Saves, too”). He admits that his stance towards technology is “ambiguous in a high sense” (GA 7: 34). 

In order to address the ambiguity, it is necessary to bring out the underlying tension clearly. In a first step, I formulate two claims that capture Heidegger’s conflicting commitments. The first commitment – (A1) – is that the programme of technology is the completion of the forgottenness of Being. The second commitment – (A2) – is that the completion of the programme of technology is itself the first step of the other beginning. In the second step, I review some of the major accounts in the literature and show that they do not have the resources to accommodate both commitments. 

In the end, I formulate an alternative picture that can account for both commitments. I will show that the two-sidedness is built into Heidegger’s understanding of the notion of “danger”. The term always designates a state in between two possibilities – never just the seemingly less desirable possibility. In the 1949 Bremen Lectures, Heidegger describes how this state is constituted as part of a “chase” for the inaccessible. He characterises danger as the move of setting after something [nachstellen] by setting something before it [verstellen].  Heidegger calls this notion the “setting after with forgottenness” (GA 79, 55). From it, I will develop an account of how we can understand the mechanism of the transition to the other beginning.

Jonathan Krude is a DPhil student at Corpus Christi College Oxford, where he holds the Dubuque Scholarship in Existential Phenomenology. He works on Heidegger's philosophy of technology under the supervision of Mark Wrathall. Previously, he completed an MA in philosophy at Universität Potsdam and Sorbonne Université and a BA in philosophy at Trinity College Cambridge.

For Heidegger, the stone does not touch the earth; only Dasein is capable of touching. Such a claim situates materiality within an anthropocentric horizon, where the being of matter is disclosed only in relation to the temporal existence of the human. In the context of the climate crisis, this framework appears increasingly inadequate. What is required is a thinking of the elements and of materiality that attends to their own force and density, rather than understanding them solely through the measure of human worldhood.

This paper returns to Heidegger’s thesis of the wordless stone and to his account of Dasein as fundamentally temporal, placing these claims in tension with the phenomenon of material density—whether virtual or physical, yet irreducibly bodily. To pursue this tension, I turn to Advaita Vedanta, which articulates a mode of phenomenological reduction oriented not toward the disclosure of the world but toward an inward withdrawal. This meditative reduction allows for the encounter with a rhythmic density that persists as a residue after the suspension of worldly relations.

This residue discloses a material core of the human that is ordinarily concealed by the temporal absorption of everyday Dasein. What comes to presence is not materiality as object, but materiality as a cyclical, rhythmic density—experienced as a dense spaciousness of presence itself, akin to the expansion and contraction of breathing. This density undergoes phases comparable to water as it freezes into ice and melts again. 

Within Vedanta, the evidence of the fabric of the world—Brahman—emerges through this reversed movement of reduction toward the self: a movement that negates the body as object while paradoxically revealing a phenomenological materiality through an embodied mode of reduction. In this way, materiality is disclosed not as mute presence-at-hand, but as a density that both grounds and exceeds the temporality of Dasein. 

Darshna Kumar is a PhD scholar at the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, where she has been awarded the Director’s Fellowship. She also completed her Master’s degree at IIT Gandhinagar and holds a Bachelor’s degree from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences. Her research interests lie in Phenomenology, Posthumanism, and Critical Animal Studies.

This paper presents Heidegger as a theorist of existential gratitude: that is, of the thankfulness one has for one’s own being—or even for being as such. The paper argues that Heidegger’s construal of thinking as thanking  offers an account of existential gratitude which does not posit the existence of a creator God to whom one is to be grateful for their being or for any being; rather, Heidegger in fact holds that any genuine gratitude for being must necessarily exclude the possible existence of any divine creator of being.

The paper begins by attending to Heidegger’s construal of existential gratitude in his later texts including ‘What Is Called Thinking’ (1951–52) and his 1949 postscript to ‘What Is Metaphysics?’, and reading them light of his earlier, more explicitly phenomenological work. It argues that Heidegger’s later account of ‘thinking as thanking’ and ‘it gives’ (es gibt) is profoundly informed by his phenomenology of being as well as the phenomenological method of reduction in his earlier work. After this, the paper brings Heidegger’s account of ‘thinking as thanking’ into conversation with recent debates on existential gratitude (e.g. Harris, Lougheed and DeRoo 2024), particularly on whether existential gratitude requires a giver to whom one is grateful.

This paper argues that Heidegger’s account of the ontological difference between being and beings can not only clarify some of the conceptual issues at stake in this debate, his construal of existential gratitude can moreover provide a framework to account for how non-theists or even atheists can articulate existential gratitude without the need to posit a divine creator of being to whom one is to be grateful: an existential gratitude that is conceptually distinct from the religious or even onto-theological  gratitude to God.

Dr King-Ho Leung is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Theology, Philosophy and the Arts at King’s College London, UK. His works have been published in journals including Philosophy, Continental Philosophy Review, Theory, Culture & Society, and Textual Practice. His most recent book is Spiritual Life and Secular Thought: A Phenomenology (Oxford University Press, 2026).

The problem of education recurrently occupied Heidegger’s thought, particularly during the 1930s. One of the central texts of his reflections on education—understood in terms of paideia and Bildung—is Plato’s Doctrine of Truth.  Published in 1940, its core ideas date back to the winter semester seminar of 1930/31, titled On the Essence of Truth. In this work, Heidegger developed his well-known critique of the modern concept of education as Bildung, arguing that modern educational ideals remain confined within a fixed metaphysical framework, distort the “essence” of the human being, and ultimately lead human beings away from truth understood as alētheia. By contrast, Heidegger maintained that authentic education opens human beings to their own being, to truth as unconcealment, and habituates them to dwelling within this truth. As Heidegger says, “genuine education” consists in “leading us to the place of our essential being and accustoming us to it.”

Drawing on Heidegger’s reflections on pedagogy, this presentation outlines the contours of a phenomenological pedagogy that can respond to contemporary challenges—including the ecological crisis, the rise of authoritarian tendencies, alienation generated by social media, and the mechanisation of thought through artificial intelligence. To develop this response, I engage with phenomenological pedagogy—and Heideggerian pedagogy in particular. This field is well established, represented by seminal figures such as Theodor Ballauff and Max van Manen, and more recently Iain Thompson, Sacha Golob, Christopher Naughton, John Roder, and Robert Shaw. In building on and radicalising these approaches, my aim is to apply Heideggerian pedagogical insights to the conditions of our rapidly transforming world. I will argue that Heideggerian pedagogy can help Dasein open itself to its authentic possibilities of existence, thereby contributing to the harmonisation of its relations with nature, with itself, with others, and with the technological apparatus it has itself created.

Bence Peter Marosan is a philosopher, an Associate Professor at the Budapest University of Economics and Business. His research focuses on phenomenology, with particular emphasis on Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, as well as on phenomenological metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and eco-phenomenology. He has published extensively in international journals and edited volumes, including Husserl Studies, Continental Philosophy Review, Human Studies, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, Analecta Husserliana, and Capitalism, Nature, Socialism. His recent work explores the philosophical foundations of phenomenological pedagogy, environmental education, and the challenges posed by modern technology and artificial intelligence.

Martin Heidegger’s well-known statement “Only a God can still save us” (Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten) marks the final threshold of Western metaphysics: the persistence of a salvific horizon even at the end of philosophy. His late reflections on the Letzter Gott and on the “event” (Ereignis) still preserve, within the awareness of metaphysics’ decline, the possibility that the divine might open a new beginning of being. Jean-Luc Nancy inherits this limit only to displace it: what remains after the last God is not the expectation of redemption, but the suspension of reality itself, the exposure of being as being-with. Through works such as La déclosion, L’adoration, Le sens du monde, and La communauté désœuvrée, Nancy transforms Heidegger’s ontotheological closure into a thinking that suspends the ontological-foundational demand of Western thought. This suspension does not abolish sense but reveals its ecstatic structure: the world as déclosion, as the opening of reason to its own finitude, where phenomena and world coexist in a relation of trans-immanence. Within this gesture, transcendence is not denied but rendered inoperative. The finite co-appears as openness itself, referring to nothing beyond its own exposure. Nancy thus pushes Heidegger’s inheritance to its limit, where the question “who will save us?” loses all theological resonance and becomes a gesture of affirmation: not a God who saves, but the world sustaining itself in its own self-exceeding. In this reversal, the last God gives way to the ecstasy of the reality, the infinite exposition of bodies in the world, where sense persists without ground, without salvation, and without end.

