GARRETT ON THE THEOLOGICAL OBJECTION TO HUME'S COMPATIBILISM

Between 1927 and 1936, Martin Heidegger devoted almost one thousand pages of close textual commentary to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. This article aims to shed new light on the relationship between Kant and Heidegger by providing a fresh analysis of two central texts: Heidegger's 1927/8 lecture course Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and his 1929 monograph Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. I argue that to make sense of Heidegger's reading of Kant, one must resolve two questions. First, how does Heidegger's Kant understand the concept of the transcendental? Second, what role does the concept of a horizon play in Heidegger's reconstruction of the Critique? I answer the first question by drawing on Cassam's model of a self-directed transcendental argument (‘The role of the transcendental within Heidegger's Kant’), and the second by examining the relationship between Kant's doctrine that ‘pure, general logic’ abstracts from all semantic content and Hume's attack on metaphysics (‘The role of the horizon within Heidegger's Kant’). I close by sketching the implications of my results for Heidegger's own thought (‘From Heidegger's Kant to Sein und Zeit’). Ultimately, I conclude that Heidegger's commentary on the Critical system is defined, above all, by a single issue: the nature of the ‘form’ of intentionality.     

From Radical to Banal Evil: Hannah Arendt against the Justification of the Unjustifiable

Two central strands in Arendt's thought are the reflection on the evil of Auschwitz and the rethinking in terms of politics of Heidegger's critique of metaphysics. Given Heidegger's taciturnity regarding Auschwitz and Arendt's own taciturnity regarding the philosophical implications of Heidegger's political engagement in 1933, to set out how these strands interrelate is to examine the coherence of Arendt's thought and its potential for a critique of Heidegger. By refusing to countenance a theological conception of the evil of Auschwitz, Arendt consolidates the break with theology that Heidegger attempts through his analysis of the essential finitude of Dasein. In the light of Arendt's account of evil, it is possible to see the theological vestiges in Heidegger's ontology. Heidegger's resumption of the question concerning the categorical interconnections of the ways of Being entails an abandonment of finitude: he accommodates and tacitly justifies that which can have no human justification.     

Heidegger and Post-Cartesian Psychoanalysis: My Personal,Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Sojourn

The dual aim of this article is to show both how Heidegger's existential philosophy enriches post-Cartesian psychoanalysis and how post-Cartesian psychoanalysis enriches Heidegger's existential philosophy. Characterized as a phenomenological contextualism, post-Cartesian psychoanalysis finds philosophical grounding in Heidegger's ontological contextualism, condensed in his term for the human kind of Being, Being-in-the-world. Specifically, Heidegger provides philosophical support (a) for a theoretical and clinical shift from mind to world, from the intrapsychic to the intersubjective; (b) for a shift from the motivational primacy of drives originating in the interior of a Cartesian isolated mind to the motivational primacy of relationally constituted affective experience; and (c) for contextualizing and grasping the existential significance of emotional trauma, which plunges us into a form of Being-toward-death. Post-Cartesian psychoanalysis, in turn, (a) relationalizes Heidegger's conception of finitude, (b) expands Heidegger's conception of relationality, and (c) explores some ethical implications of our kinship-in-finitude.     

The Necessity of Thinking Historically – Heidegger After Nietzsche

ABSTRACT

This paper is concerned with the turning that occurs within the work of Martin Heidegger. In particular it seeks to reveal it as a turning that takes place within the notion of history as it is elaborated by Heidegger in the difference between Nietzsche and Hölderlin, that is, in the difference between philosophy and poetizing. It locates the necessity for such a turning in Heidegger's dissatisfaction with his own thinking up to the early 1930s (as suggested in his Black Notebooks). In particular the paper focuses on Heidegger's confrontation with Nietzsche over the question of nihilism in the hope of drawing out the different approaches of each thinker in trying to think this problem historically, and how this confrontation helps move Heidegger's thought towards a more poietical way of thinking. The paper concludes that Heidegger, in seeking to distinguish his thought from that of Nietzsche's, not only owes a debt to Nietzsche but that Heidegger's non-public texts of the late 1930s and early 1940s are also formally indebted to him.     

