This book chapter shows how the early Heidegger’s philosophy around the period of Being and Time can address some central questions of contemporary social ontology. After sketching “non-summative constructionism”, which is arguably the generic framework that underlies all forms of contemporary analytic social ontology, I lay out early Heidegger’s conception of human social reality in terms of an extended argument. The Heidegger that shows up in light of this treatment is an acute phenomenologist of human (...) social existence who emphasizes our engagement in norm-governed practices as the basis of social reality. I then defuse a common and understandable set of objections against invoking the early Heidegger as someone who can make any positive contribution to our understanding of social reality. Lastly, I explore the extent to which the early Heidegger’s philosophy provides insights regarding phenomena of collective intentionality by showing how the intelligibility of such phenomena traces back to individual agents’ common understanding of possible ways of understanding things and acting with one another. With the early Heidegger, I argue that this common understanding is the fundamental source and basis of collective intentionality, not the non-summativist constructionism on which contemporary analytic social ontology has sought to focus with much effort. The lesson about social ontology that we should learn from the early Heidegger is that there is a tight connection between the social constitution of the human individual and his or her capacity to perform actions or activities that instantiate collective intentionality. (shrink)

Since the earliest commentaries on Heidegger's Being & Time, its theory of judgment and of propositions has been widely misrepresented as relativistic, psychologistic, anthropologistic, pragmatic, etc. Even Edmund Husserl allowed himself to be persuaded to this point of view, to the great detriment of his phenomenological movement. And most of Heidegger's interpreters, whether friendly or hostile, have adopted this point of view, which normally includes the notion that there can be no fundamental difference between circumspective and apophantic forms (...) of explication. This misreading ignores important aspects of the theory of propositional explication in Being & Time, ignores the fact that forms of interpretation would not be genera or species of interpretation, and is a clear instance of genetic fallacy. Yet it pervades the literature on Heidegger still. (shrink)

Early Heidegger argues that a “homogenous space of nature” can be revealed by stripping away the intelligibility of Dasein's everyday world, a process he calls “deworlding.” Given this, some interpreters have suggested that Heidegger, despite not having worked out the details himself, is also committed to a notion of deworlded time. Such a “natural time” would amount to an endogenous sequentiality in which events are ordered independently of Dasein and the stand it takes on its being. I (...) show that Heidegger was indeed committed to such a temporal realism even though his treatment of these issues is somewhat scattered and pulled in different directions. In the course of my reconstruction, I renew an interpretation of Heidegger that stresses Dasein's thrownness into nature and I answer William Blattner's powerful interpretation of Heidegger as a failed temporal idealist who was unable to derive the sequentiality of ordinary time from Dasein's non-sequential originary temporality. Heidegger did not attempt to derive sequentiality; instead, he understood it as a built-in feature of the natural universe by which Dasein's activities are constrained. World-time turns out to be a co-production of Dasein's non-sequential originary temporality and the endogenous sequentiality of events in nature. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to introduce an original and radical phenomenology of life into Heidegger’s earliest lectures at Freiburg University. The motivation behind this aim lies in the exclusion of life from the existential analytic despite Heidegger’s preoccupation with the question of life during this very early period. Principally, the essay demonstrates how Husserl’s phenomenological insight into the intentionality of life has the potential to be transformed into a living aporia. Although this demonstration is set (...) within the general context of obtaining knowledge in and of life, it is achieved via a reciprocal critique of the possibility of a philosophy of life and Husserlian phenomenology to reveal the congruence life philosophy has with the project of phenomenology. In contrast to fundamental ontology, the essay ends by exposing Heidegger’s latent and inexplicit formulation of phenomenology in terms of a radical correlation that holds aporetically between living and unliving experience. (shrink)

Heidegger argues that modern technology is quantifiably different from all earlier periods because of a shift in ethos from in situ craftwork to globalised production and storage at the behest of consumerism. He argues that this shift in technology has fundamentally shaped our epistemology, and it is almost impossible to comprehend anything outside the technological enframing of knowledge. The exception is when something breaks down, and the fault ‘shows up’ in fresh ways. Stiegler has several important addendums to (...) class='Hi'>Heidegger’s thesis. Firstly, that Heidegger fails to fully appreciate the early Greek myth of Prometheus, and the technological depth that fire offers all human societies. Secondly, the fall, or failure, which is doubled in the myth of Prometheus, and shows up in epistemology accordingly. Thirdly the acceleration of technology since the onset of Information Technology, and the way this is disorientating our Being. I argue the fall in both Heidegger and early Stiegler has encaptured their imagination. In later work, Stiegler argues that acceleration is fused with algorithmic pretensions, that are distorting and undermining the creative political imaginary, and making it difficult to revalue the values that underpin the nihilist Anthropocene. The overcoming of the Anthropocene engages politics, economics, power, physics, and ecology. (shrink)

Heidegger’s debt to Aristotle is, of course, vast: Volpi went so far as to ask whether Being and Time was a translation of the Nicomachean Ethics. In this chapter, I want to investigate a fundamental divergence between the two, a rejection by early Heidegger of one of the central tenets of Aristotelian ethics. This rejection begins in the years before Being and Time and the forces behind it extend into the post-war period. I will focus in particular (...) on Ga18, 1924’s Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy: what Heidegger’s Aristotle rejects there, in effect, is the notion of character. -/- What makes this rejection so complex and so revealing is that Heidegger’s interpretative approach forces him to present disagreement as discovery, as an insight into a true Aristotle who has remained concealed. My claim here is not the familiar one that Heideggerian history of philosophy is exegetically ‘violent’ or that it frequently tells us more about Heidegger than about its supposed target. Rather, it is more specific. Texts such as Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy present a unique exegetical situation. This is because Heidegger lacks several of the interpretative tools that will justify his radical reading of Kant just a few years later: I will examine in particular his changing conception of “philology”. The result is that, whilst commentators routinely talk of Heidegger’s “appropriation” of Kant, Heidegger’s early use of Aristotle is simultaneously more complex and less refined. “Perversion” is, one might think, scarcely a rigorous term, but it is, I will argue, the best description of what follows. (shrink)

