scholarly journals The Courage To Be Anxious. Paul Tillich’s Existential Interpretation of Anxiety

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-25
Author(s):  
Ștefan Bolea

The similitude between anxiety and death is the starting point of Paul Tillich's analysis from The Courage To Be, his famous theological and philosophical reply to Martin Heidegger's Being And Time. Not only Tillich and Heidegger are concerned with the connection between anxiety and death but also other proponents of both existentialism and nihilism like Friedrich Nietzsche, Emil Cioran and Lev Shestov. Tillich observes that "anxiety puts frightening masks" over things and perhaps this definition is its finest contribution to the spectacular phenomenology of anxiety. Moreover, Tillich has some illuminating insights about the anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness, which are important for the history of the existential philosophy. It is interesting how the protestant theologian tries to answer to Heidegger: while the German philosopher asserted that we must avoid fear and we have to embrace anxiety as a route to personal authenticity, Tillich notes that we should transform anxiety into fear, because courage is more likely to "abolish" fear.

2021 ◽  

Martin Heidegger (b. 1889–d. 1976) is a central figure in 20th-century philosophy. Especially in his early works, most notably Being and Time (1927), Heidegger critically continues the tradition of phenomenology inaugurated by Edmund Husserl (b. 1859–d. 1938). Heidegger’s philosophy has been a major influence on a number of important philosophers in their own right, including Hans-Georg Gadamer (b. 1900–d. 2002), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (b. 1908–d. 1961), Hannah Arendt (b. 1906–d. 1975), Paul Ricoeur (b. 1913–d. 2005), Michel Foucault (b. 1926–d. 1984), Jacques Derrida (b. 1930–d. 2004), and Richard Rorty (b. 1931–d. 2007). His work has also impacted other disciplines, such as theology, literary and cultural studies, art theory, and the theory of architecture. Heidegger is primarily known for his work in metaphysics and existential philosophy, but he has also made much-discussed contributions to a wide range of philosophical topics, including the study of numerous authors from the history of philosophy. The German edition of his collected works (Gesamtausgabe, or GA) includes published writings, lecture courses, seminars, and manuscripts. Once completed, it will include 102 volumes. To manage this rich material, Heidegger’s philosophy is often divided into different periods. Although how to demarcate these periods is itself a matter of scholarly debate, Oxford Bibliographies divides his work into an early, middle, and later period. This entry treats the middle period of his thought (roughly 1933–1945). It coincides with the rise to power of the German National Socialist Party, in which Heidegger was involved as rector of the University of Freiburg, the Second World War, and the Holocaust. Although Heidegger rarely addresses these events directly, this period in particular should not be considered without taking into account these events and the dominant ideologies of the time. Heidegger’s major concerns during this period are with the experience of art, the philosophy of history, and the history of Western philosophy in particular. Heidegger gives a few important lectures and lecture series during this time that were later edited. These should be the starting point for any reading. The major body of his writing during this period, however, consists of manuscripts, notes, and course materials, which are more difficult to assess. In using this bibliography, be sure to also check the entries on the early and later period of Heidegger’s works. Although the focus of Heidegger’s philosophical concern shifts, many themes continue to be relevant throughout his works. Often, scholars writing on Heidegger take into account his development as whole, and relevant literature may be treated in another entry. This bibliography aims to be inclusive with regard to schools of thought and interpretations of Heidegger. It is not exhaustive but rather an attempt to identify useful starting points for individual study within the more recent literature on Heidegger.


