Daniel Dahlstrom

The aim of this crisply written study is to elaborate and criticize the basic direction of the third section of the first part of Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, the unfinished but, as it were, systematic center of the entire project. Köhler undertakes this ambitious project with the help of lectures held right after the completion of Sein und Zeit as well as the lectures of the winter semester of 1925/26. In these lectures the works of Scheler and Kant figure significantly and Köhler, accordingly, devotes the first four chapters of the book to the way in which the use of schemata by these two thinkers is reworked by Heidegger in an attempt to schematize the sense of 'to be'. The first and second chapters of the book lucidly detail affinities and disaffinities [[sic]] between Scheler's analysis of the environment and Heidegger's analysis of Dasein. Scheler's more dynamic, but also more restricted, use of the concept of schema is indicated as are several crucial differences between the two thinkers.

Challenging twentieth-century skepticism regarding the notion of subjectivity, the author sets for himself the task of elaborating several models of self-consciousness, each differentiated by an advancing degree of complexity. Düsing’s book is accordingly both critical and constructive; its aim is to construct a viable theory of subjectivity and a clear foundation for scientific research, thereby forestalling the naive practice, common among researchers of neural processes, of assuming an arbitrary conception of consciousness and self-consciousness. At the same time, Düsing creatively appropriates theories of subjectivity produced in the period from Kant to Hegel and distinguished by a sophisticated differentiation and combination of concepts of pure self-consciousness and a concrete self.

Does adherence to the principles of logic commit us to a particular way of viewing the world? Or are there ways of being – ways of behaving in the world, including ways of thinking, feeling, and speaking – that ground the normative constraints that logic imposes? Does the fact that assertions, the traditional elements of logic, are typically made about beings present a problem for metaphysical prospects of making assertions meaningfully about being? Does thinking about being accordingly require revising or restricting logic's reach – and, if so, how is this possible? Or is there something precious about the very idea of thinking the limits of thinking? Contemporary scholars have become increasing sensitive to how Heidegger, much like Wittgenstein, instructively poses such questions. Heidegger on Logic is a collection of new essays by leading scholars who critically ponder the efficacy of his responses to them.

From a phenomenological point of view, others present themselves as unities within my intentional life as a whole, constituted ‘for’ me even while maintaining a certain reserve. This ‘reserve’ is meant to indicate that the consciousness of alter egos involves the consciousness of a breach that does not obtain between consciousness and its other ‘objects’. Indeed, there is an obvious sense in which this very consciousness requires a considerable modification of the phenomenological understanding of the ego itself and the way in which intentional life is constituted. As a means of accounting for intersubjectivity without reducing it to the ego or vice versa, the author of this short, but densely written volume focuses on the body as the place in which the above mentioned breach is constituted and countenanced in tandem with a transformed conception of the ego. The rationale for this strategy is outlined in chapter one, “Alterity and Otherness: The Problem of the Body in the Cartesian Meditations,” where the author observes, to begin with, that “the reduced ownness” cannot be defined as ‘nonalien’ since it is embodied and, as such, includes its “own inescapable otherness... thus indicating that the ‘inside’ of the ‘I’ is ordered in such a way that the experience of alterity is possible.” While providing some important clues, this observation does not explain how alterity in fact is experienced. The beginning of an explanation, Dodd suggests, is to be found in the passive synthesis of my body and another’s and, on the basis of that pairing, the interpretation of the other’s body in analogy with the way the ego mundanely expresses itself in its body. Thus, the most basic answer to the question of how another ego-life can be constituted in its alterity yet in my consciousness is provided by “expression” as a mundane and mutual modification of my life and others, in short, by their encounter, not as transcendental subjects, but as living bodies. The remainder of the book accordingly focuses on the body as “the basic element of the encounter between two lives”, based upon Husserl’s account of the three essential features of a “physical thing”: extendedness, materiality, and temporality.