This chapter provides an interpretation of the early Heidegger’s underdeveloped conception of the undistinguishedness of everyday human existence in Being and Time. After explaining why certain translation choices of some key terms in this text are interpretively and philosophically important, I first provide a concise argument for why the social constitution interpretation of the relation between ownedness and unownedness makes better overall sense of Heidegger’s ambivalent attitude toward the social constitution of the human being than the standard (...) existentialist interpretation of this relation. I then proceed to the heart of this chapter, which develops his inchoate conception of the undistinguishedness of everydayness by arguing that it specifies the third distinctive mode of concrete human existence in addition to ownedness and unownedness. Accordingly, I show how unownedness is actually a generic phenomenon with two distinct species, namely, undistinguishedness and disownedness, which are at once closely related to, but also differ in significant respects from, each other. Consequently, instead of taking for granted a one-dimensional and mutually exclusive opposition between ‘authenticity’ and ‘inauthenticity’, I argue that we should adopt a two-dimensional and more nuanced understanding of the relations among undistinguishedness, disownedness, and ownedness that intersects with Heidegger’s underappreciated distinction between genuineness and ungenuineness. After raising and replying to some objections to this interpretation of undistinguishedness, I conclude this chapter by briefly sketching three of its philosophical consequences and pointing out its potential as an important resource for contemporary social theories. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) is one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. His influence, however, extends beyond philosophy. His account of Dasein, or human existence, permeates the human and social sciences, including nursing, psychiatry, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and artificial intelligence. In this chapter, I outline Heidegger’s influence on psychiatry and psychology, focusing especially on his relationships with the Swiss psychiatrists Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss. The first section outlines Heidegger’s early life and work, up (...) to and including the publication of Being and Time, in which he develops his famous concept of being-in-the-world. The second section focuses on Heidegger’s initial influence on psychiatry via Binswanger’s founding of Daseinsanalysis, a Heideggerian approach to psychopathology and psychotherapy. The third section turns to Heidegger’s relationship with Boss, including Heidegger’s rejection of Binswanger’s Daseinsanalysis and his lectures at Boss’s home in Zollikon, Switzerland. (shrink)

Heidegger’s ontologische Differenz imposes methodological limits which strictly mark his philosophy for rigor and determinacy. If it is not possible to think Being from the categories of the entity, it is also true that the difference is a tank of possibilities and developments to which Heidegger himself hints at. From the accuracy of the early works to the overturning of the problem in the later works, the ontological difference is a constant of Heideggerian thought. This paper seeks (...) to push Existenz from a mode of being of Dasein to a mode of giving of Seiende. In accordance with his late writings, bringing the question of the Being­-existence bond towards the perspective of the entity – and not only the entity among entities that poses the question –, the development of the problem in Heidegger’s meditation is analysed through the questions of ontological difference – the mode of negation, the between of distinction, the specific situatedness that defines experience, the Being, as a member of ontological difference, in its connection to the Nichts, the Event as a relaxation of the connection between Sein and Seiende. The entity that is exist­ent is the convergence point of the Event where Being and existent, Being and existence, are not in contrast, but protrude (ragen) towards each other revealing the traits of a Seyende des Seyns, of the entity of Being. (shrink)

While it is well known that the early Heidegger distinguishes between different ‘kinds of being’ and identifies various ‘structures’ that compose them, there has been little discussion about what these kinds and structures of being are. This paper defends the ‘Property Thesis’, the position that kinds of being (and their structures) are properties of the entities that have them. I give two arguments for this thesis. The first is grounded in the fact that Heidegger refers to kinds (...) and structures of being as ‘characteristics’ and ‘determinations’, which are just two different words for ‘properties’, in the broadest senses of these terms. The second argument is based on the fact that kinds and structures of being play three roles that properties are supposed to play: they are what account for similarities between things, they are what predicates express, and they are what abstract nouns refer to. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger as Interrogator: The Final Paradigm By Daniel Fidel Ferrer. Copyright©2024 Daniel Fidel Ferrer. All rights reserved. Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND. Imprint 1.0. 2024. All Rights are reserved. Intended copies of this work can be used for research and teaching. No change in the content and must include my full name, Daniel Fidel Ferrer. Enjoying reading and disagreeing. Publisher: Kuhn von Verden Verlag. Language: English and German. Includes bibliographical references and an index. Pages 1-316. Index total pages is 524. (...) Ontology. 2. Metaphysics. 3. Philosophy, German. 4. Thought and thinking. 5. Kant, Immanuel, 1724-1804. 6. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, 1775-1854. 7. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770-1831. 10. Philosophy, Modern -- 20th century. 11. Philosophy, Modern -- 19th century. 12. Practice (Philosophy). 13. Philosophy and civilization. 14. Postmodernism. 15. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900. 16. Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976. 17. Ferrer, Daniel Fidel. Table of Contents Mottos Division I. Discussion of the title pages 2-6 Prologue pages 7-14 Heidegger, what do we know about him? page 15-22 Early Heidegger pages 23-41 What are the periods in Heidegger’s thought? pages 42-51 Preface and Setting the Stage pages 52-65 Introduction pages 66-82 Heidegger on Questioning pages 83-94 The Crisis or Krisis in philosophy? pages 95-106 Does Heidegger have a philosophy? pages 107-127 Heidegger about the Nature of Teaching pages 128-132 Heidegger against philosophy as a worldview or the standpoint of standpointlessness pages 133-137 Heidegger’s world-famous book Being and Time (Sein und Zeit, SuZ, 1927) pages 138-153 Heidegger’s second attempt Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (1936-1938) pages 154-162 Heidegger on the image of the Bridge pages 163-170 Conclusion pages 171-188 -/- Division II. Engagement with Heidegger on history of philosophy (metaphysics). Reinigung as cleaning, purifying pages 189-191 What is Heidegger’s Metahistory of philosophy? pages 192-243 Appendix A. Reconstruction of a partial letter from Martin Heidegger to Dieter Sinn. Dated. 24 August 1964. pages 244-248 Appendix B. Martin Heidegger's Dialogue and Critical Debate with Hegel. pages 249-253 Appendix C. Heidegger on Pain (Schmerz) pages 254-257 Appendix D. Update: 2023 Oct 24. Daniel Fidel Ferrer replies to Professor Thomas Sheehan (Sein question) pages 258-269 Appendix E. Five Habilitations done with Martin Heidegger. Habilitationsschrift pages 270-272 Heidegger Bibliography Individual Lectures Vortrag or Vorträge. Detailed pages 273-294 Heidegger‘s Gesamtausgabe (HGA or GA). Note GA 72 has yet to be published (2024). pages 295-299 Letters. Briefe. Briefwechsel. Not complete pages 300-303 Heidegger Studies / Heidegger Studien / Etudes Heideggeriennes (list of Heidegger texts) pages 304-305 Jahresgaben der Martin-Heidegger-Gesellschaft (from the internet) (list of Heidegger texts) pages 306-308 Additional References (bibliographies) pages 309-310 Heidegger Index Projects by Daniel Fidel Ferrer page 311 -/- Martin Heidegger Audio Recordings pages 312-313 -/- Additional acknowledgements pages 314-315 -/- Letter from Hermann Heidegger to Daniel Ferrer den 5.2.2002. In German. Hermann Heidegger’s response to the Barbara Fiand collection being in the USA. -/- One of the thesis: there is no Heidegger philosophy. Read more… -/- “What always counts in the lecture-courses is the manner of proceeding - the sequence of steps - not a claim to final truths. The lecture-courses never wrap up in a completeness and in seemingly "finishing off" the works interpreted, but rather in the inner fullness of the hidden dynamics of questioning.” GA 66. Besinnung (1938/39). GA 66: 421. (shrink)

