Scott Campbell

My thesis is that the early Heidegger develops the Being-question through a concentrated interest in life and language and that in doing so he makes the experience of Being pertinent to the life that human beings live and to the language that they speak. ;In his early lecture courses, Heidegger explains that life and language are philosophically relevant only insofar as they are experienced in the temporal human world. To designate the kind of philosophizing which attends to the temporal vitality of living and speaking, he uses the term, "facticity." By analyzing the facticity of life and language---mainly through the early courses---I show how profoundly living and speaking are operative in the development of Heidegger's understanding of Dasein, world, and Being. In tracing these developments I take account of the relationships facticity has to science, religious life, phenomenology, ontology, hermeneutics, and, most importantly, rhetoric. ;Aristotle, especially his Rhetoric, figures prominently in my dissertation. Heidegger believed that the disciplines of philosophy and theology could be traced back to Aristotle. Thus, the factical situation from out of which Aristotle conceptualized needed to be clarified. Since the Greeks lived profoundly in the spoken language, Heidegger says at this time that the original meaning of logos is speaking. Speaking, therefore, and rhetoric are critical to the factical situation of Aristotle. Accordingly, my dissertation focuses on speaking and life and thus on the way that logos as speaking permeates Dasein's way of Being-in-the-world. Importantly, by connecting speaking with the factical life of Dasein, I show that for the early Heidegger speaking discloses the world and that this disclosure constitutes Dasein's Being-in-the-world.

The following essay compares and contrasts Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time with an earlier lecture course that he delivered in the Winter Semester of 1919/2020 entitled Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Heidegger says explicitly that the pre-phenomenal basis for his analysis in Being and Time is “entities” in their equipmental totality. He calls these the “preliminary theme” for his analysis of Dasein. While the analytic of Dasein is the first step in posing the question of Being, the pre-phenomenal basis for the analytic of Dasein is, he says, “entitities” or “equipment”. I argue that this can lead to certain misunderstandings, especially when he talks about nature and human relationships. In Basic Problems, Heidegger’s focus is not on “entities” or “equipment” but rather on experiences. In this earlier work, he is trying to develop a language that can capture the intensity of lived-experience, suggesting an experiential vibrancy to Dasein that is implicit but not thematized in Being and Time. I aim to show that while Heidegger turns away from the term “life” in Being and Time, his understanding of Dasein can still draw on the intensity and immediacy of experience so prominent in this early lecture course.

In his early lecture courses, Martin Heidegger exhibited an abiding interest in human life. He believed that human life has philosophical import while it is actually being lived; language has philosophical import while it is being spoken. In this book, Scott Campbell traces the development of Heidegger's ideas about factical life through his interest in Greek thought and its concern with Being. He contends that Heidegger's existential concerns about human life and his ontological concerns about the meaning of Being crystallize in the notion of Dasein as the Being of factical human life. Emphasizing the positive aspects of everydayness, Campbell explores the contexts of meaning embedded within life; the intensity of average, everyday life; the temporal immediacy of life in early Christianity; the hermeneutic pursuit of life's self-alienation; factical spatiality; the temporalizing of history within life; the richness of the world; and the facticity of speaking in Plato and Aristotle. He shows how Heidegger presents a way of grasping human life as riddled with deception but also charged with meaning and open to revelation and insight.

Frank Jackson in Perception uses the relation to ground the distinction between direct and indirect perception. He argues that it follows that our perception of physical objects is mediated by perceiving their facing surfaces, and so is indirect. I argue that this is false. Seeing a part of an object is in itself a seeing of the object; there is no indirectness involved. Hence, the relation is an inadequate basis for the direct-indirect distinction. I also argue that claims that we don't,, see objects, are also false.

I critically analyse two causal analyses of seeing, by Frank Jackson and Michael Tye. I show that both are unacceptable. I argue that Jackson's analysis fails because it does not rule out cases of non-seeing. Tye's analysis seems to be superior to Jackson's in this respect, but I show that it too lets in cases of non-seeing. I also show that Tye's proposed solution to a problem for his theory -- which involves a robot that mimics another (unseen) robot -- fails. Finally I show that his 'variability' requirement is not necessary, because there are cases where someone can see an object even though the variability that Tye requires does not exist

Taking Rom Harré's social constructionism as a focus we point to and discuss the issue of the a priori psychological subject in social constructionist theory. While Harré indicates that interacting, intending beings are necessary for conversation to occur, he assumes that the primary human reality is conversation and that psychological life emerges from this social domain. Nevertheless, we argue that a fundamental and agentive psychological subject is implicit to his constructionist works. Our critical analyses focus upon Harré's understandings of persons, human development and human agency. Our intention is neither to suggest that this latent entity must be understood in a Cartesian sense nor is it to ask for an explicit accounting of an autonomous agent. Rather, our claim is simply that psychological subjectivity is reflexively entailed in Harré's human psychology. We suggest that this pertains more generally to social constructionist theory