Posts Tagged Martin Heidegger
Thomas Sheehan (on Entitled Opinions) on Phenomenology
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts on January 27, 2012
Robert Harrison and Thomas Sheehan
Interviewer Robert Harrison starts the discussion expressing the excitement of applied, humanistic phenomenology, i.e. as it was used by existentialists like Sartre. Sheehan says that while there’s not much in the way of modern, creative phenomenology going on now, there are plenty of philosophers who use Husserl and Heidegger as a launching point for their own (apparently not phenomenological) philosophies, and that in particular you can’t understand Heidegger unless you understand him as a phenomenologist, as opposed to someone just concerned with ontology, i.e. metaphysics, which is what you might think given his discussions of the ancient Greeks and his emphasis on “Being.”
Here’s a little quiz for you to see if you got it: What does it mean to say that what Aristotle is to Plato, Heidegger is to Husserl?
Here’s the Entitled Opinions home page.
-Mark Linsenmayer
Foucault and Heidegger
Posted by Seth Paskin in Misc. Philosophical Musings on January 17, 2012
Superman at the blackboard from learning3pointzero.com
So there was a longish (8 minutes) bit that I cut from the episode where I asked Katie whether Foucault’s notions of Power and Knowledge correlated in some way with Heidegger’s notions of Being and Truth. I was incoherent and Katie understandably treated the question as the nonsense that it was. She has since addressed the Heidegger/Foucault connection in the comments on the episode here. One of the papers she links to by Dreyfus is precisely on this topic: Being and Power: Heidegger and Foucault.
In his usual straightforward style, Dreyfus sets the stage:
At the heart of Heidegger’s thought is the notion of being, and the same could be said of power in the works of Foucault. The history of being gives Heidegger a perspective from which to understand how in our modern world things have been turned into objects. Foucault transforms Heidegger’s focus on things to a focus on selves and how they became subjects. [You should read the paper, it's fun]
His stated goal in the paper is to push the correlation between the two as far as he can and see where it goes. He hits upon that in which I was interested in section II. Seinsgeschichte and Genealogy. Here Dreyfus shows the parallels between Heidegger’s History of Being and Foucault’s Genealogy of regimes of power. Dreyfus is concerned to show the structural similarities in the accounts, how they deal with historical epochs and then how that leads each thinker to their criticisms of the modern notion of subjectivity and human being. Read the rest of this entry »
The Tree of Life’s Contingent Universe
Posted by Daniel Horne in Reviewage, Things to Watch on October 20, 2011
I can write nothing on Heideggerian scholar*/(anti)Hollywood director Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life that hasn’t been better written elsewhere. Even so, the film has just come available on DVD and digital download, so I thought I’d recommend it to anyone who has been interested in PEL’s recent religion episodes. (Suggestion: try to watch the HD version of the clip.) If I had to try to connect the film’s theme to recent topics, I’d call attention to Malick’s ruminations on life’s utterly contingent nature, and whether it suggests the presence or absence of God.
While the film isn’t perfect (somebody please explain the ending!), a movie with existential dinosaurs beats a two-hour couch-warming session with another Transformers sequel. Trust me.
*I can’t find a decent link, but Malick translated Heidegger’s The Essence of Reasons for Northwestern University Press before he abandoned graduate study.
-Daniel Horne
More Analytic vs. Continental: What is the “Situation of Reason”?
Posted by Tom McDonald in Reviewage on August 14, 2011
The living Hegelian dialectic in hardback!
The disciplinary identity of philosophy is in question. So says John McCumber in “Reshaping Reason”, where he makes a serious argument with evidence of trends pointing toward a sort of Hegelian synthesis in American philosophy to overcome the “Fantasy Island” of analytic thought and the “Subversive Struggle” of continental thought.
“Fantasy Island” and “Subversive Struggle” are McCumber’s well-reasoned nicknames for the two schools. Here are his two primary criticisms of the schools: (1) analytic thought traps itself in present tense language, ignoring the substantive insights of Hegel and Heidegger about the temporal present-past-future structure of thought or the subject; (2) continental thought dooms itself by pretending that it can continue to talk intelligibly while getting rid of the concept of true statements, irrespective of social construction — that’s why so much continental philosophy is bad.
