The Hidden Law of Selfhood: Reading Heidegger's Ipseity after Derrida's Hospitality

Despite his wide-ranging and incisive engagement with Heidegger's thought across his career, Derrida seems to have written very little about Heidegger's Ereignis manuscripts, which, according to many commentators, constitute the place where Heidegger's thinking comes closest to Derridean deconstruction. Taking up Derrida's comments in Hospitality 1 on the figure of ‘selfhood’ ( Selbstheit) in Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy, this essay argues that this dense but important moment of engagement with the Ereignis manuscripts reveals the extent to which Heidegger's thinking of selfhood, in spite of its fundamentally relational character, remains thoroughly determined by ipseity, the philosopheme that links selfhood, possibility, and sovereignty within the metaphysics of presence. Beginning with a reconstruction of the link between power and selfhood in Derrida's thinking of ipseity and a close-reading of the key passage in Hospitality 1, the essay then turns to Heidegger's engagement with Hölderlin to show both the depth of Heidegger's commitment to a relational thinking of selfhood and the philosophical and rhetorical safeguards by which he ensures that the relations of difference that constitute the self continue to function in the name of the ipseity, understood as the very Ur-form of sovereign power.

Relational Thinking of College Students in Solving Recurrence Relation Problems Using Hanoi Tower Props

The purpose of this study is to describe how college students with visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic learning style think relationally in solving recurrence relation problems using the tower of Hanoi. This study is an exploratory with a qualitative descriptive approach. It began by the provision of a mathematics ability test and a learning style questionnaire to obtain three subjects, each of which had a different learning style but equivalent mathematics ability. Next, the three subjects were given problem-solving tasks and interviewed twice. Time triangulation is used to check the consistency of the data. After the validity of the data had been confirmed, the analyses were executed. The data analysis stage of this study consists of five stages: data categorisation, data reduction, data presentation, data interpretation, and conclusion. The result shows that all three subjects met the four indicators of relational thinking, were Understand the problem, make a plan completion, carry out the completion plan, and recheck completion but only the kinaesthetic subject managed to find the final answer.

Island ceremony and submerged worlds

David Chandler and Jonathan Pugh’s ((2021) Anthropocene islands: there are only islands after the end of the world. Dialogues in Human Geography.) ambitious undertaking is to understand how islands have not only become emblematic sites within a wide range of Anthropocene scholarship, but also ‘generative forces’ at the center of Anthropocene thinking. At the core of their analysis is the idea of ‘relational entanglements’, which are embodied through the four organizational devices they have identified of resilience, patchworks, correlation and storiation, each being different modalities of relational thinking. In this commentary, I reflect on both the promise and limits of this Anthropocene Islands project, engaging with its generativity to also push against its boundaries. I emphasize the origins of relational thinking in Caribbean theory; question the materiality of islands as sites for Anthropocene thinking; and posit the significance of Caribbean, Pacific Islander, and Indigenous animistic and shamanistic spiritual practices for being in ceremony with geo-spiritualities that connect human beings with submerged worlds.

Designing Exhibits to Support Relational Learning in a Science Museum

Science museums aim to provide educational experiences for both children and adults. To achieve this goal, museum displays must convey scientifically-relevant relationships, such as the similarities that unite members of a natural category, and the connections between scientific models and observable objects and events. In this paper, we explore how research on comparison could be leveraged to support learning about such relationships. We describe how museum displays could promote educationally-relevant comparisons involving natural specimens and scientific models. We also discuss how these comparisons could be supported through the design of a display—in particular, by using similarity, space, and language to facilitate relational thinking for children and their adult companions. Such supports may be pivotal given the informal nature of learning in museums.

Kant and Anthropology

Actual, possible, and potential relations between Kant and anthropology in early-21st-century scholarship are worth exploring. Within the realm of actual relations, classical figures within anthropology took up Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Practical Reason to understand the nature of thinking and morality within so-called primitive societies. They sought to put society before mind within Kant’s architectonic of thought and to posit classification, or relational thinking, as equally important as cognition. Within possible relations, contemporary anthropologists engaged Kant’s anthropology or Kant as a possible anthropologist in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View or “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” or set apart their enterprise of studying ethics from his on morality. A very central question that Kant’s writings posed for them was whether the figure of the human was knowable, to which anthropology added its own nuance by asking whether we can assume it is the same human or reason across all contexts. Within potential relations, writings on the history and method of anthropology both critiqued and celebrated the inheritance of German romanticism, understood as an intellectual trend, a methodology, a sensibility, a mystical orientation, and a celebration of individual singularity and genius within anthropology. In contrast to this mode of inheriting romanticism, a more Kantian-inflected understanding of the romantic movement, mediated by different figures, suggested itself as a productive point of entry for anthropology to understand the philosophical underpinnings of its preferred methods (e.g., fieldwork), its engagement with philosophy beyond that of agonism and possible arrogation, and its re-engagement with the question of the human in relation to itself, other humans and nonhumans, and nature. The fragment, one of romanticism’s greatest creations and a complex response to Kant’s two world metaphysics, appears to anthropology through both trajectories and, in keeping with anthropology’s evolving relation to philosophy, anthropology provides its own spin on the importance of the fragment for inhabiting the world.