According to the author, Heidegger's understanding of the metaphysical roots of modern technology also indicates a way out of its life-threatening grip. Technik und Gelassenheit is an attempt to clear that alternative path according to and after Heidegger. Unaware of the extent of "die ökologische Katastrophe wie das atomäre Inferno," Heidegger was too generous to metaphysics and unable to hope that technology itself would be part of the turn from metaphysics. Schirmacher aims to cultivate that very hope, taking up where Heidegger left off, by developing a notion of the unity of Technik and Gelassenheit.

Commentaries on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit are hardly novel. Several attempts exist to supply readers with sometimes critical, sometimes historical explanations of difficult passages and transitions and occasionally with an interpretation of the work as a whole. Curiously German scholars, unlike their French and English speaking counterparts, had not produced an extensive commentary before the appearance of Scheier's impressive undertaking. Rightly convinced that neither its architectonic nor the need to which it responded had been adequately treated in previous studies of the Phenomenology, Scheier's commentary single-mindedly attempts to pursue Hegel's employment of "die einfachen Bestimmungen, z. B. des Ansichseins, des Fürsichseins, der Sichselbstgleichheit usf.," described by Hegel in the Vorrede. The result is quite aptly labelled an "analytic commentary," one that refrains from the temptation either to pass over passages or to "explain" them in terms of extraneous considerations or possibly relevant historical detail. Such reflections are useful, perhaps even necessary to comprehending Hegel's most baffling work, but interpretation must begin with the sort of careful textual analysis Scheier has undertaken. Scheier's approach makes for rather dry reading and it is certainly flawed by being too uncritical, even slavish. He often takes positions on controversial matters of interpretation without entering into the reasons elaborated for and against that position by other commentators. Yet Analytische [[sic]] Kommentar remains a valuable contribution to study of the Phenomenology of Spirit, as a clearly written and tenacious pursuit of its logic, both in detail and in general outline.

The "conceptual story" told by Kisiel neatly divides into three parts, reflecting the genesis of SZ respectively "as a topic, as a program, and as a text". Part 1 begins with the 1919 War Emergency Semester and Heidegger's transformation of Husserlian phenomenology into a "pretheoretical science" of pretheoretical origins, leading to the elaboration of a hermeneutics of facticity and its methodological problematic in concert with the demands of a phenomenology of religion. Part 1 is the lengthiest of the three parts, but with good reason. By securing extant transcripts of courses, Kisiel is able to provide illuminating material not found in the published editions. The paraphrase of lectures of the winter semester 1920-21 "Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion," based upon four extant student transcripts, is particularly valuable since Heidegger's autograph of this course is missing and, hence, the lectures presumably will not find their way into the Gesamtausgabe. Kisiel relates how the course undergoes an abrupt change in focus from methodological considerations to the examination of concrete religious phenomena, a change apparently prompted by students' complaints over the lectures' "lack of religious content".

There are several difficulties, largely the product of the distinctive question and paths of Heidegger's thinking, that beset any attempt to determine his philosophical heritage. In the first part of the following paper, after reviewing these difficulties, the author argues that Heidegger is, nonetheless, singularly and quite rightly preoccupied with the heritage of his thinking. In the second part an attempt is made to show how a particular understanding of being, namely, being as presence and absence, motivates various paths taken by his thinking, paths which, indeed, have given rise to several appropriations of his thinking in the present: pragmatic, religious, hermeneutical as well as in the philosophy of art and technology. In the final part of the paper the author identifies some of these ongoing "Heideggerian heritages," but with the aim of underscoring their dependence upon what for the author is the principal heritage of his thinking, a way of thinking about being that recovers its fundamentally historical character. /// Existem várias dificuldades, as quais são em larga medida produto da questão distintiva e dos diversos caminhos do pensamento de Heidegger, que condicionam toda e qualquer tentativa de determinar a sua herança filosófica. Na primeira parte do presente artigo, o autor, depois de mencionar as sobreditas dificuldades, argumenta que Heidegger, apesar de tudo, está singularmente, e apropriadamente, preocupado com a herança do seu pensamento. Na segunda parte, é feita uma tentativa no sentido de mostrar até que ponto uma compreensão particular do ser, nomeadamente do ser como presença e ausência, deu lugar a diversas apropriações do pensamento heideggeriano no presente: apropriação pragmática, religiosa, hermenêutica, bem como no âmbito da filosofia da arte e da tecnologia. Finalmente, na sua última parte, o presente artigo identifica algumas das "heranças heideggerianas" correntes, mas com a intenção de sublinhar a sua dependência em relação àquilo que para o autor constitui a principal herança do seu pensamento, nomeadamente, um modo de pensar acerca do ser que recupera o seu carácter fundamentalmente histórico.

