ABSTRACTMost scholars agree that meaning and intelligibility are central to Heidegger’s account of Dasein and Being-in-the-world, but there is some confusion about the nature of this intelligibility. In his debate with McDowell, Dreyfus draws on phenomenologists like Heidegger to argue that there are two kinds of intelligibility: a basic, nonconceptual, practical intelligibility found in practical comportment and a conceptual, discursive intelligibility. I explore two possible ways that Dreyfus might ground this twofold account of intelligibility in Heidegger: first in the distinction (...) between the hermeneutic and apophantic “as”, and second in the presence and absence of the as-structure. I argue that neither approach succeeds because practical intelligibility is always already discursive and discursive articulation is a condition of practical comportment. (shrink)

In this paper I take issue with Heidegger's use of the concept of death as a means of disclosing human finitude. I argue that Being‐towards‐death is inadequate to the disclosure of Dasein's thrownness which is necessary for the kind of authentic historizing that Heidegger describes and furthermore leads to a reading of authenticity which is preclusive of Being‐with‐Others, I suggest that this difficulty may be alleviated through increased attention to the opposite boundary of Dasein's existence, namely its birth. Although I (...) do not pursue the project here of conducting a phenomenology of birth, I suggest some directions for proceeding with that task, and I illustrate that a greater emphasis on Dasein's beginning will increase the richness of our understanding of our Being‐with‐Others. (shrink)

This essay critically engages Dreyfus's widely read interpretation of Heidegger's Being and Time . It argues that Dreyfus's reading is rooted in two primary claims or interpretative principles. The first - the Cartesianism thesis - indicates that Heidegger's objective in Being and Time is to overturn Cartesianism. The second - the hermeneutics of suspicion thesis - claims that Division II is supposed to suspect and throw into question the results of the Division I analysis. These theses contribute to the view (...) that there are two conflicting accounts of inauthenticity that threaten the coherence of Heidegger's notion of authenticity. This view concerning authenticity is mistaken, as are the two theses that support it. The first thesis is incorrect because Heidegger's explicit aim is to investigate the question of the meaning of being not to overturn Cartesianism. The second is incorrect because the analyses of Division I describe the structures of everyday human existence in preparation for a closer examination in Division II of what makes them possible. Division II does not undercut Division I; it carries the analysis deeper. Authenticity, then, is not a negation of everydayness; it is a deepening of the self-understanding expressed in everydayness. (shrink)

The existential analytic of Being and Time is set within the frame of the Seinsfrage. This question arises for Heidegger out of his critical engagement with Husserl's phenomenology. More careful attention to Heidegger's project as a phenomenological one reveals that Dasein, the entity who asks the Seinsfrage and who always has a pre-ontological understanding of Being, is also intentional. Dasein's existentiality is an intentionality. I will argue that inauthenticity and authenticity may be fruitfully understood in terms of the phenomenological notions (...) of empty intention and intentional fulfillment, respectively. Such an approach opens up the possibility of understanding Dasein's subjectivity in a way which challenges more traditional existentialist and voluntarist interpretations. (shrink)

Often we frame our learning about or discovery of things and indeed the very existence of those things in terms of unconcealment, as when we say that something.

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. (shrink)

The Early Heidegger’s Philosophy of Life: Facticity, Being and Language offers an interpretation of Heidegger’s concept of facticity as it is articulated in connection with the ideas of life and language in the lecture courses from 1919225. The book argues that facticity is both the source of vitality for theory and a source of deception and falsehood and therefore cannot be viewed in either positive or negative terms exclusively, but must instead be viewed as ambiguous. This essay argues that this (...) basic thesis is correct and is supported by drawing a distinction between everydayness and inauthenticity. It is also argued that the analysis of language the book offers can be useful in clearing up misunderstandings of Heidegger’s concept of discourse in Being and Time. (shrink)

Infectious Nietzsche is a collection of twelve provocative essays written by Krell during the years 1969-94. This fact accounts for the somewhat fragmentary texture of the work, but each piece adds another dimension to what Krell refers to as his interpretation of Nietzsche's "descensional" thinking, and, in this regard, they remain remarkably well coordinated.