This essay traverses a heterogeneous terrain, finding important links in the ideas of Jacques Derrida and John Cage, and relating these to diverse cultural topics such as film soundtrack design, audio art, Saussurian linguistics, the sound and light shows at the Egyptian pyramids, the analogic nature of digital information, and cybernetics. Furthermore, the essay attempts to create some bridges- through the concept of "perceptual differance"- between the divergent world pictures (to use Heidegger's term) of cognitive psychology (with its quantitative frame of analysis) and the more slippery domain of hermeneutics.

America has become a spiritual wasteland. Three aspects of the human condition are crucial for human beings to recognize if they are to develop a proper identity and agency within the world: these aspects are finitude, contingency, and the spiritual (which follows from the other two). The notion of the spiritual can be filled out with an understanding of faith. American culture is antithetical to faith, as is demonstrated through a discussion of the basic human practice of conversation. In America, conversation works against faith because conversation has become brutal. Contemporary debate literally works against faith because conversation has become brutal Contemporary debate literally works to annihilate the reality of others. These reflections support the conclusion that brutality is the antithesis of faithfulness.

Heidegger understands technology as an act of revealing rather than merely a human achievement. Within the modem era, technology represents the manner in which humans stand within and make manifest the open interplay and inter-relatedness that is world. The danger of this era is the extent to which everything has become available, accessible, and disposable to human manipulation, practically without limit. However, the very totalizing extent to which this is happening and the forgetfuUness that takes it all for panted, can also make us suddenly aware that everything, including world itself, is at risk; that we ourselves are at risk; that we are the danger He calls for an attitude of releasement that handles world with a sense of receiving and not just taking a sense of thankfulness. Such a change could directly impact how we see ourselves and our responsibilities as we go about developing and using technologies.

Alphonso Lingis is the author of many hooks and renowned for his translations of Levinas, Merleau-Pontyy and Klossowski. By combining a rich philosophical training with an extensive travel itinerary, Lingis has developed a distinctive brand of phenomenobgy that is only now beginning to gain critical attention. Lingis inhabits a ready-made language and conceptuality, but cultivates a style of thinking which disrupts and transforms the work of his predecessors, setting him apart from the rest of his field. This essay sketches Lingis phenomenobgy of sensation in order to give expression to some dimensions of Lingisian travel. As we see, Lingis deploys a theory of the subject which features the plasticity of the body, the materiality of affect, and the alimentary nature of sensation.

Sylvia Plath wrote in the midst of growing racial tensions in 1950s and 1960s America. Her work demonstrates ambivalence towards her role as a middle-class white woman. In this paper, I examine the racial implications in Plath's color terms. I disagree with Renee Curry's reading in White Women Writing White that Plath only considers her whiteness insofar as it affects herself. Through a phenomenological study of how whiteness shifts meaning in this poem, I hope to show that Curry's negative estimation is only partly right. I suggest that embodiment is a problem for Plath in general, and this contributes to her inability to fully examine other bodies.

Auto-description does not typically start with people introducing themselves saying "l am vertical". From our human condition as bipeds we associate the upright position as the typical conscious human body situation. The sheer fact that someone mentions this detail about their personas, makes their individual experience of themselves no less than remarkable. With its title, Sylvia Plath's poem "I Am Vertical" invites the reader to investigate on the persona speaking behind its words. In order to study how the mention of body position contributes here to the readers mental construction of this persona, I shall start from Cámara's definition of "lyrical subject" and move on to construe an integration mental space corresponding to the persona behind the poem. With this purpose I shall use Lakoff and Johnsons study on image-schemas, Sweetser and Ibarretxe's account of the way sensory experience influences conceptualisation, and Fauconniers proposal of mental spaces.

This paper examines the possibility of friendship across differences in Richard Wright's Native Son by examining the protagonist's relationship to three pivotal white characters in the text. Through the application to Native Son of a theory of friendship I cull from Heidegger's discussion of care in Being and Time, I offer a model for relationships whereby radically different individuals may approach each other across across spite of differences. In putting Heidegger and Wright into dialogue I both shed light on the intricacies of inter-subjective relations depicted by Wright as well as give depth to an obscure passage regarding inter-subjective relations in Heidegger's Being and Time.

This paper attempts to reconcile, what appear to be, two conflicting accounts of authenticity in Heidegger's thought. Authenticity in Being and Time (1927) is commonly interpreted in 'existentialist' terms as willful commitment and resoluteness (Entschlossenheit) in the face of one's own death but, by the late 1930's, is reintroduced in terms of Gelassenlieit, as a non-willful openness that "lets beings be." By employing Heidegger's conception of authentic historicality (Geschiclidichkeit), understood as the retrieval of Dasein's past, and drawing on his writings on Hölderlin in the 1930'sand 1940's, I suggest that the ancient interpretation of leisure and festivity may play an important role in unifying these conflicting accounts. Genuine leisure, interpreted as a form of play (Spiel), frees us from inauthentic busy-ness and gives us an opening to face the abyssal nature of our own being and the mystery that "beings are" in the flrst place. To this end, leisure re-connects us with wonder (Erstaunen) as the original temperament of Western thought. In leisurely wonder, the authentic self does not seek purposive mastery and control over beings but calmly accepts the unsettledness ofbeing and is, as a result, allowed into the original openness or space of play of time (Zeit-Spiel-Raum) that lets beings emerge-into-presence on their own terms.

This article explores the different ways in which suffering is represented iconographically in Christianity and in Buddhism. The disparate images of Christ nailed to a cross and Buddha sitting serenely under a tree surest diametrically opposed attitudes toward the role of suffering in religion. In line with the suggestion posed by a Tibetan lama to the author, this article seeks to demonstrate that these various approaches to suffering—seeking redemption through suffering versus transcendence of suffering—are at a deeper level not in actuality different. This rapprochement is achieved through appealing to Jungian and post-Jungian theories in situating Christ and Buddha within a singular process of psychospiritual transformation.

This essay analyzes Marcel Proust's claim that "Crime and Punishment" could be the title of all of Dostoevskys novels. Although Proust reveals some important points regarding the motivation for Dostoevskys writings, his account is also inadequate in some relevant respects. For example, while Proust calls our attention to what happens to victimizers, he ignores the perspective of victims; thus Ivan Karamazovs challenge remains unaccounted for in Proust's interpretation. More importantly Proust does not account for Dostoevsky's optimism, which, in connection with his realism, is the central aspect of Dostoevsky novelistic and philosophical approach.

Poet and playwright Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's scientific studies grew out of a disenchantment with the reductionist science of his time. He believed a more accurate description of nature was possible. Goethe's scientific method paralleled the methodology of art current in his era, and very likely arose, at least in part, from pre-existing traditions of knowledge in the visual arts. The study of similarities between Goethe's scientific method and the methodology of art couldprovide insights into both disciplines, and insights into the intentions that drove Goethes scientific studies.