Juan Luis Segundo (1925-1996) was a Uruguayan Jesuit priest who, I argue, based his liberation theology on his understanding of existentialism. The major contribution of this thesis is the exploration of unknown and unexplored sources in Segundo's work. These sources support my thesis of his basis in existentialism and are corroborated by his mature theology. This thesis is significant because the connection between existentialism and liberation theology has been widely overlooked. My starting point is Segundo's 1948 book, in which he combines existentialism with personalism and develops a transcendental method grounded in love and inter-subjectivity. The following three chapters develop my argument through his engagement with four existentialist thinkers: Berdyaev, Sartre and Camus, and Heidegger. Chapter 3 demonstrates how Segundo follows Berdyaev's primacy of freedom, which allows for human creativity, but Segundo takes it as a "quality of the will" and relates freedom to love. Berdyaev influences Segundo's preference for a methodology yielding consistent growth rather than a systematic approach to theology. Chapter 4 shows how Sartre's and Camus' understanding of freedom and limits influenced Segundo's sense that a person's lived reality must be the starting point for theological reflection (e.g. the hermeneutic circle). In chapter 5, I use an unpublished manuscript to show how Segundo uses the place of tradition in the Christian church and the role of tradition in Heidegger's phenomenological analysis of Dasein in order to build his theology of "liberative human seeking and divine revelation". In the final two chapters, I draw the new sources together with two of Segundo's widely read books: Faith and Ideologies (1982) in chapter 6 and The Liberation of Theology (1975) in chapter 7. In chapter 6, the transcendental method he first wrote about in 1948 returns and he addresses materialism and personalism. Chapter 7 serves as my conclusion and uses Segundo's hermeneutic circle as the fullest manifestation of my argument.

This essay aims to shed light upon the philosophical dignity of Edith Stein’s critique of the early Heideggerian conception of sociality in her text ”Martin Heideggers Existenzphilosophie”, from 1936. I will argue that Stein’s critique of Heidegger’s concept of sociality comes to be substantiated through her existential-philosophical approach to his understanding of the transcendent character of Dasein. By objecting to Heidegger’s definition of Dasein as ecstatic temporality, Stein points out his inattentiveness to authentic otherness in Being and Time, which reaches out into a problem surrounding Mitsein. I will further demonstrate how Stein, by ascribing to Dasein an enduring and sustaining quality in the midst of ecstasy, uses Heidegger’s concept of Dasein in order to formulate her own social ontology.