This book offers a fundamentally new account of the arguments and concepts which define Heidegger's early philosophy, and locates them in relation to both contemporary analytic philosophy and the history of philosophy. Drawing on recent work in the philosophy of mind and on Heidegger's lectures on Plato and Kant, Sacha Golob argues against existing treatments of Heidegger on intentionality and suggests that Heidegger endorses a unique position with respect to conceptual and representational content; he also (...) examines the implications of this for Heidegger's views on truth, realism and 'being'. He goes on to explore Heidegger's work on the underlying issue of normativity, and focuses on his theory of freedom, arguing that it is freedom that links the existential concerns of Being and Time to concepts such as reason, perfection and obligation. His book offers a distinctive new perspective for students of Heidegger and the history of twentieth-century philosophy. (shrink)

Although Heidegger’s explicit account of “poetic dwelling” belongs to his later philosophy, there are important indications that he was already engaging with the core matter of the notion in his early thought. Contrary to the idea that in Being and Time, “dwelling” amounts to mere practical coping with the environment, we would like to demonstrate that the notion is already a poetic issue in his early thought, as it requires the appropriation of our relation to the world (...) via an authentic experience of finitude. Following a topological mode of thinking, the paper thematizes the connections between Heidegger’s early and later thought, and elucidates the following three points: First, “freeing” and “letting” appears as the appropriate ethos of a poetic experience of finitude, one that maintains the “clearing” of meaningfulness. Second, a topological reading of Being and Time can explicate the notions of authenticity and inauthenticity as different disclosures of the clearing where human being-world correlation occurs. Third, the notion of “keeping-still” (Schweigen) can be interpreted as an authentic disposition that frees space for the disclosure of existence. The paper concludes that an authentic experience of finitude through “stillness” appears to reorient human ethos by releasing “discourse” from absorption in “idle-talk” and that such an act of existential re-orientation of one’s disposition towards the world is the essence of “authenticity,” and Heidegger’s early “poetic dwelling”. (shrink)

In Sein und Zeit Heidegger makes several claims about the nature of ‘assertion’ [Aussage]. These claims are of particular philosophical interest: they illustrate, for example, important points of contact and divergence between Heidegger's work and philosophical movements including Kantianism, the early Analytic tradition and contemporary pragmatism. This article provides a new assessment of one of these claims: that assertion is connected to a ‘present-at-hand’ ontology. I also indicate how my analysis sets the stage for a new reading (...) of Heidegger's further claim that assertion is an explanatorily derivative phenomenon. I begin with a loose overview of Heidegger's position and then develop a sharper formulation of the key premises. I go on to argue that existing treatments of the supposed link between assertion and the ‘present-at-hand’ are unsatisfactory, and advance a new, ‘methodological’, interpretation of that link. Finally, I sketch the implications of my interpretation for the further claim that assertion is explanatorily derivative. (shrink)

Heidegger’s main interest was ontology or the study of being. In his fundamental treatise, Being and Time, he attempted to access being (Sein) by means of phenomenological analysis of human existence (Dasein) in respect to its temporal and historical character. After the change of his thinking (“the turn”), Heidegger placed an emphasis on language as the vehicle through which the question of being can be unfolded. He turned to the exegesis of historical texts, especially of the Presocratics, but (...) also of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and Hölderlin, and to poetry, architecture, technology, and other subjects. Instead of looking for a full clarification of the meaning of being, he tried to pursue a kind of thinking which was no longer “metaphysical.” He criticized the tradition of Western philosophy, which he regarded as nihilistic, for, as he claimed, the question of being as such was obliterated in it. He also stressed the nihilism of modern technological culture. By going to the Presocratic beginning of Western thought, he wanted to repeat the early Greek experience of being, so that the West could turn away from the dead end of nihilism and begin anew. His writings are notoriously difficult. Being and Time remains his most influential work. (shrink)

Most interpreters of Heidegger’s reflections on the body maintain that—whether early, middle, or late in the Gesamtausgabe—Dasein’s or the mortal’s openness to being/beyng is the ground of the fleshly or bodily (das Leibliche), but not the reverse. In this paper, I argue that there is evidence from Heidegger’s own oeuvre demonstrating that this relationship is instead mutually reciprocal. That is to say, I contend that corporeal variability is constitutive of Dasein’s openness to being just as Dasein’s openness (...) to being is constitutive of its corporeal variability. Understood in this way, Heidegger’s thinking puts forward what I call a corpoietic understanding of the body and of the meaning of ability. I show that, despite the ableist assumptions at play in much of Heidegger’s work, such an understanding is nevertheless grounded in the idea of access, a central concept in philosophy of disability and disability studies. After developing this idea of ability as access, I close by addressing the larger political stakes of using Heidegger’s work to think about embodiment and disability given the Third Reich’s mass slaughter of people with disabilities. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger did not write ethics, but basic ethical thought permeates the systematic draft and the main idea of his philosophy from Being and Time. Heidegger believes that the traditional division of philosophy into logic, physics and ethics is appropriate to the very thing of thought. The task of contemporary philosophy is to explain the principle of the traditional division of philosophy. Heidegger’s early philosophy designates a systematic metontological place for the question of ethics. Interpretations of (...) Heidegger’s philosophy by Günter Figal and Franco Volpi show that the ethical thought figure – that human life should be taken from itself and subordinated to the d emand for self-care – is at the core of Heidegger’s systematics of Being and Time. (shrink)

