Maciej Czerkawski

Co-Sponsor: Notre Dame Global

Maciej Czerkawski is employed as a Lecturer in Philosophy and General Education by the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen in China. Before that, he was an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University (UMCS) in Lublin, Poland. He completed his graduate work at the University of Warwick (MA) and the University of Oxford (DPhil) in the UK. His academic interests revolve around post-Kantian philosophy, ancient philosophy, and metaphysics.

Abstract: Many commentators now agree that, in his Being and Time, Heidegger embraced – joining a tradition in philosophy that includes Aristotle, Aquinas, and his one-time teacher, Husserl - the notion of the analogy of Being. The meaning of the term ‘analogy’ is contested, but, on any account, its application to Heidegger’s thinking entails that Heidegger’s ‘being’ – a term that tries to capture (roughly) what it is for entities to be - ‘has a generic sense, which, roughly, applies to objects of different sorts in virtue of those objects exemplifying different features.’ (McDaniel 2017: 17) For example, Heidegger argues that it applies to objects of cultural significance (paradigmatically tools) in virtue of their ‘referring’ us to other objects of this kind (in a way a hammer might ‘refer’ us to nails as well as to the job to be done with it). He calls their ‘kind of Being’ – a set of features that determine them as beings – ‘readiness-to-hand’. I’m working on a book manuscript that tries to explain what unifies Heidegger’s diverse kinds of Being as instances of a single subject-matter - Being (of which, as Heidegger says, there is a question) - in the light of Heidegger’s engagement with Aristotle and some of his medieval commentators.