In 1929, after rejecting the suggestion that contemporary Christians may be expected to feel "threatened" by Kierkegaard's criticisms, the Protestant theologian Gerhardt Kuhlmann remarks.

"This book provides new interpretations of Heidegger's philosophical method in light of 20th-century postmodernism and 21st-century speculative realism. In doing so, it raises important questions about philosophical method in the age of global warming and climate change. Vincent Blok addresses topics that have yet to be extensively discussed in Heidegger scholarship, including Heidegger's method of questioning, the religious character of Heidegger's philosophical method and Heidegger's conceptualization of philosophical method as explorative confrontation. He is also critical (...) of Heidegger's conceptuality and develops a post-Heideggerian concept of philosophical method, which provides a new perspective on the role of willing, poetry and earth-interest in contemporary philosophy. This earth-interest turns out to be particularly important to consider and leads to critical reflections on Heidegger's concept of Earth, the necessity of Earth-interest in contemporary philosophy and a post-Heideggerian concept of the Earth. Heidegger's Concept of Philosophical Method will be of interest primarily to Heidegger scholars and graduate students, but its discussion of philosophical method and environmental philosophy will also appeal to scholars in other disciplines and areas of philosophy"--. (shrink)

Heidegger’s early project aims to articulate the form of our being as Dasein, and he says that for this usually hidden form to become accessible, a certain kind of “mood” is required of the philosopher. This “ground-mood” he identifies in Sein und Zeit as anxiety. He also, however, presents anxiety as a mood anyone, philosopher or not, experiences when there is some significant breakdown in the living of her life. I argue here that there are largely unrecognized problems with (...) this conflation of methodological and “existential” moods, but that there is nevertheless a compelling methodological account of anxiety that can be teased apart from the existentialist one: methodologically understood, anxiety is a self-affected state of the ontologist, one that results from her asking ontological questions of herself, and, by imagining crisis or breakdown, withdrawing from her determinate situation to a position where she can see the form of her own activity as questioner and imaginer. I draw out some consequences this has for how we should understand the place of ontological understanding in living one’s life, and I conclude by briefly showing how my reading helps us see Heidegger as developing key elements in the work of Descartes and Kant. (shrink)

For your students, celebrating this day is a source of rare and pure joy. The only way we can be adequate to this occasion is to let the gratitude that we owe you become the fundamental mood suffusing everything from beginning to end. In keeping with a beautiful tradition, today on this celebratory occasion we offer you as our gift this slender volume of a few short essays. In no way could this ever be an adequate return for all that (...) you, our teacher, have lavished upon us, and awakened and nourished in us. In the coming days many will try to survey your work in philosophy and to evaluate its impact and effect on various scales. In so doing, they will bring to mind many things that we should not forget. However, that way of parceling out a person's intellectual impact and of calculating the influence of his writings fails to grasp the essential matter for which we owe you our thanks. That essential element will not be found by considering how fruitful your teaching career has been. Surely such effectiveness will continue to be the prerogative and good fortune of every professor as long as German university escapes the doom of getting turned into a mind-numbing trade school. No, the essence of your leadership consists in something else, namely that the content and style of your questioning immediately forces each of us into an intense, critical dialogue, and it demands that we always be ready to reverse or even abandon our position. There is no guarantee, of course, that any of us will find our way to the one thing that, so unpretentously, your work sought to lead us to: that releasement in which one is seasoned and ready for the problems.2 So too the works we present to you are mere witnesses to the fact that we wanted to follow your guidance, not proof that we succeeded in becoming your disciples.3 But there is one thing we will retain as a lasting possession: Each of us who had the privilege of following in your footsteps was confronted by you, our esteemed teacher, with the option either of becoming the steward of essential matters or of working against them. On this celebratory occasion, as we view your philosophical existence in this light, we also acquire secure points of reference for giving a true assessment of the value of your work in philosophy. Does it consist in the fact that some decades ago a new movement emerged in philosophy and gained influence among the then-dominant trends? Or that a new method was added to the list of previous ones? Or that long-forgotten problem-areas got reworked.. (shrink)

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 ', the method of 'bracketing' natural knowledge. In this way, Heidegger's sometimes very severe critique must be understood as an internal critique. (shrink)

Heidegger’s hermeneutic method and his account of pedagogy are useful in teaching students how to think and write. This paper interprets the method of thinking which Martin Heidegger taught to his students and indicates strategies that have been used to introduce that method to New Zealand students in an online course. The method appears to philosophers as a technique of conceptual analysis, although Heidegger may not have agreed with that characterisation or its use in this (...) way. To tertiary teachers it is one framework that they may use to teach a strategy and techniques under the rubric of critical thinking. The use of the method of procedure proposed is well within the capabilities of teachers in practical subjects such as business, management, medicine and law. Students in the author’s business analysis course say that a hermeneutic strategy forces them to struggle, but ultimately they report satisfaction at their increased abilities and believe that they have gained something efficacious. (shrink)

Against the background of a recent exchange between Cristina Lafont and Hubert Dreyfus, I argue that Heidegger's method of ?formal indication? is at the heart of his attempt in Sein und Zeit to answer ?the ontological question of the being of the ?sum?? (SZ, p. 46). This method works reflexively, by picking out certain essential features of one's first-person singular being at the outset of its investigation that are implicit in the question ?what is it to be the (...) entity I am?? On the basis of these features, various further a priori, ontological structures (care and temporality) that constitute one as a first-person singular entity then become accessible. Formal indication is thus formal in two senses: it officially designates or signals certain first-person singular phenomena as the topic of investigation, and it picks out features which define the ontological form of the entity in question. It is thereby the method by which a legitimately transcendental account of our being may be begun to be generated by each of us from out of our factical, immanent existence. (shrink)

