ABSTRACTThroughout his writings, Heidegger's view of animals is ostensibly anthropocentric, defining them as deficient in relation to human beings. His most extensive analysis of animality, found in the 1929–1930 lecture course entitled The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, seems to be a clear example of this anthropocentrism, defining the animal as poor in world in opposition to the human being's world-forming character. Nevertheless, Heidegger is explicitly ambivalent regarding the anthropocentric implications of this conception of animality. This paper examines Heidegger's articulation of (...) the notion of world-poverty as a distinct form of negativity, its implications for the question concerning Heidegger's anthropocentrism, as well as his ambivalence with regard to this question. (shrink)

This paper concerns the relation of Heidegger’s thought to the traditionally opposed positions of realism and idealism: a dilemma that Heidegger explicitly addresses in Section 43 of Being and Time. Heidegger’s attempt to forge a position ‘between’ realism and idealism has recently been interpreted in a number of ways, depending on whether Heidegger’s affinity with realism or his affinity with idealism is prioritized. My contention is that Heidegger’s realist and idealist dimensions are equally essential to his thought in view of (...) the re-interpretation of subjectivity as ‘ahead of itself,’ which follows from his phenomenological analysis of immediate, everyday experience. (shrink)

This paper concerns the relation of Heidegger’s thought to the traditionally opposed positions of realism and idealism: a dilemma that Heidegger explicitly addresses in Section 43 of Being and Time. Heidegger’s attempt to forge a position ‘between’ realism and idealism has recently been interpreted in a number of ways, depending on whether Heidegger’s affinity with realism or his affinity with idealism is prioritized. My contention is that Heidegger’s realist and idealist dimensions are equally essential to his thought in view of (...) the re-interpretation of subjectivity as ‘ahead of itself,’ which follows from his phenomenological analysis of immediate, everyday experience. (shrink)

Heidegger conceives Dasein’s death as a peculiar type of negation, i.e., a negation that is not simple disappearance, and so is, in some sense, survived by Dasein. This paper argues that Heidegger’s technical terminology for this type of negation is the “deficient mode.” The ontological structure of the deficient mode is characterized by Heidegger as a mode of the “nur noch,” which is a way of just being. And to just be, in the sense that deficient modes just are, is (...) grounded in the unique identity conditions characteristic of a being that can exist in deficient modes—its identity is an unnecessary necessity, and so its loss is a possible impossibility. Hence, the connection with Dasein’s death, which Heidegger defines as “the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein.” Death is Dasein in a deficient mode. This interpretation of Heideggerian death is then used to address the debated issue concerning Heidegger’s distinction between death and demise. (shrink)

Volume 18 of Martin Heidegger's collected works presents his important 1924 Marburg lectures which anticipate much of the revolutionary thinking that he subsequently articulated in Being and Time. Here are the seeds of the ideas that would become Heidegger's unique phenomenology. Heidegger interprets Aristotle's Rhetoric and looks closely at the Greek notion of pathos. These lectures offer special insight into the development of his concepts of care and concern, being-at-hand, being-in-the-world, and attunement, which were later elaborated in Being and Time. (...) Available in English for the first time, they make a significant contribution to ancient philosophy, Aristotle studies, Continental philosophy, and phenomenology. (shrink)

They are forged either by the arbitrary acts of a radically free human subject ("decisionism," the position of the early Heidegger) or by the equally arbitrary dispensations of the unrestricted power of Being, which is beyond the capability of reason to comprehend ("quietism," the position of the later Heidegger). Both positions, Heidegger's opponents contend, amount to amoral irrationalism.".

One prevalent strategy for connecting Heidegger’s thought and his support of Nazism focuses on his notion of resolve. The claim is that it is through resolve that Dasein achieves authenticity, but that Heidegger’s notion of resolve is without determinate content, and thus empty. Since the call to authenticity, it is supposed, is Heidegger’s version of the command to be moral, the indeterminacy of Heideggerian resolve apparently results in an ethicopolitical “decisionism”-an effectively amoral form of judgment that precludes Heideggerian thought from (...) recognizing the evil of National Socialism. In this paper, I argue that the above critique is based on a misinterpretation of Heidegger’s notion of freedom. Specifically, it imputes the “existentialist” conception of freedom as unconstrained arbitrariness to Heideggerian resolve. A proper understanding of Heideggerian freedom, however, reveals that freedom is highly constrained, and that the freedom of resolve is far from an empty notion. (shrink)

One prevalent strategy for connecting Heidegger’s thought and his support of Nazism focuses on his notion of resolve. The claim is that it is through resolve that Dasein achieves authenticity, but that Heidegger’s notion of resolve is without determinate content, and thus empty. Since the call to authenticity, it is supposed, is Heidegger’s version of the command to be moral, the indeterminacy of Heideggerian resolve apparently results in an ethicopolitical “decisionism”-an effectively amoral form of judgment that precludes Heideggerian thought from (...) recognizing the evil of National Socialism. In this paper, I argue that the above critique is based on a misinterpretation of Heidegger’s notion of freedom. Specifically, it imputes the “existentialist” conception of freedom as unconstrained arbitrariness to Heideggerian resolve. A proper understanding of Heideggerian freedom, however, reveals that freedom is highly constrained, and that the freedom of resolve is far from an empty notion. (shrink)

Heidegger’s 1927 lecture course, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, includes an examination of the Kantian conception of being as it appears within the first Critique’s refutation of the ontological proof of God’s existence. There, Heidegger maintains that the Kantian definition of being as position is beset with an ambiguity that Kant could not resolve, as such a resolution would require the repudiation of the traditional ontology of the subject that Kant presupposes. Heidegger then claims that his own ontology of Dasein, (...) articulated in Being and Time, addresses the ambiguity in the Kantian position, and thus in Kantian being, through a phenomenology of the intentio/intentum relation—an analysis in which Heidegger attempts to move beyond the traditional ontology. Heidegger’s assessment of Kant, here, is characteristic of Heideggerian Kant-interpretation. That is, Heidegger typically views Kant as having pushed the traditional ontology to its limits, and then as having retreated from the radical implications of his own thought, due to his allegiance to that ontology. And in the context of his Kant-interpretations, Heidegger characterizes his own philosophical position as resulting from the pursuit of these radical implications of Kantian thought. (shrink)