Nihil ex nihilo : the archaeology of nothing : Heidegger and the inception of logos

• Main Author: Tsagdis, Georgios
• Other Authors: Osborne, Peter
• Published: Kingston University 2013
• Subjects: 930.1; Philosophy
• Online Access: https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.587386

The essay at hand undertakes to think the inception of occidental thought as an event opening for the first time the horizon of the thought of Nothing. Although a study with and from, it is not a study of Heidegger, but a study of the inception (arche) of logos, as such an archaeology. The inception is delimited along the proper names of Anaximander, Heraclitus and Parmenides which we approach in reverse order, re-turning ever-closer to the origin that appears as ever-other, ever-distant. In this re-turn we try to understand the beginning, its truth and the task it presents us with, a task of essential thought. This task consists in the attempt of a turn of Being towards Nothing, a tum wherein essence is trans-formed from ex-istence, an existence foreign to every existentialism. In this thematization of the lesion between 'essentia' and 'existentia' comprising itself a distinct history of Being, a change of tone takes effect, a change of tone that cor-responds to the essence of the turn that we come to know as 'tropos'. The tropos of Being, its essence of turning, emerges inceptively thus in the re-turn of Nothing, the jointure and origin of presence and absence, what opens and maintains the field of their oscillation. This Nothing we try to trace across the inception so that a new beginning may be granted to us, a new beginning that is always the first.