Francesco Menichetti (Gubbio - Italy -1985) is a PhD candidate in Human Sciences – Philosophy at the University of Perugia (Italy) and a research associate at the Centre de recherches en philosophie allemande et contemporaine (CRePhAC) at the University of Strasbourg (France). He holds a Master’s degree in Philosophy from the University of Perugia and the University of Strasbourg, and a Bachelor’s degree in Theology from the Pontifical Theological Institute of Assisi. His research lies at the intersection of ontology, political philosophy, and phenomenology, focusing on Jean-Luc Nancy’s deconstruction of Western metaphysics and the ontology of being-with.

Generative AI music platforms (e.g., Suno, Udio) and viral chart-topping AI-generated tracks (e.g., "Walk My Walk" by Breaking Rust) have sparked industry upheaval and ontological questions: What is real music in the age of algorithmic creation? This paper applies Martin Heidegger’s philosophy to illuminate these implications for authenticity. Drawing on The Origin of the Work of Art, authentic music emerges as poiesis: truth-disclosure (aletheia) through Dasein’s thrown-projection and historically situated strife between world and earth. Fully AI-generated music, by contrast, exemplifies Enframing (Gestell): reducing creativity to calculative optimization and standing-reserve, fostering inauthentic “idle talk” (Das Man). Yet Heidegger’s “saving power” suggests that reflection on this danger may provoke a turning: recentering music on performative unconcealment while subordinating AI as harmonious techne. Engaging Iain D. Thomson’s recent book, the paper argues generative AI threatens existential authenticity but harbors promise for rediscovering music’s world-disclosing essence, prompting whether reflective poiesis offers a path beyond technological nihilism.

Sam Miller is an independent scholar working in digital music distribution. His research focuses on continental philosophy, technology, and aesthetics, particularly Heidegger’s critique of modernity applied to contemporary AI.

During the infamous 1966 Der Speigel interview, Heidegger pronounced philosophy to be at an end, having become calculation (Berechnung), after which there is only cybernetics (GA.16.674). The ‘end’ in question became “the triumph of the manipulable arrangement (steuerbaren Einrichtung) of a scientific-technological world and of the social order proper to this world.” (GA.14.73) For Heidegger this technologized modernity is a nihilism of the exponential increase and rule of machination (Machenschaft), which culminates with the estrangement of human beings from their home, i.e. Being. The actual ‘end’ of philosophy is essentially ‘homelessness’ (Heimatlosigkeit), and what comes afterward is a groundless recursive feedback-loop where scientifically formed information is endlessly processed and reconfigured through analyses of itself and its relations, in short, cybernetics and data-analytics. Thus, by circuitous routes, the question of cybernetics becomes a metaphysical question, and metaphysics itself becomes a technological question.

Even if this state-of-affairs is entirely true, does Heidegger’s own late thinking comprise a real answer to the threat of this technologized nihilism? And within this, does technology itself have a metaphysical significance or presence irreducible to such calculative instrumentalism? This paper attempts to answer these questions, rooting its reflections in Heidegger’s understanding of technology in his late thought, and some of its subsequent philosophical interlocutors. Our analysis moves from a redefinition of technology as promise, a space of pure potentiality, to an account of the aporia within this definition. To speak of ‘promise of technology’ means reckoning with its production of both alienation and communality. While technology alienates through distancing it also creates conditions for an ever-increasing commune. The human animal is thus irreducibly yet paradoxically bound up with technology, since this creative dichotomy is also an exponential increase in destructive capability, which always threatens to destroy the very possibilities of technology itself.

Dr. Nathan Mulder is a recent PhD graduate from University College Dublin (UCD), where he worked under the supervision of Professor Joseph Cohen. His dissertation is entitled “The Haunted Image: From Phenomenology to the Aporias of Justice” and focuses on phenomenological accounts of the image in Husserl, Heidegger, and Levinas in order to develop a ‘spectral’ account of the image in a Derridean manner. His research interests include the history of metaphysics, classical phenomenology, and phenomenological accounts of justice, art, writing, and technology.

This contribution presents Eugen Fink's critical engagement with the late Heidegger's thought by focusing on the former's cosmological ethics. Departing from Fink's dictum that 'ethics is rooted in physics', the contribution first looks back to the elements of Heidegger's thought which are crucial for the development of Fink's philosophical cosmology and its corresponding ethics.  Next, the contribution outlays Fink's own position. While Fink has often been seen as a mere sidekick or interpreter of Husserl and Heidegger, his own philosophical project distinguishes itself from the latter through its emphasis on the infinity of the world, but also through its more detailed analysis of the social and political dimension of human existence. The contribution fleshes out these differences by elaborating central concepts of Finks's cosmologically and anthropologically grounded social philosophy. This culminates in contrasting his ethos of cosmological cohabitation with the late Heidegger's notions of releasement and the shepherd of Being.Last, the contribution situates Fink's cosmopolitan ethos within contemporary discourses on habitability. In balancing the tension between proclaiming the 'end of the human being' and elevating it to the position of a master of the world, Fink's position holds promise in enriching current debates on the place and role of the human being.

Lutz Niemann is a research associate in the GAČR-DFG-funded research project 'Differential Anthropology: World-antecedence, Coexistence and Nature in Eugen Fink and Jan Patočka.' He received his doctorate in 2025 from Charles University in Prague, where his dissertation examined human existence based on the gaps and voids in the fullnes of life the world. In addition to several academic articles, his publications include the monograph 'Die Existenz als Jagd (Existence as a Chase)'. He is a member of the SIF and the philosophy collective Prager Gruppe*.

In his Spiegel interview, Heidegger invokes ‘a god’ with little discussion of what that god would be. This paper begins by pointing out that the god invoked here – whether present or absent – refers to an intervention in history, not the emergence from history. As such, what Heidegger is pointing to is a temporal attitude, which later in that interview he elaborates as one of waiting and preparedness. Heidegger is returning to Luther here: anguish at the absence of god, faith in the grace of his return. This interview can, therefore, be read in terms of the motifs of grace and eschatology. Heidegger is returning to a proto-Christian ‘between-time’ as the world ends and the divine is absconded. The temporality of such a time requires the neutralization of optimism and pessimism, affectively the refusal of confidence and despair. This is a radically anti-Stoic affectivity orientated not to the power of the self, but rather to the self’s relation to those possibilities constitutive of world as such. The affective responses to such a situation are (inter alia) those of hope and awe. This paper will show how both of these moods express an affectivity of world, while being ambiguous between an opening to the worldly possibility and an awareness of the precarity of world, world as ending. In contrast to the growing (at least in popular culture) tendency to Stoicism in the face of the current crises of world, this paper argues that Heidegger gives us a way of living towards world-ending as meaningful, while open to the world-transforming agency of divinity, which it will be briefly shown here can best be understood in the light of justice both as we find it in Anaximander and in Jesus of Nazareth. 

Felix Ó Murchadha is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Galway. He is a Fulbright Scholar and currently President of the Irish Philosophical Society. His research centres on questions of Religion, Time, Violence and the Self. His most recent monograph is The Fidelity of Reason: A Phenomenological Metaphysics of Self, Nature and Divinity (Springer, 2025). Along with numerous articles and book chapters, he is the author of The Formation of the Modern Self (Bloomsbury 2022), A Phenomenology of Christian Life (Indiana University Press, 2013) and The Time of Revolution: Kairos and Chronos in Heidegger (Bloomsbury, 2012).

The question of Heidegger’s silence regarding the Holocaust and his compromising engagement with National Socialism is certainly not a novel question.[1] In his posthumously published interview with Der Spiegel, Heidegger claims that “the way of thought today may lead one to remain silent in order to protect this thought from becoming cheapened within a year.”[2] But as the Spiegel interviewer is quick to note, “silence is denied us.”[3]

There would seem to remain an ethical exigency regarding silence and speech, each in relation to thought. Mahon O’Brien has recently remarked upon the “ethical bond” which Heidegger attests to in his “Letter on Humanism.”[4] But how does Heidegger’s silence interact with the demand for such an ethical bond? I aim to explore this question by the demand for communication, which is expressed in a letter of Hölderlin,[5] and which was taken as essential to the thought and actions of the French thinker and political figure Dionys Mascolo – forming the basis for what he searches under the name of “a communism of thought.”[6]

While avoiding the too simple denunciation of Heidegger which Mascolo has made,[7] I intend to show how communication, at the grounds of our “ethical bond,” may inscribe itself through silence (as an attestation of the unavowable), and how it may continue to speak – to us, today, as thinkers thinking in the wake of Heidegger. No god can save us, save the “god” exposed in its absence and in our need, attested to by communication and its poverty.