Dans le cadre de cette thèse, nous nous proposons d’explorer la patiente explication que Heidegger a poursuivie avec Hegel à propos de l’origine de la négativité – problème qui s’impose de fait à titre d’« unique pensée d’une pensée qui pose la question de l’être ». Partant du constat d’une affinité insoupçonnée entre les deux penseurs quant au rôle insigne qui doit revenir à la négation en philosophie, nous entendons percer à jour les motifs de la constante fin de non-recevoir que Heidegger oppose néanmoins à la méthode dialectique de son plus coriace adversaire. Afin de rendre justice aux différents rebondissements d’une explication en constante mutation, et qui, de surcroît, traverse l’ensemble de l’œuvre de Heidegger, nous procédons à une division chronologique qui en circonscrit les quatre principaux moments. I. En un premier temps, notre regard se porte ainsi sur l’opposition résolue que le jeune Heidegger manifeste à l’égard de la montée du néo-hégélianisme, au nom d’une appropriation toute personnelle de l’intuitionnisme husserlien. Les transformations auxquelles il soumet la méthode phénoménologique de son maître doivent néanmoins laisser transparaître un furtif emprunt à la dialectique hégélienne, dont le principal mérite serait d’avoir conféré une fonction productrice à la négation. II. Le propos d’Être et temps demeure toutefois bien discret quant à cette dette méthodologique, bien que ses vestiges se laissent exhumer, notamment sous la forme d’une négation contre-déchéante dont l’intervention essentielle ponctue l’analytique existentiale. C’est qu’un désaccord subsiste entre Heidegger et son prédécesseur quant à l’origine ontologique de la néantité, qui semble devoir se dérober à toute forme de sursomption dialectique. III. Loin d’être alors définitivement réglé, le problème de l’origine du négatif rejaillit au cœur d’une nouvelle mouture métaphysique du projet heideggérien, la minant peut-être même en son fond. Il s’agit en l’occurrence de disputer à Hegel une compréhension plus originaire du néant, comprise comme témoignage de la finitude de l’être lui-même et s’inscrivant en faux face à l’accomplissement spécifiquement hégélien de la métaphysique. IV. Des tensions qui ne sont pas étrangères à cette délicate entreprise entraînent toutefois Heidegger sur la voie d’un dépassement de l’onto-théo-logie et de l’achèvement technique que Hegel lui a préparé. Il s’agit dès lors de situer l’origine abyssale du négatif auprès d’un irréductible retrait de l’estre, à l’encontre de l’oubli nihiliste auquel Hegel l’aurait confinée en la résorbant au sein de l’absolue positivité de la présence. Par là même, Heidegger propose un concept de négation qu’il juge plus originaire que son contrepoids dialectique, négation à laquelle il attribue la forme d’une réponse interrogative, patiente et attentive à la réticence hésitante de l’événement appropriant. Mais est-ce suffisant pour soutenir qu’il parvient, en définitive, à se libérer de l’embarras dialectique qui semble coller à sa pensée et qui exige de lui un constant effort de distanciation ? Cette thèse entend contribuer à établir les conditions d’une décision à cet égard. / In this thesis we explore Heidegger’s patient engagement (Auseinandersetzung) with Hegel about the origin of negativity – an inescapable problem insofar as it is “the sole thought of a thinking that asks the question of Being”. We begin by noting an unsuspected affinity between the two thinkers with respect to the privileged role that negation must play in philosophy, and from there we elucidate the motives for why Heidegger nevertheless rejects the dialectical method of his toughest adversary. Heidegger’s engagement with Hegel evolved constantly over his entire oeuvre; in order to do it justice we therefore propose a chronology that delimits its four principal stages. I. Firstly, we examine the young Heidegger’s resolute opposition to the rise of Neo-Hegelianism in the name of a very personal appropriation of Husserl’s intuitionism. The modifications that Heidegger made to his master’s phenomenological method nevertheless reveal that he also surreptitiously borrowed from Hegelian dialectic, the principal merit of which was to have granted negation a positive function. II. Being and Time does not openly declare this methodological debt, yet traces of it can be found, notably in the form of a counter-falling negation that plays a marked and essential role in the existential analytic. A disagreement remained between Heidegger and his predecessor as to the ontological origin of nothingness, which seemed to elude any form of dialectical sublation. III. The problem of the origin of the negative, far from having been definitively settled, then resurged at the heart of a new conception of metaphysics within the Heideggerian project, perhaps even undermining its very foundations. Heidegger vied with Hegel for a more originary understanding of nothingness, one which he conceived as a testament to the finitude of Being itself and as opposed to the specifically Hegelian accomplishment of metaphysics. IV. However, the tensions inherent to this delicate enterprise led him to go beyond onto-theo-logy together with the technical completion that Hegel had envisioned for it. From then on, Heidegger sought to situate the abyssal origin of the negative in an irreducible refusal of Being – over against the nihilistic forgetfulness to which Hegel had confined it by having resorbed it into the absolute positivity of presence. In so doing Heidegger proposed a concept of negation that he deemed more originary than its dialectical counterpart, construing negation as an interrogative answer, patient and attentive to the hesitant refusal of the event (Ereignis). But can it ultimately be maintained that Heidegger thereby succeeded in freeing himself, once and for all, from the dialectical troubles that seemingly clung to his thought and from which he constantly strove to distance himself? The present thesis will contribute to settling this very question.

