¹ Edwards' essay (P., Edwards, ’Heidegger's Quest for Being', Philosophy 64 (1989), 437–70)is referred to in the text as E,Google Scholar

the response by Janusz an Webster (S., Janusz and G., Webster, ’In Defence of Heidegger’, Philosophy 66 (1991), 380–85) asGoogle Scholar

J & W and Edwards' ferocious reply (‘A Reply to Crude and Reckless Distortions’, Philosophy 67 (1992), 381–85) as E-R.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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³ Ibid.., 37.

⁴ Ibid., 37, 35.

⁵ M., Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Macquarrie, J. ' E., Robinson(Blackwell, 1962), 19.Google Scholar

⁶ Ibid. 31.

⁷ Exactly what Heidegger means by this term is a difficult question to answer and, in this piece, I ignore his claims regarding the historical reality of this ‘tradition’. It will be sufficient for our purposes to take ‘metaphysical thought’ as meaning a particular brand of thought which accepts, among others, the assumptions we shall be discussing.

⁸ M., Heidegger, The Question of Being, trans. W., Kluback and Wilde, J. T. (Twayne, 1958), 33.Google Scholar

⁹ M., Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, trans. Krell, D. F. in Basic Writings (Harper and Row, 1977), 242.Google Scholar

¹⁰ This is the explicit motivation offered in his early works for the rejection of terms like ‘human being’ and ‘reflective consciousness’ and the adoption of the family of terms which includes ‘Being-in-the-World’ and ‘Dasein

¹¹ M., Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, trans. R., Lilly (Indiana, 1991), 48.Google Scholar

¹² Related suspicions underlie Heidegger's attitude towards methods of formal analysis, an attitude which Edwards attributes to Heidegger's lacking the necessary ‘intellectual aptitude’ (E, 461). The results of formal analytic methods have the significance that their advocates claim they have only against a certain background, one constituted by what Heidegger would see as a number of highly contentious metaphysical theses about language. In his later work, Heidegger insists that our relationship to language is essentially non-rationalizable and that consequently there is an aspect of language which escapes formalization. For this reason, to say that the formalization of our language dissolves Heidegger's problems is to say nothing with which he would disagree.

¹³ The Principle of Reason, 48.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Cf., e.g., ibid., and ‘Letter on Humanism’, 239

¹⁵ Correspondingly, Heidegger's insists that ‘the opposite of the poem... is not prose’, that ‘[p]ure prose is never “prosaic”’ (M. Heidegger, ‘Language’, trans. A. Hofstadter in Poetry, Language, Thought (Harper and Row, 1971), 208).Google Scholar

¹⁶ Cf., e.g., Dreyfus, H. L.Being-in-the-World (MIT, 1991),Google Scholar

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