[1] See, for but one example among the many, Berel Lang, Heidegger’s Silence (London: Cornell University Press, 1996). [2] Martin Heidegger, “‘Only a God Can Save Us’: The Spiegel Interview (1966),” trans. William J. Richardson, in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan (Chicago: Precedent Publishing, 1981), p. 60. [3] Ibid. [4] Mahon O’Brien, Heidegger on Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025). [5] It is a question of two sentences from the end of Hölderlin’s second letter to Böhlendorff, dated November 1802. See Friedrich Hölderlin, Große Stuttgarter Ausgabe, Volume 6.1 (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1954), p. 433; translated in Friedrich Hölderlin, Essays and Letters, ed. and trans. Jeremy Adler and Charlie Louth (London: Penguin, 2009), pp. 214-215. [6] See the texts collected in Dionys Mascolo, À la recherche d’un communisme de pensée (Paris: Fourbis, 1993). For Heidegger on communism (and via a different text of Hölderlin), see Martin Heidegger, “Die Armut,” Heidegger Studies 10 (1994), pp. 5-11; translated as “Poverty,” trans. Thomas Kalary and Frank Schalow, in Heidegger, Translation, and the Task of Thinking: Essays in Honor of Parvis Emad, ed. Frank Schalow (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), pp. 3-10. [7] In Dionys Mascolo, Haine de la philosophie: Heidegger pour modèle (Paris: Éditions Jean-Michel Place, 1993)."

Alex Obrigewitsch is an independent scholar who received his PhD in Philosophy at the University of Sussex in December 2024. His research interests include the relation between philosophy and literature, as well as Post-Kantian Continental philosophy in both its German and French traditions. His most recent publications appear in the OLR and the collection Homo Mimeticus III (eds. Nidesh Lawtoo and Willow Verkerk; 2025). He has also written a chapter for the forthcoming Palgrave Handbook for Phenomenology and Literature, and his PhD thesis is soon to be published with Palgrave Macmillan.

Heidegger’s now 80-year-old critique of modernity is eerily prescient of the distinctly 21st-century poverty of experience we confront daily. Our lives are increasingly governed by a relentless force he names modern technology, disclosing the world under the mark of an all-pervasive instrumentality. As this instrumentality enters every moment of our lives, we are drained by the endless demand for optimal efficiency and left longing for respite. Yet our cultural attempts at a countermovement—a peculiarly modern asceticism, often involving the compulsive tracking of habits and routines—have only accelerated the extension of technological thinking into our personal lives.  

This paper argues that approaching such a countermovement through Heidegger’s account of releasement-towards-things allows us to develop a practice capable of genuinely resisting the soul-crushing impoverishment of modernity. While Heidegger clearly conceives of releasement-towards-things as primarily thing-directed, I present a reading focused on his account of Dasein’s ecstatic ek-sistence to demonstrate how releasement-towards-things also ‘releases’ its practitioner from the grip of technology and into an ecstatic relationship with their world. I then situate Heidegger’s often-enigmatic notion of releasement (Gelassenheit) in the context of our daily activity by placing this reading into dialogue with the everyday aesthetics movement. This encounter looks to articulate a form of practice to meet our widespread longing for habits and routines that might ground our daily activity without falling back into technological thinking. Cultivating releasement as an everyday practice allows us to reapproach apparently tedious and burdensome daily tasks as a time of genuine respite, to be drawn out of ourselves and into our worldly activity. The enduring relevance of a Heideggerian approach is thereby in demonstrating that habits and routines will not provide respite in themselves, but only when they allow us to be released into an ecstatic relationship with our world.

Charlie Oliver is a PhD student in the Philosophy Department at Durham University, where his research is supported by an AHRC Northern Bridge Doctoral Award. He received his BA in Philosophy from Durham in 2023, before completing his Research Masters in Philosophy at KU Leuven, Belgium in 2025. His research engages with a wide range of issues in phenomenology, and their overlap with environmental and religious questions. In particular, he is interested in the phenomenology of embodiment and its implications for understanding human animality; and in finding ways phenomenological insights can be ‘lived out’ in our everyday lives.

This paper will explore the ways in which the work of Heidegger can elucidate the phenomenon of addiction. Although Heidegger does not explicitly thematize addiction in its clinical dimension, scholars have utilized his work to illuminate the temporality of addictive experiences. Building on these contributions, our paper will draw on Heidegger’s idiosyncratic interpretation of Kant to shed light on another important contribution that his work can make in the field of addiction research. We will particularly focus on Heidegger’s claim that transcendental  imagination is closely tied to original temporality which he –  similarly to Husserl – understands as a fundamental condition of lived experience. Following Heidegger we argue that imagination should be seen as coinciding with temporality and it thus relates to our capacity to open worlds into which we may venture. On the basis of this argument, and by drawing on clinical insights, we attempt to illuminate the phenomenon of ‘restricted imagination’ often observed in people recovering from addiction. We argue that the cycle of addiction does not mark a collapse of the structural capacity to imagine but an extreme narrowing of its scope. Indicative of a functioning imagination is the way that people with addiction re-appropriate social and physical spaces and objects. Having shown that imagination remains active in addiction, we argue that the process of recovery can be experienced as an existential crisis in the sense that one’s habitual way of practicing their imagination is now recognized as deleterious and as something to be avoided. When the worlding of addiction is removed during recovery, one is left with a structural capacity for imagination that lacks a world to which they can meaningfully relate to.

Georgios Petropoulos is a teaching and research fellow at University College Dublin. His research interests lie in the fields of Continental European Philosophy, Phenomenology (classical, applied and critical), Philosophy of Childhood, and Philosophy for/with Children. His work has been published in international peer-reviewed journals such as Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology, the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Childhood & Philosophy, Critical Horizons and Angelaki.

This contribution proposes a dialogue between Heidegger’s late thought and contemporary philosophies of the Anthropocene, with particular reference to authors such as Dipesh Chakrabarty, Bruno Latour, and Clive Hamilton. Fifty years after Heidegger’s death, and in light of the planetary crisis that now defines our historical condition, the famous statement from the Der Spiegel interview – “Only a God can save us” – appears less as an enigmatic provocation and more as a diagnosis whose relevance has intensified.

In the Anthropocene, technological modernity no longer merely enframes beings; it threatens the very conditions of life on Earth. At the same time, the human being can no longer be understood as an autonomous subject capable of mastering or redeeming itself through technical, political, or ethical means alone. A new protagonist has irrupted into history: the Earth system itself, or what Latour, drawing on Lovelock, names “Gaia” – a multiplicity of interrelated agencies that resist reduction to passive nature or objectified environment.

This contribution argues that recent Anthropocene thought inherits a deeply Heideggerian intuition: the crisis we face is not primarily ecological, but ontological and anthropological. What is at stake is a transformation in the understanding of world, agency, and the human place within being. Gaia, in this sense, should not be interpreted as a substitute divinity or a return to myth, but as a name for the relational, contingent, and non-totalizable field within which existence unfolds.

Re-reading Heidegger through the Anthropocene allows us to think a necessary convergence between phenomenological worldhood, individual existential pathways, and planetary interdependencies. Rather than offering salvation in any strong sense, Gaia – like Heidegger’s “God” – designates what exceeds human planning and mastery, calling for a reconfiguration of thought, responsibility, and dwelling on Earth. The question, then, is not whether Gaia can save us, but whether we can learn to think and inhabit a world no longer centred on human self-sufficiency.

Matteo Pietropaoli is a fixed-term researcher in Moral Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, Sapienza University of Rome, where he teaches Environmental Ethics. He has authored four books and numerous articles on the thought of Martin Heidegger, and has edited and translated into Italian two previously unpublished lecture courses (HGA 17 and 31). His most recent book, Filosofia e politica dell’Antropocene. Prospettive per un esistenzialismo planetario (Carocci, 2025), develops an original proposal of planetary existentialism through a dialogue with continental philosophy. His research engages with Heidegger, Nietzsche, and recent Anthropocene thinkers such as Latour, Chakrabarty, and Hamilton, focusing on the ethical, ontological and anthropological implications of ecological crisis.

In his reading of Sophocles’ “Ode to Man” in Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger equates Being with the Greek notion of dikē (usually translated as “justice”). This identification allows Heidegger, for the first time, to speak of Being in terms of force and violence (Gewalt). It is important to stress that this identification takes place in the mid-1930s, a period during which Heidegger was heavily influenced by the violent events of the time, resulting from the rise of Nazism to power. According to Heidegger’s reading of the Ode, humanity’s attempt to dominate the earth and the seas is violent by nature. Human violence is understood as an attempt to subdue the violence of Being and thereby to harness Being for human utilization. In this struggle—pitting human violence (technē) against the violence of Being (dikē)—it is always Being that gains the upper hand, ultimately leading humanity to catastrophe.

