Heidegger on Animality and Anthropocentrism

Throughout his writings, Heidegger's view of animals is ostensibly anthropocentric, defining them as deficient in relation to human beings. His most extensive analysis of animality, found in the 1929–1930 lecture course entitled The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, seems to be a clear example of this anthropocentrism, defining the animal as poor in world in opposition to the human being's world-forming character. Nevertheless, Heidegger is explicitly ambivalent regarding the anthropocentric implications of this conception of animality. This paper examines Heidegger's articulation of the notion of world-poverty as a distinct form of negativity, its implications for the question concerning Heidegger's anthropocentrism, as well as his ambivalence with regard to this question.     

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.     

The Birth of Being and Time: Heidegger's Pivotal 1921 Reading of Aristotle's On the Soul

During the 1920s Heidegger gave no less than twelve seminars and lecture courses devoted either exclusively or in large part to the reading of Aristotle's texts. Seven of these, especially the smaller seminars for advanced students, have not been published and apparently will never be included in the Gesamtausgabe . My focus here is on the very first of these. Billed as a reading of Aristotle's De Anima , much of it was devoted to Aristotle's Metaphysics . This decision not to separate Aristotle's “psychology” from his “ontology” is a key move of the seminar that anticipates the project of Being and Time . This and many other ways in which Heidegger's early reading of De Anima anticipates the key moves of the later book constitute one of the reasons for its importance. Another is that the seminar allows us to see what gets suppressed in Heidegger's reading of Aristotle, most significantly, the phenomenon of life itself in favor of an eventual focus on the being of human life or Dasein. This early seminar thus enables us not only to better understand Heidegger's project, but also to raise some fundamental questions concerning it.     

Heidegger on Plato,truth, and unconcealment: The 1931–32 lecture on The Essence of Truth

This paper discusses Heidegger's 1931–32 lecture course on The Essence of Truth. It argues that Heidegger read Platonic ideas, not only as stage‐setting for the western philosophical tradition's privileging of conceptualization over practice, and its correlative treatment of truth as correctness, but also as an early attempt to work through truth as the fundamental experience of unhiddenness. Wrathall shows how several of Heidegger's more‐famous claims about truth, e.g. that propositional truth is grounded in truth as world‐disclosure, and including Heidegger's critique of the self‐evidence of truth as correspondence, are first revealed in a powerful (if iconoclastic) reading of Plato.     

The Nothing and the Ontological Difference in Heidegger's What is Metaphysics?

This essay gives an interpretation of Heidegger's “What is Metaphysics?” lecture in light of passages from his other writings and lecture courses of the period. This exegetical task is important, for interpreters of “What is Metaphysics?” have been confused by puzzling phrases in the lecture without noticing that Heidegger makes the same points in clearer terms elsewhere. In particular, these interpreters ignore Heidegger's crucial distinction between entities and the being of entities. Since Heidegger's “nothing” is an aspect of being, this difference is at the core of Heidegger's lecture. The present interpretation establishes a conditional conclusion: If the ontological difference makes sense, then we have a sound basis for understanding “What is Metaphysics?” and do not need to read Heidegger as an irrationalist who debunks science or rejects the principle of contradiction. This paper does not give independent justification for the ontological difference.     

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.     

Meaning and Significant Intention in G. Ryle's Logical Thought

In spite of the prima facie differences between Spinoza and Heidegger, I argue that Heidegger's views in his 1929 lecture. Was ist Metaphysik?, are both consistent with, and supplemental to, the basic premise of Spinoza's ontological argument in Part One of his Ethics. According to this view, being held out into the nothing, in Heidegger's sense, is a condition without which substance can not be adequately conceived, while at the same time, being held out into the nothing does not preclude the possibility that substance, defined as an infinite being without negation, does exist.     

