Annotation
The seminar focuses on the aporetic question of nothingness, using as a background the continental philosophical discussions of the last circa hundred years. Heidegger's fundamental ontology shall serve as our starting point, as it interprets the experience of nothingness as the precondition for what-is appearing qua what-is (esp. in his inaugural lecture 'What is Metaphysics?'). Later, we will follow the transposition of the problem of nothingness into consciousness, as developed in Sartre's 'Being and Nothingness', and the subsequent integration of nothingness into the ontological structure of subjectivity. Finally, we will concentrate on the phenomenological, thus not solely logical, critique of nothingness in passages selected from Lévinas' works.
The aim of the seminar is to go 'beyond the texts' and explicitly pose the fundamental questions which the problem of nothingness induces: (1.) On which presuppositions can nothingness be grasped, so it can be said that it 'belongs' to being? (2.) Is it possible that the way of resolution, or rejection of the problem of nothingness is determined by the way we approach the problem of time? What is the temporal meaning of nothingness? (3.) And lastly, on what is founded the vaguely 'evident' link between nothingness and our death?