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This article is structured in two parts. In the first part there is a focus on Deleuze’s philosophy and in particular the question of desert(ed) islands. Running throughout this section is a consistent concern with empathy and sociality, with the changing structure of alterity in the identified movement from neurosis, psychosis to perversion. In this section I make the argument that several forms of contemporary philosophy are carrying out acts of philosophical autism with regards to species extinction and the question of the absence of the other. I try to counter this trend in the second part of the paper where there is a concern with thinking the structure “Us-without-world,” which is my original contribution. In the time of the coronavirus pandemic, in the time of our forced solitude, in the time of our intoxication with technology, there is a real problem of the life-world, of thinking we-experience in common life, in this new hermetic reality. This is encapsulated in the thought-experiment of the structure “Us-without-world”.

The Heideggerian theme of authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) proves crucial to the task of fundamental ontology that Heidegger pursues in Being and Time. Unfortunately, clear and textually based commentary on this notion of authenticity has been sparse. Many prominent readings of authenticity fail to stay true to its purpose in Being and Time, opting instead to render a stronger existentialist reading than is warranted. While such readings of authenticity are truly fascinating as independent conceptions worthy of philosophical attention, they cannot be properly ascribed to Heidegger or the project of Being and Time. The present essay serves as an attempt to correct this course in the scholarship, offering a textually supported account of authenticity that recognizes its role as that which makes manifest the transparency that everyday Dasein lacks—a transparency that can do away with self-concealments and assist Heidegger in his pursuit of an answer to the question of Being qua Being.

The doctrine that the content of the conclusion of a deductively valid argument is included in the content of its premises, taken jointly, is a familiar one. It has important consequences for the question of what value valid arguments possess, since it indicates the poverty of three traditional answers: that arguments may and should be used as instruments of persuasion, that they may and should be used as instruments of justification; and that they may and should be used to advance knowledge. The truth is, however, that in each of these cases the argument has only a managerial role and, if there is any work done, it is the premises that do it. It will be maintained that this point has little force against the critical rationalist answer, which I shall defend, that the principal purpose of deductive reasoning from an assemblage of premises is the exploration of their content, facilitating their criticism and rejection. That said, the main aim of the present paper is not to promote critical rationalism but to consider some published objections to the doctrine that a statement asserts every statement that is validly deducible from it. The alleged counterexamples to be considered fall roughly into two groups: statements that emerge with time from a rich mathematical or empirical theory, but were originally unformulated and are deducible from the theory only in a non-trivial way (Frederick 2011, 2014; Williamson 2012); and statements, notably disjunctions, that are easily formulated and are deducible from a theory in a trivial way (Schurz & Weingartner 1987; Mura 1990, 2008; Gemes 1994; Yablo 2014). Each of these counterexamples will be evaluated and dismissed.