Heidegger's Early Critique of Husserl

This paper examines Heidegger's critique of Husserl in its earliest extant formulation, viz. the lecture courses Ontologie from 1923 and Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung from 1923/4. Commentators frequently ignore these lectures, but I try to show that a study of them can reveal both the extent to which Heidegger remains committed to phenomenological research in something like its Husserlian form, and when and why Heidegger must part with Husserl. More specifically, I claim that Heidegger rightly criticizes Husserl's account of 'equipmental objects', and that he is especially unsatisfied with the terminology in which Husserl presents his phenomenological analyses, not only of 'equipment', but of other types of entities as well. However, it will also emerge that Heidegger's own phenomenological work presupposes the performance of what Husserl calls the 'epoch 7 ', the method of 'bracketing' natural knowledge. In this way, Heidegger's sometimes very severe critique must be understood as an internal critique.     

Heidegger: The Role of Logic in his Thought

Since his inaugural lecture at Freiburg in 1929 in which Heidegger delivered his most celebrated salvo against logic, he has frequently been portrayed as an anti-logician, a classic example of the obscurity resultant upon a rejection of the discipline of logic, a champion of the irrational, and a variety of similar things. Because many of Heidegger's statements on logic are polemical in tone, there has been no little misundersanding of his position in regard to logic, and a great deal of distortion of it. All too frequently the position which is attacked as Heidegger's is a barely recognizable caricature of it. We shall, therefore, attempt to determine precisely what Heidegger understands by logic. When he “attacks” logic, as he did in the inaugural lecture, as well as in many other of his writings, what “logic” is he attacking? The word “logic” is, after all, placed in quotation marks which would seem to indicate some special sense. This paper will argue that if one takes logic as it has traditionally been understood and practiced that one is forced to the conclusion that it is incompatible with Heidegger's “way of thought” (Denkweg). This rejection of logic, however, does not deliver him up to irrationalism or the enthronement of blind instinct in place of reason, as some of his critics have charged. Neither is it a self-indulgent refusal to achieve clarity and precision which ends in a kind of mystical pseudo-poetry. Rather, it will be argued, it represents a quite valid, and indeed rich, approach to Being, though certainly not a “logical” one in the traditional sense.     

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 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.     

Martin Heidegger's principle of identity: On belonging and Ereignis

This article discusses Martin Heidegger's interpretation of Parmenides given in his last public lecture “The Principle of Identity” in 1957. The aim of the piece is to illustrate just how original and significant Heidegger's reading of Parmenides and the principle of identity is, within the history of philosophy. Thus the article will examine the traditional metaphysical interpretation of Parmenides, and consider G. W. F. Hegel and William James’ account of the principle of identity in light of this. It will then consider Heidegger's contribution, his return to and re-interpretation of Parmenides in his last lecture. Heidegger will, through the Parmenidean claim that “Thinking and Being are one”, deconstruct the traditional metaphysical understanding of the principle of identity, and in its place offer a radically different conception of how our relationship, our “belonging together” with Being can be understood.     

The Wonder and Spirit of Phenomenology and Theology: Rubenstein and Derrida on Heidegger's Formal Distinction of Philosophy from Theology

While Heidegger's earlier phenomenological writings inform much contemporary discourse in the continental philosophy of religion, his 1927 essay on ‘Phenomenology and Theology’ offers a largely uncontested distinction between philosophy and theology on the basis of their possibilities as sciences following ontological difference. This paper reconsiders Heidegger's distinction by invoking spirit and wonder, concepts Jacques Derrida and Mary‐Jane Rubenstein have more recently emphasized as central to thought that is open to that which ruptures metaphysical schemas. I contend Heidegger's use of ontological difference as a formal distinction between philosophy and theology distances us from the wonder, spirit, and truth (alētheia) that undoes the binaries behind which we take shelter. However, I temper this critique with the recognition that Heidegger, Derrida, and Rubenstein equally recognize an inescapable repetition of metaphysical thinking in the philosophy of religion.     

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.     