This review discusses Vincent Blok’s book Heidegger’s Concept of Philosophical Method. Blok’s daring and important argument is that Heidegger has been misunderstood by contemporary philosophers who dismiss his thinking as correlationism; but that at the same time there lies something at the core of Heidegger’s thinking that prevents it from unleashing its true innovative potential; namely a logic of unity. To move beyond this logic of unity, Blok aims to rediscover and redefine the potential of Heidegger’s (...) philosophical method by characterising it along the lines of interrogative intention and creativity of world-interest. This move allows Blok to think about Earth in the age of global warming in a way that was not possible in Heidegger’s work, providing a positive concept of the Earth’s materiality as uncorrelated being that guides the way to a future environmental ethics. The review discusses the main contributions of the book, and also three criticisms, which concern the justification of choices for certain perspectives, the unfulfilled promise of moving from philosophical theory to more practically oriented guidance, and unclarities concerning the alternative that Blok puts forward as an answer to his criticism of Heidegger’s method. (shrink)

For Heidegger, phenomenological investigation is carried out by formal indication, the name given to the methodical approach he assumes in Being and Time. This paper attempts to draw attention to the nature of formal indication in light of the fact that it has been largely lost upon American scholarship (mainly due to its inconsistent translation). The roots of the concept of formal indication are shown in two ways. First, its thematic treatment in Heidegger's 1921/22 Winter Semester course, Phenomenological Investigations into (...) Aristotle, is examined to make clear what Heidegger silently assumes in Being and Time. Second, Heidegger's adaptation of Husserl's use of the term, indication, is outlined to clarify the concept even more. The enhanced understanding of formal indication granted by these two points leads to a better grasp of Heidegger's concept of truth, for formal indication and truth are mutually implied for Heidegger. Finally, it is suggested that the reader of Being and Time, on the basis of what formal indication demands, approach the work not as a doctrine to be learned but as a task always requiring further completion. (shrink)

Against the consensus that Heidegger reads his own philosophical views into Kant, I argue that Heidegger takes up the main question posed by the first Critique and attempts to identify Kant's best answer to it. Heidegger's method resembles those of Gadamer and Davidson. But by reading the first Critique as offering two conflicting strands of argument, he abandons their aim of maximizing truth, and his theory of error explains why Kant offers the less-promising strand. Heidegger thus provides a distinctive (...) model of charitable, reconstructive interpretation that avoids hermeneutic ventriloquism—a failure to recognize differences of view between interpreter and text. (shrink)

Some eighty years after Husserl’s The Crisis of the European Sciences, yet another crisis looms over Europe. However, this haunting crisis – and one could here question the value of the word ‘crisi...

Blok makes a compelling case for renewed consideration of philosophical method in the pressing context of environmental threats, plunging readers into the depths of Heidegger’s philosophical method...

Heidegger's Eschatology is a ground-breaking account of Heidegger's early engagement with theology, from his beginnings as an anti-Modernist Catholic to his turn towards an undogmatic Protestantism and finally to a resolutely a-theistic philosophical method.

Heidegger has a reputation for reading himself into the philosophers he interprets, and his interpretation of Kant has therefore had little uptake in anglophone Kant scholarship. In this book, Morganna Lambeth provides a new account of Heidegger's method of interpreting Kant, arguing that it is more promising than is typically recognized. On her account, Heidegger thinks that Kant's greatest insights are located in moments of tension, where Kant struggles to articulate something new about his subject-matter. The role of the (...) interpreter, then, is to disentangle competing strands of argument, and to determine which strand is most compelling. Lambeth traces Heidegger's interpretive method across his reading of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and situates Heidegger's reconstruction of Kant's best line of argument against other post-Kantian readings. She finally shows how Heidegger's deep engagement with Kant sheds light on Heidegger's own philosophical views. (shrink)

En este artículo se desarrollan las consideraciones heideggerianas acerca de la corporalidad expuestas en Zollikoner Seminare, atendiendo a la posición fundamental desde la cual estas se despliegan. Se discute acerca de la necesidad, por parte de Heidegger, de abordar el problema del cuerpo vivo al margen de las consideraciones científicas y, por consiguiente, se enfatiza el sentido íntimo de un eventual "6cambio de método" que pareciera conducir la reflexión sobre el cuerpo a la aclaración de su modo de ser propio, (...) con el fin de clarificar cómo es que aquel puede ser entendido como un existencial. The article examines Heidegger´s considerations of corporeality in the Zollikon Seminars, focusing on the fundamental position from which they are made, and discusses Heidegger´s need to address the issue of the living body separately from scientific considerations. Therefore, it emphasizes the profound meaning of a possible "change of method" that seems to lead the reflection on the body toward the clarification of its inherent mode of being, in order to explain how it can be understood as an existential. Neste artigo, desenvolveram-se as considerações heideggerianas sobre a corporalidade expostas em Zollikoner Seminare, atendendo à posição fundamental a partir da qual estas se realizam. Discute-se sobre a necessidade, por parte de Heidegger, de abordar o problema do corpo vivo à margem das considerações científicas e, consequentemente, enfatiza-se o sentido íntimo de uma eventual "mudança de método" que parece conduzir a reflexão sobre o corpo ao esclarecimento de seu modo de ser próprio, com o objetivo de esclarecer como aquele pode ser entendido como um existencial. (shrink)