McCumber gives to the analytic tradition that philosophy must cede ground to science on much of its old territory, but insists that there is one job (at least one, but he discusses others) only philosophy is uniquely situated to do, and that is the “situating” of reason and knowledge as such, especially their being situated in time. It’s a very Hegelian idea: after science, philosophy becomes the practice of understanding — to be sure, with handy dandy new post-Fregean analytic conceptual tools — the historical becoming and meaning of knowledge in the context of the present. This is a job that can actually have relevance for the public (you know, all those weird people outside the walls of academia?).
Heidegger on Schleiermacher’s Second Address
Posted by Daniel Horne in PEL's Notes on June 23, 2011
Let us think for a while of a farmhouse in the Black Forest, which was built some two hundred years ago by the dwelling of peasants. Here the self-sufficiency of the power to let earth and heaven, divinities and mortals enter in simple oneness into things, ordered the house.
- Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking” (1951)
Schleiermacher’s On Religion provided me a kind of Rosetta Stone by which to decipher certain Heideggerian concepts. Heidegger discussed On Religion’s Second Address in lectures he gave on religion in 1920-21. I agree with those who believe Schleiermacher’s influence remained well into Heidegger’s later writings, and I feel that in any event the Second Address informed Heidegger’s monism.
Heidegger’s later gnomic talk of “the relation of man and space” is more understandable to me if viewed through the prism of Schleiermacher’s “third realm” of religious intuition, separate and distinct from either conceptual thought or moral action.
Heidegger and Feuerbach
Posted by Seth Paskin in Misc. Philosophical Musings on February 13, 2011
There are lots of directions one can go in investigating influences on Heidegger or uncovering ideas he appropriated and reworked in Being and Time. Hegel, Kant, Descartes, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, etc. One of the more interesting might be Ludwig Feuerbach, a post-Hegelian and pre-Marxist who is most well known for a critique of Christianity (and later religion in general) in which he claims that god-hood and religion are simply projections of our own humanity and subjectivity. Worshiping divinity is celebrating human accomplishment.
In countering abstraction and transcendence, Feuerbach turned to a view of human beings as material organisms connected to the world through body and senses, that have a sense of community and a desire for fulfillment which manifests as desires. Ultimately he was still preoccupied with solving a problem of knowledge (epistemology) and altruism (ethics), but you can see this same structure reflected in B&T. Heidegger’s move is to treat the question of these ‘facts’ as ontological – which requires a different way of talking about them.
Another notion that Feuerbach introduces is the alienation of the subject from the community. He says that focus on the subjective “I”, misses the fundamental “I-Thou” relationship which part of human existence. Love, which involves an essential I-Thou, is the defining desire of humanity, if you will and death, because it is the one shared experience, represents the last surrender of the self. For Marx, this idea was essentially political (alienated labor) and for Buber, ethical. I don’t want to stand too firmly on this assertion, but there is something here that I imagine influenced Heidegger’s idea of authenticity. The inauthentic person is someone who is alienated from the world and hence his/her essential humanity.
Feuerbach is a challenging and influential thinker who none of us will probably ever spend much time on, but I was surprised doing a little digging how much he echos in B&T. Check out the canonical entries for some background:
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
The Wikipedia entry has some biography but is otherwise weak and IEP doesn’t even have an entry for him. Alternatively, you can listen to this rap about the Feuerbach neighborhood in Stuttgart.
Grappling with Heidegger’s Biography
Posted by Seth Paskin in Things to Watch on February 11, 2011
More than most other philosophers, Heidegger’s life is almost as much a subject of scrutiny as his writings. Part of this comes with the territory of being a founding figure in Existentialism, but 99% has to do with his conduct during and immediately after the National Socialist era in Germany, particularly regarding his membership in the Nazi party, treatment of Husserl, failure to speak out against Antisemitism and steadfast refusal to apologize or admit he had acted poorly, if not immorally.
The BBC covered Heidegger’s life, focusing on his involvement in National Socialism, in their “Human, All Too Human” series, reproduced on YouTube in 6 parts. Here’s the first:
The purpose of the series is biography, not intellectual history, but there’s still some insight into his philosophical work. It touches on Being & Time, but as you might expect, focuses on the Existentialist aspects over the ontological undertaking. Of special note are the interviews of Richard Rorty, Hans Georg Gadamer and Heidegger’s son Hermann.
