What are the basic coordinates of the dispute between Heidegger and Levinas over the phenomenology of “death” and its larger ontological or ethical significance? Or, put in the “perfectionist” terms developed in Chapter 4, in what ways do Heidegger and Levinas disagree about how we human beings become genuinely or fully ourselves? Examining the convergences and divergences of Heidegger’s and Levinas’s phenomenologies of death, this chapter suggests that Heidegger and Levinas both understood themselves as struggling to articulate the requisite ethical response to the great traumas of the twentieth century. By comparing their thinking at this level, I contend, we can better understand the ways in which Levinas genuinely diverges from Heidegger even while building critically on his thinking.

In Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education (2005), I sought to establish and build upon the hermeneutic thesis that Heidegger’s concern to reform education spans his entire career of thought. In my view, a radical rethinking of education – in a word, an ontologization of education, one that situates a transformative death and rebirth of the self at the very heart of the educational vision that founded the philosophical academy in Plato’s Republic – forms one of the deep thematic undercurrents of Heidegger’s work, early as well as late. We will come back to this “ontologization” of education at the end, but I want to begin by addressing a worry I did not previously thematize and confront. If my interpretive thesis is correct, then we should expect to find some sign of Heidegger’s supposed lifelong concern with education in his early magnum opus, Being and Time. The fact, then, that little or nothing had been written on Being and Time’s “philosophy of education” before my first book came out could reasonably be taken to cast doubt upon my thesis that a philosophical rethinking of education was of great importance to Heidegger’s work as a whole. Such a worry, of course, does not arise deductively; even if Being and Time contained no philosophy of education, one might be able to explain such an omission in a way that would leave my general thesis intact. Rather than trying to preserve the thesis in the face of such a hermeneutic anomaly, however, I will instead demonstrate that no such anomaly exists. This chapter will seek both to show that Heidegger’s philosophy of education deeply permeates Being and Time and to explain some of the context and significance of this fact, thereby coming to understand yet another interlocking set of philosophical implications arising from Heidegger’s phenomenology of existential death.

Is happiness possible in the Anthropocene? If, as Sarah Ahmed suggests, happiness is the mark of an accommodation with the future, then what becomes of the possibility of happiness when our planetary relation to the future has become estranged?

This essay considers this question, in relation to two performances staged in the summer of 2021, a site specific piece entitled Beckett in Folkestone, and a production of Beckett’s Happy Days, directed by Trevor Nunn at the Riverside Studios.

Both pieces, staged as we were emerging from the Covid lockdown and in the midst of ecological and biopolitical crisis, conduct a forensic examination of how it is possible now to share each other’s lives, enter into collective futures, or look forward, like Beckett’s Winnie, to another happy day.

In reading the pieces together, the essay looks to the imaginative forms in which we can encounter happiness, not as an accommodation with the future, but as the expression of a radical hope.

This chapter argues that the New York School of Poets occupy a complex transitional moment in relation to both the history of sexuality and the history of poetry and modern art. Their work is governed by both the epistemology of the closet that shapes high modernism from earlier in the twentieth century and, looking forward to Stonewall and Gay Liberation, also presents utopian potentialities in its experimental forms of sociability.

When Lady Philosophy suggests that Boethius’ definition of himself as a rational mortal animal is inadequate, it implies that a superior self-understanding is contained within the Consolation. This chapter argues that this more adequate self-understanding – that Boethius, via participation in God, is himself divine – is implicit in the text and unpacks the profound implications and consolations of this interpretation of the self. Being a rational animal is more than being this specific living thing; it is also an opportunity to manifest divine intelligibility and goodness in the world. The chapter focuses on two perplexing arguments in Book IV that are unsatisfying without this interpretation of Boethius’ identity: that the punished are happier than those who escape punishment and that it is possible to attach ourselves to Providence and escape from Fate. The difficulties that most people will face in accepting these arguments are the direct result of the challenge of adopting this self-interpretation.

Employing “Asia as method,” this chapter examines the twofold pedagogical practice of cultivating learners’ abilities to cognize truth and create value from it as the font of authentic happiness. The chapter first summarizes the intrinsic nature of sōka kyōikugaku, or “value-creating pedagogy,” in the work of Japanese educators Makiguchi Tsunesaburō (1871–1944), Toda Jōsei (1900–1958), and Ikeda Daisaku (b. 1928) and defines the concepts of truth, value, and happiness therein. It then considers the extrinsic relevance of these in the context of today’s politicized, semantic war on truth in the United States and the implications this has for modern notions of schooling and young people’s happiness. The chapter advances our understanding of value-creating approaches to knowledge, society, and power that increasingly inform the perspectives and practices of thousands of educators around the world and has significance for ethics in education.

The chapter discusses the influence of utilitarianism on education. It begins by introducing the core principles of utilitarianism. The chapter then argues that it is possible to distinguish between two major strands within the utilitarian view of education: one that focuses on promoting the happiness of each individual, and the other on enhancing the happiness of the greatest number by creating facilitating social conditions for it. Each of these two strands is separately examined. The chapter also maintains that the second strand had a lasting impact on education that finds its clearest current expression in the emphasis on education’s role in economic development. Finally, the chapter suggests that reviving certain traditional forms of utilitarianism has significant potential to improve education.

Starting from the Solon-Croesus episode, this chapter argues that Herodotus’ inquiry establishes a horizon of expectation in which historical memory (through the narratives of Tellus and Cleobis and Biton) opens up a new space for philosophical knowledge. The second half of the chapter suggests that the Histories’ generic affiliation with history over philosophy is anachronistic in the fifth century BCE. It demonstrates that Herodotus was not interpreted as a historian in his own time and that "inquiry" and "love of wisdom" characterize the dynamic and highly experimental intellectual culture of this period.

Ethical Aristotelianism, with happiness at its core, is enjoying a resurgence. The revival of this view has been driven in large part by historically minded philosophers, who believe that the best versions of this general outlook were developed many centuries ago by some of our astute philosophical forebears. John Buridan shares a similar approach. Like these historically minded philosophers today, he both attempts to reconstruct others’ views – especially those of Aristotle and Seneca – and attempts to respond to potential concerns that one might have through a sensitive and creative development of those inherited views. This sort of creative development is on full display in Buridan’s work on happiness and the good life, as he clarifies, expands, and reshapes Aristotle’s basic conception of happiness.

This essay reconstructs the account that results. It begins with Buridan’s account of happiness understood as the best single human good. It then turns to Buridan’s account of happiness understood as the best collection of human goods, which he takes to be unqualified human happiness. Finally, since unqualified happiness is extremely demanding and thus exceedingly rare, the essay considers varieties of happiness in various restricted senses that Buridan seems to countenance, namely, being happy for a time, being happy within the confines of one’s non-ideal situation in life, and being happy in a domain of one’s life. The author hopes that even in this short span it will become clear that Buridan is among those astute philosophical forebears worth taking seriously as an ethicist, especially for those invested in the project of Ethical Aristotelianism.