Author(s):  
Maria B. Mitlyanskaya ◽  

The paper explores Martin Heidegger’s concept of the «history of being». This concept was created in the philosopher’s late period. Critically analyzing the own paths of existential philosophy revealed in Being and Time, Heidegger gradually forms a spectrum of being-historical notions that will occupy a central position in contemplation after «the turn». The methods of analyzing the presence used before «the turn» create the appearance of an anthropological approach to the question of being, which becomes the main subject of the philosopher’s self-criticism. This, in particular, served as an originative impulse for the formation of the «history of being» concept. This article presents the key intentions of this concept. The author reveals these intentions in their natural interconnection, tracing the development trends from Black Notebooks to full-fledged volumes devoted to history of being. The questions asked in the renowned Heidegger’s opus magnum are revealed in a completely different plane, where the human presence (Dasein) is transformed into the foundation of the people’s essence, provided they are open to the call of being (Geschick). The author of the article does not share the opinion of researchers claiming that there are sufficient grounds to draw a hard line between Heidegger-1 and Heidegger-2, interpreting «the turn» as a sharp rejection by the philosopher of the results of his work before the 1930s. However, the being-historical layer requires new historical and philosophical interpretations: the professor’s forced release from the academic framework opened a new depth of his language and thought. Therefore, the key notions of the being-historical concept, necessary for acquaintance with it, have become the topic of this study. The hermeneutic and historical-genetic methods are the main ones applied in the study. The former, perfected by Martin Heidegger himself, is necessary in the interpretation of his texts, saturated with specific turns, original use of previously known terms, poetic allegories.


2016 ◽  
pp. 104-128
Author(s):  
Heiner Schwenke

In 1871, the German philosopher Gustav Teichmüller (1832-1888) moved from his Basel chair to the much better paid chair in Tartu, and taught there until his untimely death. Besides philosophy, he had studied various disciplines, including the natural sciences. In the preparation of his own philosophy, he explored the history of philosophy for more than twenty years and made pioneering contributions to the history of concepts. Only by the early-1880s did he begin to elaborate his "new philosophy", an original version of personalism, both anti-idealist and anti-materialist. He did this in three major works (Die wirkliche und die scheinbare Welt 1882, Religionsphilosophie 1886, Neue Grundlegung der Psychologie und Logik, posthumous 1889) which built upon each other. Unwritten remained the keystone of his philosophy, the Philosophie des Christentums, in which Teichmüller wanted to show that the philosophical contents of Christianity were encapsulated by his own personalism. One major objective of his philosophy, as I see it, was regaining reality---in particular the reality of the person---after it had been lost in the wake of the failure of modern representationalism. Notwithstanding its coherentist elements, I see Teichmüller's philosophy as a precursor of direct realism. Although he fell into oblivion soon after, his thoughts were received throughout Europe, notably by Friedrich Nietzsche, Aleksey Kozlov and Nicholas Lossky. His extensive literary remains, which are kept in Basel, remain to be explored.


2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 457-469
Author(s):  
Irina Nikolayevna Sidorenko

Analysis of the state and possible options for the development of modern humanities gives the grounds to assert the growing importance of the idea of historicity in culture and philosophy during the 20th and early 21st centuries. In this regard, both the disclosure of the concept of historicity and the substantiation of the significance of the principle of historicity, both for the methodology of historical and philosophical knowledge and for humanitarian knowledge in general become relevant. The author of this article carries out historical and philosophical reconstruction of historical issues in the philosophy of M. Heidegger and reveals the process of converting the idea of historicity into the principle of German existentialism. It is concluded that with the help of historicity M. Heidegger was able to present his own version of phenomenology on an existential basis. Seeing an existential achievement in historicity, M. Heidegger understood by it the direction of existence to the source, tradition, on the basis of this, the intentionality of consciousness was revealed as an essential property of existence: the direction of man as a finite being to its source, which allowed the German philosopher to interpret historicity as a tradition, the existential source of man, and how the temporality of human existence. The author of this article concludes that in the philosophy of M. Heidegger historicity was transformed from an idea into a principle on the basis of which the German philosopher revealed not only the historicity of Dasein, building a fundamental ontology and hermeneutics of factuality, but also tried to solve the problem of the history of being, going beyond the existential philosophy.


Author(s):  
Vanessa Lemm

Readers of Giorgio Agamben would agree that the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) is not one of his primary interlocutors. As such, Agamben’s engagement with Nietzsche is different from the French reception of Nietzsche’s philosophy in Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Georges Bataille, as well as in his contemporary Italian colleague Roberto Esposito, for whom Nietzsche’s philosophy is a key point of reference in their thinking of politics beyond sovereignty. Agamben’s stance towards the thought of Nietzsche may seem ambiguous to some readers, in particular with regard to his shifting position on Nietzsche’s much-debated vision of the eternal recurrence of the same.


