Delimitations: Phenomenology and the End of Metaphysics

John Sallis characterizes the end of metaphysics as a limit, or horizon, both enclosing metaphysical thought and opening the field of thinking beyond it. He elaborates five areas in which the boundaries of thinking are extended: imagination as an opening power, the radicalizing of phenomenology's injunction to attend to the things themselves, Heidegger's shift of thinking toward an opening or clearing, archaic closure through a return to Plato and Heraclitus, and the nonidentity that takes place in the act of delimitation. This last question is developed in relation to Husserl's project of a pure phenomenology, to the debate between hermeneutics and deconstruction, and to the secluding of ground announced in Schelling's thought.