Why Tugendhat's Critique of Heidegger's Concept of Truth Remains a Critical Problem1

With what right and with what meaning does Heidegger use the term ‘truth’ to characterize Dasein's disclosedness? This is the question at the focal point of Ernst Tugendhat's long‐standing critique of Heidegger's understanding of truth, one to which he finds no answer in Heidegger's treatment of truth in §44 of Being and Time or his later work. To put the question differently: insofar as unconcealment or disclosedness is normally understood as the condition for the possibility of propositional truth rather than truth itself, what does it mean to say – as Heidegger does – that disclosedness is the “primordial phenomenon of truth” and what justifies that claim? The central aim of this paper is to show that Tugendhat's critique remains unanswered. Recent Heidegger scholarship, though it confronts Tugendhat, has not produced a viable answer to his criticism, in part because it overlooks his basic question and therefore misconstrues the thrust of his objections. Ultimately, the paper suggests that what is needed is a re‐evaluation of Heidegger's analysis of truth in light of a more accurate understanding of Tugendhat's critique. The paper concludes by sketching the profile of a more satisfactory reply to Tugendhat's critical question, advocating a return to Heidegger's ‘existential’ analyses in Being and Time in order to locate the normative resources Tugendhat finds lacking in Heidegger's concept of truth.     

On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Reading Heidegger Backwards: White's Time and Death ∗

In Time and Death: Heidegger's Analysis of Finitude, Carol White pursues a strange hermeneutic strategy, reading Heidegger backwards by reading the central ideas of his later work back into his early magnum opus, Being and Time. White follows some of Heidegger's own later directives in pursuing this hermeneutic strategy, and this paper critically explores these directives along with the original reading that emerges from following them. The conclusion reached is that White's creative book is not persuasive as a strict interpretation of Heidegger's early work, but remains extremely helpful for deepening our appreciation of Heidegger's thought as a whole. Most importantly, White helps us to understand the pivotal role that thinking about death played in the lifelong development of Heidegger's philosophy.     

The opening of the future: Heidegger's interpretation of Rilke1

The aim of this paper is to revisit Heidegger's phenomenological reading of Rilke with a view to eliciting its implications for our future and that of phenomenology. The paper focuses on how Heidegger, despite regarding Rilke as a much-needed poet in these destitute times, criticises the metaphysical and Nietzschean underpin- nings of his poetic account of the open and animal existence within it. In addition to shedding considerable light on Heidegger's own conception of the open and human existence within it, focusing on this criticism underscores how the sort of phenom- enological thinking exemplified in Heidegger's reading of Rilke essentially and uniquely provides an opening of the future.     

Heidegger?s Thought and Nazism

This article rejects the idea that Heidegger's Nazism derives from his philosophical thought. No connection has convincingly been shown to hold between the ontological apparatus of Being and Timeand any political orientation. The elaboration of the concept of being in the later work needs to be understood as Heidegger's own reaction to the activism of his earlier thought which in the absence of any principle of respect for other human beings could provide no moral basis for resistance to Nazi ideology. The tensions between the circumstances of Heidegger's early life - rural, conservative, and Catholic - and the Nietzschean modernism of his philosophical thought are explored. It is suggested that there were analogous tensions between tradition and the modern world in Nazism and that it was Heidegger's hatred of that world that led him to respond favorably to some (but not all) of the themes of Nazi thought.     

How is Philosophy Supposed to Engage with Religion? Heidegger's Philosophical Atheism and Its Limits

The paper addresses two related questions: 1. the much debated issue concerning philosophy's proper way of engaging with religion, and 2. the extent to which religious concerns belong to our existence. If philosophy is understood as the hermeneutics of existence, that is, as the self‐interpretation of existence, as the early Heidegger proposes, then the way the second question is answered bears on the approach to the first issue. While endorsing Heidegger's claim in the 1920s that philosophy should be autonomous and neutral in relation to religious concerns, I reject his view that this can be achieved through a silencing attitude characteristic of a “fundamentally atheistic” philosophy. I link Heidegger's failure to offer a convincing response to the first question to the way in which he addresses the second question as to whether religious concerns essentially belong to our existence. In contrast with his views on the second question, which often seem to propose a negative answer to it (but which, I claim, are not as not as clear as it is sometimes assumed), I argue that spiritual comportment is an essential aspect of our life. How can then philosophy ‘transcend’ it and be religiously neutral without becoming silent about it? I argue that philosophy can be religiously neutral and, at the same time, speak about spirituality as an open question within a shared space.     