Heidegger’s thoughts on modern technology have received much attention in many disciplines and fields, but, with a few exceptions, the influence has been sparse in biomedical ethics. The reason for this might be that Heidegger’s position has been misinterpreted as being generally hostile towards modern science and technology, and the fact that Heidegger himself never subjected medical technologies to scrutiny but was concerned rather with industrial technology and information technology. In this paper, Heidegger’s philosophy of modern technology (...) is introduced and then brought to bear on medical technology. Its main relevance for biomedical ethics is found to be that the field needs to focus upon epistemological and ontological questions in the philosophy of medicine related to the structure and goal of medical practice. Heidegger’s philosophy can help us to see how the scientific attitude in medicine must always be balanced by and integrated into a phenomenological way of understanding the life-world concerns of patients. The difference between the scientific and the phenomenological method in medicine is articulated by Heidegger as two different ways of studying the human body: as biological organism and as lived body. Medicine needs to acknowledge the priority of the lived body in addressing health as a way of being-in-the-world and not as the absence of disease only. A critical development of Heidegger’s position can provide us with a criterion for distinguishing the uses of medical technologies that are compatible with such an endeavor from the technological projects that are not. (shrink)

The purpose of the study is to determine the key strategies of philosophical criticism of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, whose achievement is realized in the following tasks: 1) to identify the body of texts that represent the discourse of philosophical criticism of Heidegger notes; 2) to reveal the typological features of the different strategies of interpreting Black Notebooks; 3) to reconstruct a thematic horizon of Heidegger studies, opened up by discussion on published notes. The methodology combines elements of discourse analysis (...) with traditional methods of historical and philosophical criticism. Scientific novelty is expressed in the following: 1) philosophical discourse of the Notebooks’ reception includes texts of narrowly specialized character, as well as reflections of key philosophers 2) basic strategies in philosophical critique of Black Notebooks convey the overall structure of the discourse of interpretation of Heidegger’s legacy, distributed between apologetics and ideological criticism; 3) Black Notebooks have exacerbated the problem of architectonics of Gesammtausgabe and formed the textual basis for the study of "silence" period in philosophical life of Heidegger. Conclusions. The discourse of philosophical critique of Heidegger’s notes proves evidence for ideological charge of philosophizing and justifies socially oriented approaches of historical and philosophical studies examining philosophizing as a special cultural practice, not as a form of sublime creativity. (shrink)

It is argued that, despite the neglect which Heidegger’s writings on science have generally received, the “fundamental ontology” of Being and Time reveals certain structures of experience crucial for our understanding of science; and that, as these insights cast considerable doubt upon the validity of the empiricist/positivist conception of science, Heidegger deserves considerably better treatment as an incipient philosopher of science than has been the case thus far. His arguments for the distortive effects of the alleged “change over” from (...) praxis to theoria, for the circularity of all human understanding (including scientific understanding), for the necessity of interpreting scientific method in terms of the hermeneutic circle, and for viewing scientific “crises” in ontological terms, are examined and evaluated. The article concludes with some reflections on the later Heidegger’s views on the limits of his earlier idea of science. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dialectic as "Philosophical Embarrassment":Heidegger's Critique of Plato's MethodFrancisco Gonzalez (bio)Philosophie ist ein Ringen um die Methode.(GA58, 228)Hans-Georg Gadamer has expressed the following debt to the thought of Martin Heidegger: "The philosophical stimuli I received from Heidegger led me more and more into the realm of dialectic, Plato's as well as Hegel's."1 It is therefore surprising to discover that Heidegger himself did not see his thought as leading him into (...) the realm of dialectic. On the contrary, in Being and Time we find a curt and unexplained dismissal of dialectic, specifically Plato's, as a "genuine philosophical embarrassment" (Verlegenheit).2 This dismissal is repeated in the Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics course of WS 1929/30 where Heidegger asserts that "all dialectic in philosophy," and thus that of Hegel as well as Plato, "is only the expression of an embarrassment."3 Only with the publication of Heidegger's earlier lecture courses from the 1920s, are we in a position to understand and evaluate this surprising dismissal. We are also in a better position to understand why even the later Heidegger failed to reassess his rejection of dialectic, despite the existence of strong incentives for doing so: incentives recognized not only by Heidegger's students but, as will be shown, by Heidegger himself. What will emerge are not only the oft-observed limitations of Heidegger as an interpreter of Plato, but also, and more importantly, their source in certain limitations of Heidegger's own thinking. [End Page 361]1. Heidegger's Critique of Dialectic in the 1920sHeidegger's most detailed account of Plato's dialectic, and thus the one that best explains his curt dismissal of dialectic in later works, is to be found in the Sophist lectures of 1924/25.4 This account begins with a description of the pervasiveness and potential obstructiveness of. Though ordinarily and most immediately pervades all forms of disclosing (GA19, 196), "[a]ccording to its original sense and original facticity, is not at all disclosing (aufdeckend), but is, if one may speak in an extreme way, precisely concealing (verdeckend)" (197).5 In other words, is initially and for the most part "idle talk" (Gerede), the kind of speech that is bandied about concerning anything whatsoever and that "has the facticity of not allowing the things themselves to be seen, but producing instead a self-satisfaction in resting content with what 'one says'" (197). Thus speech at first presents itself as self-sufficient and autonomous; one hangs onto what is said without being directed beyond it to the things themselves.This tendency of to conceal is a theme to which Heidegger returns repeatedly in the courses of the 1920s. In a course from WS 1923/24 he argues that deception has its origin in the very facticity of language.6 In the unpublished course from SS 1924 ("Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie"), the one that immediately preceded the Sophist lectures, Heidegger characterizes language as the proper domain of "Das Man" (18, 22) and describes the dominance of as leading to Gerede (7, 112).7 Heidegger therefore claims that because the Greeks lived in speech they were also imprisoned by it, with the result that a tremendous effort was needed for them to overcome their imprisonment and thus make science possible (41, 106 ).In the Sophist lectures, Heidegger assigns to dialectic an important role in this effort. Given both the pervasiveness and the concealing character of, philosophy, in its attempt to disclose the things themselves, must both begin with and break through it by means of a "speaking for and against" (Für- und Gegensprechen) that destroys the autonomy and self-sufficiency that has in Gerede and in this way "leads more and more to the matter under discussion and lets it be seen" (GA19, 197). What is needed, in short, is dia-lectic: a speaking that passes through speech.Already, however, one can see the tension that characterizes dialectic on Heidegger's account. Though dialectic is a, a speaking, it seeks to be more. Its aim is to disclose the things themselves of which it speaks, to see these things in a "pure seeing" uncontaminated by the... (shrink)

