De Gennaro I. Principles of Philosophy: A Phenomenological Approach

München: Verlag Karl Alber, 2020. — 375 p.This book offers a phenomenologically informed reading of some fundamental positions of the philosophical tradition. Its objective is not that of giving an exhaustive account of the thinking of any single philosopher, much less of the trajectory of philosophy as a whole; rather, the aim is to retrace a few key moments in the course of philosophical enquiry, from its outset to its accomplishment in Nietzsche's metaphysics, with a focus on the main motive of that enquiry: the always new attempt to establish a sufficient knowledge of the ultimate principle on which to build a human ethos.A Propaedeutic Distinction: Operative Concepts versus Ontological Concepts (On Σχολή)
Appendix 1: From the Preface to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1806)Appendix 2: Kant on the Learning and Teaching of Philosophy
The End of Philosophy — and Beyond
Contingency
Why Engage with the Principles of Philosophy?
Appendix 3: Schelling on the Condition for Attaining the Point of Inception of Philosophy
Heraclitus
Logos
Harmonia
Kosmos
Physis
Appendix 4: On Abscondedness
In the visible domain:
In the mindable domain:
Parmenides
Preliminary Consideration: the Word »Being«
Fundamental Concepts
(1) The notion of physis
(2) The notion of alētheia
(3) The notions of einai and eon
(4) The notion of noein
Fragment VI: Being’s Need
The Paths of Inquiry
Circuits and Cybernetics
Fragment VIII: the Traits of Being
The Ontological Temptation
The Philosophical Question
Plato
The Structure and Scope of the Guiding Question of Philosophy
Plato’s Answer to the Guiding Question of Philosophy
The Traits of the Idea and its Reference to Physis
The Idea of the Good
Paideia
The Myth of the Cave
Plato and the Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics
Appendix 5: Plato on the Uselessness of Philosophy
Appendix 6: Heidegger on the Eros of Being
Aristotle
Transition to Modernity[srtn](On Method)
Appendix 7: From Galilei’s Discorsi
Descartes
The Meditations as First Philosophy
What is Old and what is New in the Philosophy of the »New Time«
(a) What is old
(b) What is new
Descartes’s First Principle
What Does »to Cogitate« Mean?
(i) Cogitating as perceiving (percipere)
(ii) Cogitating as doubting (dubitare)
(iii) Cogitating as »I cogitate myself cogitating« (cogito me cogitare) or as self-assuring assurance
The Cogitating I as Subiectum
Recapitulation of Descartes’s Metaphysical Position
Appendix 8: From Descartes’s Meditations
Leibniz
Leibniz’s Answer to the Guiding Question of Philosophy
The Principle of Sufficient Reason
The Original (Harmonic) Economy of the World
Kant
The Transcendental Experience
The Position of Being and the Original Unity of Apperception
Appendix 9: Schelling on the Desirableness of Philosophy
Nietzsche
Nietzsche’s Answer to the Guiding Question of Philosophy: Life and the Will to Power
Values as Conditions of the Will to Power
The Will to Power as the Cause of Universal Becoming and the Absence of a »True World«
Becoming as an Approximation of Being
Nihilism and the Necessary Inversion of the Polarity of Values
The Overall Economic Management of the Earth and the Overman
Heidegger
The End of Philosophy
The Task Held in Store
Being and Time
Greek Alphabet