William Koch

In this work I present both a historical and philosophical argument. First, I use Martin Heidegger's early interest in the argument that concepts are furnished to the mind directly by experience, as found in Edmund Husserl's categorial intuition and Emil Lask's principle of the material determination of form, to build an interpretation of Being and Time and "The Origin of the Work of Art" which provides a unified understanding of Heidegger's consistent underlying position throughout his career as one of realist historicism. My interpretation of Heidegger as a realist historicist rejects the reading of Being and Time as a transcendental project and the claim that Heidegger, like Kant, has an abstractionist view of concept formation. Rather, for the realist historicist, our modes of relating to things, even the supposedly conceptual, have the form of engaged historical practices. These practices are understood as arising from the things they concern rather than being subjectively abstracted from, or imposed upon, them. This view furnishes us with an understanding of art as a key type of historical event through which practices arise or are changed. This position necessitates, however, a rejection of any a-historical universal knowledge and reveals the substantialist assumptions that underlie such claims to knowledge. I then apply this new reading of Heidegger to the debate between Hubert Dreyfus and John McDowell concerning the nature of skillful coping. I show that Dreyfus' embodied non-conceptual understanding of skill acquisition fails to take seriously the centrality of membership in a historical community while McDowell's position fails to appreciate that practices and not concepts are primary.

The films of Lars von Trier offer unique opportunities for thinking deeply about how Philosophy and Cinema speak to one another. The book addresses von Trier’s films in order of their release. The earlier chapters discuss his Golden Heart trilogy and USA: Land of Opportunities series by addressing issues of potential misogyny, ethical critique, and racial justice. The later chapters focus on his Depression Trilogy and address the undermining of gender binaries, the psychoanalytic meaning of the sacrifice of children and depression, and philosophical questions provoked by the depiction of the end of the world. Taken together, the volume explores the topics of Philosophical Psychology, Social Theory, Political Theory, Theories of the Self, Philosophy of Race, and Feminist Thought, and opens a conversation about von Trier’s important work.