In this thesis I offer an exegetical account of Martin Heidegger's 1951/1952 lecture course Was Heisst Denken?. My reading of the text is based on two essential tenets Heidegger puts forward in Was Heisst Denken?: that there cannot be a conceptual definition of thinking and that thinking begins by attending to the unfolding of language from the Ereignis. Thus the thesis aims to show how Heidegger's teaching of thinking takes place largely through attending to the unfolding of language, which seeks to interrupt the conceptual and representational thinking of metaphysics through challenging its instrumental use of language. Heidegger's development of a notion of thinking does thus largely take place through a critique of traditional forms of thinking by seeking to find an entry within metaphysics to that which calls forth thinking, which he names as the twofold of being. As Heidegger presents the lecture course as a concerted effort to learn thinking, the structure of the thesis follows the structure of the lecture course itself, in order to show how the momentum of Heidegger's text builds up through a consistent introduction of difference through language, in order to allow the reader to hear the difference at the heart of the Ereignis itself. To show this my reading is based on the German text rather than its English translation, in order to highlight how Heidegger works with the particularity of the German language in order to find and instil difference within the conceptual and representational thinking of metaphysics.

This thesis offers a genealogical-exegetical account of Heidegger's phenomenology of mood (Stimmung), focusing on his Freiburg and Marburg lectures from 1919 to 1925. In Being and Time, moods manifest the transcendental factical ground of “thrownness” (Geworfenheit) in which an understanding of Being is constituted. However, throughout Heidegger's work, moods have operated as the ground for disclosure, the origin of authentic ontological understanding, the defining character of each historical epoch and as the enactmental urgency that will bring about an ‘other' beginning. This thesis contextualizes Heidegger's accounts of mood within the broader phenomenological project concerning the constitution and grounding of meaning. The first part of the thesis examines the neo-Kantian challenges to philosophy as well as Husserl's response. It further explores the problems Heidegger identifies in Husserl's phenomenology and shows how Heidegger offers a grounding of phenomenological understanding in lived experience, in order to provide a concrete account of a phenomenological “beginning” (Anfang). Heidegger's turn to affects constitutes a radicalization, rather than a repudiation, of Husserlian insights. The second part of the thesis explores Heidegger's earliest accounts of affective phenomena in his interpretations of St. Augustine and Aristotle, where the terminology of Being and Time is developed for the first time. This involves an analysis of Heidegger's accounts of love (Liebe) and joy (Freude) as they figure in the 1920 lecture course Phenomenology of Religious Experience, and analyses the emergence of Angst and other grounding moods (Grundstimmungen). The thesis then looks at Heidegger's early interpretation of Plato and Aristotle in the lecture courses immediately prior to Being and Time, where the technical notion of disposition (Befindlichkeit) emerges, as well as his first analysis of fear (Furcht).

The aim of this study is to attempt a re-conceptualisation of ethics and politics away from the well-rehearsed structure of singularity versus community, particularity or individuality versus universality, as well as from the inadequate dyadic positioning of these sets of terms. Dominant scholarship on Lévinas's and Derrida's work has generally been divided into those who see Derrida's work as continuing the Lévinasian legacy, and thus having little to offer to the political, and those who would like to divorce the trajectory of deconstruction from the Lévinasian heritage, and thus reveal it as being inherently political. The above split in opinion is largely based on a divergence in the interpretation of Lévinas's own writings as essentially about ethics, and therefore as either having little to offer to our thinking of the political, or as undergoing something like a ‘split', with the focus coming to rest more clearly on politics through the figure of the third, in later writings. My contribution to this impasse is to foreground a recent, though much overlooked notion within Jacques Derrida's work as an alternative to thinking being-with: that of community of singularities. I also suggest the notions of alteronomy and fiendship as alternatives to thinking being-with, which take into account the way in which the other-within-the-self restructures the concepts of freedom and autonomy and takes them beyond a humanist context. I will be arguing from two overarching points: a) that Lévinas's own work can convincingly be interpreted as not only concerned with the political from his earliest writings, but as setting up the political as the interruptive force within the ethical, thus providing a shift in perspective for what is essentially a mutually-interruptive relation between ethics and politics, and b) that Derrida's own writing need not be ‘divorced' from Lévinas's trajectory of thought, in order to be considered as having something to offer to our re-thinking of the relation between ethics and politics.

The thesis argues that for Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger, the free will debate has been rendered intractable by a fundamental misunderstanding of the terms involved. This is exacerbated by a failure to identify and adopt an appropriate methodological approach to the problem. Both philosophers argue that this error in the free will debate is symptomatic of a broader misunderstanding of philosophical enquiry and the method it necessitates. For Heidegger, the entire history of ‘analytic/western' ontology has been fatally misconceived as a result of an effort to define the being of entities in static terms. The insistence on the question of what a being ‘is' obstructs any meaningful enquiry by conceding its existence at the outset of the investigation. Sartre's project is founded on Heidegger's argument, pushing it into a definitive claim about the nature of consciousness. He argues that as the only being for whom ‘meaning' is possible, consciousness is distanced from beings by ‘nothingness' which ensures its ontological freedom. The thesis will argue that Sartre has misconstrued Heidegger's work, making comprehension of his freedom all the more complicated. We propose that a thorough investigation of their projects will reveal an account of ontological freedom that does not suffer from the shortcomings of existentialism whilst avoiding the methodological missteps of the traditional discourse.