Ian Lyne

This paper is concerned with the relation between Heidegger's early work and that of the Neo-Kantian philosopher Heinrich Rickert (1863-1936). The question of the influence of Neo-Kantianism, and the work of Heinrich Rickert in particular, on Heidegger's thought, is still a contentious one. Heidegger was supervised by Rickert for his Habilitations thesis on Duns Scotus, and was a regular teaching assistant for Rickert until Rickert’s departure from Freiburg in 1915. In this paper I argue that despite Heidegger's protestations to the contrary, elements of Rickert's thought can be regarded as contributing in a decisive way to the development of Heidegger's philosophical thinking towards Being and Time. By drawing lines of influence the paper aims to contribute both to a better understanding of Heidegger's early path of thought, and to a certain rescuing of Neo-Kantian thinking from the oblivion to which it is still predominantly consigned — a state of affairs which Heidegger's work itself undeniably contributed to. The paper has three main sections. The first section, as a means of orientation, is historical and concerned with briefly outlining the rise and fall of Neo-Kantianism, together with giving some historical detail of the relation between Heidegger and Rickert. The second section will introduce aspects of Rickert's general epistemology. The third section will then focus on one of Rickert's main concerns: the difference between the natural and historical sciences. It is here, I will argue, that Rickert's work can be seen as exercising a lasting influence on Heidegger's thought, in relation to Heidegger's ideas of everydayness, the readiness-to-hand of everyday objects, and the difference between this way of understanding things and the way they are thematized as present-to-hand in the natural sciences.

Walter Benjamin's dissertation, "The Concept of Art-criticism in German Romanticism," is arguable of decisive importance for understanding the direction of his later work. Presented in 1919 as his doctoral dissertation, it is Benjamin's first major work, coming three years after his essay "On Language as Such and the Language of Man " and two years before "The Task of the Translator." The purpose of this paper is to untangle the complex of issues and motives which lie behind this text, by focusing on how it expresses a notion of tradition in relation to literary works. This notion of tradition will be clarified by relating it both to Benjamin's earlier philosophical interest in Kant, and to his later more political thought on the concept of history. The dissertation by no means represents merely the application of a pre-formed philosophy of history to the writings of the Early German Romantics. Rather, the dissertation marks a complex interaction between Benjamin's own maturing position and the philosophy of history he divined in Early German Romanticism's concept of criticism. His dissertation may be best understood, therefore, as a honing of his critical philosophy through an engagement with Romantic thought, whereby the result of this engagement is simultaneously turned back on Romanticism to yield both a work of criticism on Early German Romanticism, and a new understanding of "Romantic tradition."

The purpose of this paper is to explore the parallels between the analyses of time given by Aristotle and Kant – in particular, focussing on the role played by a notion of language or conceptuality in their accounts respectively. It is argued that both Aristotle and Kant postulate a complex inter-relationship between time and language in our knowledge of the world. Using Aristotle’s analysis of change as developed in the first part of the paper, the complex position of time in Kant’s system of philosophy is explored by considering the temporal identity of ‘non-Newtonian’ systems – organisms – as discussed in the Third Critique (Critique of Teleological Judgment), in contrast to the conceptualised experience of time presented in the First Critique. The tension which results between the temporal presuppositions of a 'system' and Kant's treatment of time and language within his own system of philosophy, casts light more generally on the interplay of issues of language and temporality in philosophical thought.

Contrary to the idea that there are fundamental differences between the work of Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin, the thesis shows that there exists a profound similarity in the direction of their projects, by exploring how they took up Kant's critical legacy concerning the temporality of language: the belonging together of language and time. The ground of Kant's system and of the systematicity of knowledge - via the three-fold synthesis which 'generates' time under the direction of conceptuality - is elucidated via the Second Analogy and the Critique of Teleological Judgment. It is argued that Kant's understanding of language and time remains fixed within a circular justification of Newtonian Science, which prevented him from taking up the critical resources of his treatment of teleological concepts and applying it to his idea of the critical system itself. Heidegger's and Benjamin's work can both be understood as taking up the hermeneutic circularity of Kant's philosophical system, though freeing it from its appeal to a limited time determination. They both develop notions of a more originary temporality in conjunction with a linguistic phenomenology. This further allows for a more critical thinking of language and time to reflexively fall back on the writing of philosophy itself. Their understanding of the temporality of language is explored through their treatments of 'translation' - in each case, a re-thinking of tradition and the historical ontology of linguistic works. The thesis contests attempts to separate Heidegger's early work from his later approach, and further rejects a tendency to focus on Benjamin's style of writing in isolation from its theoretical basis. The thesis concludes by arguing that the work of both Heidegger and Benjamin points to a rethinking of Kant's legacy in connection with the very idea of a 'system' of philosophy, in view of the inescapable belonging together of language and time in our understanding of it.

This paper concerns the notion of 'openness to reality' as a conjecture in the philosophy of knowledge. I argue that this conjecture may be found in both John McDowell's Mind and World and Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, as a common response in each case to the traditional Problem of the External World. Notwithstanding this proximity, I argue there are in fundamental differences in the ways McDowell and Heidegger cash out this conjecture. In particular, for McDowell the conjecture is understood primarily in normative terms and points to the primacy of normativity in a proper conception of our relation to the world, while for Heidegger the conjecture is understood primarily in terms of ontology, and points to the need for a proper ontological conception of the sort of entities we are. One might say that an 'is-ought' divide opens up in how the Openness toReality conjecture is understood: for Heidegger, to be open to the world means simply to be or exist, in a certain sense of Being which includes Being-in-the-world as a constitutive aspect. For McDowell, to be open to the world is to be answerable to the world, to be governed by the world, so to speak, in regard to the irreducibly normative aspect of knowledge and truth. However, I seek to complicate this neat picture in two ways. First of all, by pointing to the roots of Heidegger's thinking in a strongly normative conception of knowledge, that found in Neo-Kantian value-philosophy. Secondly, I want to argue that Mind and World shows problematics signs of moving towards an ontological construal of the Openness to Reality Conjecture, which is in danger of reintroducing the sort of ontological mysticism to which Heidegger fell foul. This ontological mysticism is what results from trying to articulate in the language of 'being' or in purely ontological terms something that precisely resists such treatment -i.e., the normativity implicit in a proper understanding of what it is to be open to the way things are.