Politics of responsibility: From Aristotle to Heidegger and beyond

My dissertation offers a new conceptualisation of responsibility from a Heideggerian perspective, which aims to move the problematic of human responsibility to a historico-ontological plane which is also political in its essence. I conceptualise responsibility as capability of the Self to respond to its ontological possibilities, by first disclosing the historical conditions that shape and limit those possibilities. In Chapter One, my main aim is to introduce this concept by distinguishing it radically from the dominant discourse of responsibility and its metaphysical foundations. I argue that responsibility is ultimately a self-responsibility; i.e. before and beyond one's actions and their consequences responsibility is for Self, which is to be taken not in sense of a "subject" but a way of being in the general mode of what Heidegger called Being-in-the-world. The Self can thus respond to and for itself only out of the particular world into which it is "thrown", by first dis-closing it, through a combination of understanding and praxis.;As the title of the dissertation suggests, I find the origins of this concept of responsibility in Aristotle's thinking, to which I devote Chapter Two. I argue that in Aristotle's thought there is a richer concept of human responsibility than the one to which it is usually reduced, which is ultimately a matter of the openness of the self to its highest possibilities of being Aristotle calls arete which has its intellectual and ethical components. By returning to Aristotle I also find the origins of another essential aspect of human responsibility which I try to develop in the latter part of the dissertation, namely disposition---what Aristotle calls ethos---as the historico-ontological ground of responsibility. But Aristotle himself was not able, but first of all not in a position, to see to its full extent the historicity of human disposition as the ground of human responsibility. The aim of the last two chapters is, accordingly, to do justice to this historicity which demands that we re-introduce Heidegger but also go beyond him, for this historicity needs to be seen in its concreteness, and in its essentially political character.