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Philosophy Postgraduates

Adam Tate

Degree:  PhD
Thesis Topic:  The Confrontation between Heidegger and the Tradition
Supervisor:  Dr Robert Sinnerbrink
Associate Supervisor:  Dr Jean-Philippe Deranty
Scholarship:  Macquarie University Research Excellence Scholarship (MQRES)

I completed my BA (Hons) in 2006 having studied since 2002 at La Trobe University Bundoora (which is in Melbourne).  I commenced my study towards a PhD in February 2008 so for the moment, having been lost in technical work for a while, I feel a bit sketchy.  I plan to read Heidegger, the Transcendental Idealists, the Greeks, and to a greater or lesser degree, the usual 19th-20th century names in continental philosophy.  Below are three apparently separate ideas that, to me, often in an obscure way, are joined together at a fundamental level. 

1)  The transcendental (qua conditions of possibility) such as it exists in the history of philosophy as a fundamental question which philosophy is tied to as its most basic task, especially insofar as it is integrated into a thinking which only thinks beings and the consequent necessity of fatal aporia; thinking this aporia.  The givenness, or effect of, ontological/transcendental notions/situations-of-attunement in and beyond philosophy in the contemporary world, e.g. conditions of possibility for consumerism/the convergence of hyperproductive technologies, art in the most general sense and the conditions in which property/production is managed (i.e. contemporary capitalist society).

2)  The ontological possibility of difference such as it exists as an unthought problem which is both in and out of the rationality of philosophy's thinking concerning itself.  Recourse to structural preconditions of the thinking of difference in the history of philosophy.  These structures as methodological necessary and simultaneously negated in the history of philosophy; the most obvious, silly and myopic being empty space as nothing and the related idea of the precondition of differences as the structure of space, but, one could also say, Hegel's story of becoming (qua the aufhebung of being and nothing) as requiring a structural precondition whose essence remains unthought and which remains merely an implicit negative unity (time could act as such a structure but it is not the one of the Logic at that point so far as one is aware).

3)  Fundamental exigency at the ground, always and everywhere; the prevalence of complacency and smugness, ontological exigencies and their occlusion, the possibility of the real as a real problem, ontological exigency and the possibilities of everyday life.