Heidegger's Descartes and Heidegger's Cartesianism

Abstract: Heidegger's Sein und Zeit (SZ) is commonly viewed as one of the 20^th century's great anti‐Cartesian works, usually because of its attack on the epistemology‐driven dualism and mentalism of modern philosophy of mind or its apparent effort to ‘de‐center the subject’ in order to privilege being or sociality over the individual. Most who stress one or other of these anti‐Cartesian aspects of SZ, however, pay little attention to Heidegger's own direct engagement with Descartes, apart from the compressed discussion in SZ §§19–21. I here show through a careful reading of Heidegger's lectures on Descartes from the years immediately preceding SZ that, while he has sharp criticisms of Descartes and certain ‘Cartesian’ aspects of modern philosophy along the lines commonly recognized, he also aims to disclose what he calls the ‘positive possibilities’ in Descartes and the philosophy he inspired. I detail a number of these and then show that they force us to see Heidegger's own early project as largely unconcerned with dualism and mentalism per se, and much more with questions of the philosophical methodology that gives rise to them. Moreover, I show that a careful reading of Heidegger's treatment of the cogito makes clear that he is no serious way attempting to ‘de‐center the subject’ and that the fundamental question of the ‘analytic of Dasein’ is one that takes Descartes as an immediate jumping off point: how can I articulate what I understand myself to be as the general kind of entity I am, and on what besides me does my being depend?     

Heidegger's Gods

The notorious difficulty of Heidegger's post‐Second World War discussions of ‘the gods’, along with scholarly disagreement about the import of those discussions, renders that body of work an unlikely place to look for a substantive theory of religion. The thesis of this article is that, contrary to these appearances, Heidegger's later works do contain clues for developing such a theory. Heidegger's concerns about the category of ‘religion’ are addressed, and two recent attempts to ‘de‐mythologize’ Heidegger's ‘gods’ are examined and criticized. The paper concludes by outlining four substantial contributions that Heidegger's later work makes to a phenomenological account of religion.     

Heidegger's animals

This paper provides a reading of Heidegger's work on the question of animality. Like the majority of discussions of this topic it utilises the 1929–30 course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, but the analysis seeks to go beyond this course alone in order to look at the figure or figures of animals in Heidegger's work more generally. This broader analysis shows that animals are always figured as lacking: as poor in world, without history, without hands, without dwelling, without space. The article shows how all these claims are grounded upon the most fundamental distinction: that the human is the zoon logon ekhon. In Heidegger's analysis this is not the animal rationale of metaphysical thought, but the living being that has and is held by logos, speech. Looking at how the logos became ratio, the paper notes how the way that animals do not calculate is the sole positive accreditation of animals in Heidegger's work.     

Heidegger's Generative Thesis

Abstract: For William Blattner, Heidegger's phenomenology fails to demonstrate how a nonsuccessive temporal manifold can ‘generate’ the appropriate sequence of world‐time Nows. Without this he cannot explain the ‘derivative’ status of ordinary time. In this article I show that it is only Blattner's reconstruction that makes failure inevitable. Specifically, Blattner is wrong in the way he sets out the explanatory burden, arguing that the structure of world‐time must meet the traditional requirements of ordinary time logic if the derivation is to succeed. He takes this to mean: mundane ‘tasks’, the contents of world‐time nows, must form a transitive series, importing back into world‐time the very structure that Heidegger says is derived by its levelling‐off. I argue, instead, that world‐time nows, seen at the level of lived content, can be quite ‘irrational’ but this is perfectly consistent with the generative thesis. Adapting Blattner's useful suggestion that temporality is sequence building or ‘iterative’ I show that iteration does not manifest itself at the level of tasks but at the ‘existential’ level of my involvement in a task. Depriving that involvement of its expressive content is what accounts for the levelling‐off of the world‐time now and thus the derivation of the ordinary concept of time.     