The thesis treats the subject of how the work of Max Picard, Rainer Maria Rilke and Jan Zahradníček relate. Its unifying element is the motif of salvation, its negative and positive aspect. Picard, Rilke, and Zahradníček perceive the world overfilled with technology and become witnesses of dehumanisation of humans and the related destruction of speech. Their work mirrors this decomposition, but it alongside offers a positive counter movement, an alternative to the age of dominion of technology. A comparative analysis of the specific understanding of the two aspects of salvation also casts light on the reception of Max Picard in their work. The first part deals with the analysis of Heidegger's essence (Wesen) of modern technology (Gestell) and the possibility of alternative revealing (poiésis). It renders the transformation of a human beings and their relationship to things, a transformation diagnosed by Picard, Rilke, and Zahradníček in their work. It thus proposes a context for the observed motif of salvation. The introduction of the first part accounts for a treatise on the loss of a thing which is linked to the penetration of technology and on salvation consisting in paying heed to the inconspicuous state of affairs. The second part opens with the reception of Picard's book Hilter in Our Selves...

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-28T20:37:40Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Ida Elizabeth Cardinalli.pdf: 513996 bytes, checksum: a5f906486c5d7f5388fcc1082ebd9492 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011-07-06 / Urban violence is currently a complex and worrying issue so much so that national and international organizations have been calling for studies in its various aspects. This research was developed with a focus on the impact of urban violence on the health and illness of its victims, based on an overriding concern: explaining and clarifying the meaning and significance of the experience of those who suffered urban violence, such as hold-up and/or express kidnapping. The methodology was based on the existential-phenomenological thinking, in particular Martin Heidegger s, who understands human existence as being-there and being-in-the-world, seeking to understand the experience of victims of urban violence in its entirety. The methods used included interviews with three participants and focal psychotherapy with one with 23 sessions of 50 minutes each. The participants were two men and one woman, all married, and aged between 48 to 53 years. The analysis of the results was organized along two axes: thematic and temporal. The results suggest that the victims of hold-up or express kidnapping show significant distress, when the experience of violence remains trapped in the sense of risk, threat and danger. The impact of violence can also affect the understanding of oneself, of others and the world with the sudden approach of the dimensions of unpredictability, precariousness and vulnerability resulting from a situation of violence. The discussion of the results is extended to possible applications in the Public Health Service. Topics for future research that articulate Clinical Psychology and urban violence are also listed. (Supported by CEPE/PUC-SP) / A violência urbana é uma problemática complexa e preocupante na atualidade, tanto que os organismos internacionais e nacionais têm solicitado estudos da suas diversas facetas. O desenvolvimento da presente pesquisa focalizou o impacto da violência urbana na saúde e adoecimento em suas vítimas, pautado pela questão norteadora: explicitar e esclarecer o sentido e os significados da experiência de quem sofreu violência urbana como assalto e/ou sequestros relâmpago ou de curta duração. A metodologia foi baseada no pensamento fenomenológico-existencial, em particular, de Martin Heidegger, que entende o existir humano como ser-aí e ser-nomundo, buscando compreender a experiência da vítima de violência urbana em sua totalidade. Os métodos utilizados foram entrevistas de três participantes e a psicoterapia focal de um deles, com 23 sessões de 50 minutos cada uma. Os participantes foram dois homens e uma mulher, todos casados, entre 48 a 53 anos. A análise dos resultados foi organizada em dois eixos: temáticos e temporais. Os resultados sugerem que as vítimas de assalto e sequestros relâmpago ou de curta duração mostram sofrimento significativo, quando a experiência de violência permanece aprisionada no sentido de risco, ameaça e perigo. O impacto da violência pode abalar, ainda, a compreensão de si mesmo, do outro e do mundo com a aproximação abrupta das dimensões de imprevisibilidade, precariedade e vulnerabilidade abertas pela situação de violência. A discussão dos resultados é ampliada para possíveis aplicações no Serviço Público de Saúde. São indicados também temas para futuras pesquisas que articulem a Psicologia Clínica e a violência urbana. (Apoio CEPE/PUC-SP)

