Richard Colledge

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Australian Catholic University

ACU/Deakin conference on Perception 5-6 June

This paper looks to make a small contribution to the critical engagement between philosophical Thomism and phenomenology, inspired by the recent work of the German phenomenologist and hermeneutic thinker Günter Figal. My suggestion is that Figal’s proposal for a broad-based hermeneutical philosophy rooted in a renewed realism concerning things in t...

Heideggerian thought is routinely understood to involve an insistence on finitude, and a rejection of the metaphysical priority of the infinite. As a general rule, this characterization is adequate, but it risks a significant oversimplification of a complex theme in Heidegger's thinking. After an initial discussion of his dominant position on (in)f...

If Martin Heidegger is a thinker of Being par excellence, he is also one of the west’s key thinkers concerning the nothing. This paper has two main aims. The first is to highlight the continuity of the way in which Heidegger develops the theme of the nothing, in its close kinship with Being, throughout the long arc of his thought: from Sein und Zei...

This talk approaches the closely inter-connected themes of nature and Vorhandenheit in the early Heidegger by initially distinguishing three internally complex senses of these terms (the theoretical, the intraworldly and the extraworldly,) before honing in on the last of these: i.e., nature understood as radical non-hermeneutical excess (Übermaß.)...

In recent debate concerning the relationship between faith and reason, a pervasive assumption is evident according to which one or other is considered to be original and basic. This paper develops an alternative view of the status of both rational and religious modes of thought drawing on the work of Adriaan Peperzak, and bringing his suggestion in...

In his 2010 article, ‘Secular Spirituality and the Logic of Giving Thanks’, John Bishop recalls a striking theme in a recent address by Richard Dawkins in which he appeared to enthusiastically endorse the appropriateness of a ‘naturalised spirituality’ that involved ‘existential gratitude’, and this led him to investigate the notion of a naturalise...

The work of Martin Heidegger holds a pre-eminent place in contemporary ontological metaphysics, and this, it is argued, is a deeply two-edged sword. Proceeding on the basis of the unity of Heidegger’s life-long project, the thesis critically evaluates Heideggerian thought, with a particular emphasis on its early formative texts (1923-35), highlight...

In the context of the contemporary emergence of a "postmodern Kierkegaard," I take issue with the idea that Kierkegaardian thought involves an anti-essentialist rejection of ontology. I argue that Kierkegaard's keynote existential analysis is paralleled by, if not tacitly set within, a less developed yet explicit ontology of human being. This "subj...