IS research is to some extent driven by practitioner concerns. Both practitioners and.Information Systems research has been dominated by the Cartesian worldview of duality. This has had the effect of narrowing the range of research questions addressed and focusing mainstream research on the application of scientific research methods. Heidegger’s ontology gives us an alternative view of the reality of human life. His analysis of tools in use is of particular interest for IS research. His concept of equipment can be (...) directly applied to Information and Communications Technology by both practitioners and researchers. The paper outlines some of the implications of this step for IS researchers. (shrink)

This paper argues that Heidegger’s ‘history of being’ is a debunking narrative, characterised by both analogies and disanalogies to genealogy, at least in its Nietzschean form. I begin by defining such narratives in terms of non-truth-tropic explanation. In §2, I argue, contra Foucault, that the debate is not best approached via the idea of an “origin” or “Ursprung.” Instead, having flagged some classic features of at least Nietzschean genealogy, I examine two case studies from Heidegger’s ‘history of being’. (...) The first, I argue, is not a debunking history. The second is and its target is ironically Nietzsche himself. I highlight Heidegger’s psychological and epistemic claims, and I draw a comparison with MacIntyre’s discussion of ‘dead-end’ problems. I conclude that Heidegger’s history of being is a debunking history, but not a genealogy, at least in the Nietzschean sense: amongst other things, Heidegger’s method differs in its stance on truth and on the role of polemical writing. (shrink)

Heidegger’s thinking, according to his own testimony, is rooted in two traditions of philosophy: Platonic-Aristotelian ontology and Husserl’s phe­nomenology. Heidegger’s claim that the original understanding of Being is lost and has to be rediscovered conjoins the phenomenological claim that there is a certain mode of seeing that enables a revelatory philosophical insight. I would like to show how Heidegger combines both these claims in his supposition that the original philosophical conceptuality, as developed by Plato and Aristotle, was lost (...) but can be retrieved by means of applying the phenomenological method to the interpretation of texts. Furthermore, I would like to interpret this retrieval in the context of Heidegger’s project of “overcoming metaphysics” and Nietzsche’s suggestion that “Plato was essentially a pantheist, yet in the guise of a dualist”. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger is now widely recognized as the most influential philosopher of the Twentieth Century. Until the late 1960's, this impact derived mainly from his early magnum opus, 1927's Being and Time. Many of this century's most significant Continental thinkers---including Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Arendt, Gadamer, Marcuse, Habermas, Bultmann, and Levinas---acknowledge profound conceptual debts to insights first elaborated in this text. But Being and Time was never finished, and Heidegger continued to extend, develop, and in some places revolutionize his own thinking for (...) another fifty years. This "later" Heidegger's prolific body of work has decisively influenced the next generation of Continental thinkers, shaping the concepts and concerns of important figures such as Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Blanchot, and Baudrillard. Despite this unparalleled impact, several basic aspects of Heidegger's later philosophy remain shrouded in mystery, confusion, and controversy. ;The End of Onto-Theology: Understanding Heidegger's Turn, Method, and Politics explains four central aspects of Heidegger's later thought: his controversial understanding of metaphysics as onto-theology, his famously recondite Kehre, his heretofore overlooked philosophical methodology, and his appalling misadventure with Nazism. ;Chapter I introduces the basic structure and unifying thesis of the text. Chapter II clarifies and periodizes Heidegger's mysterious Kehre or "turn," the philosophical transformation which distinguishes his "early" and "later" work. Chapter III uncovers another sense of Kehre, connecting this "turning" to Heidegger's infamous political misadventure. Chapter IV reconstructs Heidegger's famous Destruktion of the history of metaphysical foundationalism, showing how this "deconstruction" both disabused Heidegger of his own politically disastrous metaphysical ambition to recover a "fundamental ontology" and provides the necessary philosophical background for understanding Heidegger's later philosophy. Chapter V explicates Heidegger's later methodology, "ontohistorical placement through hermeneutic altercation," using the case of Nietzsche to demonstrate how Heidegger developed and deployed this method to situate other philosophers' contributions to the history of intelligibility. Chapter VI addresses the complex intersection of Heidegger's critique of Nietzsche's nihilistic legacy with his failed bid to assume philosophical leadership of the National Socialist "revolution," isolating its philosophical sources and establishing the important philosophical lessons Heidegger learned from his "great political error.". (shrink)

