Abstract

The prevailing assumption among philosophers today is that metaphysics, with its problematic dualisms and exclusions, is a dead issue. Despite the fact that it has been exhaustively demonstrated by some of the most prominent thinkers of the past century (including Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida) that it is impossible to overcome metaphysics simply by edict, more philosophers are presuming to be able to do just that. The question of metaphysics as such, as a historical phenomenon, appears through a certain naivety to be losing its philosophical urgency. The aim of my dissertation, then, is to revitalize this question, but to do so by beginning with it is taken up by Luce Irigaray as a question of non-essential sexual difference. While this is admittedly a broad topic, having implications for many different philosophical concerns, my work demonstrates how it is especially relevant for a feminist critique that would work within the conceptual and linguistic resources of Western philosophy. My research focuses on three figures who take up the question of metaphysics in different but related ways. After Irigaray, I discuss the German Idealist F.W.J. Schelling, who, like Irigaray, can be seen as challenging the philosophical project of modernity through the disclosure of and in terms of the difficulty of addressing a third term. Next I address Plato because it is the Platonic dialogues (the Timaeus in particular) that are often accused of inaugurating the rigid distinction between the sensible and the intelligible that arguably pervades Western metaphysical discourse. However, my reading shows how the dialogues also resist and even undermine the very dualisms that are so often attributed to a Platonic doctrine. Thus, in my dissertation I speak to the disclosure of what is called the "third kind," especially as it emerges in the Timaeus as "chora." My research then returns to Irigaray, not only in order to situate my work within the horizon of contemporary feminism, but also because Irigaray's work, like Plato and Schelling's, speaks to the question of difference in metaphysics without recourse to the naive negation that is typical of some contemporary philosophy.