Original and critical essays by leading scholars on the question of the human in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger.

Heidegger scholars consider the philosopher's recently published notebooks, including the issues of Heidegger's Nazism and anti-Semitism. For more than forty years, the philosopher Martin Heidegger logged ideas and opinions in a series of notebooks, known as the “Black Notebooks” after the black oilcloth booklets into which he first transcribed his thoughts. In 2014, the notebooks from 1931 to 1941 were published, sparking immediate controversy. It has long been acknowledged that Heidegger was an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazi Party in the (...) early 1930s. But the notebooks contain a number of anti-Semitic passages—often referring to the stereotype of “World-Jewry”—written even after Heidegger became disenchanted with the Nazis themselves. Reactions from the scholarly community have ranged from dismissal of the significance of these passages to claims that the anti-Semitism in them contaminates all of Heidegger's work. This volume offers the first collection of responses by Heidegger scholars to the publication of the notebooks. In essays commissioned especially for the book, the contributors offer a wide range of views, addressing not only the issues of anti-Semitism and Nazism but also the broader questions that the notebooks raise. Contributors Babette Babich, Andrew Bowie, Steven Crowell, Fred Dallmayr, Donatella Di Cesare, Michael Fagenblat, Ingo Farin, Gregory Fried, Jean Grondin, Karsten Harries, Laurence Paul Hemming, Jeff Malpas, Thomas Rohkrämer, Tracy B. Strong, Peter Trawny, Daniela Vallega-Neu, Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Nancy A. Weston, Holger Zaborowski. (shrink)

The history of Heidegger's relationship to the neo-Kantians is still largely unwritten, despite the fact that in his formative period Heidegger was very close to the neo-Kantian school, especially Windelband and Rickert, Lask and Natorp. With regard to the concept of history and the importance of historical philosophizing, it is the received view that Dilthey was early Heidegger's main and only source of inspiration. This paper argues against this one-sided view by showing the historical and systematic connections between early Heidegger's (...) views on history and the philosophy of history developed by Windelband and Rickert. (shrink)

In this paper I analyze Hegel’s concept of life in the Phenomenology of Spirit and Heidegger’s critical comments regarding this concept of life in his 1930/31 Lecture Course on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. I claim that Heidegger's lecture course shows his continued fascination with life, despite his official distance to Dilthey and the then contemporary life-philosophy. I argue that one of the fundamental tenets of life-philosophy, the opposition of "life" to "reason," still motivates Heidegger’s critique of Hegel’s supposedly logocentric concept (...) of life. I begin the paper with a brief review of Heidegger’s life-philosophical starting point after World War One (Section I)and, drawing on Hans Jonas, suggest some meta-reflections on the reasons behind the renewed interest in "life" in the last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century (section II). After a sketch of Hegel’s concept of life in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Section III), I then turn to Heidegger’s interpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in 1930/31 (Section IV), in particular Hegel’s conception of the correlation of life and time. (shrink)

: In this paper I analyze early Heidegger’s concept of history. First, I argue that early Heidegger makes use of three distinct concepts or spheres of history, namely (1) history as intergenerational process, (2) history as personal or autobiographical development, and (3) history as the real center and origin of all intentional acts in the intentional self. Second, I argue that an essential motif in Heidegger’s discussion is the re-appropriation of what he considers the externalized and expropriated historical reality in (...) all three spheres. I suggest that this constitutes an objective parallelism to similar moves in Marx and neo-Marxist thought, especially Lukaìcs and the Frankfurt School. I show that Heidegger is on his way towards an ethics of time. First, in opposition to theoretical historicism and historical aestheticism or determinism of his time, early Heidegger advocates the active historical participation in history, the engagement in one’s historical situation or praxis. Second, in opposition to the publically regimented and reified time frames, calendars and interpretations, Heidegger argues for the self-reflexive, historical shaping of one’s very own and unique lifetime. Third, because Heidegger finds the origin of all history in the historical enactments of intentions in the intentional self, he ultimately argues for the self-reflexive acknowledgment of this ultimate historicity at the very heart of human intentionality, calling for the always renewed accentuation of this inevitable and ultimate historicity as a necessary condition for authentic temporality. (shrink)