It is striking to find that Freud, in Totem and Taboo, also alludes to the notion of dikē, which, although framed in psychoanalytic terms, is conceived in a broadly similar way. In Freud’s account, dikē is identified with the violence of the primordial father, the uncontested leader of the human horde, who exercises merciless violence over its members—his sons and daughters. Eventually, driven by their suffering, the sons form an alliance to murder their father. The prohibition against murder is thus achieved at the price of murder itself.

Both narratives therefore point to the violent nature of the origin—Being in Heidegger’s case and the primordial father in Freud’s. More importantly, they both describe the human attempt to overcome this violence through the formation of the social contract. The crucial difference is that, in Heidegger’s account, this attempt ultimately fails, whereas in Freud’s it succeeds.

Prof. Dror Pimentel teaches at the Visual and Material Dept. and the M.A. Program for Policy and Theory of the Arts at Bezalel Academy for Arts and Design, Jerusalem. His publications include: The Dream of Purity: Heidegger with Derrida (Magnes Press, 2009 [Hebrew]); Aesthetics (Bialik Institute, 2014 [Hebrew]); Heidegger with Derrida: Being Written (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); Aesthethics: Of Hospitality in Art (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). And articles in: Iyyun: The Jerusalem Philosophical Quarterly; Heidegger Studies; British Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology; Performance Philosophy Journal; Inscriptions; Aesthetic Investigations, among others. He translated to Hebrew Heidegger’s Letter on “Humanism” (Magnes Press, 2018).

Heidegger's memorable allusion to a saving God in 1966 has, on the surface, the ring of quietism or despair. Our way of relating to the god to come is, with the poet, to wait. But to wait is not simply to sit idly, still less to throw up one’s hands. Precisely insofar as waiting is passive, unbusy, it demands the active development of the one who waits.

Waiting, in the sense of a holding open and a relating to possibility, is for Heidegger a vitally important attitude, bearing on our ability to relate meaningfully to our own impoverished time and to see past it. Any number of illusions stand ready to rush in and fill the space opened by need and to relieve us of the burden of waiting—the promise of consumer satiation, technological ease, total self-optimisation, psychedelic insight, wellness, even philosophical knowledge; it takes a disciplined mind to able to bear absence, longing, risk, and lack of control—all things that waiting demands of us.

In this paper, I will explore the cultivation of self involved in Heidegger's conception(s) of waiting, focusing on two aspects: patience and openness. It is my aim to show that this waiting itself, rather than the arrival of what is waited for, is transformative.

I will attempt to bring precision to this discussion by exploring an apparent tension between the urgent tenor of waiting Heidegger describes in his earlier writings on St Paul, where alertness and readiness are emphasised, and the later choice of the poet as the figure of transformative waiting in Elucidations.

Dr Erin Plunkett is Joint Head of Philosophy at the University of Hertfordshire and works on Kierkegaard, Patočka, phenomenology, existentialism, and philosophy of religion. She is the editor of Kierkegaard and Possibility (2023) and The Selected Writings of Jan Patočka: Care for the Soul (2022), as well as the author of A Philosophy of the Essay (2018).

This paper examines Husserl’s account of the historical development of scientific reason, emphasizing its dialectical structure. Although the conception of history presented in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1970) has often been compared with Hegel’s philosophy of history (e.g., Staehler 2016), the specifically dialectical character of Husserl’s thinking has received relatively little attention (cf. Luft 1999).

I argue that in the Crisis Husserl employs an original and non-systematic form of dialectic to articulate the historical development of scientific reason. First, I briefly outline several general similarities between Husserl’s and Hegel’s conceptions of the history of reason. Second, I reconstruct a dialectical structure operative in Husserl’s analyses. On this account, reason develops historically through tensions between different forms of philosophy and their corresponding scientific ideas. A paradigmatic example is Husserl’s contrast between the practical skills (praxis) of geometrical measurement in ancient Greece and the idea of pure geometry (theoria), an opposition later synthesized in the modern notion of applied geometry. Such dialectical relations, I suggest, can be uncovered through what Husserl describes as a “zigzag” method—a form of flexible dialectic (Staehler 2016). Finally, I show that Husserl’s dialectic differs fundamentally from Hegel’s dialectic of absolute reason. Whereas Hegel conceives the development of reason as deterministic and culminating in absolute knowledge, Husserl understands rational progress as fragile and continually threatened by recurring crises. This openness of history underscores, for Husserl, the gravity of philosophy’s task. In contrast to Heidegger’s claim that philosophy is incapable of saving humanity from crisis and that “only a god can save us” (1981), Husserl consistently affirms the indispensable role of philosophers in confronting the crises of reason.

References:  Heidegger, M. (1981). Only a god can save us: the Spiegel interview. In T. Sheehan (Ed.), Heidegger: The man and the thinker. Precedent Press. / Husserl, E. (1970). The crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology: An introduction to phenomenological philosophy. D. Carr (Trans.), NUPress. / Luft, S. (1999). “Dialectics of the absolute: The systematics of the phenomenological system in Husserl's last period”. Philosophy Today, 43, 107. / Staehler, T. (2016). Hegel, Husserl and the phenomenology of historical worlds. Bloomsbury Publishing.

I am an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Warsaw. My research interests include phenomenology, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of cognitive science. 

This paper aims to clarify the scope of Heidegger’s claim, articulated in his interview with Der Spiegel, that «the only possibility available to us is that by thinking and poetizing we prepare a readiness for the appearance of a god, or for the absence of a god in [our] decline». This will allow an understanding of Heidegger’s legacy also with regard to the non-metaphysical framework underlying our (still current) possibilities of acting, waiting, and hoping.Indeed, apparently Heidegger’s statement in the eponymous interview Only a God Can Save Us seems to invoke the arrival of a God – a sort of deus ex machina – whose salvific intervention compensates for human impotence in the «current state of the world». The statement, in fact, emerged in response to the interviewer’s question concerning the possibility for the «individual man» and «philosophy» to influence the «web of fateful circumstance». However, this onto-theological interpretation does not correspond to what Heidegger intended: if this were the case, the “us” would imply some subjects, who could be either active or passive, which would only need to hope and wait for a God which, through his advent, would become present to these subjects, saving them – thus leading them to a better state. But this providentialist stance falls within the metaphysics of presence.To elucidate what Heidegger meant, we will refer to the treatise Contributions to Philosophy, in which the «preparation for the appearing of the last god» is identified with «the utmost venture of the truth of be-ing» (§256), and is therefore connected with the Ereignis. Reading this “appearing” through the lens of the “refusal” (§254) of the last God, we will illustrate the relationship between Dasein, the last God, and the grounding of the truth of being by Dasein: it will thus emerge what the preparation that concerns us – as well as the appearance (or absence) of god – consist of.

Marlene Prosdocimo is a PhD student within the FINO doctoral convention (Universities of Turin, Pavia, Genoa, Eastern Piedmont – Italy). Her doctoral research in theoretical philosophy focuses on the Heideggerian eschatology in the “unpublished treatises”. During her PhD, she undertook a visiting period at the University of Erfurt (Germany). She graduated from the University of Bologna (Italy) and during her studies she spent study periods as well at the Universities of Würzburg and Freiburg im Breisgau (Germany). Alongside Heidegger, her publications also engage with figures such as Meister Eckhart, Schelling, and Kierkegaard. Her research interests include the negative, metaphysics and the ontological difference.

This paper examines the relevance of Heidegger’s concept of enframing, the technological understanding of being, amidst the Fourth industrial revolution, characterised by hybrid realities that blur the boundaries between the physical, digital and biological. It also demonstrates the development of an experimental methodology, inspired by Heidegger’s philosophy of technology and art, that employs art practice for reflecting on the relationship with contemporary technology. 

The first part of the paper illustrates how Heidegger foresaw the structure of contemporary lived experience where enframing continues to perpetuate itself through a self-replenishing cycle of extraction, processing, consumption, and optimization. With the ubiquity of smart devices and networked digital information systems, daily life is increasingly qualified and quantified through datafication and governed by algorithms. The paper argues that with datafication and platformization everyday life is challenged-forth, secured and regulated and thus, enframing’s logic of efficiency and optimization now governs everyday lived experience. Everything is ordered to stand-by as data.