This study reviews the controversy surrounding Dasein’s neutrality in Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. First, I reiterate the problem and examine Derrida’s assertion that the early Heidegger ignored sexual difference as well as how feminist philosophers accepted the case after that. Next, I analyse whether the neutrality of Dasein is justified at the essential and factual levels. I discuss whether (1) phenomenological neutralization is a male-biased outlook and (2) Heidegger’s thoughts according to such method were successful in neutralizing it. (...) With regard to (1), neutralization is not inherently androcentric. To address (2), I first argue that Heidegger’s philosophical project at the time was fundamental ontology, but he completed the task with the development of existential philosophical ideas in terms of the existential analytic. Finally, I demonstrate that the criticism of Heidegger’s covert generalization of masculinity, while almost unfair to fundamental ontological work, makes limited sense to existential philosophical work. (shrink)

Em primeiro lugar, (1) examinarei a chamada Destruktion fenomenológica da ontologia medieval, componente básico do método a partir da história da ontologia. Nessa seção, coloco algumas questões sobre a apropriação da Idade Média com base na escolástica tardia, como se esta fosse o "cume" das reflexões precedentes! Em segundo lugar, (2) apresento a reflexão de próprio Heidegger sobre a ontologia medieval tal como se expõe no curso de semestre de verão de 1927 ("Os problemas fundamentais da fenomenologia"), ministrado na Universidade (...) de Marburg. Igualmente nessa parte, faço algumas reflexões críticas sobre a leitura heideggeriana dos medievais, que se presta muito mais para conhecer o próprio modo de pensar de Heidegger do que os medievais em si mesmos, ou seja, pela leitura cursiva dos textos em seu contexto histórico e cultural: sem o élan espiritual, consubstancial aos escritos de Tomás de Aquino, por exemplo, a organização conceitual deste último não pareceria um sistema assaz grandioso e seco? Esta não terá sido a compreensão de Heidegger, fruto da separação metodológica feita entre mística medieval e filosofia escolástica desde o curso não proferido intitulado "Fundamentos filosóficos da Mística Medieval" (1918-1919)? First, I will examine the so-called phenomenological Destruktion of medieval ontology, a basic component of the method of the history of ontology. In this section I put forth some questions regarding the appropriation of the Middle Ages by late scholasticism, which supposed itself the apex of preceding reflections. Secondly, I present Heidegger's own reflections on medieval ontology as presented in his course of the summer semester of 1927 ("The fundamental problems of phenomenology") taught at the University of Marburg. In this part I also make some critical reflections on Heidegger's reading of the medieval philosophers, which lends itself more to understanding Heidegger's way of thinking than that of the medievals themselves (i.e. as read in their historical and cultural context). Without spiritual élan, consubstantial with the writings of Thomas Aquinas, for example, would not the conceptual organization of Aquinas' system seem rather grandiose and dry? Would not this have been Heidegger's understanding, which was the result of a methodological separation made between medieval mysticism and Scholastic philosophy ever since his undelivered course entitled "Philosophical Foundations of Medieval Mysticism" (1918-1919)? (shrink)

Heidegger through Hegel's "Phenomenology of Mind" from the absolute beginning and returns the absolute prerequisite for the analysis, while abandoning Hegel skillfully expounded his own view of hermeneutics, in particular related to the limited and infinite nature of the relationship, the meaning of existence and there are other issues, for we understand the "Phenomenology of Mind", to understand Heidegger's own thinking and in philosophical method, as well as between the two thinkers and critical internal succession relations are very instructive.

Does the recent publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks require a re-evaluation of his thought? In the present text we will deal with this question and reach the conclusion that a change of theoretical perspective on Heidegger’s work is indeed justified. The franker and less cautious style of the Black Notebooks puts in the foreground stances that were already known, but were previously relegated to the background: it becomes possible thereby to establish that Heidegger’s philosophical views host a (...) significant lot of unwarranted prejudices, which are incorporated in his picture of the ‘history of being’. We argue that in his process of radical questioning Heidegger progressively drops all available rational methods and epistemic criteria, and that this paves the way to the unwitting reception of personal prejudices in his theoretical frame: Heidegger knowingly abandons all the theoretical instruments that could enable him to discriminate between deeply felt prejudices and proper philosophical intuitions. We conclude our analysis by proposing some criticisms that should be acceptable also to scholars sympathetic with Heidegger’s thought. Heidegger’s vindication of an ‘erratic’ way of thinking, where the journey is more qualifying than the result, turns out to be incompatible with the assertiveness of the many unjustified claims disseminated across the Black Notebooks. Moreover, Heidegger wants to show the narrowness of an overwhelmingly dialectical and argumentative attitude, while his late style of thinking unwittingly discredits an alternative philosophical style, that widely appeals to a ‘principle of charity’ in the collaboration between author and reader. (shrink)

What is the philosophical significance of Heidegger’s interpretation of the Japanese notion of kotoba (言葉) for Japanese philosophy? Was his conversation with Tezuka Tomio a real dialogue or not? To answer to these correlated questions, I elucidate Heidegger’s 1954 essay “A Dialogue on Language” by following a topological mode of thinking, and I inquire into the way-making of a “thinking conversation”. First, I problematize whether Heidegger engaged in a genuine dialogue with Tezuka. To that end, I distinguish the (...) hermeneutic horizon of the actual encounter between Tezuka and Heidegger from Heidegger’s essay which places Tezuka (the Japanese) and Heidegger (the Inquirer) in a fictional philosophical conversation. Second, I argue that Heidegger’s topological method of interpretating kotoba can be read as a poetic means of thematizing East-West dialogue. Third and finally, exploring the topological sense of kotoba, I engage with third generation Kyoto School thinker Ueda Shizuteru’sideaof“hollow words” of language, situated in a twofold view of the world. I conclude that the true character of Heidegger’s conversation with Tezuka can be identified neither in Heidegger’s “actual” encounter with Tezuka, nor merely in Heidegger’s “hollow” essay. Departing from Ueda’s account of kotoba, it appears that a genuine conversation with language can be located in the dialogue of actuality and hollowness, which finds it expression in poetic language. (shrink)

