April 15, 2024: This article published in Early View in error. The article will republish shortly.

While all of the great philosophers are difficult to read, Heidegger and Wittgenstein seem to be so in striking ways. Their writings are oddly reluctant to yield up to us what we might think of as ‘their philosophical claims’; and both seem to manifest an attitude towards argument unlike that of most contemporary philosophers. This paper will re-consider these features of Heidegger’s and Wittgenstein’s work in the light of some common themes in their understanding of philosophical confusion. Given that understanding, (...) writings that would combat such confusion must meet rather distinctive objectives and, as a result, may be required to take on rather distinctive forms. The paper will explore these possibilities, drawing, in particular, on the motif of ‘recollection’ upon which both Heidegger and Wittgenstein draw, Heidegger's scattered remarks on 'formal indication', and The Sophist lectures’ discussion of Platonic dialectic. (shrink)

This paper explores two models using which we might understand Heidegger's notion of ‘Eigentlichkeit’. Although typically translated as ‘authenticity’, a more literal construal of this term would be ‘ownness’ or ‘ownedness’; and in addition to the paper's exegetical value, it also develops two interestingly different understandings of what it is to have a judgment of one's own. The first model understands Heideggerian authenticity as the owning of what I call a ‘standpoint’. Although this model provides an understanding of a number (...) of key features of authenticity, it also invites an important objection—which I call ‘the closure objection’—that can be found in, for example, the work of Steven Galt Crowell and Tony Fisher. Although I argue that this objection can be met, the response for which it calls reveals that the feat of authenticity as understood through the standpoint model rests upon a further feat, and one which may itself have a stronger claim to be identified with Heideggerian authenticity. I develop this thought, introducing what I call the ‘all-things-considered judgment model’ of authenticity, the basis of which lies in, among other sources, Heidegger's appropriation of themes from Aristotle's discussion of phronesis. I explain the exegetical benefits of adopting this model and consider some objections that it invites, before closing with a discussion of how the two models understand the notion of ‘a judgment of one's own’. (shrink)

In This Paper, I Identify a Problem, which the project that I will refer to as the ‘Being and Time Project’ (or ‘BTP’ for short) aimed to solve; this is the project within which Heidegger reinterpreted his early thought—and which he unsuccessfully attempted to bring to fruition—in, roughly speaking, the years 1925–28. The problem in question presents several faces: viewed from one angle, it concerns the unity of the concept of “Being in general,” from another, the integrity of the notion (...) of “Dasein,” and from another, the possibility of the perspective from which the philosopher does her work. The solution that the BTP would have offered turns on the claim that time is “the possible horizon for any understanding .. (shrink)