Denis McManus

Although Heidegger never engages directly with the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, his account of Being-in-the-world—which depicts the lives of thinking, feeling and willing agents as an essentially shared and public worldly phenomenon—entails that those lives could not differ profoundly and systematically as the classic thought-experiments that inspire the ‘hard problem’ envisage. ‘So much the worse for Heidegger!’, one might conclude. But drawing on his account, we can also arrive at a diagnosis of why such thought experiments might seem compelling even if that account were to be correct. Key elements of this diagnosis are (1) the rejection of a rationalistic conception of how we grasp phenomenal properties, (2) the depiction of samples of such properties as what one might call ‘descriptive tools’, mastery of which is essential to that grasp, and (3) an understanding of why such tools nevertheless typically do not form part of the phenomenological content of our ordinary engagement with these properties. This Heideggerian account challenges the ‘hard problem’ by suggesting that sense cannot be assigned to zombies, inverted spectra and the like even though such possibilities will necessarily seem imaginable—the crucial fact that makes the ‘hard problem’ appear to be a problem.

The paper presents an interpretation of the thinking behind the early Wittgenstein's "general form of the proposition." It argues that a central role is played by the assumption that all domains of discourse are governed by the same laws of logic. The interpretation is presented partly through a comparison with ideas presented recently by Michael Potter and Peter Sullivan; the paper argues that the above assumption explains more of the key characteristics of the "general form of the proposition" than Potter and Sullivan suppose, including, in particular, its claim that the bases from which all other propositions are derived must be elementary propositions.

In This Paper, I Identify a Problem, which the project that I will refer to as the ‘Being and Time Project’ (or ‘BTP’ for short) aimed to solve; this is the project within which Heidegger reinterpreted his early thought—and which he unsuccessfully attempted to bring to fruition—in, roughly speaking, the years 1925–28. The problem in question presents several faces: viewed from one angle, it concerns the unity of the concept of “Being in general,” from another, the integrity of the notion of “Dasein,” and from another, the possibility of the perspective from which the philosopher does her work. The solution that the BTP would have offered turns on the claim that time is “the possible horizon for any understanding ..