The End of Metaphysics and the End of Modernity: Reconsidering Philosophical Postmodernity

My doctoral project studied the theme of a postmetaphysical “other beginning” of Western thinking in Heidegger’s later thought with regard to the Presocratic “first beginning” of philosophy. My postdoctoral work will focus on the topic of the “end of metaphysics” which, according to Heidegger, comes about with the culmination of the Western metaphysical tradition in the work of Hegel and Nietzsche.

According to my hypothesis, Heidegger’s understanding of this end as the historical situation in which the development of Western metaphysics with its Greek origins attains its utmost limits provides a fruitful point of approach to the alleged “crisis of reason” in late modernity, as well as to the associated philosophical and counterphilosophical trends (historicism, positivism, naturalism, structuralism) of the 19th and 20th centuries. Heidegger’s outline of a transition from this end to another philosophical beginning will provide a new and still mostly unexploited perspective for understanding the central features of philosophical “postmodernity” (in thinkers like the later Wittgenstein, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, and Rorty) and of a possible postmetaphysical notion of rationality.