The thesis investigates the role of technology in the formation of the artistic avant-garde, along with various forms of philosophical reflection on this development, with a particular emphasis on Heidegger. Setting out from an analysis of three paradigmatic cases in the interplay between art and technology—the invention of photography, the shift from Futurism to Constructivism, and the interpretation of technology in debates on architectural theory in the 1920s and ’30s—it proceeds to a discussion of three philosophical responses to this development, those found in Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, and Ernst Jünger, all of which share a certain avant-garde sensibility and a notion of art as a response to nihilism. In Heidegger’s postwar writings we see a retreat from the positions of the mid 1930s, and in his reflections on technology a different answer emerges to the question of whether “great art” is still possible: great art is an art that exists precisely by making the founding of a world into something problematic. The fourth part confronts Heidegger’s analysis of technology with the work of an individual artist, the architect Mies van der Rohe, and asks how the “silence”—the withdrawal of language, sense, aesthetic perception, etc.—that is often understood as a precondition for the critical potential of his work should in fact be understood. By examining interpretations that draw on Heidegger via comparisons with other types of critical theory, a different understanding emerges of the relation among nihilism, art, and technology. They form a field of constant modulation, which implies that the concepts that have been the foundation of critical theory, nature, subjectivity, experience, even “being” in Heidegger’s sense, must be subjected to a historical analysis that acknowledges them as ongoing processes of construction, and that also accounts for the capacity of technologies and artistic practices to intervene in the formation of philosophical concepts. / The chapters 5, 6 and 7 in the monograph Essays, Lectures for a part of the Ph.D.thesis.

This thesis firstly aims at discussing the early works of American poet Marianne Moore (1887-1972) through the bio-philosophical perspectives developed since the investigations of Estonian Jacob von Uexküll (1864-1944). The study elucidates Uexküll’s research on the web-like forms of life that is the Umwelt of animals and Moore’s creation of poetic environments. Such investigations provide a basis for the analysis of Moore’s animals and environments in dialogue with Martin Heidegger’s (1889-1976) concepts of “poverty in world”, and “animal captivation”. Uexküll’s and Heidegger’s concepts are revised by Italian Giorgio Agamben (1942- ), who proposes that there is an openness in the state of being ontologically captivated, caused by interactional processes occurring within the environment. Subsequently, taking into account these same perspectives, this thesis offers a comparative study of Marianne Moore and Brazilian poet João Cabral de Melo Neto (1920-1999), engaging, respectively, her early poems with his book O Cão Sem Plumas [The Dog without Feathers], written in 1950. From the bio-philosophical perspectives previously discussed, this study focuses on moral and ethical stances addressed towards interpretations of the onto-ethological (Buchanan, 2008) nature of animals. The study analyses how both Moore and Melo Neto convey their ethical reflections and specific moral issues through expressions of nature and animal life, especially when they emphasise contexts of violence, misery and deprivation, either in material or conceptual respects, involved with the ontological and world-forming conditions of both animals and human beings. Therefore, the research will focus on their use of literary devices, such as allegories, and literary genres, such as fables, in order to develop both explicit and implicit dimensions of their poetry, thus providing a deeper understanding of the ontological status of animals and human beings.

