Richard Schmitt

Jon Elster believes that methodological individualism is self-evident (Elster 1986, 66). Not finding it so, and being suspicious of philosophers who claim that their views are so obvious as to demand no arguments in their favor, I went back to retrace the outlines of the methodological individualism debate. It turns out that the participants to the debate disagree widely as to what they are arguing about; it is not obvious to them what methodological individualism is. The defenders of methodological individualism agree with their critics much more than those critics acknowledge. Each side ascribes views to the other which its proponents disown explicitly.

Calls for a rapprochement between analytic philosophy and phenomenology have lately been issued in England and America. It is not altogether clear what such calls intend. No one, I suspect asks for an attempt to restate, say, Austin’s views on language in Heideggerian jargon. More likely the unspoken hope is that, on the contrary, someone would enable analytic philosophers to understand what Husserl and Heidegger and some of the other phenomenologists have to say. This requires nothing less than a translation of these thinkers’ statements not only into a different natural language but into a different philosophical vocabulary. Translating German philosophical works into English is difficult. Translating Husserl’s or Heidegger’s views into a vocabulary acceptable to analytic philosophers is considerably more laborious. However arduous the task, translations from the vocabulary of Husserl or Heidegger into analytic jargon are possible. The present paper shows that they are, by discussing Heidegger’s distinction between ’vorhanden sein’ and ’zuhanden sein’ in reasonably plain English.