Translation is an early and ongoing, but as yet for the most part unexamined, theme of Heidegger's lecture courses and essays. According to Heidegger, translation became a central philosophical issue in the Western tradition soon after its beginnings when a number of the basic words of the early Greek thinkers were sometimes mistranslated into Latin and that, as a result, the thought of the pre-Socratics and the classic Greek philosophers, especially Aristotle, has remained obscure. ;For Heidegger, because of the relation (...) between thinking and translating, and the relation of both to language, it is not a thinker's words, but rather the translator's thought, that is translated when he attempts to render a text in his own native language. The resulting text is a recomposition of the original text, not the exchange of words between the vocabularies of two natural languages. Translation also goes on within the same language whenever one speaks and writes. ;I first present the principles of Heidegger's philosophy of translation and present them as ontological, hermeneutic and methodological elements. Next, I examine Heidegger's rendering of Parmenides' Fragment VI as an example of his method of paratactic translation, in which each word of an utterance, rather than the syntactic ensemble, initially guides the rendering. Finally, I apply Heidegger' s own principles to a translation of Was ist Metaphysik? and argue on philosophical grounds for new renderings of Heidegger's basic words, including Sein, Seiende, Dasein and Existenz. I also explore the relation of Heidegger's view of translation to the question about the meaning of Sein and the relation of Sein and thinking. ;Heidegger's hermeneutics complements interpretation theory since Schleiermacher, but in suggesting that thinking does not occur in words, Heidegger also challenges that view. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education When reliability and validity were introduced as validation criteria for empirical research in the human sciences, quantitative research methods prevailed, and theory of science relied on neopositivism (Vienna Circle) or postpositivism (scientific realism). Within this worldview, notions of reliability and validity as criteria of scientific goodness were introduced. Reliability and validity were associated with the correspondence theory of truth, which is mostly ill-suited to the needs of qualitative research. For that reason, qualitative research must look (...) for other kinds of validation criteria. The article elaborates the problems arising when the correspondence theory of truth is used as an ultimate criterion in evaluating qualitative research and proposes Heidegger's hermeneutical or alethetical idea of truth as a more suitable approach. (shrink)

This study interprets the movement of Heidegger's famous "turn" through an analysis of his critique of Kant, Schelling, and Hegel in the period spanning roughly 1925 to 1936. Heidegger's "turn" sought to overcome the traditional metaphysical conception of being that had come to absolute expression through Hegel's method of dialectical reflection. Heidegger was successful to the extent that he provided the final "con-text" of being as a discourse that both frames the historical "text" of being and permeates it, allowing (...) the coherence of that text to appear in a new light. Heidegger's interpretation of the original sense of time as temporality opposed the latent dogmatism in Kant's critique of reason by shifting the locus of unity in experience away from the spontaneity of the self toward an intuitional transcending of the self as "being-in-the-world." This pointed Heidegger toward a novel revelatory conception of freedom as "letting being be," which he posed as an alternative to the absolutizing of subjectivity that took place in German idealism. Heidegger used Schellings anti-Hegelian conception of the origination of freedom from nature to clarify the meaning of Hegel's key metaphysical notion of reflection. In so doing he developed an alternative interpretation of the "nothing," in contrast to Hegel's method of double negation, that set the meaning of negation into a greater contextual perspective. Heidegger's goal of uncovering the meaning and possibility of reflection as the original possibility of evil led him to a qualified retrieval of his early Roman Catholic orientation to thinking. Transforming these paradigms into a new deconstructive discourse, Heidegger advanced beyond Schellings critique of Hegel, allowing him to establish a hermeneutical relationship with Hegel's system that simultaneously confronts and preserves it. Heidegger's early phenomenological interpretation of Pauline eschatology and Augustinian original sin thus, finally situates his interpretation of the "nothing" as the abyss of being retrieved from the primal Greek conception of nature . Heidegger thereby provides the ultimate "con-text" of metaphysics in its necessary and reciprocal relation to Hegel's conception of presence as an all-encompassing, "self-absolving" system. (shrink)

Introduction to Phenomenological Research, volume 17 of Martin Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe, contains his first lectures given at Marburg in the winter semester of 1923–1924. In these lectures, Heidegger introduces the notion of phenomenology by tracing it back to Aristotle’s treatments of phainomenon and logos. This extensive commentary on Aristotle is an important addition to Heidegger’s ongoing interpretations which accompany his thinking during the period leading up to Being and Time. Additionally, these lectures develop critical differences between Heidegger’s phenomenology (...) and that of Descartes and Husserl and elaborate questions of facticity, everydayness, and flight from existence that are central in his later work. Here, Heidegger dismantles the history of ontology and charts a new course for phenomenology by defining and distinguishing his own methods. (shrink)

