'Who are we?': Plurality and the questioning of philosophy (Immanuel Kant, Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger)

What has become of plurality as a decisive element in thinking, particularly thinking about polities and the political? What has become of reflexive questioning as an activity engaged in by the many who make up a polity? In this dissertation, I ask these questions together as a way of beginning to rethink philosophy, politics, and their relation, taking specific canonical texts in the history of modern philosophy as my starting points. The first (discussed in Chapter II) is Descartes' 'Second Meditation' where the Cogito is a supreme moment of first person reflexivity which nonetheless can only function if a certain plurality is surreptitiously assumed. In Kant's work, I concentrate on three moments were plurality promises to surface: the discussion of the Kingdom of Ends (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft), the treatment of taste as a sensus communis (Kritik der Urteilskraft ) and the consideration of humans' unsocial sociability ('Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte'). Each time, however, plurality is once again covered over, though each time in a way that is disclosive. In Chapter III, I follow the fate of plurality under the ontological title 'being-with' in Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, arguing that it, along with the possibility of reaching an understanding of the political space, is lost when Heidegger devotes his attention to Da-sein's historicity; the question of how generations follow one upon another is given precedence over the question of how a generation constitutes itself as a generation. In Chapter IV I turn to the thought of Arendt, particularly to her analysis of human plurality and the location of thinking in her taxonomy of human activities. Finally, in Chapter V, I pursue my questions beyond that taxonomy to Nancy's ontology of being-with, concluding that it is on this level that the primacy of ontology and plurality, of philosophy and politics can be recognised. The challenge, finally, is to think and work through what it now would mean to engage in a philosophical political practice of asking, together: "Who are we?"...