Heidegger's Nietzsche interpretation

Continental Philosophy Review -     

Authenticity and Heidegger's Antigone

Sophocles' Antigone is the only individual whom Heidegger names as authentic. But the usual interpretations of Heidegger's ‘authenticity’ (as being-towards-death, taking responsibility for norms, world-historical creation, and a neo-Aristotelian phronēsis) either do not apply to Antigone or do not capture what Heidegger finds significant about her. By working through these failures, I develop an interpretation of Heideggerian authenticity that is adequate to his Antigone. The crucial step is accurately identifying the finitude to which Antigone authentically relates: what Heidegger calls ‘uncanniness' (Unheimlichkeit). I argue that uncanniness names being's presencing through self-withdrawal and that Antigone stands authentically towards this in her responsiveness to the call of being and her reticence at the end of explanation. In conclusion, I consider Sophocles' own creative act, which bequeathed to the West an understanding of being and a vision of how to relate to it authentically. I argue that Sophocles' status as a world-historical creator does not provide a competing picture of authenticity but must itself be understood as responsive and reticent.     

Heidegger's Leibniz and abyssal identity

When Heidegger pursues his destructive interpretation of Leibniz's doctrine of judgment, he identifies a principle of abyssal ground and a concealed metaphysics of truth that undermine the priority of logic with respect to ontology. His reading turns on an account of Leibniz's methodological generation of metaphysical principles and the relation between reason and identity, which, I argue, is at once deeply flawed and extremely productive. This essay pursues the implications of Heidegger's quickly abandoned suggestion that Leibniz's principle of identity is reflexively self-grounding, arguing that this claim makes possible a rigorous interpretation of Leibnizian method as an abyssal logic of repetition. I hold that the identification of such a methodology requires a modified account of the metaphysics of truth operative in Leibniz that reinvigorates Heidegger's reading even while moving beyond his now exhausted trope of a hidden presupposition of subjectivity.     

Heidegger's Kantian idealism revisited

I offer a revised interpretation of Heidegger's ‘ontological idealism’ – his thesis that being, but not entities, depends on Dasein – as well as its relationship to Kant's transcendental idealism. I build from my earlier efforts on this topic by modifying them and defending my basic line of interpretation against criticisms advanced by Cerbone, Philipse, and Carman. In essence, my reading of Heidegger goes like this: what it means to say that ‘being’ depends on Dasein is that the criteria and standards that determine what it is to be, and hence whether an item (or anything at all) is, are conceptually interwoven with, and hence conceptually dependent upon, a structure that could not obtain without Dasein (namely, time). For this reason, to ask whether entities (e.g., nature) would exist, even if we (Dasein) did not, is either to ask an empirical question with an obvious negative answer (viz., According to our best current theories, does everything depend causally upon us?), or to ask a meaningless question with no answer (viz., If we suspend or discount the standards and criteria that determine whether anything is, does anything exist?). In short, Heidegger is an empirical realist, but neither a transcendental idealist nor realist.     

Heidegger's Phenomenology as Transcendental Philosophy

In this paper I seek to shed some light on Heidegger's conception of phenomenology, and on the relationship between Heidegger's conception and that of Husserl. In particular, I am concerned to elucidate the sense in which Heidegger's phenomenology can be seen as a species of transcendental philosophy. In the concluding section of the paper I briefly consider the significance of Heidegger's conception of phenomenology for his later philosophy, as represented by 'The Question Concerning Technology'.     

论海德格尔的知觉现象学

本文通过对海德格尔的《现象学的基本问题》一书的解读和分析,阐述了海德格尔知觉现象学的意义和特征。在这本书中,海德格尔借助对康德存在论题（“存在不是一个实在的谓词”）的现象学阐释,表明了对知觉行为进行现象学探究的必要性和可能性,并从两个层面具体阐述了他自己的知觉现象学：一方面,是对知觉行为的现象学描述,指出了知觉行为的意向性特征;另一方面,是阐明了知觉行为的存在论基础,进而突显了知觉现象在此在存在论建制中的地位和功能。     

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.     

Deciphering Heidegger's Connection with the Daodejing

This paper carries out an intensive study of Heidegger's famous reflection on the word dao and of his citations from the Daodejing, with the purpose of elucidating his complex relation with Daoist thinking. First I examine whether dao could be said to be a guideword for Heidegger's path of thinking. Then I discuss Heidegger's citations, in six places of his writings, from five chapters of the Daodejing, by situating them in the immediate textual context as well as against the broad background of the fundamental presuppositions and orientations of Heidegger and Laozi's thinking. My examination of Heidegger's citations from the Daodejing has for the first time gathered together all the relevant materials discovered so far.