In his work through the early 1930’s, Heidegger determines what it means to be an authentic self through fundamental attunements such as anxiety, boredom, uncanniness and guilt, and equi-primordially via understanding and thrown projection. The way that attunement and understanding structure authentic disclosure of being involves paradoxical gestures juxtaposing meaning and meaninglessness, presence and absence, affirmation and negation, possibility and reality, holism and individuation, normativity and own-ness. The key to navigating and unifying this tangle of contradictory moments, as (...) Heidegger reminds his readers, is in understanding the dynamics of temporality. In this paper I discuss common ways that contemporary readers of Heidegger render authenticity inauthentic by interpreting such tropes as anxiety, the self and the nothing by reference to what Heidegger calls the ordinary conception of time, the sequential emerging, lingering and passing away of beings. Thought via ordinary time, nothingness opposes itself to presence, making authentic anxiety appear similar to depression as the breakdown of possibilities. I contrast these readings with my interpretation of authentic temporality, and explain how my reading of time changes the way the authentic self, attunement and projective understanding disclose themselves. In choosing the particular authors that I cite in support of my representation of inauthentic interpretations of authenticity, I do not mean to imply that these writers are united in their approaches to Heidegger. On the contrary, they differ amongst themselves concerning many aspects of his thinking. My purpose is to highlight what I take to be key points of intersection among their differing accounts. (shrink)

Scholars who deal with Heidegger’s philosophy often remark the scarcity of his references to phenomenological reduction as a means to grant access to the point of view of the being-in-the-world of the Dasein, the central theme of his early philosophy. Also the role of phenomenological reduction in Heidegger’s philosophy makes problem, as he criticizes Husserl for making of reduction a mere tool to reveal a pure, timeless and extra-worldly conscience – an untenable claim, according to Heidegger, (...) for Dasein’s being-in-the-world, as his most original way of being, can never be put out of play by any reduction. The role of transcendental reduction in Heidegger’s phenomenology is the theme of the present paper. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger 1910-1932: An Index -/- Cataloging: -/- 1. Heidegger, Martin, -- 1889-1976. 2. Heidegger, Martin, -- 1889-1976 -- Concordances. 3. Heidegger, Martin, -- 1889-1976 -- Indexes. 4). Metaphysics. 5). Philosophy, German. 6). Philosophy, German – Greek influences. 7). Heidegger, Martin; -- Wörterbuch. I. Ferrer, Daniel Fidel, 1952-. -/- First step: 29 whole* volumes from Martin Heidegger’s collect writings (Gesamtausgabe) were combined into one file and then machine indexed. The 29 volumes were selected for (...) their emphasis on Martin Heidegger’s writing around the time of publishing his most well-known writing, Being and Time (Sein und Zeit (1927). This includes his early writings starting in 1910; and his lectures from Marburg University, which lead up to the writing and publication of Sein und Zeit in 1927. This was the period that Martin Heidegger was engaged in the methodology and considerations: Phänomenologische. -/- The main purpose of this Main Index is to help with research regarding Being and Time (Sein und Zeit (1927) GA 2. All words are included in this Main Index (see below) from the 29 volumes have been indexed by machine indexing (pages 10 to 5786 of this book). Because of sorting problems it is best to use the FIND FUNCTION. Nota Bene: use umlauts because the letters sort different as well!! Greek letter may not sort as you might expect, etc. So, again use the FIND FUNCTION to look for words or names (Dignum memoria). Please note the German words that start with umlauts are at the end of the index because of machine sorting of the words. Starting with the German word “ßA” on page 5398: ßA The Greek words start on page 5473: ΐίάνχες Plus, there are typos. -/- This is a machine created index for 29 volumes. (shrink)

This paper presents an account of Iris Murdoch's engagement with the work of Martin Heidegger. It covers her early discussions and evaluations of him in The Sovereignty of Good, through to her late Heidegger manuscript, covering both his early and late work. It details the significant changes that occur in her evaluation of him, as well as the key sympathies identified and criticisms developed in the late manuscript. The focus is on her insistence that only 'the (...) Good', and not Heidegger's 'Being', can fill the space left by the traditional Western God, and of the related failure in Heidegger to account properly for value. (shrink)

Heidegger’s analysis of human existence has long been criticized for ignoring the full possibilities of human encounter. This article finds a basis for the criticism in recent infancy research. It presents evidence for a second-person structure in our earliest encounters: An infant first becomes present to herself as the focal center of a caregiver’s gazing, smiling, or vocalization. The exchange in which the self thus appears is termed a You–I event. Such an event, it is held, cannot be assimilated (...) into Heidegger’s Dasein analysis. The article locates the origins of temporality in the early playful exchanges that make up You–I events. The dread of losing the You is seen as the original form of what Heidegger calls dread in the face of death. The apparently self-sufficient self of the cogito first emerges, it is held, when the child becomes capable of playing the role of a You toward herself. This happens especially through talking “with oneself,” as in “inner” speech. The postinfancy self is here interpreted as a derivative of the You–I event. It is argued that because inner speech frees the child from a felt dependence on others for self-awareness, they are no longer experienced in their full significance. The loss of fullness extends to all beings, including the self, with the result that beings are, as Heidegger puts it, depleted of being. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Heidegger’s “Evening Conversation: In a Prisoner of War Camp in Russia, between a Younger and an Older Man”, one of three dialogues composed by Heidegger after the defeat of National Socialist Germany published in Country Path Conversations explores the being-historical situation and fate of the German people by turning to the early Daoist text of the Zhuangzi. My article traces how Heidegger interprets fundamental concepts from the Zhuangzi, mediated by way of Richard Wilhelm’s translation Das wahre (...) Buch vom südlichen Blütenland, such as naturalness, letting/releasement, the unnecessary and the useless in the context of his hermeneutical and political situation. I consider to what extent this dialogue, along with his other discussions of the Zhuangzi and intensive engagement with the Daodejing from 1943 to 1950, constitute a “Daoist turn” in Heidegger’s thinking that helped shape his Postwar thought. (shrink)