In lectures and writings during the 1920s, Heidegger appropriates what he takes to be the basic insights expressed in Parmenides’ Poem, even as he criticizes other decisive and fateful aspects of it. He gives his most ample, early account of major parts of Parmenides’ Poem in 1922 lectures on Aristotle. The aim of this study is to review Heidegger’s account in those lectures, with a view to showing how Heidegger’s reading of Parmenides contributes to thinking that culminates in the project of fundamental ontology. To this end, following the detailed review of that account, the article addresses the significance of Heidegger’s references to Parmenides in Sein und Zeit.

BOOK REVIEWS 473 Chapter 4 concerns Peirce's "pragmatic metaphysics" and is the culmination of the development of Rosenthal's pluralism thesis. Together with the observation that the categories are categories of process, and through a close examination of the category of Firstness, she emphasizes the importance of sense-qualities that are inseparable from negative and positive possibilities Cmay-bes" and "would-bes") and their relevance to the controversies over whether Peirce is a realist, an idealist, or a phenomenalist. She says that Peirce did not see that the language he had available from the tradition was not adequate; thus, he proposed that objective idealism is the best answer to the question of whether the universe is mind or matter, even though he in fact repudiated objective idealism. In considering Peirce's cosmology, Rosenthal draws on Peirce's discussions of the law of mind, considering the ineradicable place of spontaneity in the emergence of new intelligibility or the evolution of laws. She concludes with a reiteration of the point that although knowledge involves convergence, convergences are always within a common world that inquirers partially but continually remake. Rosenthal's book is far too rich to do it justice in this short space. It challenges the reader to see why Peirce's thought is particularly relevant to contemporary debates, not only over how to interpret Peirce but, more importantly, about how his philosophy may help..

This volume identifies and develops how philosophy of mind and phenomenology interact in both conceptual and empirically-informed ways. The objective is to demonstrate that phenomenology, as the first-personal study of the contents and structures of our mentality, can provide us with insights into the understanding of the mind and can complement strictly analytical or empirically informed approaches to the study of the mind. Insofar as phenomenology, as the study or science of phenomena, allows the mind to appear, this collection shows how the mind can reappear through a constructive dialogue between different ways—phenomenological, analytical, and empirical—of understanding mentality.

This paper attempts to shed light on Heidegger’s critical appropriation of Husserl’s phenomenology. It begins by reviewing Heidegger’s basic criticisms of Husserl’s philosophical approach as well as his ambivalence towards it, an ambivalence that raises the question of whether Heidegger shares Husserl’s idealist trajectory. The paper then examines how Heidegger appropriates what he regards as two of Husserl’s “decisive discoveries,” namely, Husserl’s accounts of intentionality and categorial intuitions. Regarding the first discovery, the paper demonstrates how Heidegger tweaks the method of phenomenological reduction for the purpose of describing intentional experience in terms of being-in-the-world. As for the second discovery, the paper shows how Heidegger adapts the basic sense of categorial intuitions, both pre-thematically and thematically, into his existential analysis. In conclusion, the paper discusses how the role of horizons in Heidegger’s analysis of temporality provides him with firm reasons to resist an idealist interpretation of phenomenology.

