The philosophical significance of death: a reconstructive interpretation of Hegel and Heidegger

Download
2019
Mandalinci, Maya.
The main interest of this thesis consists in presenting an ontologico-existential understanding of death as seeking the possible ways to place and hold the nothing within being itself. Interpreting death in light of its belongingess to human being’s very own being initially needs a confrontation with the deeply rooted difficulty of thinking outside the language of binary opposition. Unless this difficulty is eliminated death and the nothing remain to be left out of the domain of being, which is the only domain out of which meaning can occur. Hegel’s dialectic approach will be of assistance to search for an alternative way of moving within the midst of opposites. Yet Hegel’s speculative system in which finitude and infinity as well as being and nothing are shown to be in a constitutive relation can offer only a conceptual solution. As turning to Heidegger, we will then be presented with a comprehensive and rich notion of death. Being able to include death within being will introduce a new understanding of temporality as finite and ecstatic. Within the end it will become possible to question whether the relation between noting and being can be accounted through an ontologico-existential understandin of death.

Suggestions

The thought of process in hegel and whitehead: Life and vitality
Karaosmanoğlu, Toprak Seda; Baç, Mutlu Murat; Department of Philosophy (2020-10-22)
The purpose of this thesis is to clarify the thought of process in Hegel and Whitehead in the context of life and vitality. The concept of life has a special place for both Hegel and Whitehead. While for Whitehead, the situation of life in nature is the capital problem of philosophy and science, the concept of life serves as an analogy for Hegel’s own philosophical system, since it offers a model for thinking about development in general. The center of this study is the difficulty in unifying spirit and nat...
THE CONCEPT OF AKRASIA IN ANCIENT GREEK PHILOSOPHY: PLATO, ARISTOTLE, AND THE STOICS
Akkökler Karatekeli, Büşra; Turan, Şeref Halil; Department of Philosophy (2022-9)
This thesis investigates the concept of akrasia, with particular attention given to its sundry interpretations in the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. In this inquiry, I argue that these philosophers agree on the lack of knowledge of the akratic person, while they differentiate from each other as to what this missing knowledge is. Irrespective of their rejection or acknowledgement of akrasia due to their conceptions of the soul, I argue that Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics share the common ...
An Attempt at dissolution of the notion of self
Sugorakova, Daria; Sayan, Erdinç; Department of Philosophy (2014)
The purpose of this thesis is to provide a plausible approach to the problems of self and personal continuity that arise in various thought experiments and reported extraordinary real-life cases. When we approach the puzzling thought experiments and actual cases in terms of the notion of sense of self, the question of whether a person’s self continues becomes moot and inconsequential. The approach based on the sense of self provides clarity, is capable of dissolving the puzzles, while the notion of an endur...
"The Inwardness of the Modern Mind": Reading Henry James through a Hegelian Spirit
Çırakman, Elif (2010-01-01)
The aim of this article is to investigate the ways in which memory and imagination operate in and through the development of consciousness in literary texts. Its guiding theme shall be the double consciousness in modern life which sets the plot for one of the masterpieces of Henry James, The Ambassadors (1903). Thus The Ambassadors artfully crafts the "inwardness of the modern mind" by plotting it as a process of maturity and of becoming mindful through the powers of imagination, recollection and memory. Th...
The Embodiment of the individual self: a conceptualization of body in hegel’s phenomenology of spirit
Önder, Sevi Emek; Çırakman, Elif; Department of Philosophy (2018)
The primary purpose of this thesis is to investigate and conceptualize the notion of “body” in the context of certain sections of the Phenomenology of Spirit. While investigating the notion of “body” in the thesis, my intention is to see the possibility of reading the Phenomenology as “the science of the embodiment of consciousness”. By relying on this approach, I will try to thematize and give a comprehensive account of the “body” in the “Consciousness” and “Self-Consciousness” sections of the Phenomenolog...
Citation Formats
M. Mandalinci, “The philosophical significance of death: a reconstructive interpretation of Hegel and Heidegger,” Thesis (Ph.D.) -- Graduate School of Social Sciences. Philosophy., Middle East Technical University, 2019.