Individual objects have potentials: paper has the potential to burn, an acorn has the potential to turn into a tree, some people have the potential to run a mile in less than four minutes. Barbara Vetter provides a systematic investigation into the metaphysics of such potentials, and an account of metaphysical modality based on them. -/- In contemporary philosophy, potentials have been recognized mostly in the form of so-called dispositions: solubility, fragility, and so on. Vetter takes dispositions as her starting (...) point, but argues for and develops a more comprehensive conception of potentiality. She shows how, with this more comprehensive conception, an account of metaphysical modality can be given that meets three crucial requirements: Extensional correctness: providing the right truth-values for statements of possibility and necessity; formal adequacy: providing the right logic for metaphysical modality; and semantic utility: providing a semantics that links ordinary modal language to the metaphysics of modality. -/- The resulting view of modality is a version of dispositionalism about modality: it takes modality to be a matter of the dispositions of individual objects. This approach has a long philosophical tradition going back to Aristotle, but has been largely neglected in contemporary philosophy. In recent years, it has become a live option again due to the rise of anti-Humean, powers-based metaphysics. The aim of Potentiality is to develop the dispositionalist view in a way that takes account of contemporary developments in metaphysics, logic, and semantics. (shrink)

»Selten hat in den neueren Jahrhunderten ein philosophischer Erstling so durchgeschlagen und einen so unverrückbaren Platz unter den >großenHans Georg Gadamer in DIE ZEIT Nr. 47 vom 19.11.1982.

Being and Time is a methodologically complex work, combining hermeneutic, transcendental, phenomenological, and ontological strategies in a provocative and not-obviously-stable concoction. In this article, I focus on one strand of the methodological puzzles raised by Heidegger’s undertaking: the problem of warranting the modal claims that occur frequently in the course of Heidegger’s project. In a number of crucial passages, we are told that one or another trait of Dasein is necessary, or that some ontic feature of Dasein would not be (...) possible were it not for some deeper ontological feature. I undertake to determine the logical form of these doctrines, and to consider what kind of evidence might suffice to establish them. I draw on Heidegger’s complex debt to Dilthey in proposing an interpretation of the notion of an existeniale, and I critically assess Taylor Carman’s treatment of Heidegger’s project as an extension of Kantian transcendental strategies. In the end, I argue, much comes to turn on one’s account of the semantics of Heidegger’s central term of art: “Dasein.” I identify shortcomings in two possible approaches to this problem: one takes the extension of the term to be antecedently fixed; the other fixes the meaning of the term by specifying its intension. I then explore an alternative semantics for “Dasein” under which the modalized doctrines of Being and Time can be considered de re necessities. All three of the semantic models that I consider here remain highly schematic – cartoons rather than fully elaborated portraits – and I do not mean to suggest that any of the three would suffice to capture the enormously complex semantic structure of Heidegger’s undertaking. Nonetheless, I argue that the third semantic model enjoys certain demonstrable advantages over the other two, both for mounting a defense of Heidegger’s modal propositions and as a schema for mapping the text of Being and Time. It also allows us to frame a challenge that any fully adequate semantic interpretation of Heidegger’s text would have to meet. (shrink)

An indispensable guide to the major work of one of the twentieth century's most influential thinkers.

: As Heidegger acknowledges, our understanding is essentially situated and so limited by the context and tradition into which it is thrown. But this ‘situatedness’ does not exhaust Heidegger's concept of ‘thrownness’. By examining this concept and its grammar, I develop a more complete interpretation. I identify several different kinds of finitude or limitation in our understanding, and touch on ways in which we confront and carry different dimensions of our past.