A Phenomenological Reflection on Kurosawa's Ikiru in Light of the Early Heidegger's Concept of “Distance”

This article focuses on one of Heidegger's early lecture courses, Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle: Initiation into Phenomenological Research, in order to explore his early development of fallenness. Within this lecture it is termed ruinance and at the heart of its development is what Heidegger refers to as distance. The first half of this article is dedicated to examining the concept of distance and to following Heidegger's movement of life towards ruinance through his understanding of distance. Heidegger understands distance as the relationship between life and its possibilities and it is the variances within this relationship that cause for a natural movement towards ruinance and also allow for a return from it. The second half of this article is a phenomenological reflection upon Kurosawa's film Ikiru in light of Heidegger's observation of this movement of life. Ikiru provides a concrete example of a life that has fallen completely and unwittingly into ruinance. Heidegger's understanding of distance, especially as being dynamic, is more readily grasped by observing Mr. Watanabe as he becomes aware of his ruinance and struggles to recover from it. Gaining an understanding of distance as described by Heidegger provides a new way of phenomenologically reflecting upon life and expresses the importance of the subject's self-awareness within experience.     

Loving the World We Are: Anthropology and Relationality in Laudato si’

There is a tension between Laudato si's consistent emphasis on relationships and interconnectedness and its acceptance of anthropocentrism. While Laudato si’ does reject certain problematic forms of anthropocentrism, the encyclical does not assert an alternative to this traditional framework. This article contends that “relatiocentrism” provides the best avenue for developing the convictions expressed within Laudato si’ while moving beyond the limitations of the encyclical itself. In so doing, this essay explores the use of narrative as a means of shaping identity by mapping significant relationships and points of meaning. It examines the central anthropological claims of the encyclical and the tensions these create with anthropocentric narratives. And it examines relatiocentrism in light of the biblical creation accounts, the eschatological perspective of Laudato si’, and virtue ethics. The essay concludes by suggesting further theological and moral implications of this shift in perspective.     

Haugeland's Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Normativity

Abstract: John Haugeland's distinctive approach to Heidegger's ontology rests on taking scientific explanation to be a paradigmatic case of understanding the being of entities. I argue that this paradigm, and the more general account that Haugeland develops from it, misses a crucial component of Heidegger's picture: the dynamic character of being. While this dimension of being first comes to the fore after Being and Time, it should have been present all along. Its absence grounds Heidegger's persistent confusion about whether world is an entity, as well as problems that both Haugeland's Heidegger and Heidegger's Plato run into with the ontological difference. Retrieving the dynamic character of being reveals the proper object of Heidegger's fundamental ontology as well as a distinctive feature of his metaphysics of normativity, which is all but impossible to see if we grasp Heidegger's account through the special case of scientific explanation—at least as usually understood.     

Was Heidegger an Externalist?

To address the question posed in the title, I focus on Heidegger's conception of linguistic communication developed in the sections on Rede and Gerede of Being and Time. On the basis of a detailed analysis of these sections I argue that Heidegger was a social externalist but semantic internalist. To make this claim, however, I first need to clarify some key points that have led critics to assume Heidegger's commitment to social externalism automatically commits him to semantic externalism regarding concept use. I begin by explaining the independence of those positions, arguing that social externalism answers the question of whose concepts in a linguistic community are properly individuated, whereas semantic externalism makes a claim about what it takes for concepts to be properly individuated. Once these issues are distinguished, it is possible to see that Heidegger's intersubjectivist conception of language commits him to social externalism, while his conception of the ontological difference commits him to semantic internalism.     

Heidegger à la Wittgenstein or ‘coping’ with Professor Dreyfus

This is a critique of the interpretation of Heidegger's Being and Time that has been proposed by Hubert Dreyfus. Through an assimilation of much of Heidegger's thought to that of Wittgenstein, Dreyfus treats human being (Dasein) as being principally defined by its embeddedness in ‘shared social practices’ and claims that the mode of comportment he calls ‘coping’ is the source of the intelligibility of our world which he also identifies with being as such. Against this, I argue that unless it is brought into much closer contact with Heidegger's ontological account of the kind of entity Dasein is, ‘coping’ remains an ontic concept that cannot perform the function Dreyfus assigns to it. The thesis that Dasein is distinguished by the fact that it is self‐interpreting is also examined and found wanting for much the same reasons; and Dreyfus's conception of the larger design of Being and Time is shown to be seriously flawed by his failure to do justice to Heidegger's central theme ‐being as presence. In a final section, Heidegger's account of Das Man is reviewed as is Dreyfus's thesis that this anonymous modality of social existence is the master concept for understanding Dasein. This paradoxical magnification of the role of Das Man within human being is shown to fail because it does not distinguish between skills and social norms, and misses the fact that Das Man is a deformation of our social being (Mitsein), not its highest achievement as Dreyfus apparently supposed it to be.     