The article defends Heidegger’s view that the main question of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is the question of being. It is also argued that Heidegger special understanding of the level and method of KrV deserves serious attention. Finally it is argued that Heidegger’s phenomenological reading of the KrV is best seen as representative of an hermeneutical conception of phenomenology.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:P. Christopher Smith HEIDEGGER'S MISINTERPRETATION OF RILKE Certainly one of Heidegger's most important accomplishments is to have reminded us of the original unity of poetry and philosophy. The "metaphysical" philosophy which Heidegger calls into question is characterized by its sharp separation of itself from what it calls "unscientific" modes of discourse. But that, Heidegger shows, is a limitation which comes from its narrowed conception of itself as strict, methodical (...) science, and one need only turn to Parmenides before the tradition of metaphysics or Nietzsche at the end of that tradition to see that in fact Heidegger is right: philosophy and poetry are not necessarily to be dissociated. Indeed, the former can and should grow out of the soil of the latter. The point here is one which Heidegger might be said to have learned by experience: he found that the poetry of Hölderlin opened a way for philosophy out of the cul de sac into which phenomenological science had led it. And of course not only Hölderlin: Rilke was obviously important too. In fact to some, myself included, it seems that certainly as much as Hölderlin and perhaps even more, Rilke is the poet who displays the pre-metaphysical unity of poetry and philosophy. But that is not how Heidegger views Rilke. In respect to its philosophical value, Rilke's poetry, we are told, is inferior to Hölderlin's. There is, I suggest, a most puzzling blend of attraction and suspicion in Heidegger's interpretation of Rilke. On the one hand, Heidegger, perhaps better than anyone, is able to make clear the philosophical importance of Rilke's poetry and yet, having done that and having shown thereby the greatest sympathy for Rilke's thought, Heidegger goes on to portray Rilke as "metaphysical" and to claim for that reason that he is not the poet Hölderlin is. Is that assessment valid? And how did Heidegger arrive at it? It is to these questions that the following study is addressed. On my reading of "Wozu Dichter"1 the charge that Rilke persists in "metaphysical" thought has three dimensions. To begin with, the overriding consideration in the whole of the essay is that, like all "metaphysicians," Rilke is oblivious to the Being event. There are in 4 Philosophy and Literature turn two consequences which follow from that obliviousness: first, Rilke grounds all of what is in some highest existent, namely nature taken as will, and second, in turning inwards to consciousness he re-presents the original presencing of existents. The theme of grounding in a highest existent is worked out from page 256 (p. 100) to page 281 (p. 126) and that of the re-presentation in consciousness, from page 281 (p. 126) to page 294 (p. 141). It will become evident, I think, that the discussions of two other apparently separate questions, that of the Open and that of saying and singing, fit respectively into each of these major sections of the essay. Let us now consider the aspects of the charge that Rilke is "metaphysical" one by one. Just what does obliviousness to Being mean? It means obliviousness to the clearing or lighting {Lichtung). Heidegger, it must be kept in mind, distinguishes between what is and the event in which what is comes to be displayed as such. He refers to the event itself as the lighting and it is only in the light of the lighting, he tells us, that what is can be. Obliviousness to Being is obliviousness, not to some highest existent or even to the whole of beings, but to the Being event, to the lighting. "Metaphysics," in seeking the ontos on, the being which in being most truly underlies all other existents, forgets the event in which any being, even the highest, comes to be. Consequently, instead of experiencing temporal presencing, arising out of non-presence, das Nichts, "metaphysics" reduces anything which comes to be to something which always is in steady presence. Obliviousness to Being is, if seen in this way, obliviousness to the nicht-ist, das Nichts from which any ist originates. That shows up in Rilke in that for him beings are not "dissolved in void... (shrink)

The question addressed in this article is to what extent a destructed concept of religion can be said to characterize the philosophical method of Martin Heidegger. In order to approach this question, we first characterize his method as “Vollzug der Fraglichkeit”: philosophy in its deepest sense does not mean to give answers to questions but to ask questions. According to Heidegger, the execution of questioning consists in the “transforming repetition” of the leading question of philosophy in order to (...) ask the basic question of philosophy. In the second part of the article, we reflect on the “religious” character of Heidegger’s method of questioning. The reflection makes use of different etymological derivations of the word ‘Religion’: relegere, re-eligere, religare, relinquere. In the third part of the article, we discuss what Heidegger’s “religious” method of philosophy means for present questions concerning religion. To that end, we finish with a confrontation between Heidegger and Derrida with respect to the “religious” method of philosophy. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

It is a study of the phenomenological philosophies of Husserl and Heidegger. Through a critical discussion including practically all previously published English and German literature on the subject, the aim is to present a thorough and evenhanded account of the relation between the two. The book provides a detailed presentation of their respective projects and methods, and examines several of their key phenomenological analyses, centering on the phenomenon of being-in-the-world. It offers new perspectives on Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology, e.g. concerning (...) the importance of Husserl's phenomenology of the body, the relationship between the Husserlian concept of "constitution" and Heidegger's notion of "transcendence", as well as in its argument that "being" designates the central phenomenon for both phenomenologists. Though the study sacrifices nothing in terms of argumentative rigor or interpretative detail, it is written in such a way as to be accessible and rewarding to non-specialists and specialists alike. (shrink)

Heidegger scholarship has done an admirable job accounting for Luther’s influence on key Heideggerian concepts such as his method of destruction and anxiety. Yet given Heidegger’s statements concerning Luther’s immense personal and philosophical importance, it is likely that Luther’s influence extends further and deeper than might first appear. I argue that this influence also manifests in Heidegger’s concept of authentic existence. In particular, I argue that Luther’s understanding of Christian freedom and servitude form ontic material from which (...) Heidegger draws to come to his general ontological understanding of Dasein’s freedom as power over its existence and servitude to its communal involvements. As Luther understands the freedom of a Christian, everything comes to aid the Christian in salvation, much like Dasein gains power over its existential possibilities in coming to authenticity. Yet this newly created freedom also creates additional ontological or existential connections with one’s community. The consequence of such connections is the addition of new responsibilities, or form of servitude, to one’s community wherein one aids others in coming to faith or authenticity, respectively. (shrink)