In this paper we discuss Heidegger’s conception of philosophy in the Black Notebooks. In particular, we set out a reading of the Notebooks from the 1930s and early 1940s as exhibiting an extremist view of philosophy, and its concern with being, which accords it an absolute and exclusive priority above and beyond everything else. We argue that such overcompensation for philosophy’s declining fortune involves a willful turning away from the realities of human life, and from the multifarious symbolic and functional (...) worlds in which the meaning of being is articulated, refracted, and lived by individuals. In contrast, we suggest that Heidegger’s early Freiburg lecture courses already contain the basis for a critique of such an inflated notion of philosophy, and that the shift in Heidegger’s thinking in the late 1940s—away from an onto-historical and towards a topological understanding—is a consequence of Heidegger’s own reaction against the extremity of his thinking, and a turning back to the properly human dimensions of thinking and the matters that call for thinking. (shrink)

Jeff Malpas’ book Experience and Place has become a significant landmark in philosophy. I take the publication of the revised and extended second edition of the book in 2018 as an opportunity to re...

The dissertation is a historical and systematic study of Heidegger 's philosophizing at Freiburg between 1919 and 1923. It is shown that Heidegger pursues a philosophy of life directed at articulating how human life is lived from within, rather than how it is objectively thought about in the various positive sciences. Heidegger 's basic thesis that life is inextricably tied to the historical world and centered in the personal self leads him to experiment with various forms of relativism or historicism, (...) which, however, cannot be defended. Moreover, Heidegger 's search for a non-objective, non-theoretical method of describing life ultimately leads to a dead-end, although it does raise important questions about the theory of phenomenological description and concept formation. ; Heidegger 's extreme anti-objectivist phenomenology of life draws on and radicalizes strands in Bergson, Simmel, Jaspers, Kierkegaard, Dilthey, and Husserl. However, it also co-opts anti-objectivist impulses about the non-naturalist conceptuality of history and psychology, as pioneered by Natorp, Windelband, and Rickert. The conclusion is that Heidegger is not starting out as a philosopher of being, but as a philosopher of life, being driven by the life-philosophical ferment of the time. ;In addition, it is argued that Heidegger 's life-philosophy is a "philosophy of crisis," putting at center stage the fragility of life and the tendency to fall away from original self-being and the unique historical situation. It is suggested that this corresponds to the lived through "crisis" of World War One, and the political upheavals in the immediate post-war period. As a crisis philosopher, Heidegger embraces modernism and its skeptical distance to the normative powers of the tradition. ;Last but not the least, it is argued that, in the early twenties, Heidegger 's philosophy does not carry the slightest traces of overt or covert reactionary political motifs. (shrink)

Hermeneutical Heidegger critically examines and confronts Heidegger's hermeneutical approach to philosophy and the history of philosophy. Heidegger's work, both early and late, has had a profound impact on hermeneutics and hermeneutical philosophy. The essays in this volume are striking in the way they exhibit the variety of perspectives on the development and role of hermeneutics in Heidegger's work, allowing a multiplicity of views on the nature of hermeneutics and hermeneutical philosophy to emerge. As Heidegger argues, the rigor and strength of (...) philosophy do not consist in the development of a univocal and universal method, but in philosophy's ability to embrace—not just tolerate—the questioning of its basic concepts. The essays in Hermeneutical Heidegger are exemplars of this kind of rigor and strength. (shrink)

In this study Berkowitz challenges interpretations which claim Nietzsche as the "founding father of postmodernism" and its relativism and perspectivism. He argues that Nietzsche's commitment to a search for truth, wisdom, and virtue marks him as an ethicist proper, whose "break from traditional morality is by his own account, and is in fact, grounded in and a partial continuation of traditional morality".

Edmund Husserl, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology: From the Lectures, Winter Semester, 1910--1911. Translated by Ingo Farin and James G. Hart Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s10743-010-9073-7 Authors Colin J. Hahn, Department of Philosophy, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI 53201-1881, USA Journal Husserl Studies Online ISSN 1572-8501 Print ISSN 0167-9848 Journal Volume Volume 26 Journal Issue Volume 26, Number 3.