You can't get something for nothing: Kierkegaard and Heidegger on how not to overcome Nihilism 1

This paper analyzes Kierkegaard's Religiousness A sphere of existence, presented in his edifying works, and Heidegger's concept of authenticity, proposed in Being and Time, as responses to modern nihilism. While Kierkegaard argues that Religiousness A is an unsuccessful response to modern nihilism, Heidegger claims that authenticity, a secularized version of Religiousness A, is a successful response. We argue that Heidegger's secularization of Religiousness A is incomplete and unsuccessful, that Heidegger's later work offers a reconsideration of the problem of modern nihilism, and that later Heidegger suggests a way out of nihilism which is compatible with Kierkegaard's Religiousness B sphere of existence.     

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.     

Speaking out of Turn: Martin Heidegger and die Kehre

' Speaking out of Turn : Martin Heidegger and die Kehre ' examines the difference between Heidegger's own understanding of 'the turning' and that understanding which originated with Karl Lowith and was later presented to English-speaking readers by William Richardson in Martin Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought . The study focuses on Heidegger's own introduction to Richardson's book, and argues that, far from confirming Richardson's view that there is a 'Heidegger I' and 'Heidegger II' connected by the 'reversal' or turning, Heidegger sought to indicate with (sometimes indirect) reference to his own works that the 'turning' is a movement in thought that it was part of the original project of Being and Time to carry through, but which he only succeeded in describing much later. The study attempts to illustrate this by a close examination of the works to which Heidegger alludes in his Foreword to Richardson's book. Many of these were not available when Richardson published (1963), and so it has only more recently been possible to amplify Heidegger's earlier published works with reference to his lecture courses. The study concludes that the horizon of time and the analytic of Dasein never really disappear from his later thinking, as many have claimed, and proposes that the relationship between the earlier and later Heidegger be re-examined. This re-examination takes the form of accepting that far from the 'turning' representing a fracture, where Heidegger abandons the existential-temporal analytic of Dasein in favour of an attempt to think only being ( das Sein ) as such, the 'turning' represents the point of unity in Heidegger's work. This point of unity shows how Dasein and being 'belong together' in 'the event' ( das Ereignis ).     

Overturning Cartesianism and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion: Rethinking Dreyfus on Heidegger

This essay critically engages Dreyfus's widely read interpretation of Heidegger's Being and Time . It argues that Dreyfus's reading is rooted in two primary claims or interpretative principles. The first - the Cartesianism thesis - indicates that Heidegger's objective in Being and Time is to overturn Cartesianism. The second - the hermeneutics of suspicion thesis - claims that Division II is supposed to suspect and throw into question the results of the Division I analysis. These theses contribute to the view that there are two conflicting accounts of inauthenticity that threaten the coherence of Heidegger's notion of authenticity. This view concerning authenticity is mistaken, as are the two theses that support it. The first thesis is incorrect because Heidegger's explicit aim is to investigate the question of the meaning of being not to overturn Cartesianism. The second is incorrect because the analyses of Division I describe the structures of everyday human existence in preparation for a closer examination in Division II of what makes them possible. Division II does not undercut Division I; it carries the analysis deeper. Authenticity, then, is not a negation of everydayness; it is a deepening of the self-understanding expressed in everydayness.     

Relationality and Commitment: Ethics and Ontology in Heidegger's Aristotle

This article discusses the tension between social relationality and self-relationality central to Heidegger's ontology of Dasein and the possible ways of reconciling this tension. Arguing that this is a tension between communicability and existential commitments, the article poses the question: How are existential commitments responsive to communication? After problematizing the quasi-Kantian and communitarian ways of settling the tension, the article uses Heidegger's early reading of Aristotle to develop a third hermeneutic model of ethical relationality according to which existential commitments are shareable in communication, since ethos – the existential posture towards the good – arises out of pathos that exposes Dasein to coexistence. The account of ethical relationality found in Heidegger's interpretation of Aristotle thus takes the world to be a shared and dynamic ontological condition and emphasize that the world constitutes selfhood in a way that is constantly at stake in ethical communication.     

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.