This volume of essays by internationally prominent scholars interprets the full range of Heidegger's thought and major critical interpretations of it. It explores such central themes as hermeneutics, facticity and Ereignis, conscience in Being and Time, freedom in the writings of his period of transition from fundamental ontology, and his mature criticisms of metaphysics and ontotheology. The volume also examines Heidegger's interpretations of other authors, the philosophers Aristotle, Kant and Nietzsche and the poets Rilke, Trakl and George. A final group of essays interprets the critical reception of Heidegger's thought, both in the analytic tradition (Ryle, Carnap, Rorty and Dreyfus) and in France (Derrida and Lv̌inas). This rich and wide-ranging collection will appeal to all who are interested in the themes, the development and the context of Heidegger's philosophical thought.

Heidegger's Being and Time: Critical Essays provides a variety of recent studies of Heidegger's most important work. Twelve prominent scholars, representing diverse nationalities, generations, and interpretive approaches deal with general methodological and ontological questions, particular issues in Heidegger's text, and the relation between Being and Time and Heidegger's later thought. All of the essays presented in this volume were never before available in an English-language anthology. Two of the essays have never before been published in any language ; three of the essays have never been published in English before , and two of the essays provide previews of works in progress by major scholars

“Experiencing others” in this paper stands for apprehending fellow human beings insofar as they express themselves and thus are or have been—on some level—alive and conscious. Contemporary scholars have increasingly paid attention to phenomenological approaches to explaining this phenomenon, whether under the rubric of knowing other minds, intersubjectivity, or empathy. In this connection, Max Scheler’s studies of sympathy and Edith Stein’s dissertation on empathy have stood out. Yet scholars often treat their views in tandem, paying little attention to their differences. This neglect is unfortunate since their disagreement harbors—at least prima facie—two radically different points of departure for understanding how we experience one another. The main objective of this paper is to identify their disagreement and to probe the possibility and necessity of resolving it.

This paper concerns Hegel’s much-neglected discussion of the rational observation of nature in the first part of the chapter on reason in the Phenomenology of Spirit. The paper focuses, in particular, on the themes of nature’s inexhaustibilit y, animal life’s holistic character, and the earth’s individual distinctiveness insofar as Hegel appeals to them to challenge a certain kind of self-understanding of what it means to observe nature rationally. In addition to examining the significance and trenchancy of this challenge, the paper inquires whether these same themes have implications for Hegel’s own philosophical understanding of reason as spirit.

To criticize a philosopher’s views properly a primary requirement is an accurate understanding of the questions he raises, the problems he acknowledges, and the procedures he follows. In the following study I attempt to identify the specific question of truth which Hegel addresses, the basis of the sort of skepticism posing a serious threat to its resolution, and finally a strategy he adopts. The specific question of truth for Hegel is a question of metaphysical truth or, in the Cartesian terms which Hegel willingly employed, the question of the objectivity of thoughts. The sort of skepticism he has in mind is one which, based on certain purported conditions of human knowing, rejects the possibility of metaphysical truth. While Hegel’s strategy is to analyze those various conditions in an encyclopedic fashion, my concern in this paper is his analysis of the logical conditions of human knowing.

This well-written, ambitious, and admirably condensed reconstruction of Kant's concept of God in relation to his theoretical and moral philosophy, from the precritical writings to the Opus Postumum, is by its very nature an uneven survey of the works and problems treated. The author strives for a new interpretation of Kant's moral theology by interpreting Kant's practical postulate of God as "eine qualitätive neue Metaphysik," making possible "subjektiven moralischen Glauben an einen wirklichen transzendenten Gott." The author faithfully exposits how Kant conceived divinity and man's relation to God. But beyond the exposition there is a paucity of elaboration or critical consideration. The author is more intent on articulating the consistency of Kant's conception than in entertaining the rationale, if any, of its critics.