Diego Bubbio, Ingo Farin and Glenda Satne have advanced a range of comments, questions and challenges relating to the ideas and arguments set out in the new edition of my Place and Experience (2018). Rather than address each of my interlocutors separately, my responses here are organized around four main topics: the relation between space and place, including the nature of space; the relation between place and subjectivity, and the foundational role of place; the relation between place and (...) conceptuality; and the relation between place and normativity. (shrink)

Reductionism encompasses a set of ontological, epistemological, and methodological claims about the relation of different scientific domains. The basic question of reduction is whether the properties, concepts, explanations, or methods from one scientific domain (typically at higher levels of organization) can be deduced from or explained by the properties, concepts, explanations, or methods from another domain of science (typically one about lower levels of organization). Reduction is germane to a variety of issues in philosophy of science, including the structure of (...) scientific theories, the relations between different scientific disciplines, the nature of explanation, the diversity of methodology, and the very idea of theoretical progress, as well as to numerous topics in metaphysics and philosophy of mind, such as emergence, mereology, and supervenience. (shrink)

Examining previous discussions on how to construe the concepts of gender and race, we advocate what we call strategic conceptual engineering. This is the employment of a (possibly novel) concept for specific epistemic or social aims, concomitant with the openness to use a different concept (e.g., of race) for other purposes. We illustrate this approach by sketching three distinct concepts of gender and arguing that all of them are needed, as they answer to different social aims. The first concept serves (...) the aim of identifying and explaining gender-based discrimination. It is similar to Haslanger’s well-known account, except that rather than offering a definition of ‘woman’ we focus on ‘gender’ as one among several axes of discrimination. The second concept of gender is to assign legal rights and social recognitions, and thus is to be trans-inclusive. We argue that this cannot be achieved by previously suggested concepts that include substantial gender-related psychological features, such as awareness of social expectations. Instead, our concept counts someone as being of a certain gender solely based on the person’s self-identification with this gender. The third concept of gender serves the aim of personal empowerment by means of one’s gender identity. In this context, substantial psychological features and awareness of one’s social situation are involved. While previous accounts of concepts have focused on their role in determining extensions, we point to contexts where a concept’s role in explanation and moral reasoning can be more important. (shrink)

The traditional practice of establishing morphological types and investigating morphological organization has found new support from evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo), especially with respect to the notion of body plans. Despite recurring claims that typology is at odds with evolutionary thinking, evo-devo offers mechanistic explanations of the evolutionary origin, transformation, and evolvability of morphological organization. In parallel, philosophers have developed non-essentialist conceptions of natural kinds that permit kinds to exhibit variation and undergo change. This not only facilitates a construal of species (...) and higher taxa as natural kinds, but also broadens our perspective on the diversity of kinds found in biology. There are many different natural kinds relevant to the investigative and explanatory aims of evo-devo, including homologues and developmental modules. (shrink)

This chapter offers a critique of intelligent design arguments against evolution and a philosophical discussion of the nature of science, drawing several lessons for the teaching of evolution and for science education in general. I discuss why Behe’s irreducible complexity argument fails, and why his portrayal of organismal systems as machines is detrimental to biology education and any under-standing of how organismal evolution is possible. The idea that the evolution of complex organismal features is too unlikely to have occurred by (...) random mutation and selection (as recently promoted by Dembski) is very widespread, but it is easy to show students why such small probability arguments are fallacious. While intelligent design proponents have claimed that the exclusion of supernatural causes mandated by scientific methods is dogmatically presupposed by science, scientists have an empirical justification for using such methods. This justification is instructive for my discussion of how to demarcate science from pseudoscience. I argue that there is no universal account of the nature of science, but that the criteria used to judge an intellectual approach vary across historical periods and have to be specific to the scientific domain. Moreover, intellectual approaches have to be construed as practices based on institutional factors and values, and to be evaluated in terms of the activities of their practitioners. Science educators should not just teach scientific facts, but present science as a practice and make students reflect on the nature of science, as this gives them a better appreciation of the ways in which intelligent design falls short of actual science. (shrink)

Die vorliegende Arbeit zeigt erstmals, dass sich die Vermittlung von Moral und Glück in Immanuel Kants Philosophie strukturell beschreiben lässt. Sie bleibt aber letztlich die nicht endende Aufgabe eines bewussten Lebens, das um seine Neigungen weiß, klug mit diesen umgeht und die Moral als letzten Orientierungspunkt versteht.

Editors' introduction to the special issue on homology (Biology and Philosophy Vol. 22, Issue 5, 2007).