The second part of the paper demonstrates the development of the art practice. This art practice employs walking as drifting, reflection through writing and thinking through art as ways to contemplate on the meaning of one’s relationship with technology and the current techno-social reality. In the walk, developed using a geo-located audio app, participants receive audio cues at specific locations, as they freely drift through an outdoor space. The cues prompt them to pay attention to their body and movements and perform certain tasks that subvert habitual ways of paying attention and engaging with surroundings. Following the walk, that attempts to jolt the participants out of conditioned ways of thinking, the participants reflect on their relationship with technology through journaling and other forms of art making. Data generated is analysed to understand the structures of experiencing and meaning making shaping the participants’ everyday engagement with technology. Insights from the analysis, combined with Heideggerian concepts for overcoming the totalising nature of enframing, reveal what a free relationship with technology entails in today’s context.

Her work examines digital societies, human–technology interactions, and their philosophical/anthropological dimensions. Her research interests include digital cultures, communication and media studies and arts-based methods. Drawing on her backgrounds in English literature, media/communications, and creative arts, she develops interdisciplinary research models to understand and interpret the contemporary digital society.

The Transcendental Deduction and the Schematism chapter form the “heart” of the Critique of Pure Reason, according to Heidegger’s interpretation. This interpretation was entirely aimed at legitimatizing Heidegger’s project of a phenomenological fundamental ontology.

This paper proposes a reading of these two central sections of the Critique which argues that the only way for an a priori understanding to be possible, i.e. for the Categories to have a priori objective validity, is for them to be time-forming [zeitbildend]: the Categories must form and determine time itself. These determinations of time are the schemata of the Categories. And hence, time is not simply an empty “container”, an “indifferent field of action” in which given appearances unfold in a sequence of “nows” and get empirically synthesized by our spontaneous faculties. In this way, it is also argued that the ontological function of time is not primarily as a pure form of intuition (Kant), but as that upon-which [woraufhin] pure understanding is schematically projected onto and from which it gets its content (Heidegger), thereby breaking down the strict separation of sensibility and understanding, a hallmark of phenomenology.

From this interpretation, we can make sense of 1) Heidegger’s thesis that original temporality is that which makes possible an antecedent ontological comprehension of Being; 2) assess to what extent this idea was already present in Kant, and 3) the schematization of the ecstases of temporality in Heidegger’s own thought. In this regard, the paper argues that Kant’s thesis that the “affinity” of objects to being apprehended, reproduced and recognized is based on a time-related three-fold synthesis anticipates and informs Heidegger’s conception of temporality. This paper thus bears on the question of to what extent phenomenology is a Kantian enterprise.

Gonçalo de Carvalho is a graduate student at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Lisbon, where he is also a member of the research group HPhil and leads a fortnightly seminar on Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. Previously, he earned in B.A. in Natural Sciences and M.Sci in History and Philosophy of Science, both from the University of Cambridge. His current work is on the concept of finitude in Kant and Heidegger. He is also interested in phenomenology, ontology, ecological thought and Marxism.

In his last interview, Martin Heidegger claimed that philosophy, in its current form, is "unable to effect any immediate change in the current state of the world." This remark is not a gesture of resignation, but the ascertainment of the state of affairs: modern thought, shaped by technological enframing and political–legal rationality, has lost access to the level at which world-forming crises must be addressed. What is required, Heidegger suggests, is "another" kind of thinking — one that does not stand over against its object but attends to the conditions under which worlds are disclosed and transformed. With this in mind, my project proposes to think anew about the concept of war. Prevailing frameworks typically treat war as an object of external assessment: a breakdown of politics, a legal condition, or a context for the application of normative principles. While normatively indispensable, these approaches presuppose a relatively stable moral standpoint from which judgment can be passed. Yet for those who live through war, this standpoint is precisely what is undone. They encounter war not merely as a set of events but as a profound transformation of existence itself. Thus, uniting Heidegger's phenomenological ontology and Claudia Card's atrocity paradigm, I reconceive war as being-in-the-world-of-atrocities, arguing that war is not a problem awaiting normative adjudication but an ethical–ontological condition that destabilises the very standpoint from which judgment is usually made, and, as such, should be treated from within as a matter of phenomenological inquiry. War, in my interpretation, becomes an active force that reconfigures Dasein's temporality, agency, and being-with-others, and destabilises ordinary moral expectations of responsibility, trust, and futurity. In doing so, I hope to enact the kind of “other thinking” Heidegger called for, while grounding phenomenology in victim-centred, feminist accounts of atrocity and structural harm.

I am a Visiting Postdoctoral researcher at Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná (Brazil), sponsored by Fundação Araucária, and an Honorary Visiting Fellow at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. Former JESH Fellow at the University of Vienna (2022, 2024) and Postdoctoral Researcher in the Global Philosophy of Religion Project at the University of Birmingham (2022-2023). My paper, “Crises in Personal Orientation and Ways of Overcoming Them”, was awarded a $3k prize in the essay competition by the Foundation for Philosophical Orientation (USA) in 2024. I am chiefly working on Martin Heidegger, Claudia Card, and Hannah Arendt, and am interested in topics such as war, evil, lived experience, justice, collective action, and responsibility.

My paper examines a fundamental tension at the heart of Heidegger’s early Freiburg lectures: the claim that factical life can become transparent to itself through a hermeneutic intuition that is both immediate and yet irreducibly situated. In these texts, Heidegger inherits and transforms the Romantic obsession with “unmediated life,” reconceiving it as the primordial givenness (Urphänomen) that phenomenology must bring to donation from out of its own origin. Yet the analysis simultaneously insists—often in the very same passages—that life is always already historically mediated: linguistically articulated, culturally embedded, and shaped by the world that it inhabits. This yields a structural ambiguity. Heidegger describes a mode of self-understanding that is presented as universally accessible, while his own phenomenology reveals it to be historically contingent.

The paper reconstructs this tension by showing how Heidegger attempts to secure the possibility of “awakening” life to itself through three successive conceptual formations: hermeneutic intuition, anticipatory resoluteness in being-toward-death, and the affective disclosure of anxiety. Each is designed to replace the theological horizon of early Christianity (especially the Pauline experience of parousia) with an ontological structure capable of grounding transparency-to-self without recourse to revelation. Yet each also presupposes an affective and historical constellation proper to modernity—secularization, the collapse of transcendence, and a Romantic valorization of interiority—that cannot be universalized without contradiction.

Drawing on Herder, Berlin, and contemporary discussions of pluralism, I argue that Heidegger’s attempt to formalize “authenticity” as an existential invariant overlooks the incomensurability of historical worlds. If facticity is inescapable, then the very transparency Heidegger seeks is always local, situated, and never pure. The paper concludes that the early project quietly transforms a hermeneutics of plural life-worlds into a proto-doctrine of destiny (Schicksal), preparing the conceptual terrain for the political and metaphysical stances of the mid-1930s.

I am a professor (PhD, Lecturer) at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Bucharest, where I teach Greek and modern philosophy, phenomenology, and critical theory. In 2018 I have received my PhD summa cum laude from the University of Freiburg, with a dissertation on intersubjectivity in Husserl’s work. I am the author of a monograph on the problem of intersubjectivity published by Mohr Siebeck (2021) and have written numerous essays and studies on German and French phenomenology, German Idealism, and Critical Theory. I have also translated into Romanian major works by Schelling, Heidegger, Habermas, Adorno, Chomsky, and Stein.

Martin Heidegger has rarely been regarded as a major philosophical reference for Jean Baudrillard. This neglect has obscured the fact that, beginning in the mid-1980s, Baudrillard reopens in his own idiom the question of Being (Seinsfrage) at the center of Heidegger’s thought, thereby entering a subterranean and unrecognized dialogue with it.

This paper argues that this dialogue does not primarily concern technology or nihilism, as is commonly assumed, but rather the notion of the secret and its ontological stakes. Starting with La Gauche divine (1984), where Baudrillard explicitly engages Heidegger’s reflections on the ambiguous essence of technology and its relation to concealment, his work progressively displaces the question of Being toward a theory of secrecy, appearance, and disappearance. While Baudrillard’s engagement with the ironic and dual structure of technology has often been noted, his sustained reflection on secrecy in relation to Heidegger has remained largely unthematized, despite its decisive philosophical significance.

Through close readings of L’Autre par lui-même (1987), La transparence du mal (1990), and Mots de passe (2000), I show that Baudrillard conceptualizes seduction as the site in which being itself flickers, appears, and withdraws. Seduction is not merely a semiotic or anthropological phenomenon but the locus of an ontological play governed by secrecy: a regime in which no being is assured of its foundation, identity, or superiority, and in which forms exist only in reversible configurations.