The goal of this article is to understand the concept of poetry in the broad context of Heidegger’s “early” thought, around 1919 and 1930. To that end, we seek to disclose a relation that in Heidegger remains implicit and in the secondary literature absent. This is the relation between poetry and the ways of Being (existence, ready-to-hand, present-at-hand, etc.). Since Heidegger did not explicitly thematize poetry in this broad context, the setup of this article consists of (...) three main steps, in which we make explicit the implicit ontological notion of Heidegger about poetry and, we shall argue, the ontological status of the poeticized. First, we distinguish between the theoretical and the pre-theoretical dimensions of existence, which enable us to explain that for Heidegger poetry is a pre-theoretical letting-see of the various entities that we encounter in the immediate everyday life that is mostly overlooked because of their “self-evident” and “obvious” presence. In this first step we argue that for Heidegger poetry is partially an explicit ontic letting-see. Second, we address the ways of Being in order to secure the systematic horizon for our interpretation regarding the relationship between the ways of Being and poetry. Third, we discuss that an indicative and non-conceptual letting-see of pre-theoretical ways of Being takes place in poetry through the respective poetized entity. In the second and third steps, we exhibit that according to Heidegger poetry results ultimately in an implicit ontological letting-see of the ways of Being. (shrink)

REVIEW (1): "Jeff Kochan’s book offers both an original reading of Martin Heidegger’s early writings on science and a powerful defense of the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) research program. Science as Social Existence weaves together a compelling argument for the thesis that SSK and Heidegger’s existential phenomenology should be thought of as mutually supporting research programs." (Julian Kiverstein, in Isis) ---- REVIEW (2): "I cannot in the space of this review do justice to the richness and (...) range of Kochan's discussion [...]. There is a great deal in this foundational portion of Kochan's discussion that I find tremendously interesting and engaging [...]." (David R. Cerbone, in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science) ---- REVIEW (3): "Science as Social Existence will be of interest not only to Heidegger scholars but to anyone engaged in science and technology studies. [...] This is an informative and original book. Kochan should be praised for his clear, pleasant-to-read prose." (Michael Butler, in CHOICE). (shrink)

The main goal of this article is to examine the link between the idea of language, being and nothingness by comparing 16th century Turkish-Azeri poet Fuzûlî’s poetry and 20th century German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s philosophy departing from the latter’s thinking of being. There are similarities between Heidegger and Fuzûlî’s respective thoughts concerning the role of the human being’s relation to finitude which grounds the relationship between being and nothingness. The article consists of three sections. The first section makes (...) sense of Heidegger’s early and late thought in terms of its ontological unity, explaining the ways in which being and nothingness topologically co-determine one another in poetic language. The second section focuses on clarifying the sources that nourish Fuzûlî’s poetry, such as Sufism and the literary style of “Rind” as observed in classical Ottoman poetry, elucidating how these influences underpin the philosophical foundations of Fuzûlî’s poetry. The third section offers a philosophical interpretation of Fuzûlî’s lyric poems by illustrating how and why being and nothingness are not to be thought as mere opposites, pointing out their ontological belonging together. In the concluding section, it is argued that a poetic mode of existence necessitates an authentic experience of human finitude both for Heidegger and Fuzûlî. Although Fuzûlî’s poetry involves onto-theological influences from Sufism, Fuzûli manages to form an original idea of poetic existence, emphasizing that the poetic agent needs to take a step back from the mundane world of multitudes in order to unify with Being itself. As for Heidegger, it is doubtful whether there is such a mystical idea of being. Nonetheless, for both figures the more originary experience of finite human existence lies in the poetic interplay between being and nothingness. The poetic meaning of being comes to manifest itself in the process of one’s existential annihilation, which takes place in the movement of being-towards-death. Accordingly, exploring how the meaning of being requires the poetic experience of nothingness and how such an experience appears through language in Fuzûlî’s lyric poems provides a more comprehensive account of his thinking. (shrink)

Heidegger develops his reading of a-lētheia as privative un-concealment (Unverborgenheit) in tandem with his early phenomenological theory of truth. He is not simply reinterpreting a word, but rather reading Greek philosophy as having a primordial understanding of truth which has itself been concealed in interpretation. After shedding medieval and modern presuppositions of truth as correspondence, the existential truth-experience shows itself, no longer left puzzlingly implicit in unsatisfactory conventional readings of Greek philosophy. In Sein und Zeit §44, Heidegger (...) resolves interpretive difficulties in Parmenides through his interpretation of alētheia and philologically grounds this reading in Heraclitus’s description of the unconcealing logos. Although this primordial sense of the word has already been obscured in Plato and Aristotle, the structural gradation of their theories of truth conserves the primordial pre-Socratic sense of truth as the experience of unconcealment. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the relationship between phenomenology and metaphysics by reassessing the relationship between phenomenological and metaphysical transcendence. More specifically, I examine the notion of phenomenological transcendence in Husserl and the early Heidegger: Husserl defines transcendence primarily as the mode of givenness of phenomena that do not appear all at once, but must be given in partial profiles; Heidegger defines transcendence primarily as Dasein’s capacity to go beyond entities toward being. I argue that these divergent (...) understandings of phenomenological transcendence have resulted in a significant difference in reception among French phenomenologists of religion. These thinkers assert that phenomenology, when properly conceived and utilized, can make room for the divine and its revelation, i.e., for a metaphysical transcendence. I further argue that these thinkers prefer Heidegger’s phenomenology to Husserl’s because they understand Heidegger’s transcendence as the subject’s openness to being, while they understand Husserl’s transcendence as a limit, as the inability to capture worldly objects. I take up Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology of givenness as a “case study” to illustrate this point. Finally, I argue that this preference for Heidegger over Husserl is misplaced and should be reversed. A close reading of Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Religious Life shows that Dasein is confined to its own possibilities and cannot be open to a relationship with the divine. By contrast, Husserl’s phenomenology provides the radical openness necessary to welcome revelation. While Husserl cannot envision a “worldly God,” the structures of horizonality and temporality characterize a subject capable of an authentic openness to revelation. (shrink)