Ein naturalistisches Menschenbild sieht uns Menschen und unsere geistigen Fähigkeiten als materielle Phänomene und durch Evolution entstanden. Dies ist immer wieder der Anlass zu Menschenbildkonflikten, insbesondere mit religiös fundierten Menschenbildern. Aber auch innerhalb der Verhaltens- und Kognitionswissenschaft kann man suspekte Menschenbilder finden, die kulturell bedingte Verhaltensmuster und soziale Organisationsformen als biologisch-genetisch bestimmt sehen. Zum Beispiel kann die heutige evolutionäre Psychologie behaupten, dass aufgrund unterschiedlicher sozialer Rollen während der Evolution Männer und Frauen unterschiedliche verhaltenspsychologische Tendenzen und unterschiedliche kognitive Fähigkeiten haben. Dahingegen (...) würde ein naturwissenschaftlich und evolutionsbiologisch haltbares Menschenbild die gesamte Bandbreite menschlicher Vielfalt und kognitiver Diversität betonen. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article introduces an “ordonomic” approach to corporate citizenship. We believe that ordonomics offers a conceptual framework for analyzing both the social structure and the semantics of moral commitments. We claim that such an analysis can provide theoretical guidance for the changing role of business in society, especially in regard to the expectation and trend that businesses take a political role and act as corporate citizens. The systematicraison d'êtreof corporate citizenship is that business firms can and—judged by the criterion of (...) prudent self-interest—“should” take on an active role in rule-finding discourses and rule-setting processes with the intent of realizing a win-win outcome of the economic game. We identify—and illustrate—four ways that corporate citizens can employ moral commitments as a factor of production to enhance their processes of economic value creation. (shrink)

In the 1970s, the position that species are natural kinds characterized by essences came to be challenged, and was replaced by the view that species are individuals. To date, this remains the dominant position, at least among biologists, despite influential arguments that species can be construed as homeostatic property cluster kinds (employing a revised notion of essence). Recent philosophical discussions have broadened the scope by articulating a neo-Aristotelian essentialism for species, developing a post-essentialist account of human nature, and scrutinizing temporal (...) persistence conditions for species in the light of species de-extinction efforts. Yet most such current discussions concerning species have not relied on the notion of an essence, which also parallels recent accounts of natural kinds in the philosophy of science. (shrink)

This article introduces an “ordonomic” approach to corporate citizenship. We believe that ordonomics offers a conceptual framework for analyzing both the social structure and the semantics of moral commitments. We claim that such an analysis can provide theoretical guidance for the changing role of business in society, especially in regard to the expectation and trend that businesses take a political role and act as corporate citizens. The systematicraison d'êtreof corporate citizenship is that business firms can and—judged by the criterion of (...) prudent self-interest—“should” take on an active role in rule-finding discourses and rule-setting processes with the intent of realizing a win-win outcome of the economic game. We identify—and illustrate—four ways that corporate citizens can employ moral commitments as a factor of production to enhance their processes of economic value creation. (shrink)

Zwei Aspekte bilden die Grundlage der allgemeinen Symboltheorie, die der amerikanische Philosoph Nelson Goodman in einem seiner Hauptwerke, Languages of Art, als Zentrum seiner analytischen Philosophie entworfen hat: Zum einen setzt jede Symbolisierung Bezugnahme voraus, zum anderen finden sämtliche Arten von Symbolisierung - als Performanzakte - im Bereich zwischen sowohl syntaktisch als auch semantisch eindeutigen (formalen, notationalen) und weder syntaktisch noch semantisch eindeutigen (pikturalen,,repräsentationalen') Symbolsystemen - kurz, im Spannungsbereich zwischen,Wissenschaft' und,Kunst' - statt. Somit muss es einen Bereich geben, in dem (...) diese beiden extremen Weisen von Darstellung,ineinander übergehen', und genau in diesem Bereich lässt sich, so die zentrale These dieses Buches, das Verfahren der Metaphernbildung lokalisieren. Das hat Konsequenzen für einen tragfähigen Kompetenzbegriff in Wissenschaft und Kunst, für den Kreativitätsbegriff, wirft ein besonderes Licht auf Goodmans Neufassung des Induktionsproblems und letztlich auf das Wesen (philosophischer) Erkenntnis im Allgemeinen... (shrink)