The Fateful Discourse of Worldly Things

This broad interdisciplinary and comparative study of the ways in which we discursively make the world and its things aims to go beyond the poetic thinking of Heidegger toward a more pragmatic way of interpreting concrete social, cultural, and political experience. The book outlines three constitutive functions of world-making. Endowing signifies the direct provision of the wherewithal that must come into being if anything else is to come into being. Enabling develops or facilitates what is endowed; it is a kind of education in being-in-the-world. Entitling embraces the realm of justice and decision; it concerns what is right for human beings to have and do and be.