All of these studies attempt to give some insight into the basic thrusts of Heidegger's thinking, and one can learn a great deal from each of them. I propose to approach this diverse set of studies somewhat indirectly by considering Heidegger's methodological reflections in some detail and trying to assess the works under discussion in terms of the light they shed upon these considerations. A partial justification for this procedure can be found in Heidegger's insistence that a proper understanding of (...) method, a "learning how to think," is what is most crucial to his enterprise. For purposes of order and clarity my remarks will be divided into three major sections. In the first I want to consider in some detail the phenomenological method as practiced at least by the Heidegger of Sein und Zeit. On the basis of this it will be possible to reflect in the second section upon a few of the problems surrounding the controversial Kehre in Heidegger's thought. In the third section I want to discuss some of the distinctive virtues and vices of the various studies, their points of agreement and disagreement and their convincingness as accounts of Heidegger's thought. A fourth and final section will reflect ever so briefly on Heidegger interpretation, authenticity, and the problems of rapprochment. (shrink)

In my review, I analyze the main points of Shawn Loht’s book “Phenomenology of Film: A Heideggerian Account of the Film Experience” (2017), in which the author makes not only an attempt to develop the phenomenology of cinema, but also to substantiate it as a kind of philosophy—philosophy through watching a movie. The content of the book can be reduced to three major components: 1) clarifying M. Heidegger’s attitude to cinema and evaluating the contribution of his philosophy to the (...) analysis of cinema; 2) revealing cinema viewing as one of the ways of human existence; 3) substantiating cinema art as revealing the truth of being. To implement these tasks, Sh. Loht develops the phenomenology of cinema as a kind of cinema philosophy. Despite the fact that Heidegger expressed his negative attitude towards cinema and photography in his work “Time of the World Picture,” since they serve to technically represent the world, turn it into a picture and strengthen the position of a person as a representative subject, Loht substantiates the understanding of cinema as an artistic creation, which, according to Heidegger’s philosophy of art, reveals the truth of being. Using such concepts of Heidegger’s presence analytics as being-in-the-world, project, understanding, disposition, interpretation, speech, S. Loht describes the motion picture as a thing in the world that Dasein encounters, and the cinematic experience as a way of human existence. The author understands phenomenology as a method that focuses on phenomena as a person experiences them. Loht concludes that movies are fundamentally phenomenological. The subject of the phenomenology of cinema is the space between the viewer and the screen, the discovery and understanding that the viewer produces. The phenomenology of cinema is the phenomenology of the presence of the moviegoer. The core question is, is it possible to philosophize with the help of cinema? Loht answers in the affirmative, but this philosophizing will be phenomenology. The viewer philosophizes while watching the film, which is based on the self-understanding of the presence, the philosophical reflections of the viewer are caused by the film. (shrink)

This paper attempts to shed light on Heidegger’s critical appropriation of Husserl’s phenomenology. It begins by reviewing Heidegger’s basic criticisms of Husserl’s philosophical approach as well as his ambivalence towards it, an ambivalence that raises the question of whether Heidegger shares Husserl’s idealist trajectory. The paper then examines how Heidegger appropriates what he regards as two of Husserl’s “decisive discoveries,” namely, Husserl’s accounts of intentionality and categorial intuitions. Regarding the first discovery, the paper demonstrates how Heidegger tweaks the (...) method of phenomenological reduction for the purpose of describing intentional experience in terms of being-in-the-world. As for the second discovery, the paper shows how Heidegger adapts the basic sense of categorial intuitions, both pre-thematically and thematically, into his existential analysis. In conclusion, the paper discusses how the role of horizons in Heidegger’s analysis of temporality provides him with firm reasons to resist an idealist interpretation of phenomenology. (shrink)

In this article, I present John Russon’s phenomenological method of authorless description. I trace this method to Russon’s engagement with Aristotle, Hegel, and Heidegger. Speci????ically, I claim that he is informed by Aristotle’s practice of accounting for appearances, Hegel’s method of presuppositionless science, and Heidegger’s project of preparation to “let being be.” I apply this to Russon’s book, Sites of Exposure, and his account of both the human need to transcend the home towards an open-ended realm (...) of indifference and the concrete development of the conditions in which that is made possible in what we call the modern world. I present his account of the emergence of representative democracy, modern science, and glob-al capitalism. I argue that Russon’s method provides essential tools for understanding the promises and failures of what we call the modern world and the imperative of openness that ought to guide us in striving to address those failures. (shrink)

Heidegger’s 1927 call to provide “a special hermeneutic of empathy” is linked with his later commitment at the Zollikon Seminars to engage explicitly with issues in psychodynamic therapy with psychiatrists. The task of providing a special hermeneutic of empathy is one that Heidegger assigns in Being and Time, but on which he does not deliver. Inspired by the assignment, this article applies the distinctions of Heidegger’s Daseinanalysis to human interrelations. This article generates a Heideggerian account of empathy as (...) a multi-dimensional process that delimits and illuminates the field of possibilities of authentic human relationships. The multiple dimensions of empathy include affectedness (Befindlichkeit), understanding of possibility, interpretation, and speech, the latter including listening. The result is a reconstruction of a Heideggerian account of empathic human relations in the sense that it goes beyond what Heidegger explicitly says to what the Heideggerian method of inquiry can contribute to understanding and implementing the process of empathy. In particular, a two-by-two matrix is built and engaged in detail, cross referencing the four possibilities of authentic and inauthentic relationships with the individual and the other. A specifically Heideggerian analysis of the multi-dimensional process of empathy is the result. The clinical relevance of Heidegger’s work is made explicit as empathy is positioned as the foundation of clinical practice as exemplified in psychodynamic psychotherapy. (shrink)