Philip Tonner

Summary: my thesis engaged Aristotle, Duns Scotus and Heidegger in a debate over the concept of being and critically engaged with Heidegger’s philosophy of art in relation to history. I engaged Husserl and Heidegger in a debate over the nature of phenomenology and examined Heidegger’s phenomenology of religion in relation to historical manifestations of religious practice. I argued that Heidegger’s temporal configuration of being as meaningful presence amounts to a univocal conception of being in terms of time. I then related this interpretation to Heidegger’s later philosophy. 

Department of Philosophy, University of Glasgow, 2006.

Phenomenology between Aesthetics and Idealism is a short introductory volume on phenomenology and aesthetics that highlights the phenomenological traditions connections to transcendental philosophy and the tradition of philosophical idealism. The book places aesthetics at the centre of the discussion and provides an overview of ‘transcendental philosophy’ since Kant, situating the phenomenological movement in relation to that tradition. Figures discussed include: Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Dufrenne, Benjamin, Bergson, Deleuze and Derrida.

New Studies in Idealism Series, Editor, Paolo Diego Bubbio, The Davies Group.
http://www.amazon.com/Phenomenology-between-aesthetics-idealism-Idealism/dp/1934542539/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1444935189&sr=1-1

This paper argues that any museum's collecting policy must face up to the problem of vulnerability. Taking as a starting point an item in the collections of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, I argue that the basic responsibility of museums to collect 'things', and to communicate information about them in a truthful way brings their collecting practice into the epistemological domain of testimony and into the normative domain of ethics. Museums are public spaces of memory, testimony, representation and interpretation that at once enable humanity to hold to account those who transgress while at the same time holding to account those who witness these transgressions. By virtue of this, museums can be considered spaces of ethics wherein testimonial and hermeneutic injustice can be confronted and challenged.

This paper begins to develop an interpretation of European cave art based on Martin Heidegger's account of artistic production and 'dwelling' so as to indicate a potentially rich area for future research. The paper will also draw on Foucault's account of heterotopic space and will engage with one of the key researchers on the archaeology of cave art, Randall White. The role of a work of art for Heidegger is to hold open a world. Art enables a decision to be made by a group regarding how things are going to matter for, and to, them as dwellers in their world. Works of art, on Heidegger's account, put up for decision what will count as the highest values (the gods) for a group while determining what will prove essential for human dwelling in a world. With reference to Foucault, it will be suggested that caves are a good candidate for a heterotopic space. Caves are uncanny, numinous spaces and because of this, I suggest, they enable human beings to produce art as a world-opening event. I suggest that there is something significant about human experience in caves and I attempt to make a connection between heterotopic space, dwelling, and the art of the last Ice Age in Europe in order to point towards a novel field of research: dwelling and prehistoric art.

This paper is an introductory exploration of the notion of 'forms of life' in the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The notion of 'forms of life' is central to understanding Wittgenstein's later philosophy. Even though this is the case, there have been a variety of interpretations of this notion in the literature on Wittgenstein's thought. In part this is due to Wittgenstein's infrequent reference to 'forms of life'. The term 'form of life' only appears five times in the Philosophical Investigations, the central text of Wittgenstein's later philosophy. It is a point of debate whether the notion of 'forms of life' commits Wittgenstein to a form of relativism. This paper explores this problem. We argue that it is entirely possible for members of different conceptual communities to engage in dialogue with each other on Wittgenstein's view. We argue that Wittgenstein was not a cognitive relativist. Wittgenstein's conviction was that truth is bound to this complicated form of life, or the fundamentally human perspective. His view of truth remains perspectival. Members of different conceptual communities can enter into dialogue. Other 'forms of life' are available to " us " and members of diverse groups can change their views.

This paper offers a reading of the philosophy of Heidegger in terms of the problematic of history as set out by
Collingwood. We take Collingwood’s two questions (‘how did people in the past derive the meaning of their
lives?’ and ‘what is the nature of historical description?’) as our guiding principles. We show how Heidegger’s
philosophy can be put to use in the service of writing history. Ereignis names that event whereby being (the
meaningful relatedness of things to human interest and understanding) is revealed and appropriated by historical
humanity. Ereignis is that event whereby historical civilizations come to be in world history: it is the happening
of historical civilization. Heidegger claims that the history of being, as he understands it, provides the clue to all
history. As such, we show how, by way of a reading of the focal artworks representative of particular
communities, historians can hermeneutically reconstruct the narrative background or meaning of being
constitutive of particular civilizations. And, it is in terms of this background that individuals can come to endow
their lives with meaning. We end our piece with a reading of Heidegger on poetry and the poetic function of the
work of art. Ultimately, Heidegger understands poetry to be the sustaining ground of history. Poetry is
projective saying and projective saying is that original ‘naming’ of things by a historical community which
produces the horizons of meaning and meaninglessness constitutive of a historical world. By elucidating
Heidegger’s thought on being/history in such a way as to show its relevance to the writing of history and to the
reconstruction of past ‘meanings of life’, this article constitutes a contribution to both Heidegger studies and the
philosophy of history generally.

A collaborative piece with Gail Higginbottom and Andrew G.K. Smith.

Abstract Focussing on the earliest periods of intensivemonument building in prehistoric
Scotland (3000–1000BC), this study identifies how humans chose and made places that
were important to them. It examines how monuments and the natural environment were
used to create landscapes embedded with culturalmeaning and remembrance. This project
addresses a gap in knowledge about prehistoric Scotland, namely the lack of understanding
of the place that many hundreds of free-standing stones (F-SS) in circles, rows, pairs or
on their own, had for their creators, especially the smaller monuments. This work with its
special focus on the islands of Coll and Tiree goes some way to rediscover the perceptions
and decisions made by people in the past about their monumental landscape.

Somewhere between 500,000 to 300,000 years ago in the Lower Palaeolithic of Europe our ancestor Homo heidelbergensis placed around 28 to 32 deceased individuals into a deep sink hole or ‘pit’ in the Sierra de Atapuerca, Spain: exactly why they did so remains a matter of debate. Drawing on theoretical advances grouped together under the banner of ‘the dwelling perspective’ this paper will explore a novel approach to this fascinating area of debate and suggest some experiential parameters available in the present that might help us to make sense of this remarkable site.

I acted as a researcher for this documentary.

From the BBC website: Dramatized documentary in which Andrew Marr explains how Edinburgh changed from a squalid provincial city into a beacon of intellectual thought, led by the brilliance of the philosopher David Hume and the father of economics, Adam Smith.

Their enlightened ideas opened up the eyes of the people across the world, arguing for a progressive and tolerant society with freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and freedom of action. Their ideas are just as relevant today as they were over 250 years ago.