2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-779
Author(s):  
David Gutkin

H. Lawrence Freeman's “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan's Broadway district. Its reception bespoke competing, racially charged values that underpinned the idea of the “modern” in the 1920s. The white press critiqued the opera for its allegedly anxiety-ridden indebtedness to nineteenth-century European conventions, while the black press hailed it as the pathbreaking work of a “pioneer composer.” Taking the reception history of Voodoo as a starting point, this article shows how Freeman's lifelong project, the creation of what he would call “Negro Grand Opera,” mediated between disparate and sometimes apparently irreconcilable figurations of the modern that spanned the late nineteenth century through the interwar years: Wagnerism, uplift ideology, primitivism, and popular music (including, but not limited to, jazz). I focus on Freeman's inheritance of a worldview that could be called progressivist, evolutionist, or, to borrow a term from Wilson Moses, civilizationist. I then trace the complex relationship between this mode of imagining modernity and subsequent versions of modernism that Freeman engaged with during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through readings of Freeman's aesthetic manifestos and his stylistically syncretic musical corpus I show how ideas about race inflected the process by which the qualitatively modern slips out of joint with temporal modernity. The most substantial musical analysis examines leitmotivic transformations that play out across Freeman's jazz opera American Romance (1924–29): lions become subways; Mississippi becomes New York; and jazz, like modernity itself, keeps metamorphosing. A concluding section considers a broader set of questions concerning the historiography of modernism and modernity.


Author(s):  
Irving R. Epstein ◽  
John A. Pojman

Just a few decades ago, chemical oscillations were thought to be exotic reactions of only theoretical interest. Now known to govern an array of physical and biological processes, including the regulation of the heart, these oscillations are being studied by a diverse group across the sciences. This book is the first introduction to nonlinear chemical dynamics written specifically for chemists. It covers oscillating reactions, chaos, and chemical pattern formation, and includes numerous practical suggestions on reactor design, data analysis, and computer simulations. Assuming only an undergraduate knowledge of chemistry, the book is an ideal starting point for research in the field. The book begins with a brief history of nonlinear chemical dynamics and a review of the basic mathematics and chemistry. The authors then provide an extensive overview of nonlinear dynamics, starting with the flow reactor and moving on to a detailed discussion of chemical oscillators. Throughout the authors emphasize the chemical mechanistic basis for self-organization. The overview is followed by a series of chapters on more advanced topics, including complex oscillations, biological systems, polymers, interactions between fields and waves, and Turing patterns. Underscoring the hands-on nature of the material, the book concludes with a series of classroom-tested demonstrations and experiments appropriate for an undergraduate laboratory.


In his later work, Heidegger argued that Western history involved a sequence of distinct understandings of being and correspondingly distinct worlds. Dreyfus illustrates several distinct world styles by contrasting Greek, industrial, and technological practices for using equipment. By reading Being and Time in the light of Heidegger’s later concerns with the history of being, Dreyfus shows how Heidegger’s own account of equipment in Being and Time helped set the stage for technology by encouraging an understanding of being that leaves equipment and natural objects open to a technological reorganization of the world into a standing reserve of resources. Seen in the light of the relation of nature and technology revealed by later Heidegger, Being and Time appears in the history of the being of equipment not just as a transition but as the decisive step toward technology.


Author(s):  
Mark Douglas

The history of ethics in the Presbyterian Church has been shaped by the theological commitments of Reformed theology, the church’s ecumenical and interreligious encounters, its interactions with the wider cultures in which it functions, and its global scope. Consequently, Presbyterian ethics have become increasingly diverse, culturally diffused, ecumenically directed, and frequently divisive. That said, its history can helpfully be divided into three lengthy periods. In the first (roughly from the church’s origins in 1559 to the Second Great Awakening in the early nineteenth century), theology, ethics, and politics are so interwound that distinguishing one from the others is difficult. In the second (roughly from the Second Great Awakening to the end of World War II), moral concerns emerge as forces that drive the church’s theology and polity. And in the third (for which proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 might be a heuristically helpful starting point), ethics increasingly functions in ways that are only loosely tethered to either Reformed theology or polity. The strength of the church’s social witness, the consistency of its global engagements, and the failings of its internecine strife are all evident during its five-hundred-year history.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document