Online research in philosophy

A number of prominent philosophers advance the following ideas: (1) Meaning is use. (2) Meaning is an intrinsically normative notion. Call (1) the use thesis, hereafter UT, and (2) the normativity thesis, hereafter NT. They come together in the view that for a linguistic expression to have meaning is for there to be certain proprieties governing its employment.1 These ideas are often associated with a third.

This essay turns from a discussion of measure as it pertains to poetry to a discussion of Hölderlin’s poem “In Lovely Blueness” in the context of Heidegger’s essay on that poem, “Poetically Man Dwells.” For Hölderlin, paradoxically, although man measures himself against the godhead, there is a sense in which, for man, there is no measure on earth. I argue that Heidegger’s attempt to bridge the gap between absence and presence has the effect of “retheologizing” the poem and distorting its meaning. The argument proceeds partly by measuring several English translation of the poem against one another.

In this contribution the author sketches his main motives for translating Sein und Zeit into Dutch. First, the author argues that Heidegger’s text – and its translation – can clarify its notions better than most of Heidegger’s interprets can do. Then, the author shows that Heidegger’s method, being hermeneutics, has intrinsically to do with translation. Referring to the genesis of his translation, the author points at some general peculiarities of Heidegger’s use of language, insisting upon their meaning for the translation of Heidegger’s work into Dutch.

The period after World War Two saw the emergence both of the so-called later Heidegger and of the corresponding problem of the unity of his thought. Although his major work, Sein und Zeit, 1927 (=SZ) had announced Heidegger's intention of working out the meaning of being (Sein), his publications up through 1943, with the exception of the brief Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, presented only his preparatory analysis of human openness (Dasein). However, Heidegger's post-war publications seemed to emphasize “being itself” (the history of being, being as language, pre-Socratic notions of being, the withdrawal of being in the modern world) and indeed almost seemed to hypostasize being into an "other" with a life of its own. This state of affairs, combined with Heidegger's announcement in 1953 that SZ would be left a torso, gave rise to such questions as whether his later thought was still phenomenological, how it might be continuous with his earlier writings, and how, if indeed at all, it was to be understood.

The article deals with the recently published Besinnung, a work dating from 1938–1939, one among the unpublished treatises in Part III of Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe. It follows the Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) (1936–1938), taking up the same themes as that work, such as the last God, the first and the other beginning, etc. But whereas the earlier work, especially the notion of the last God, relates more to Schelling, this one muses on Kierkegaard. The article sets Besinnung within the context of related works of the same period, not only the Beiträge but also Metaphysik und Nihilismus and Geschichte des Seyns. However, Besinnung also breaks new ground, finding a deeper ontological distinction between Seyn and Sein as the basis for the earlier ontological difference between being and beings. The work is part and parcel with Heidegger's destructuring of metaphysics, which he sees as really a freeing up of the beginning, as also the issue of onto-theology. Thus it is integral with Heidegger's program of getting God out of metaphysics and being out of theology. It is in virtue of the meaning he attaches to Seyn (Logos) in Da-sein that it is possible for him not only to retrieve the meaning of the other beginning, the en-owning (Er-eignis) of Da-sein, and with it the meaning of the first beginning (in the two senses the phrase has in this work), but also thereby to recover the forgotten meaning of being (Sein). The approach to Seyn, with Kierkegaard, is not through the thinking (Denken) that thinks being, which cannot really get beyond beings and/or the Supreme Being of metaphysics, but through a thinking, a musing, that thinks through to (Er-denkt) Seyn. The article concludes with some reflections on the significance of Heidegger as theo-logian.

It has been suggested recently that Heidegger’s philosophy entails a linguistic idealism because it is committed to the thesis that meaning determines reference. I argue that a careful consideration of the relationship between meaning and signification in Heidegger’s work does not support the strong sense of determination required by this thesis. By examining Heidegger’s development of Husserl’s phenomenology, I show that discourse involves a logic that articulates meaning into significations. Further analysis of Heidegger’s phenomenological method at work shows that while meaning serves as a condition of possibility of signification in the sense that all possibilities for a term’s signification are latent in the meaning of that term, meaning under-determines signification and hence reference. Key Words: discourse • language • linguistic idealism • logic • meaning • phenomenology • signification.

Although Levinas’ “il y a” does not directly correspond to Heidegger’s conception of being, his criticism of Heidegger’s temporal ontology is nevertheless justified. With the reduction of every meaning (and being) to its temporal constitution, Heidegger excludes any possibility of transcendence beyond time. The problem of overcoming the radical finitude and historicity of meaning, which is ethically motivated, brings Levinas to the age-old question of metaphysics. However, taking Heidegger’s thought seriously, Levinas is forced to look for an entirely new understanding of the metaphysical quest.

Linguistic meaning has an essential normative dimension that prima facie cannot be reduced to descriptive, non-normative, terms. Taking this point for granted, this paper however aims at proposing a naturalist view of semantics - inspired by Wilfrid Sellars' original works - focused on the way the constitutive normative aspects of meaning might be properly explained and accounted for, rather than eliminated.

Heidegger has been taken by many as a prophet of extremity, a nihilist, an existentialistic individualist, and a destroyer of normativity. This article offers a sympathetic reading of Brandom’s efforts to extricate Heidegger from such readings and to set out a way to read Heidegger’s philosophy of language and action that underscores their fundamental sociality and normativity. Herein it is shown specifically why Brandom must turn to Heidegger’s work as a testing ground for his own proposal of an inferentialist semantics. In tandem, Brandom’s Kantian reading of Heidegger is analysed and assessed. Key Words: Dasein • Martin Heidegger • language • normativity • objectivity • pragmatics • referential • Richard Rorty • semantics • sociality • world-disclosing.

It has frequently been suggested that meaning is, in some important sense, normative. However, precisely what is particularly normative about it is often left without any satisfactory explanation, and the ‘normativity thesis’ has thus, justly, been called into question. That said, it will be argued here that the intuition that meaning is ‘normative’ is on the right track, even if many of the purported explanations for meaning’s normativity are not. In particular, rather that being particularly social, the normativity of meaning may follow from the more logical/epistemic relations between use and meaning. Because of this, some use-based theories we still be able to accommodate the normativity of meaning by allowing that while meaning supervenes upon use, the function from use to meaning is a normative one.