This thesis offers an analysis of selected works by Virginia Woolf through the theoretical framework of technology of place. The term “technology”, meaning both a finished product and an ongoing production process, a mode of concealment and unconcealment in Martin Heidegger's sense, is used as part of this thesis's argument that place can be understood through constant negotiations of concrete place perceived through the senses, a concept based on the Heideggerian notion of “earth”, and abstract place perceived in the imagination, a concept based on the Heideggerian notion of “world”. The term “technology of place”, coined by Irvin C. Schick in The Erotic Margin: Sexuality and Spatiality in Alteritist Discourse (1999), is appropriated and re-interpreted as part of this thesis's adoption and adaptation of Woolf's notion of ideal biographical writing as an amalgamation of “granite” biographical facts and “rainbow” internal life. Woolf's granite and rainbow dichotomy is used as a foreground to this thesis's proposed theoretical framework, through which questions of space/place can be examined. My analysis of Flush (1933) demonstrates that place is a technology which can be taken at face value and, at the same time, appropriated to challenge the ideology of its construction. My analysis of Orlando (1928) demonstrates that Woolf's idea of utopia exemplifies the technological “coming together”, in Heidegger's term, of concrete social reality and abstract artistic fantasy. My analysis of The Years (1937) demonstrates that sense of place as well as sense of identity is ambivalent and constantly changing like the weather, reflecting place's Janus-faced function as both concealment and unconcealment. Lastly, my analysis of Woolf's selected essays and marginalia illustrates that writing can serve as a revolutionary “place-making” technology through which one can mentally “make room” for (re-)imagining the lives of “the obscure”, often placed in oblivion throughout the course of history.

This bachelor thesis engages in the question of silence in the writings of Fenno-Swedish modernists Mirjam Tuominen and Gunnar Björling, silence being understood as both a poetic theme and a question of literary form. Alongside this exposition runs a discussion about the possibilities and impossibilities of interpretation in the field of academic literary studies. This query is connected to the different ideological positions of the two writers, conjoined by ideas about anti-comprehensibility. Considering certain weaknesses of classical hermeneutics as well as the theory of deconstruction, especially in the case of reading poetry, this thesis tries to point out possible routs for a practice of a more dynamic interpretation, with special regard to understanding the trope of silence in the modernist poetry of Tuominen and Björling. The composition explicitly applies a ”method of wandering” inspired by Maurice Blanchot’s understanding of the priests of Dionysus in Hölderlin’s writings – maundering in the holy night – as a metaphor for a critique-in-the-creating. This complies to Theodor W. Adorno’s idea of the aporetic situation of the interpreter and the unsolvable conflict between scientific discourse and art understood as a medium of truth in a more radical sense. The study aspires to perform a dialogue between different faculties of interpretation, and to make this dialogue viewable, so that the question of understanding remains ambiguous in line with the poetics of Tuominen and Björling. The results that follow bare the mark of aporia, but points towards a possible reading of silence (in Björling’s and Tuominen’s writings) as connected to a certain kind of sensibility and confidence in the immanence of truth in existence.

El límite como concepto plástico en la obra de Eduardo Chillida consiste en una investigación estética que desde un cariz fenomenológico, específicamente desde la óptica del filosofo alemán Martin Heidegger, pretende indagar en la obra del escultor vasco en su carácter de acontecimiento artístico-espacial. Concretamente, tomando como eje conceptual la noción de límite, entendida como categoría ontológica fundamental aplicada a la obra de arte. Esto siguiendo la línea propuesta por el filósofo barcelonés Eugenio Trías, que con su Filosofía del límite, sobre todo en relación al ámbito estético, nos proporciona un cauce adecuado y una sistematización para nuestra lectura sobre la obra del artista. De esta forma, se realiza una reflexión estética fundada en la categoría del límite, que en su desarrollo y radicalización artístico-conceptual, concluye con la relación que se establece entre el arte y la religión, partiendo de la obra de Eduardo Chillida. / The limit as an artistic concept in the work of Eduardo Chilida is an aesthetic investigation looking at the work of the Basque sculptor from a phenomenological viewpoint, applying the ideas of German Philosopher, Martin Heidegger and using the concept of the limit as a fundamental ontological category applied to his works of art. This notion of the limit follows the ideas of Barcelona philosopher, Eugenio Trías, who in his philosophical system, above all in relation to his aesthetic sphere, provides us with both the appropriate channels and structure for our approach to Chilida´s work. In this way, an aesthetic reflection based on the concept of the limit is made, in which its conceptual-artistic development concludes with the relationship established between art and religion.