Heidegger’s reimagining of the artwork was instrumental in forcing a re-evaluation of modern aesthetic assumptions in the first half of the twentieth century. Heidegger’s theory of the origin of the work of art derives from a hermeneutic analysis of a single van Gogh masterpiece. On Heidegger’s view, the artwork provides a substantive and practical way of accessing the nature of art even if questions remain about all manifestations of the nature of art in general. This paper turns (...) his analysis to an alternative influential artwork - Duchamp's ‘Fountain’. I argue ‘Fountain’ presents difficulties for Heidegger’s method, some of which can be accommodated. However, the requirement to confine phenomenal engagement to the art object alone leads to problems when the object is appropriated from outside the artworld, not exhibited, and only one photograph bears witness to its existence. The prospect of broadening the focus of our attention from the art object alone to the ‘drama’ of ‘Fountain’ provides for a much richer phenomenal engagement. However, this move runs counter to a second stipulation of Heidegger's approach - that the artist’s intentions and her performative acts in creating the object should be excluded from our engagement with the work. Duchamp's radical move with ready-mades, and ‘Fountain’, in particular, disarms more than Heidegger’s early post-modern conception of an artwork. It also places pressure on aesthetic theories that lack the capacity to reset ontological boundaries when deeper transformative experiences lie beyond the remit of the object alone, or when art-relevant concepts are appropriated into and out of the realm of art. Duchamp points to a richer means of engaging with artworks than the one construed by Heidegger, one that includes consideration of the relevant artmaking acts. (shrink)

In this article I claim that distinction should be made between an "early Derrida" and a "later Derrida," similar to the one made between Wittgenstein of the Tractatus and Wittgenstein of the Investigations, or between Heidegger before the Kehre and Heidegger after it. Acceptance of such a distinction enables us to understand Derrida's teachings more clearly, to solve a disagreement in Derrida scholarship, and to understand his deconstruction as less contradictory. I shall also explain the reasons for, (...) and causes of, the change in Derrida' teachings and distinguish between those aspects that changed and those that did not. (shrink)

The present chapter investigates Heidegger's early understanding of Platonic dialectic in its contrast to sophistry as this comes to expression in his lectures on Plato's Sophist.

One of the controversial issues in the development of Heidegger’s thought is the problem of the will. Th e communis opinio is that Heidegger embraced the concept of the will in a non-critical manner at the beginning of the thirties and , in particular, he employed it in his political speeches of 1933–1934. Jacques Derrida for instance speaks about a “massive voluntarism” in relation to Heidegger’s thought in this period. Also Brett Davis discerns a period of “existential (...) voluntarism” in 1930–1934, in which Heidegger takes over a notion of the will in a non-critical manner. In this article, this interpretation is challenged and a stronger interpretation of Heidegger’s concern with the will is developed. Our hypothesis is that Heidegger’s concern with the will at the onset of the thirties is brought about by his confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) with the concept of the will. Based on his lecture courses from 1930 and 1936/37 and his Rectoral Address from 1933, enables us to discern three main characteristics of Heidegger’s destructed concept of the will in the early thirties. (shrink)

Like Husserl, the young Heidegger was preoccupied with the a-priority of phenomenology. He also incorporates hermeneutics into phenomenology, though Husserl was convinced that the a-priority of phenomenology removed all interpretation from its analyses. This paper investigates how the early Heidegger is able to make hermeneutics a general condition of understanding while maintaining, in line with Husserl, that phenomenology is an a-priori science. This paper also provides insight into key debates in the history of phenomenology. I examine two (...) places in which Heidegger departs from Husserl’s phenomenology – the doctrine of categorial intuition and the “as-structure” of understanding – to show that a-priority and hermeneutic understanding come together, ontically, in facticity as the only possible starting point for phenomenology. Ontologically, however, a-priority and hermeneutics come together in the co-affection of Dasein as understanding and being as pre-given. This co-affection is itself dependent on Temporality as “the condition of any possible earlier”. (shrink)

The paper seeks to show how Heidegger recasts the problem of reification in Being and Time, so as to address the methodological procedure of formal indication, outlined in his early writings, in order to carry out a deconstruction of ancient ontology. By revisiting Marx's and Lukács's critique of objectification in social relations, especially the former's critique of alienation, in light of Honneth's critical theory of recognition, it is shown how a Heideggerian-inspired phenomenology of sociality could be reconstructed out (...) of the semantic correlation between reification and formal indication. (shrink)

In his essay, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” Heidegger proposes the existence of uncharted avenues for intellectual exploration that transcend the confines of metaphysical philosophy. He articulates a more contemplative form of thinking, distinct from the incessant rationalization that permeates traditional discourse, transcending the dichotomy of rational and irrational thought. 2 In typical Heideggerian fashion, this paper lacks a central thesis but embarks on a journey to delve into Heidegger's relentless pursuit of novel modes (...) of thought. Along this path, it also addresses the enduring bias within the realm of philosophy towards non-Western philosophies, specifically those rooted in the Indic tradition. This inquiry encompasses three essential facets: Andrea Nightingale's examination of Plato's role in shaping the philosophical discipline, Steven Burik's exploration of the link between early and later Heidegger's assertions about the culmination of philosophy and comparative philosophical thought, and Mehta's illuminating juxtaposition of Heideggerian Being with the concept of Vedāntic Brahman. (shrink)

How can we understand the phenomena of loss and mourning in the Heideggerian framework? There is no established interpretation of Heidegger that gives an elaborate account of the phenomena of loss and mourning, let alone gauges its importance for our understanding and assessment of authentic existence in Heidegger. This paper attempts to do both. First, I give a detailed exposition of Heidegger’s analysis of the phenomena of mourning and loss and show that Heidegger’s analysis of mourning (...) in his early and late work is strikingly in line with his collectivist understanding of Being-with. This demonstrates, contrary to what some of his proponents argue, that Heidegger does not follow the kind of dynamic understanding of Being-with that places the other within fine-grained spaces of possibility. Second, with reference to Heidegger’s existential philosophy, I construct a phenomenology of mourning and grief. Though Heidegger himself fails to explain the relationships in which one mourns after a close other, we can develop a unique phenomenology of mourning with reference to Heidegger, which shows that each loss is singular and can be equiprimordial with one’s own death in opening one to the possibility of an authentic existence. In this new understanding of authenticity, loss is regarded as a powerful force, akin to death, in leading one toward their self-owned existence. (shrink)