Against dominant interpretations that reduce seduction to a strategy of signs or to an aesthetic category, I argue that seduction functions in Baudrillard as a “de-ontology,” that is, as a concealed deconstruction of onto-theology. In this sense, seduction constitutes Baudrillard’s most radical appropriation of Heidegger’s legacy, displacing the question of Being into the logic of secrecy, reversibility, and the withdrawal of being.

Enrico Schirò holds a PhD in Philosophy, Science, Cognition, and Semiotics from the University of Bologna. His research focuses on French thought, deconstruction, and speculative realism, with particular attention to a philosophical reinterpretation of Jean Baudrillard’s work. He co-edited Decentering the Human: Why Object-Oriented Ontology? (Kaiak, 2021) and the special issue Reinventing the Real: Jean Baudrillard (2007–2017) (Lo Sguardo, 2017). He has published on Baudrillard, Nietzsche, and Descartes, and works as a translator from French and English. He is currently preparing a critical edition of L’Autre par lui-même for Orthotes and collaborates with the University of Malta.

In The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger defines animals as ‘world-poor’ in contrast to humans—and has been accordingly critiqued for anthropocentrism (cf. Tanzer 2015) in his “hierarchization and evaluation” of animal life as deficient (Derrida 1989, 56). In this paper, we consider how a related view of non-human worlds deeply embeds anthropocentrism within policy responses to the polycrisis (Kesar and Ache 2024; Kopnina et al. 2022). In particular, we address ‘visioning’ practices, widely recognised as key to establishing an alternative trajectory away from extreme systemic risk and towards a nature-positive future, but which tend to neglect nonhuman experiences (Chimakonama and Ogbonnaya 2025).

We evaluate two innovative approaches to visioning aimed at centring non-human perspectives (co-developed by co-author): (1) Multi-Species Visioning (MSV), and (2) Multi-Species Systemic Risk Mapping (MSSRM). MSV entails human participants researching selected species (i.e., sustenance, behaviour, senses, mobility, etc.) as preparation for a workshop in which imaginative and meditative practices lead to the generation of species-visions and a multi-species text-voice mp3. MSSRM deploys technology from forensic architecture modelling to digitally represent sensory fields of non-human species—foregrounding environmental affordances and risks not otherwise apparent to human decision-makers.

We explore how these visioning techniques 'prime' decision-makers for responses informed by non-human perspectives and solicit expressions of moral intuition. Here, critical phenomenology can importantly contribute by describing how norms shape perception and thereby limit moral imagination across different bodies and capacities (Weiss, Murphy, and Salamon 2020; MacKenzie and Scully 2007)—thus caveating the reliability of these visioning practices. Nevertheless, while we recognise human embodiment as a limiting structure, we take seriously our shared status with nonhuman species as animate beings (Toadvine 2024) and consider how multi-species visioning might subvert anthropocentrism, tapping into phenomenology of kinaesthesia as central to the generation of perception and judgement (Sheets-Johnstone 2019).

Dr Jessie Stanier is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at UWE Bristol (UK), with research specialisms in critical and feminist phenomenology, age studies, medical humanities, and engaged methods. Anticipation has become an increasingly important philosophical lens in her work, in the wake of her research on how public health anticipations are co-constitutive of older people’s experiential outlook on transitions in their futures. Her research has been published in the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Phenomenology & Mind, Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology, Frontiers in Pain Research, and the Patient Experience Journal.

In a remarkable yet rarely read—and even more rarely discussed—newspaper article for the Neue Züricher Zeitung (21.09.1969), Heidegger is extraordinarily clear about both his thoughts on the godless—and godly—fate of the contemporary age and his stance towards Hegel and Marx:

“The contemporary Hegelian renaissance [is a] mill of dialectic [… which] now only runs idle, because Hegel’s fundamental stance, his Christian-theological metaphysics, has been abandoned; for it is only within that stance that Hegel’s dialectic finds its element and its support. The question remains whether industrial society—which today is regarded as the first and final reality (in earlier times it was called ‘God’)—can at all be adequately thought with the aid of Marxist dialectic, that is, in principle with Hegel’s metaphysics.” (GA13, 212)

The paper will first interpret this statement, focusing on how, for Heidegger, the question of Marx (as opposed to Hegel) “remains”—especially in light of the recent publication of his notes on Marx (GA104). Second, the paper will relate this to the issue of secularisation. If the loss of Christianity is the main reason why Hegel’s “onto-theology” is no longer satisfactory, how exactly can Heidegger’s critique of Hegel be understood? Basically, my argument is that, with the eclipse of Christian love as a widely available and authentic source of meaningfulness, Heidegger is indeed correct that the question of Being must be reposed. This question, I submit, is essentially to be understood as a question about the fundamental sources of meaningfulness available in our historical world. While Hegel manifestly conceptualises some kind of identity of religion and the state, and sees Christian love as the ethical cornerstone of modern society, in the face of secularisation as well as recurring discontents with it, Heidegger’s question of Being remains an important task for philosophy.

Having studied at Freiburg, London (UCL), and Dublin (TCD), Max finished his master’s in philosophy at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in early 2026 with an MA dissertation on how Heidegger’s question of Being can be found in Hegel. He argued that any confrontation of these two towering thinkers must focus on Hegel’s Doctrine of Essence, and, more specifically, on his concept of semblance (Schein). According to his thesis, this notion provides precisely the sort of “absolute negativity” Heidegger is after in his philosophy of difference (or nothingness). Max is now pursuing a PhD on Hegel, Marx, Husserl and Heidegger.

Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain is one of the most infamous objects in art history: a urinal turned into a museum piece, an object that still confuses audiences more than a century after its debut. Explanations abound—it questions what counts as art, it shifts art toward ideas—yet these accounts often leave us unsatisfied. Something seems missing. In this paper, I argue that Heidegger, of all people, can help us recover what is truly at stake in Duchamp’s gesture, and that doing so reveals why Heidegger’s phenomenology remains alive fifty years after his death.

The story begins with a simple premise: art is not only found in artworks but in the experiences they provoke. Drawing on Heidegger’s early distinction between the ready-to-hand and the present-at-hand, I show that Fountain operates as a subtle experiment in altering the way we encounter things. A urinal, in daily life, disappears into its use; we never look at it. Duchamp recognised that by shifting its context, he could shift its phenomenology—turning an invisible tool into a visible thing. In doing so, he exposes a structure of experience that Heidegger had been articulating at precisely the same historical moment.

My aim is not to claim that Duchamp read Heidegger or that Fountain is a philosophical treatise. Rather, I show how early Heidegger provides a conceptual vocabulary for understanding the experiential disruption Duchamp orchestrated. The pairing becomes unexpectedly generative: Heidegger clarifies Duchamp, and Duchamp, in turn, demonstrates the continuing relevance of Heidegger’s insights for the contemporary world of art.

Carlos M. Suárez Tavernier is an MPhil candidate in Philosophy at the University of St Andrews, specialising in aesthetics and the philosophy of art. His work explores the ways artistic practices shape and transform human experience, drawing on both historical and contemporary sources. He has published essays on opera, ballet, and the arts more broadly, and has presented his research at conferences on aesthetics, culture, and interdisciplinary approaches to the humanities.

The relationship between Martin Heidegger and the physicist, philosopher, and mathematician Hermann Weyl (1885-1955) has largely been unexplored in the philosophical literature. This, I claim, is a mistake since Heidegger would cite and praise Weyl's works throughout the 1920s (for example, see Heidegger's 1924 article ``The Concept of Time,'' the 1924-25 lectures on Plato's Sophist, and the 1925 ``History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena'' lecture series). 

In this talk, I show how shifts in Heidegger's conception of physical time, i.e., the concept of time operating in the physical sciences, can be fruitfully understood as a product of an ongoing engagement with Weyl's philosophy and relativity theory more generally. More specifically, I argue that through the lens of this engagement, we can understand why Heidegger would reject Bergson's account of physical time---on which time is spatial in character---in favor of an account that shares many of the core features of Weyl's account given in his early major writings. As my discussion will reveal, at the heart of Heidegger's rejection of Bergson is the contention that not only do spatial analyses distort the nature of physical time, but also that spatial representations are entirely dispensable for the measurement of physical time.

To conclude, I focus on some of the broader philosophical implications of Heidegger's shift in his view of physical time. In particular, I show how Heidegger's rejection of Bergson sheds light on the extent to which Heidegger endorsed a form of temporal idealism or, roughly, the view that time depends on human subjects.  As a result, this talk aims to illustrate how some of the more obscure and contentious aspects of Heidegger's thought acquire greater clarity when situated within the context of Weyl's philosophy and developments in 20th-century science more broadly.

