Report from the debate: How to think with Heidegger against Heidegger?

From the initiative of the Institute of Philosophy of the Jesuit University Ignatianum in Krakow there was a debate last May that centred on a book by young author Filip Borek from the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, who is also a member of the board of the Polish Phenomenological Association. His book consists of a phenomenological interpretation of Vom Wesen der Wahrheit [On the Essence of Truth], an important work in which Heidegger explores the essential connection between truth as correctness and freedom. In attendance were the following guests: Maria Gołębiewska (Polish Academy of Sciences), Paweł Korobczak (University of Wrocław), Daniel R. Sobota (Polish Academy of Sciences) and Jacek Surzyn (Jesuit University Ignatianum in Krakow), as well as the author himself. The debate was led by Magdalena Kozak (Jesuit University Ignatianum in Krakow).

From the initiative of the Institute of Philosophy of the Jesuit University Ignatianum in Krakow there was a debate last May that centred on a book by young author Filip Borek from the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, who is also a member of the board of the Polish Phenomenological Association. His book consists of a phenomenological interpretation of Vom Wesen der Wahrheit [On the Essence of Truth], an important work in which Heidegger explores the essential connection between truth as correctness and freedom. In attendance were the following guests: Maria Gołębiewska (Polish Academy of Sciences), Paweł Korobczak (University of Wrocław), Daniel R. Sobota (Polish Academy of Sciences) and Jacek Surzyn (Jesuit University Ignatianum in Krakow), as well as the author himself. The debate was led by Magdalena Kozak (Jesuit University Ignatianum in Krakow).
The opening speech for the event was given by the author himself, who gave a quick introduction as to the nature of his work, explaining that the book is based on his master's thesis from 2019, which was later signi icantly revised. The book was published in 2022 by the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Borek described his main goal for the book as clari ication of the concepts used by Heidegger in Vom Wesen der Wahrheit which according to him were previously accepted by the scholars as they were and not studied carefully enough. The author also attempted to translate these concepts to Polish and relate them to previous Polish translations of Heidegger. The other main goal of the author was there to interpret the sum of Heidegger's philosophy through Vom Wesen der Wahrheit and the current state of the academic reception of Heidegger's philosophy.
The irst talk was given by Maria Gołębiewska who described Heidegger's hermeneutics of proposition as a part of hermeneutics of a statement and assertion. Gołębiewska's speech dealt with the hermeneutic and also rhetorical context of Heidegger's presuppositions on logic, including rules and logical judgments. As she sees it, analytical philosophers make efforts to consider Heidegger's presuppositions and theses in the context of logic, using, among other things, modal and multiple-valued logics. Recalling quotations from Borek's book, polemical to the efforts of analytical philosophy, she referred to more or less obvious research contexts important to Heidegger, i.e.: the relationship between dialectics and rhetoric as delineated by Aristotle in the introductory passages of his Rhetoric, Ockham's theses on the semiotic and semantic nature of logical presuppositions and Schleiermacher's theses on so-called "general hermeneutics" and its close relationship with rhetoric.
In the next presentation Paweł Korobczak explored how themes undertaken by Borek in his book relate to the question about the origins of ethics. Korobczak focuses on the last, seventh part of this book that invokes themes of the totality and of the horizon, the world and the body. Korobczak underlined the topic of how borders and horizons are outlined by us in such a way that it points towards the absolute totality. The world is here seen as the origin o phenomenality in such a way that Korobczak describes as "phenomenogonia" (vide: theogonia). He identi ies in it a peculiar way of thinking by the means of differentiation that seems to characterize Heidegger and the ield of phenomenology in general.
After a short discussion of these themes between Borek, Gołębiewska and Korobczak, Jacek Surzyn gave his presentation based on the third part of Borek's book in which he re lected on how Borek's work seems to be in line with a prominent way of interpreting Heidegger in Polish subject literature, in which the language of Heidegger is seen not as his own construct, but rather his natural continuation of the German language. The authors that subscribe to that way of thinking are, among others, Łukasz Kołoczek, Janusz Mizera and Wawrzyniec Rymkiewicz. Those thinkers tried to translate Heidegger's linguistic intuitions on philosophy onto the context of the Polish language. Surzyn praises Borek's attempts in that ield.
In the inal speech Jakub S. Sobota focused on the question of the nature of appearance in phenomenology. Sobota said that the part of the book that deals with the theme of the phenomenology of appearance is a central part of Borek's work. He disputes, however, Borek's claim that phenomenology is not interested in the appearance itself, but rather in its origins, on the grounds that such a statement by necessity needlessly narrows the ield of phenomenology. This is, according to Sobota, an ancient, metaphysical way of doing philosophy, which is at the same praiseworthy and also alarming, as it separates Borek from the world which he attempts to study. Sobota's opinion on Borek's book remains, nevertheless, positive.
The debate concluded with yet another round of discussion, this time between Borek, Surzyn and Sobota. In his ending statement Borek agreed with Sobota that his work presents a metaphysical leaning, but he also differentiated it from classical metaphysics by saying that his study also focuses on the very category of "origin" that is often omitted or not clari ied well enough in phenomenology.
The debate was streamed online on YouTube and is available in its entirety (in Polish) under the following link: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=ReIHpQgePfo.