Science Proves Heidegger (Partially) Correct?
Posted by Daniel Horne in Web Detritus on February 10, 2011
Irony so overwhelming I want to tweet about it with a #Heidegger hashtag:
A scientific study recently found empirical support for Heidegger’s concept of zuhanden, which was discussed in the Being and Time podcast.* Wired Science covered the story last year, but the study itself is short enough that you can get through it during a lunch break. To quote the summary section of the paper:
Heidegger’s phenomenology has been influential in the cognitive sciences, despite the fact that no attempts have been made to empirically confirm his insights. The experiments in this paper support Heidegger’s description of the transition from readiness-to-hand to unreadiness-to-hand, a phenomenon that is key for his overall phenomenological philosophy. When humans are smoothly coping with entities ready-to-hand, they see through their tools to focus on the task they are using those tools to complete. When that coping is disrupted by a temporary malfunction, humans can no longer see through the malfunctioning tool and experience it as unready-to-hand. We demonstrated this transition by showing that when participants smoothly operate a mouse in a video game task, the body-tool performance displays the complex dynamics typical of an IDS [interaction-dominant dynamics]. Temporarily disrupting mouse behavior temporarily disrupted this IDS, at least at the body-tool boundary. We also showed that this disruption led to a reconfiguration of the participants’ awareness of the situation by showing a shift in resources allocated to an additional cognitive task. This is closing in on Heidegger’s transition from readiness-to-hand to unreadiness-to-hand. We take these experiments as progress toward justifying the influence that Heidegger’s phenomenological philosophy has had on cognitive sciences and justifying the partly Heidegger-inspired claim that cognitive systems sometimes extend beyond the biological body.
Take that, positivists! I’m not capable of assessing the quality of the study, but it looks impressive enough. More interestingly, some smartipantzen undergrads over at CalTech cited the study as inspiration for their class project on web browser optimization. One of them now works at Google. So, the ideas of a notoriously anti-technological fascist philosopher may now be influencing new ways to improve web browsers. This may be the only justice history can offer!
*Note that Hubert Dreyfus has also applied Heideggerian concepts to analysis of high technology, but Dreyfus never attempted any empirical research of which I’m aware.
-Daniel Horne
Dreyfus on Heidegger
Posted by Seth Paskin in Things to Watch, Web Detritus on February 9, 2011
Hubert Dreyfus
The preeminent Heidegger scholar in the US (and perhaps in the English language), is Hubert Dreyfus at the University of Berkeley. Daniel did a post for the Husserl podcast linking to a series of videos of him being interviewed by Bryan McGee here. In that series he actually talks more about Heidegger, so it’s worth revisiting for the Heidegger episode as well.
Dreyfus has written a fair amount about Heidegger, but he recently did a seminar at Berkeley on Being and Time that got recorded and turned into a podcast series. It’s from the Fall of 2007, so pretty recent and it’s a very disciplined approach to the text. Dreyfus is a terrifically engaging teacher and is able to speak ‘right down to earth in a language that everyone here can easily understand’. Mark mentioned that Dreyfus has also written on cognitive science and philosophy of mind and he brings that kind of sensibility to the text, while maintaining respect for the project and its insights. You can find the recordings here:
Dreyfus lectures on Being and Time (also available at Learn Out Loud – which has other good Philosophy stuff – like PEL!)
You’d have to have a lot of time and really be committed to listen to the whole series of lectures. If you just want to get the flavor, he does a great job of laying out the project of the book and many of the key insights in the first four lectures: Being, Dasein and Being-in-the-World I & II. [You can skip the first 30 minutes of the first one while they talk about the syllabus and course scheduling, etc.] I took notes on the first two that I’m happy to share with anyone who is interested.
–seth
Episode 32: Heidegger: What is “Being?”
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on February 7, 2011
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:51:38 — 102.3MB)
Discussing Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), mostly the intro and ch. 1 and 2 of Part 1.
When philosophers try to figure out what really exists (God? matter? numbers?), Heidegger thinks they’ve forgotten a question that really should come first: what is it to exist? He thinks that instead of asking “What is Being?” we ask, as in a scientific context, “what is this thing?” This approach then poisons our ability to understand ourselves or the world that we as human beings actually inhabit, as opposed to the abstraction that science makes out of this.
