Beyond Metaphysics?

243 Pages·1985·22.579 MB·English

by  John Llewelyn (auth.)

BEYOND METAPHYSICS?
CONTEMPORARY STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY AND THE HUMAN
SCIENCES
Series Editor: John Sallis, Loyola University of Chicago
Associate Editors: Hugh J. Silverman, SUNY- Stony Brook, David Farrell Krell,
University of Essex
EDITORIAL BOARD
Edward Casey. SUNY -Stony Brook Wolfe Mays. University of Manchester
Jacques Derrida. Ecole Normale Otto Poggeler. Ruhr-Universitat
Superieure. Paris Bochum
Amedeo Giorgi. Duquesne University Jacques Taminiaux. Universite de
Karsten Harries. Yale University Louvain-la-neuve
Don Ihde. SUNY-Stony Brook Bernhard Waldenfels. Ruhr-Universitat
Louis Marin. Ecole Practique des Bochum
Hautes Etudes. Paris David Wood. University of Warwick
This new international book series explores recent develop-
ments in philosophy as they relate to foundational questions in
the human sciences. The series stresses fundamental and
pervasive issues, alternative methods, and current styles of
thought. It constitutes a response to the emergence in England
and America of widespread interest in the domains, intersec-
tions, and limits of questions arising from the human sciences
within a climate inspired chiefly by Continental thought.
Although primarily philosophical in orientation, the series
cuts across the boundaries of traditional disciplines and will
include volumes in such areas as phenomenology, structural-
ism, semiotics, post-structuralism, critical theory, hermeneu-
tics, and contemporary cultural (literary and artistic) criticism.
Other Titles
DIALECTIC AND DIFFERENCE by Jacques Taminiaux, translated by James
Decker and Roberts Crease
WHERE WORDS BREAK by Robert Bernasconi
UTOPICS: SPATIAL PLAY by Louis Marin
translated by Robert Vollrath
SEEING AND READING by Graeme Nicholson
BEYOND METAPHYSICS?
THE HERMENEUTIC CIRCLE IN
CONTEMPORARY CONTINENTAL
PHILOSOPHY
by
John Llewelyn
HUMANITIES: NEW JERSEY
C> Humanities Press International. Inc. 1985
*
Softcover reorint of the 1st edition 1985 978-0-333-37581-5
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this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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ISBN 978-1-349-07560-7 ISBN 978-1-349-07558-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-07558-4
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and
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A catalogue record for this book is available from
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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 84-4638
TO MY PARENTS AND MAGGIE AND JACKY
Le plus haut point de la raison est-il de constater ce glissement du sol
sous nos pas, de nommer pompeusement interrogation un etat de
stupeur continuee, recherche un cheminement en cercle, Etre ce qui
n'est jamais tout a fait?
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements xi
Foreword
XV
Part One: Meta-Metaphysical Ontology
I. Heidegger: Beyond the Categories of Being 3
1. Categories and existentials 3
2. Language and the structure of care 11
3. What is Ereignis? 18
II. Husserl: Essentialist Phenomenology and the Chance of
Metaphysical Neutrality 31
1. Transcendental eidetic reduction 32
2. Abstractive reduction 35
3. Others and objective transcendence 36
4. Phenomenology and metaphysics 40
III. Sartre: Existentialist Phenomenology and Metaphysical
Commitment 49
1. The circle of correlativity 49
2. The paradox offreedom 53
3. The stillborn dialectic 57
IV. Sartre: Marxist Existentialism 65
1. The negative legacy 65
2. Prolegomena to any future anthropology 66
3. Community 73
V. Bachelard: Counter-Phenomenological Dialectic of
Science 83
1. Barchelardian negativism and Bergsonian positivism 83
2. Science and pre-science 85
3. Science and surrealism 88
Part Two: The Hermeneutic Circle
VI. Gadamer: Philosophical Hermeneutics 99
1. Understanding, interpretation, and application 99
2. Operatively historical consciousness 104
ix
3. Language and validity 114
4. Prescience 124
VII. Merleau-Ponty and Saussure: Hermeneutic Semiology 127
1. Signs 127
2. Language and speech 133
3. Significative intention and creative expression 137
4. Rationalism, empiricism, and phenomenological
motivation 142
5. The productive imagination 148
VIII. Levi-Strauss or Ricoeur: Structural or Hermeneutic
Anthropology? 153
1. Mythologicality 154
2. Diachronological structuralism 156
3. Ricoeur and hermeneutic historicity 161
Part Three: Meta-Ontological Metaphysics
IX. Retrospect and Prospect 173
1. Science, poetry, and meta-metaphysics 173
2. Letting be 181
X. Levinas, Derrida and Others Vis-a-Vis 185
1. Ethical metaphysics 185
2. Facial expression 191
3. Paradoxical proximity 194
4. The back of beyond 198
NOTES 207
BIBLIOGRAPHY 223
INDEX 231
X
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For comments on ancestors of chapters of this book or for discussion
of questions arising in them I thank Robert Bernasconi, Roy Bhaskar,
George Davie, Stanley Eveling, Anthony Giddens, Fergus Kerr, Magda
King, Alan Montefiore, Basil O'Neill, Timothy Sprigge, David Wood,
"Richard" (W. H.) Walsh (without his encouragement the book would
never have been started) and David Farrell Krell (without his en-
couragement it would never have been-I also thank him for this word:
finnished). I am obliged to Mrs Judith A. CamlinofHumanities Press for
her patience and advice. I am indebted to Mrs Maureen Wallace for the
carefulness of her typing. I am especially beholden to my wife for her
care also as midwife.
For permission to use in chapters 3 and 4 material published in The
Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology I am grateful to the
editor, Wolfe Mays. I am grateful to the following publishers of works
to which they own rights as indicated:
GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD.; for permission to quote from
Edmund Husser], Ideas (1931).
L'ARC; for permission to quote from L'Arc: Jacques Derrida (1973).
BEACON PRESS; for permission to quote from Maurice Merleau-
Ponty, The Structure of Behaviour (1963).
BASIL BLACKWELL LTD.; for permission to quote from Martin
Heidegger, Being and Time (1962), Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks
1914-1916 (1961), Wittgenstein, On Certainty (1969), Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations (1967), Wittgenstein, Philosophische Be
merkungen (1964).
THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS; for permission to
quote from Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics (1976).
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS; for permission to quote from
Edo Pivcevic, ed., Phenomenology and Philosophical Understanding
(1975).
JONATHAN CAPE LTD.; for permission to quote from Roland
Barthes, Elements of Semiology (1967), Claude Levi-Strauss, From
Honey to Ashes (1973), Levi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked (1970),
Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (1973).
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS; for permission to
quote from Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (1978), Claude
Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (1966).
xi