Joseph Rouse has drawn from Heidegger’s early philosophy to develop what he calls a “practical hermeneutics of science.” With this, he has not only become an important player in the recent trend towards practice-based conceptualisations of science, he has also emerged as the predominant expositor of Heidegger’s philosophy of science. Yet, there are serious shortcomings in both Rouse’s theory of science and his interpretation of Heidegger. In the first instance, Rouse’s practical hermeneutics appears confused on the (...) topic of realism. In the second instance, Rouse suppresses Heidegger’s distinction between existence and essence, and hence fails to grasp the latter’s corollary distinction between scientic research and everyday practice. I argue that, by accepting a correction in his interpretation of Heidegger, Rouse would find the means to resolve the debilitating tensions in his stance towards realism. (shrink)

When it comes to understanding the genesis and development of Heidegger’s thought, it would be rather difficult to overestimate the importance of the “Aristotle-Introduction” of 1922, Heidegger’s “Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle.” This text is both a manifesto which describes the young Heidegger’s philosophical commitments, as well as a promissory note which outlines his projected future work. This Aristotle-Introduction not only enunciates Heidegger’s broad project of a philosophy which is both systematic and historical; it also (...) indicates, in particular, why a principal (or fundamental) ontology can be actualized only through a destruction of the history of ontology. This text anticipates several central themes of Being and Time (e.g., facticity, death, falling), and also foreshadows some of the issues which were to occupy the later Heidegger (e.g., “truth” as a heterogenous process of unconcealment). There is no doubt that much can – and will – be written on the meaning and implications of this important text. But instead of making my own, early contribution to such a secondary literature, I have decided to limit myself in this “Preface” to a few brief remarks concerning the historical background to Heidegger’s “Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle.”. (shrink)

This discussion interprets William Blake's poetry and painting across the hermeneutic philosophy of Martin Heidegger and his analysis of Dasein. It shows Blake's eighteenth-century discourse to be, like Heidegger's philosophy of Dasein, a radical critique of philosophical, scientific, and artistic thinking. To better understand the connections between Blake and Heidegger, the development of aesthetic philosophy from classical aesthetics through Nietzsche is charted. The parameters of eighteenth-century aesthetics, and the rise of hermeneutics in the nineteenth and early (...) twentieth century, are discussed as a response to the limitations of the neoclassical. On this basis, ideas and practices central to Blake's poetry such as "eternity" and "Albion" are compared to Heidegger's concepts of Dasein in order to shed additional light on the pioneering nature of Blake's work, and to see that he may be understood in terms of later aesthetic philosophies. (shrink)

This paper draws a link between Heidegger’s reading of Plato’s allegory of the cave and his support for the National Socialist regime during the early 30’s. Three interrelated suggestions are made: (1) That Heidegger’s reading of the allegory of the cave is informed by his preoccupation with the imminent threat of nihilism. (2) That Heidegger’s interpretation radicalizes his critique of the public sphere to the effect that it renders the latter irredeemable. (3) That the unbridgeable gap (...) between philosophy and the public sphere commits Heidegger to the anticipation of a catastrophic event that will open up the possibility of genuine freedom. (shrink)

Like most philosophers, Heidegger gave little attention to childhood, but his philosophical emphasis on pre-reflective practice and understanding seems uniquely qualified to help make sense of a child’s experience and development. Moreover, it seems to me that many central Heideggerian concepts are best defended, exemplified, and articulated by bringing child development into the discussion. A Heideggerain emphasis on pre-theoretical world-involvement opens up a rich array of phenomena for studying child development, which can improve upon standard theories that have over-emphasized (...) exclusive conditions or criteria. I begin by laying out some basic features of Heidegger’s conception of being-in-the-world as a preparation for understanding the world of the child. Then I will briefly discuss some of Heidegger’s remarks on childhood, followed by some reflections on language acquisition and the correlation of anxiety and meaning. (shrink)

This thesis explores, thematically and chronologically, the substantial concordance between the work of Martin Heidegger and T.S. Eliot. The introduction traces Eliot's ideas of the 'objective correlative' and 'situatedness' to a familiarity with German Idealism. Heidegger shared this familiarity, suggesting a reason for the similarity of their thought. Chapter one explores the 'authenticity' developed in Being and Time, as well as associated themes like temporality, the 'they' (Das Man), inauthenticity, idle talk and angst, and applies them to interpreting (...) Eliot's poem, 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'. Both texts depict a bleak Modernist view of the early twentieth-century Western human condition, characterized as a dispiriting nihilism and homelessness. Chapter two traces the chronological development of Ereignis in Heidegger's thinking, showing the term's two discernible but related meanings: first our nature as the 'site of the open' where Being can manifest, and second individual 'Events' of 'appropriation and revelation'. The world is always happening as 'event', but only through our appropriation by the Ereignis event can we become aware of this. Heidegger finds poetry, the essential example of language as the 'house of Being', to be the purest manifestation of Ereignis, taking as his examples Hölderlin and Rilke. A detailed analysis of Eliot's late work Four Quartets reveals how Ereignis, both as an ineluctable and an epiphanic condition of human existence, is central to his poetry, confirming, in Heidegger's words, 'what poets are for in a destitute time', namely to re-found and restore the wonder of the world and existence itself. This restoration results from what Eliot calls 'raid[s] on the inarticulate', the poet's continual striving to enact that openness to Being through which human language and the human world continually come to be. The final chapter shows how both Eliot and Heidegger value a genuine relationship with place as enabling human flourishing. Both distrust technological materialism, which destroys our sense of the world as dwelling place, and both are essentially committed to a genuinely authentic life, not the angstful authenticity of Being and Time, but a richer belonging which affirms our relationship with the earth, each other and our gods. (shrink)

The paper discusses Heidegger's early notion of the “movedness of life” (Lebensbewegtheit) and its intimate connection with Aristotle's concept of movement (kinēsis). Heidegger's aim in the period of Being and Time was to “overcome” the Greek ideal of being as ousia – constant and complete presence and availability – by showing that the background for all meaningful presence is Dasein, the ecstatically temporal context of human being. Life as the event of finitude is characterized by an essential (...) lack and incompleteness, and the living present therefore gains meaning only in relation to a horizon of un-presence and un-availability. Whereas the “theological” culmination of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics finds the supreme fulfillment of human life in the semi-divine self-immanence and self-sufficiency of the bios theōrētikos, a radical Heideggerian interpretation of kinēsis may permit us to find in Aristotle the fundamental structures of mortal living as self-transcendent movement. (shrink)