Paul Tran-Hoang is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Tran-Hoang works on the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of logic, the philosophy of science, and the history of 19th and 20th century philosophy (both analytic and continental traditions). Within the history of 19th and 20th century philosophy, he is particularly interested in the relationship between phenomenology and the physical sciences.

Dreyfus once remarked that the chapter on the One (das Man) in Being and Time is both the most basic and the most confused. While much of the existing literature has focused on whether the One constitutes an essential feature of Dasein, involves the character of being together (Mitsein), or is ultimately overturned by authenticity, contemporary discussions have increasingly converged on social-ontological interpretations. Despite their insights, these accounts leave a central issue that is insufficiently clarified: how Dasein comes to understand and interpret itself as the One in the first place.

This paper argues that the difficulty of the One lies not only in specifying its ontological characteristics, but more fundamentally in explicating the structure of its self-identification. I advance three claims. First, I will show that dominant social-ontological expositions misapply or neglect Heidegger’s hermeneutics, particularly the hermeneutic circle, thereby leaving the One’s self-identification underdetermined. Second, by reexamining the hermeneutic circle as a constitutive structure of Dasein’s self-identification rather than a methodological constraint, I shall offer a hermeneutically grounded account of how inauthentic Dasein identifies itself as the One. Third, I will introduce a notion of “enactive action” to demonstrate how such self-identification necessarily involves inter-identification within the One.

Methodologically, the paper maintains that Heidegger’s hermeneutics is not an optional stance but a necessary condition for making sense of the One. By articulating self- and inter-identification as enactive accomplishments of everyday Dasein, the paper aims to clarify the social ontology of the One while remaining faithful to Heidegger’s hermeneutic method.

I am currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna. My areas of specialization comprise phenomenology, hermeneutics, and the self. 

This paper proposes that Heidegger’s famous dictum, “Only a God can save us”, can be reinterpreted through his discussion of Heraclitus’ ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων (ēthos anthrōpō daimōn) from “Letter on Humanism”. According to Heidegger, ethos means “abode”, the open region in which man dwells, preserving the advent of what belongs to his essence: “The open region of his abode allows what is headed to man’s essence – and what in its arriving resides in nearness to him – to appear.” (Heidegger 1993, 256) Arriving and remaining near is daimon, the god.

My question is as follows: what is the dis-position from which a human being can be approached by the daimon? To answer this, I will use the concept of tropos – the ancient Greek notion that means simultaneously a musical mode and a way of being – showing how it converges with Heidegger’s Befindlichkeit (as Stimmung, attunement) as a fundamental existential. I argue that through attunement musical experience shapes and prepares the dwelling place called ethos, in a way akin to Plato’s understanding of music in The Republic and Laws, echoed by Heidegger’s interpretation of Platonic Bildung (παιδεία) (Heidegger 2004, 217). The paper closes by drawing out a consequence implicit in the Platonic linkage of musical tropoi to nomoi (laws): if modes of attunement shift, the laws of the community shift with them – suggesting that musical attunement is a fundamental instance of a relational openness in which humans, individually and collectively, dwell near what belongs to them in their essence.

Christian Vassilev is an FWO junior postdoctoral fellow at KU Leuven and Head of the Research Centre for Music Philosophy and Humanities, Fundamenta musicae in Sofia, Bulgaria. He received a PhD in Musicology (2023) and an MA in Musicology (2019) from the National Academy of Music “Prof. Pancho Vladigerov”. His research spans philosophy of music, phenomenology, semiotics, and philosophy of education. He has a monograph on Eero Tarasti’s musical semiotics, and various journal articles on phenomenology, philosophy of music, and education.

In Being and Time, Division I, Heidegger appears to argue for the following two claims: (1) inauthenticity consists in a mode of existence dominated by das Man (in which Dasein is not itself but exists as the ‘they-self’) and (2) das Man is an existentiale grounded in Being-with (the communal dimension of one’s Being-in-the-world). These claims seem to jointly entail that Dasein is necessarily inauthentic, since it can never step outside the ontological structure that defines its Being. Nevertheless, Heidegger appears to argue in Division II for a third claim, namely that (3) authenticity is possible as an existentiell modification of das Man, which seems to contradict that entailment and thus (1) and (2). This paper first examines and evaluates prominent interpretations of authenticity—including what may be called the self-ownership account (e.g., Blattner 2013), the unity account (e.g., Guignon 2000, 2013; McManus 2015, 2019), and the structural account (e.g., Golob 2025)—each of which seeks to reconcile the ontological status of das Man with the possibility of authenticity. This paper proposes a different approach, arguing that authenticity and inauthenticity amount to mutually exclusive existentiell possibilities latent in the same ontological structure of das Man. Since, on this reading, inauthenticity is not of equal primordiality with das Man—but rather amounts to a modification of it and presupposes the very structure of Dasein’s existence it covers over—while authenticity requires us to abandon inauthenticity, it does not require us to escape das Man. Instead, just like inauthenticity, it consists in a modified way of relating to it. Hence, das Man is inescapable, but it is up to me whether I let it decide for me what counts as my ownmost possibility.

Yixin Wang is an undergraduate student in translation and philosophy at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and a visiting student at Mansfield College, University of Oxford (2024–25). Her research interests include post-Kantian philosophy, aesthetics, and philosophy of language. She has recently completed a research project on Husserl and non-existents under the Undergraduate Research Award at CUHK-Shenzhen, as well as ‘The Mire of Ontological Idealism: Heidegger on Being, Dasein, and Truth’ for the Pembroke Cambridge Summer Programme. She is currently working on the issue of authenticity in Being and Time.

Phenomenology is famously predicated, in its origins, on Husserl’s take on Kantian transcendental idealism: the question of what reality might consist of in itself, beyond our representations of it, is one of the things bracketed out in the Husserlian epoché. While phenomenology engages a kind of direct representation, so direct that some phenomenologists suggest that we should talk of “presentation” rather than “representation,” this is conventionally taken to be direct representation of what lies, in Kantian terms, in the phenomenal world or in Husserl’s Lebenswelt. However, the question of the thing in itself haunts phenomenology in a way that has a profound effect on subsequent continental philosophy. Despite Husserl’s bracketing, a worry persists that there is something in existence that we are not doing justice to. This worry finds a particular shape in the work of Heidegger, where that excluded ‘X’ is, at times, one of the things gathered under the name “Being.” What if we could defuse the Kantian arguments for transcendental idealism, and instead claim the opposite: that all of our representations of the world put us into direct contact with the world as it is in itself. I will draw on arguments from Michael Morris, a philosopher with a very different background, suggesting that our concerns around the possibility of a “thing in itself” inaccessible to our representations of it are misplaced. If this is the case, then we can also dispel any Heideggerean worries concerning the role of a “metaphysics of presence,” since all we would ever have is presence. Nor would there be a need for any God to save us, now or at any time.

In my twenties I pursued an academic career in philosophy, with my doctoral thesis focusing on Nietzsche and genealogy. I continued my study of Nietzsche with an IRCHSS postdoctoral research fellowship at University College Dublin. Subsequently my life priorities changed and I decided to settle in Brighton and take up a career as a pianist and piano teacher, which has continued to the present. My interest in philosophy continued, however, and I have become fascinated by questions of the self, consciousness and metaphysics, by Kant and phenomenology, and am writing and presenting papers on these subjects as an independent scholar.

Heidegger’s Frage nach der Technik has regularly been dismissed as deterministic (Feenberg), romanticist (Ihde), mistaken (Latour) or practically less relevant than Being and Time (Dreyfus). Against such readings, I argue that Die Frage nach der Technik is an inherently political and emancipatory text—it constitutes an immanent critique of modernity as a “form of life” (Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life).

What is at stake is not technology as such but the distinctly modern pursuit of human flourishing by techno-scientific means—cast by Heidegger as self-undermining, insofar as man becomes a mere resource and his existence meaningless. This contradiction is “not contingent but systematic” (Jaeggi), as it is precisely that which was supposed to provide the new ground for man’s existence—planning, calculation—which assumes “a quality of its own” (Heidegger, Age of the World Picture) and, as the predominant mode of world disclosure, becomes itself incalculable.

Meanwhile, Heidegger explicitly refers to his own work as fostering “a path” beyond the Ge-stell, something he denies political activism or normative prescription can achieve. Thus, his writings on technology are not only marked by immanent criticism’s typical “orientation to crisis” (the crisis, for Heidegger, being nihilism), but also by an impetus “to transform a contradictory and crisis-riven situation into something new” (Jaeggi).  