Situating Martin Heidegger's claim to a “productive dialogue” with Marxism

This critical review aims to more fully situate the claim Martin Heidegger makes in “Letter on Humanism” that a “productive dialogue” between his work and that of Karl Marx is possible. The prompt for this is Paul Laurence Hemming's recently published Heidegger and Marx: A Productive Dialogue over the Language of Humanism which omits to fully account for the historical situation which motivated Heidegger's seemingly positive endorsement of Marxism. This piece will show that there were significant external factors which influenced Heidegger's claim and that, when seen within his broader corpus, these particular comments in “Letter on Humanism” are evidently disingenuous, given that his general opinion of Marxism can only be described as vitriolic. Any attempt to explore how such a “productive dialogue” could be construed must fully contextualise Heidegger's claim for it. This piece will aim to do that, and more broadly explore Heidegger's general opinion of Marxism.     

Concealing and Concealment in Heidegger

The self‐concealing of being is a primary preoccupation of Heidegger's later thought, but neither Heidegger nor his interpreters have made clear precisely what it is. In this paper, I identify the self‐concealing of being as the concealing of the worlding of the world (note: not of the world), which is essential to and simultaneous with that worlding. In order to establish this, I sketch a taxonomy of the various phenomena of concealing and concealment in Heidegger's work by building on Mark Wrathall's four ‘planks’ of unconcealing and concealment. Importantly, I distinguish the procedurally prior concealment (lēthē) that all unconcealing (alētheia) presupposes from the simultaneous concealing (kruptein, kruptesthai) that Heidegger frequently confuses it with. This distinction not only allows us to get clear on what it means to say that being conceals itself but also reveals various confusions and obscurities in Heidegger's own thought as well as in that of his readers.     

The Letter and the Witness: Agamben,Heidegger, and Derrida

In Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben introduces a particular conception of bearing witness to overcome the problems contained in an account of language that depends on the voice or the letter. From his earlier work, it is clear that his critique of the voice and the letter is not only directed to ancient and medieval metaphysics, but also concerns Heidegger's account of the voice and Derrida's account of the letter and writing. Yet, if Agamben is correct in claiming that bearing witness offers an alternative to Heidegger's voice and Derrida's letter, it is remarkable – a fact unnoticed in the available literature – that Agamben does not discuss how these conceptions of the voice and the letter are intrinsically connected to the problem of testimony for Heidegger as well as Derrida. To show how this lack of attention to bearing witness in Heidegger and Derrida affects Agamben's critique, this article proceeds as follows. First, we interpret Agamben's critique of Heidegger's conception of the voice and Derrida's conception of writing in terms of the presuppositional constitution of metaphysics. Second, we describe Agamben's concept of the witness and indicate how it offers an alternative to this presuppositional constitution of metaphysics. Finally, we show which role bearing witness plays in Heidegger's voice and Derrida's letter, and how our analysis presents a more precise version of Agamben's critique.     

Reading from the middle: Heidegger and the narrative self

Heidegger's Being and Time is an underappreciated venue for pursuing work on the role narrative plays in self‐understanding and self‐constitution, and existing work misses Heidegger's most interesting contribution. Implicit in his account of Dasein (an individual human person) is a notion of the narrative self more compelling than those now on offer. Bringing together an adaptive interpretation of Heidegger's notion of “thrown projection”, Wolfgang Iser's account of “the wandering viewpoint”, and more recent Anglo‐American work on the narrative self, I argue that we read our ongoing existences in the same way that, mid‐story, we read a narrative. Reading is a better master metaphor than authorship, narration, plot, or character to guide investigations of narrative's relation to the self. It is not merely a metaphor, however, as the hermeneutic structures involved in interpreting existence and a narrative from the middle are the same.