This is one of the papers from our 2017 Annual Conference, the Future of Phenomenology. Information and the full conference booklet can be found at www.britishphenomenology.org.uk
Heidegger’s interest in the themes of theory and practice have been well documented, especially his early lectures on Aristotle’s Ethics and his prioritization of praxis over theoria. However, a less explored way into the distinction between theory and practice is to be found in Heidegger’s SS1924 analysis of Aristotle’s Rhetoric (GA 18), which analyses rhetoric in terms of a practical dynamis rather than a techne. Rhetoric, for Heidegger, is a capacity to concretise practically the diverse ways of speaking together. Rhetoric identifies the most practically appropriate means of disclosing what speaks for itself, making something evident in its substantive character.
In Heidegger’s SS1924 lecture course, he argues that the primacy of the practical attitude is represented in the proper use of pisteis, the means of persuasion, which in the parallel theoretical field of dialectic are termed syllogisms. Pistis is not simply about belief, but is a form of affective, embodied, and shared demonstration. In the end, the analogous nature of these two fields of logos, rhetoric and dialectic, practice and theory, hinges on their overlapping and yet distinct approaches to the question of demonstrable truth and how it is disclosed in a twofold manner, either by logical proof or affective demonstration. Logos is thus the fundamental determination of the communal and expressive life of the human being, and finds in rhetoric a degree of demonstrative force which discloses the modal character of truth, which is always tied to context, listener, and affect.
This paper will locate in Heidegger’s analysis of rhetoric an alternative way into the theory and practice distinction, by drawing attention to two types of thinking and speaking, theoretical and practical, and in conclusion the paper will address Heidegger’s attack on metaphysical modality in the name of a deeper and more essential blocked possibility. Heidegger’s reading of the rhetoric, the practical exercise of speaking and hearing together, is an early example of this. His interpretations of the affects of rhetoric are precisely an early attempt to draw our attention to blocked possibilities rooted in the practical attitude.
Filipa Melo Lopes - ‘“Half Victim, Half Accomplice”: Cat Person and Narcissism’
Kata Dóra Kiss - ‘The Importance of Intersubjectivity in the Process of Psychotherapy’
Rachel Elliott - ‘The Futurity of the “We”: A Merleau-Pontian Account of Group Temporality and Improvised Music’
Francesca Brencio - ‘Shifting the paradigm. Neurosciences and the phenomenological challenge’
Valeria Bizzari - ‘A multidisciplinary analysis of autism: predictive engagement and the living body’
Prisca Bauer - ‘Engaged phenomenology: neurology beyond the brain’
Dan Zahavi - ‘Pure and Applied Phenomenology’
Luna Dolezal - Interviewed by Jessie Stanier & Hannah Berry
Keith Crome - Education as Child’s Play
Hannah Berry - Empathy: the border between narratives
Francesca Brencio - “Fill the gap”. A phenomenological perspective of exercising psychiatry
William Large - Atheism of the Word: A Genealogy of the Concept of God
Pablo Andreu - Death as an “Ontological Infidelity”
Marco Di Feo - The Human Right to Family Reunification
Botsa Katara - Reassessing the Super-crip Stereotype
Pablo Fernandez Velasco - Disorientation and Self-consciousness: A Phenomenological Inquiry
Andreas Sandner - ‘Visible Odours? On the Issue of Visuocentricism in “Olfactory Austerity”
Matteo Valdarchi - The circle and the origin. An interpretation of Heidegger's Habilitationsschrift
Katherine Burn - Recalibrating the Contemporary: Reading the phenomenology of shame in Metamodernism
Dylan Trigg - Who is the Subject of Birth?
Join Podbean Ads Marketplace and connect with engaged listeners.
Advertise Today
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
Positive Thinking Mind
In the Great Khan’s Tent
Visualize Meditations
The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
The Mel Robbins Podcast