This paper uses an extended discussion of Nietzsche’s essay “The Greek State” to uncover the political aspects of his early thinking. The paper builds on a similar discussion of another essay from the same period, “Homer on Competition,” in arguing that Nietzsche’s thinking is based on a confrontation with the work of Plato. It is argued that the key to understanding “The Greek State” is seeing it, in its entirety, as an enigmatic interpretation and re-writing of Plato’s Republic. Nietzsche (...) interprets the Republic as Plato’s accomplishment of the task of the genuine philosopher: the legislation of values and the moulding of human character. (shrink)

This paper attempts to exhibit the young Heidegger’s academic and personal thinking path which stems from the two university dissertations (1913 and 1915 respectively) and ends up leading to his first lecture at the University of Freiburg on the determination of philosophy (1919). It is purported in the first place to render an account of the personal circumstances that convinced Heidegger of modifying his own early purposes of becoming a priest, then a theologian and finally a confessional (...) Catholic philosopher by means of an examination of the philosophical themes which motivate his early work (Neokantianism, medieval speculative grammar and Husserlian phenomenology). In the second place, an attempt is made in order to consider Heidegger’s first Freiburg lecture in which the young philosopher intends the enterprise of undermining the primacy of the theoretical and in which he launches a series of remarkable objections (of hermeneutical nature) against Husserlian phenomenology. (shrink)

I consider the intertextuality between Chinese and Western thought by exploring how images, metaphors, and ideas from the texts associated with Zhuangzi and Laozi were appropriated in early twentieth-century German philosophy. This interest in “Lao-Zhuang Daoism” encompasses a diverse range of thinkers including Buber and Heidegger. I examine how the problematization of utility, usefulness, and “purposiveness” in Zhuangzi and Laozi becomes a key point for their German philosophical reception; how it is the poetic character of the Zhuangzi that (...) hints at an appropriate response to the crisis and loss of meaning that characterizes technological modernity and its instrumental technological rationality; that is, how the “poetic” and “spiritual” world perceived in Lao-Zhuang thought became part of Buber's and Heidegger's critical encounter and confrontation with technological modernity; and how their concern with Zhuangzi does not signify a return to a dogmatic religiosity or otherworldly mysticism; it anticipates a this-worldly spiritual or poetic way of dwelling immanently within the world. (shrink)

Both the early hermeneutics of facticity and the mature question of being have their starting point in the investigation of everyday life. Underlining Being and Time, we discuss two dimensions of the everyday life phenomenon, namely its «content» and «modal» sense. The relationship between both of them shows up as a dynamic tendency and an internal reference. On the basis of the distinction of the two-dimensional everyday life we deal with the problem of modal indifference, which is apparently closely (...) connected with the «content» sense of everyday life, in order to find out whether it could be a third way to execute existence besides authenticity and inauthenticity. We reject the plain correspondence between everyday life with modal indifference and inauthenticity, taking into account the thesis in Being and Timeabout the possibility of authentic liberating solicitude in the facticity of being together, whose analysis remains within the limits of everyday life. (shrink)

This dissertation seeks to clarify the import of the transcendence problem in Heidegger and Derrida. The guiding suggestion of my interpretations of both thinkers is that following the development of this problem through their respective projects can help to demonstrate in each an underlying continuity in light of which their seemingly discrepant shifts in emphasis from early to late can be understood as moments of an ongoing hermeneutic task. ;My argument unfolds in four chapters and a brief conclusion. (...) Chapter one motivates the project in view of the contentious standing of the problem in continental philosophy as it is characterized in the competing narratives advanced by Richard Rorty, John Caputo, and Rodolphe Gasche. ;Chapters two and three trace the problem through Heidegger's Denkweg. While Being and Time might seem to be the obvious place to start, I argue that the character of the problem is difficult to see without recourse to both the context in which the problem first arises, and the future interpretations of the problem toward which Being and Time proceeds. Accordingly, I attend to the emergence of the problem in Heidegger's dissertation and early lectures, and then leap ahead to its more explicit appropriations in the writings of 1928 where the provisional standing of fundamental ontology becomes increasingly apparent. In view of its past and future trajectories, then, I return to Being and Time to exhibit therein what I take to be latent indications of Heidegger's later disposition toward transcendence. ;Chapter four situates Derrida in terms of his debts to and departures from Heidegger. I argue that Derrida's debts in fact compel his departures; since he concurs that the transcendence of predecessor discourses necessitates their destruction in the name of advancing their undeveloped possibilities, he must dismantle Heidegger to do justice to him. In applying this insight to Derrida's project, I maintain, the careful reader can find traces of his later injunctions to "absolute responsibility" in his early affirmations of "infinite play". ;I conclude with a few brief remarks as to how this investigation might contribute to a richer understanding of contemporary continental philosophy. (shrink)

The dissertation adopts the question of self-determination as a thread to guide us into Martin Heidegger's work. Heidegger's early work is expounded as an attempt to ascertain the possibility of self-determination, while his later work is expounded as the renunciation of this attempt. In chapters one to four, the author focuses on the exposition of Being and Time. The author upholds that Heidegger's early philosophy is torn in different directions. In the phenomenological descriptions of the (...) first division of Being and Time, we see the attempt to think Dasein as a relational being, which depends on others and on the world. However, Heidegger's distinction between authentic and inauthentic Dasein is not only descriptive. It contains a call to self-determination. The philosophy of Being and Time changes as a result of this call. In order to ascertain the possibility of self-determination, Heidegger shifts the focus away from being-in-the-world and toward the self's concern with itself. The theory of temporality as the meaning of care obliterates the essential thrownness of Dasein. The author argues that there is a conflict between phenomenological description and existentialist concern with oneself in Heidegger's early project. In chapter five, the author argues that this conflict is one of the main reasons for the famous "turning" in Heidegger's philosophy. Heidegger realizes that he cannot grasp the world-oriented, "ecstatical" character of Dasein without giving up his early theory of temporality as the meaning of care. The idea of a supra-historical articulation of existential structures is rejected. The author argues that "epochality" and "nativity" are the basic forms of Dasein's lack of self-determination. Human being is never autonomous, insofar as it always already belongs to a particular age and historical people. (shrink)