Reading Die Frage nach der Technik as an immanent critique may prove fruitful with regard to contemporary questions concerning technology. Heidegger’s work gestures towards a technology ethics focused less on straightforward regulation but on preserving human judgment and agency. The “supreme danger” does not emanate from technical instruments as such but from a reconfiguration of human subjectivity that renders us increasingly incapable of confronting contemporary crises like climate change not merely as problems of computation and calculation, but as moral and political ones. 

Jan H Wasserziehr is a political theorist whose work explores the politico-philosophical implications of contemporary technological change. Emphasising the co-emergent nature of human being and technology as well as technology’s impact on human cognition and ability, he argues for a subject-centred approach to technology ethics which recognises the systemic dimensions of technological change and transcends modes of analysis that prioritise individual artefacts and inventions. He is currently finishing his PhD thesis at the London School of Economics, supervised by Katrin Flikschuh and Lea Ypi.

Heidegger argues that the foundation of modern science lies not in empirical experience, but in the mathematical factor. When humans confront an object, they first presuppose an axiomatizable law of nature, which governs and integrates the object within a predefined system. This concept of the “mathematical project” is central to Heidegger’s critique of modern science, as it emphasizes the presuppositional and controlling nature of scientific research. According to Heidegger, scientific inquiry does not merely observe phenomena but first imposes mathematical laws on them, limiting what can be studied to phenomena that can be reduced to these laws. This process transforms the nature of scientific research, making it highly predictive, yet narrowing the scope of exploration by excluding those phenomena that cannot be mathematically modeled. Heidegger contrasts modern science with ancient science, arguing that the key difference is not the use of empirical observation or mathematical measurement—both of which were present in ancient philosophy—but the mathematical planning of the essence of things. In ancient science, there was no presupposition of an axiomatic system; research was more open-ended, concerned with the inherent nature of things rather than their calculable properties. Modern science, on the other hand, reduces entities to their measurable aspects, shaping our understanding of the world in a way that is fundamentally different from the more holistic approach of ancient inquiry. This mathematical approach not only governs the natural sciences but also influences our very conception of existence, reducing it to what can be quantified and predicted. Heidegger’s concept of the “mathematical project” highlights the “unthinking” nature of modern science, which focuses on control and predictability at the cost of a deeper, more reflective engagement with the world.

Jin Xu is a researcher at Newcastle University with interdisciplinary interests spanning science, technology, and their philosophical foundations. She received her PhD from Newcastle University. Her academic work engages with themes including the nature of scientific inquiry, modelling, and the role of mathematical structures in modern knowledge systems. She has contributed to a range of research projects and publications across different fields. In this work, she participates in an interdisciplinary discussion of Heidegger’s concept of the “mathematical project” and its implications for understanding the development and limits of modern science.

In this paper I would like to demonstrate how Heidegger’s thinking from the 1930s can be put to a novel and productive use, not necessarily in conformity with his aims, but drawing particular resources from his texts. Using some of the least commented works in his corpus, his History of Being, Seinsgeschichte, I propose a project of de-colonizing the History of Being, and thus de-colonizing our understanding of ‘Western’ philosophy in general. My focus will be on how Heidegger interprets truth in Medieval philosophy. Building on recent French work on this history (A. de Libera), I will pursue a thread that runs through major (and minor) Latin thinkers in the West. I will argue that Heidegger’s conception of truth is not rigorously instantiated in their works. I will then turn to the conception of truth found in the Arabic work of the Iranian philosopher Abu Ali Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and show that it, surprisingly, best instantiates what Heidegger had thought. However, the genesis of ‘Medieval truth' will not just be readable from the Arabic, it will also gain much from the event of translation into Latin. One might say that it was the entry of Arabic thought into Latin that constituted what Heidegger thought as Medieval truth. And yet, pursuing explicit references to Arabic (and Jewish) thinking in his works shows a disappointing failure on Heidegger’s part to exploit his own insights. Succinctly stated, I will show that of, all people, Heidegger’s interpretation of the history of philosophy, despite his declared intentions, can give us tools to recognize the long hidden, suppressed, usurped contribution of Arabic thought to the thinking of being in the ‘West.

Hakhamanesh Zangeneh is Associate Professor of Philosophy at California State University Stanislaus. He obtained his Doctorate from Paris XII after studying in Cologne and Irvine. His interest in Heidegger ranges from Heidegger’s Kantian phase and Being and Time, through the History of Being in the 1930s. He has written about the conception of temporality in the 1920s and is currently starting a set of essays on Derrida’s readings of Heidegger in his early seminars. Aside from the phenomenological movement he has interests in Structuralist linguistics as the conceptual origin of the GPT.

Heidegger argues that the foundation of modern science lies not in empirical experience, but in the mathematical factor. When humans confront an object, they first presuppose an axiomatizable law of nature, which governs and integrates the object within a predefined system. This concept of the “mathematical project” is central to Heidegger’s critique of modern science, as it emphasizes the presuppositional and controlling nature of scientific research. According to Heidegger, scientific inquiry does not merely observe phenomena but first imposes mathematical laws on them, limiting what can be studied to phenomena that can be reduced to these laws. This process transforms the nature of scientific research, making it highly predictive, yet narrowing the scope of exploration by excluding those phenomena that cannot be mathematically modeled. Heidegger contrasts modern science with ancient science, arguing that the key difference is not the use of empirical observation or mathematical measurement—both of which were present in ancient philosophy—but the mathematical planning of the essence of things. In ancient science, there was no presupposition of an axiomatic system; research was more open-ended, concerned with the inherent nature of things rather than their calculable properties. Modern science, on the other hand, reduces entities to their measurable aspects, shaping our understanding of the world in a way that is fundamentally different from the more holistic approach of ancient inquiry. This mathematical approach not only governs the natural sciences but also influences our very conception of existence, reducing it to what can be quantified and predicted. Heidegger’s concept of the “mathematical project” highlights the “unthinking” nature of modern science, which focuses on control and predictability at the cost of a deeper, more reflective engagement with the world.

Du Jiahui, Ph.D. candidate at Capital Normal University. Enjoys running and swimming. Published translator of Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality.

In The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger defines animals as ‘world-poor’ in contrast to humans—and has been accordingly critiqued for anthropocentrism (cf. Tanzer 2015) in his “hierarchization and evaluation” of animal life as deficient (Derrida 1989, 56). In this paper, we consider how a related view of non-human worlds deeply embeds anthropocentrism within policy responses to the polycrisis (Kesar and Ache 2024; Kopnina et al. 2022). In particular, we address ‘visioning’ practices, widely recognised as key to establishing an alternative trajectory away from extreme systemic risk and towards a nature-positive future, but which tend to neglect nonhuman experiences (Chimakonama and Ogbonnaya 2025).

We evaluate two innovative approaches to visioning aimed at centring non-human perspectives (co-developed by co-author): (1) Multi-Species Visioning (MSV), and (2) Multi-Species Systemic Risk Mapping (MSSRM). MSV entails human participants researching selected species (i.e., sustenance, behaviour, senses, mobility, etc.) as preparation for a workshop in which imaginative and meditative practices lead to the generation of species-visions and a multi-species text-voice mp3. MSSRM deploys technology from forensic architecture modelling to digitally represent sensory fields of non-human species—foregrounding environmental affordances and risks not otherwise apparent to human decision-makers.

We explore how these visioning techniques 'prime' decision-makers for responses informed by non-human perspectives and solicit expressions of moral intuition. Here, critical phenomenology can importantly contribute by describing how norms shape perception and thereby limit moral imagination across different bodies and capacities (Weiss, Murphy, and Salamon 2020; MacKenzie and Scully 2007)—thus caveating the reliability of these visioning practices. Nevertheless, while we recognise human embodiment as a limiting structure, we take seriously our shared status with nonhuman species as animate beings (Toadvine 2024) and consider how multi-species visioning might subvert anthropocentrism, tapping into phenomenology of kinaesthesia as central to the generation of perception and judgement (Sheets-Johnstone 2019).

Phil Tovey is the Director of Nature-Centric Approaches to systemic risk assessment at ASRA. He is responsible for managing a new effort on non-human sanctity, value, and agency related to systemic risk assessment and response. Prior to this, Phil was the Head of Futures in UK Government’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) where he led pioneering foresight research and futures practice. He is pursuing a PhD focused on the eco-phenomenological dimensions of temporality in riverine environments through augmented human senses, as Visiting Research Fellow at the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Reading.