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Author Bio

Lou Agosta, PhD, is a professor of medical education at Ross Medical University, teaching and practicing empathy lessons at Saint Anthony Hospital (Chicago). Lou is the author of three academic, peer-reviewed books on empathy including A Rumor of Empathy (Routledge 2015) and a popular, best selling book Empathy Lessons (2018). Lou Agosta has published and presented widely on empathy and topics relating to human understanding, interpretation, and transforming human suffering. His commitment is to expanding empathy in the individual and the community.

Keywords

ontology, German Idealism, Hegel, Heidegger, Pippin, Befindlichkeit, mattering, the matter of mattering

Abstract

One individual’s culmination is another’s new beginning and yet another’s abyss. The abyss is nihilism. The challenge of such a Big Idea as The Culmination (the event, not the title of Robert Pippin’s book) is to weave the hermeneutic tapestry of the meaning of Being (Sein) as disclosed in poetry, aesthetics, and the life-world, while coaxing the lumbering Hegelian camel of German Idealism through the eye of the narrow needle of Dasein’s (Heideggerian) finitude. The world and entanglement are disclosed in a nondiscursive (preconceptual) manner as mattering. The way forward in philosophy lies through innovations in “mattering”—not a conceptual sense we humans make in relating to the world, but a nondiscursive distinction to which human beings are attuned. In a dialectical gesture worthy of Hegel, a reversal based in the phenomena themselves occurs as “discovery” is the original sense of truth and statement predication is derivative on it. Examples and counter-examples, provided by Dominque Janicaud. Heidegger’s ontological engagement with metaphysics as the culmination of German Idealism is elaborated in detail. Second, the implications for ontological education in a positive sense in a post metaphysical age are engaged and explored as “coming from nothing” and “learning to learn.”

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