The preoccupation with the "historicity" of thought and existence is central to thehermeneutic-phenomenological branch of modern philosophy. Its foremostrepresentative is Martin Heidegger, who in his main work Sein und Zeit (1927)developed a theory of historicity, according to which human beings not only exist inhistory, but are themselves historical. In subsequent writings Heidegger argued thatnot only man, but also truth and being, must be understood "historically" in aparticular sense. The meaning and the impHcations of Heidegger's "historicization" ofphilosophy are here analyzed along (...) two parallel tracks: as a theory of the conditions ofphilosophical understanding; second, as an incentive to new ways of respondingphilosophically to these conditions. The study focuses on the sense of belongingwhich Heidegger assigns to historicity, as a dialogical relation to an enigmatic originthat cannot be exhaustively articulated, but to which understanding must neverthelessrespond in repetition and critique. The idea of the "hermeneutic situation," and what itmeans to occupy such a situation, is shown to be central in this regard. Heidegger's"historicization" of the philosophical territory is inte reted as an exemplary attempt topreserve philosophy as a quest for "origins" in the explicit recognition of theinterminable historical mediation of thinking. His approach leads to a criticalquestioning of fundamental philosophical distinctions, such as the temporal and theeternal, the absolute and the relative, subject and object, and of truth as correspondence.Eventually he is led to question the ability of language to express thehistoricity of thought and of being, which can only be indicated by means of conceptssuch as "moment" (Augenblick) and "event" (Ereignis). In seven chapters the themeof historicity is explored from different angles, which together provide a guide toHeidegger's path from a philosophy of life to a thinking of being in the "otherbeginning." The study covers the full range of his writings, but it emphasizes thedevelopment from the earliest lectures, over Sein und Zeit, to the second major work,Beiträge zur Philosophie (1938, published posthumously in 1989). (shrink)

O artigo examina a afirmação, feita por Heidegger em Ser e tempo, segundo a qual o nascimento de um existente humano é um outro fim para o Dasein. A afirmação é analisada a partir do conceito de possibilidade existencial. Assim como a morte é interpretada existencialmente, também o nascimento ganha uma análise em termos de possibilidade. Na medida em que a possibilidade existencial é definida pela instauração de ser, e a finitude do ser-para-a-morte qualifica a morte existencial como um fim, (...) o mesmo pode ser dito do nascimento. Ou seja, o nascimento é um fim, no sentido de que determina a qualificação finita do estar em possibilidades. Natalidade e mortalidade não são apenas características de um ente vivo, mas qualificações superiores da possibilidade existencial.The paper examines Heidegger's statement in Being and Time, according to with the birth of a human existent is another end to Dasein. The statement should be analized through the concept of possibility. In the same way that death is existential interpretaded, so becomes birth an analysis by the notion of possibility. In the extent that existential possibility is definid by instauration of being, and the finitude of Sein-zum-Tode qualifies existential death as an end, the same can also be held of birth. That is, birth is an end in the sense of the finite qualifying of being thrown into possibilities. Natality and mortality are not only marks of a living being, but higher qualifications of existential possibility. (shrink)

O artigo examina a afirmação, feita por Heidegger em Ser e tempo, segundo a qual o nascimento de um existente humano é um outro fim para o Dasein. A afirmação é analisada a partir do conceito de possibilidade existencial. Assim como a morte é interpretada existencialmente, também o nascimento ganha uma análise em termos de possibilidade. Na medida em que a possibilidade existencial é definida pela instauração de ser, e a finitude do ser-para-a-morte qualifica a morte existencial como um fim (...) , o mesmo pode ser dito do nascimento. Ou seja, o nascimento é um fim, no sentido de que determina a qualificação finita do estar em possibilidades. Natalidade e mortalidade não são apenas características de um ente vivo, mas qualificações superiores da possibilidade existencial.The paper examines Heidegger's statement in Being and Time, according to with the birth of a human existent is another end to Dasein. The statement should be analized through the concept of possibility. In the same way that death is existential interpretaded, so becomes birth an analysis by the notion of possibility. In the extent that existential possibility is definid by instauration of being, and the finitude of Sein-zum-Tode qualifies existential death as an end , the same can also be held of birth. That is, birth is an end in the sense of the finite qualifying of being thrown into possibilities. Natality and mortality are not only marks of a living being, but higher qualifications of existential possibility. (shrink)