According to Heidegger's Being and Time, social relations are constitutive of the core features of human agency. On this view, which I call a ‘strong conception’ of sociality, the core features of human agency cannot obtain in an individual subject independently of social relations to others. I explain the strong conception of sociality captured by Heidegger's underdeveloped notion of ‘being-with’ by reconstructing Heidegger's critique of the ‘weak conception’ of sociality characteristic of Kant's theory of agency. According to a weak conception, (...) sociality is a mere aggregation of individual subjects and the core features of human agency are built into each individual mind. The weak conception of sociality remains today widely taken for granted. I show that Christine Korsgaard, one of the most creative contemporary appropriators of Kant, operates with a weak conception of sociality and that this produces a problematic explanatory deficiency in her view: she is unable to explain the peculiar motivational efficacy of shared social norms. Heidegger's view is tailor made to explain this phenomenon. I end by sketching how Heidegger provides a social explanation of a major systematic concern animating Korsgaard, the concern with the importance of individual autonomy and answerability in human life. (shrink)

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

Heidegger calls his early philosophy a “science of being.” Being and Time combines phenomenological, ontological, hermeneutical, and existential themes in a way that is not obviously coherent. Commentators have worried in particular that Heidegger’s hermeneutical transformation of phenomenology is incompatible with his “scientific” aspirations. I outline three interpretations on which Heidegger cannot adopt Husserl’s “scientific” conception of phenomenology as eidetic, intuitive, propositionally articulated, and non‐relativistic due to his hermeneutical commitments. I argue that each of these readings rests on a misinterpretation (...) of one or more of three hermeneutical concepts that are central to Heidegger’s early thought: the understanding of being, the hermeneutical situation, and phenomenological destruction. By giving fresh analyses of these concepts, I show that Heidegger retains the scientific conception while refining it to avoid distortions that are introduced when inquiry is “infiltrated with traditional theories and opinions about being.” I also respond to the charge that Being and Time is a “disguised theology.”. (shrink)