This is Seth’s big episode: this was his primary concentration in his later grad school years. Plus: Nazis, trying to figure out things by free associating about their origins in ancient Greek, and whoopee cushion record breaking news!
End song: “Find You Out,” from the brand new New People album, Impossible Things.
Bryan McGee and Hubert Dreyfus on Husserl and Heidegger
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Things to Watch on January 17, 2011
Daniel has already linked to this video in comments, but I wanted to make an actual post about it:
The Husserl discussion here is pretty brief and not very revealing. Dreyfus, for one, is a Heidegger scholar and thinks that Husserl is only important insofar as he influenced Heidegger and showed (through his exemplification of it) the bankruptcy of a tradition going through Descartes and Kant, which entails starting your philosophical project with an analysis of consciousness and wondering how subjective consciousness can reach things out in the objective world when we think of or perceive or desire something. (More discussion of that issue is here.)
Consciousness (Intentionality) as Transcendent
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in PEL's Notes on January 13, 2011
An important point on the Husserl episode that I was trying to get across was his notion that “intentionality” as he uses it doesn’t just mean that all conscious acts have a target, i.e. something you’re conscious of, but that this content is not itself something subjective. When we grasp something in consciousness, we’re not just contemplating our own sensations (as Schopenhauer describes our inner sense checking out and making sense of the data fed in by our outer sense). Rather, consciousness is a connection between us and something objective: you and I in general can experience the same objects, whether they be physical objects or even the notion “Santa Claus.” If you and I think about that, we’re thinking about the same thing, which of course raises the question of what this thing is. Frege considers this “sense” that we both contemplate to be an objective entity that we have to admit into our ontology: we can’t take intentionality seriously and be materialists.
In reading Martin Heidegger’s The Basic Problems of Phenomenology,
Intentionality is said to be a character of experiences. Experiences belong to the subject’s sphere. What is more natural and more logical than to infer that, consequently, that toward which immanent experiences are directed must itself be subjective? But however natural and logical this inference may seem and however critical and cautious this characterization of intentional experiences and of that toward which they direct themselves may be, it is after all a theory, in which we close our eyes to the phenomena and do not give an account of them themselves.
David Brooks Reviews Hubert Dreyfus/Sean Kelley
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Web Detritus on January 2, 2011
In a recent New York Times Op-Ed, conservative columnist David Brooks discusses the bookAll Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age,
As a review, it’s basically just a fancied up version of one of these blog posts (meaning he gets paid a lot of money to write it and so actually puts some energy into it): he sets out a key, evocative point or two and says that while the idea doesn’t jibe with the American need for religious certainty (and it’s hard to tell if Brooks is actually advocating this need or just trying to play his role as “conservative” and represent the common man against evil academia), it’s intriguing nonetheless.
Topic for #32: Heidegger: What is “Being?”
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in General Announcements on December 24, 2010
When philosophers do ontology (coming up with a list of types of things that “exist,” what are they actually doing? Martin Heidegger thinks this is a real problem: What is existence? What is “being?” It is, he thinks, the core problem behind all of philosophy, the underlying thought nagging us that needs to be settled before we can ground science coherently discuss ethics or anything else. Worse yet, though we start our inquiry with some intuitive notion that there is a problem here, this doesn’t come to us formulated in a specific, concrete question, so we not only have to answer the question; we have to figure out what the question is.
Heidegger’s answer, not surprising given that he was Husserl’s student, is that we need to use phenomenology, i.e. the careful description of experience, though Heidegger has different ideas than Husserl about exactly how this can be most fruitfully done. So to figure out being, we end up by starting with an analysis of “the being for whom being is a question,” i.e. ourselves.
We’ll be reading the beginning of Heidegger’s most famous work Being and Time (1927): definitely the Introduction and Chapters I and II of Part One, though our discussion may range through Chapter IV.
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The Partially Examined Life is a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it. Each episode, we pick a text and chat about it with some balance between insight and flippancy. You don't have to know any philosophy, or even to have read the text we're talking about to (mostly) follow and (hopefully) enjoy the discussion. Discuss episodes and provide feedback here or via our Facebook group. You can also e-mail comments to mark@marklint.com or wesalwan@gmail.com.
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