Drawing on Heidegger’s account of Mitsein and “the fourfold,” I argue that the worldly significance that defines us is rooted in our constitutive openness to others. To own up to such significance, we must take responsibility for our involvement in its realization, which occurs through our involvement in shared institutions. However, we tend to experience ourselves as incapable of altering the nature of our involvement in institutions. Countering our sense of irrelevance requires a recognition of ourselves as agents, and of “agency” as the ability to contribute to the significance of our world through our very recognition of one another.

In the 1970s onward, feminism uncovered pornography’s harms to women. They center on the inferior ways that pornography usually presents women, its effects on many consumers to thus see and treat women, as well as abuses that go into making some pornography. Yet as Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, and Rae Langton have variously observed, the more pervasive pornography becomes the harder it is to recognize its harms as harms. Insights from Heidegger’s analysis of modern technology can help explain this difficulty. He argues that today’s technology has a distinctive power imperceptibly to alter norms by driving out other ways of engaging and understanding the world besides how technology mediates that relationship. Pornography’s intersection with Internet-age technology likewise imperceptibly alters norms by driving out alternatives to some form of pornography’s picture of women and sexuality. Against this new backdrop, pornography’s harms become less discernable as such.

While Heidegger decried ethics as a distinct area of philosophical inquiry, a steady stream of secondary literature over the last three decades has mined his corpus for ethical insights. This literature tends to draw on his early or middle work and contrast his views with canonical normative theories. I bring Heidegger into conversation with philosophy of disability and feminist philosophy by focusing on the role of relationality and ability expectations. In section one, I provide a schematic of the dominant concept of ability in modernity: ability as personal power. Through the Bremen lectures, I then develop a Heideggerian concept of ability: ability as access. I conclude by discussing the stakes—ethical, philosophical, and political—of interpreting the question of the meaning of being as a question of ability as access to meaning.

Martin Heidegger accuses Plato, or at least Platonism, of promulgating a doctrine of the truth that interprets the truth in terms of trans-temporal ideas. Human beings themselves get interpreted in terms of their relation to these eternal, universal ideas, rather than their proper “finitude, temporality, and historicity,” which leads to nihilism, according to Heidegger. This paper argues that Heidegger misses an important feature of Plato’s parable of the cave: the fact that there are two pathways within it that meet at a crossroads. One, the well-known upward path, leads to the realm of transcendent truth; the other, often overlooked, is the lateral path that transects the cave and from which the shadows are projected. At this intersection, Plato show how what it means to be human requires both temporality and what transcends the historically situated.