Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-dfsvx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T04:26:19.880Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

4 - Heidegger's Realism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 July 2009

Taylor Carman
Affiliation:
Columbia University, New York
Get access

Summary

Let us therefore know our limit. We are something, and we are not everything.

Pascal

My reading of fundamental ontology is a Kantian reading inasmuch as it recognizes the analogy Heidegger clearly had in mind between the existential analytic of Dasein in Being and Time and the transcendental analytic of the understanding in the Critique of Pure Reason. But whereas Kant offers a subjectivist and intellectualist account of the conditions of conceptually articulated knowledge, Heidegger is concerned more broadly with the practical and mundane conditions of interpretation, or explicit practical understanding. Kant and Heidegger are both interested in the transcendental conditions of the intelligibility of entities to finite human understanding. Yet notwithstanding the formal analogy between their respective projects, Heidegger's fundamental ontology is not just a pragmatic reiteration of the Kantian critique of the mind and its cognitive faculties. For the kind of conceptual knowledge that Kant considered definitive of human understanding, whether overtly expressed in the form of assertions or silently cognized in the form of judgments, is just one instance of a more general phenomenon, namely, interpretation, that is, understanding or knowing how to cope with something explicitly as something. The analytic of Dasein can plausibly claim priority not just to epistemology, then, but to all philosophies of mind that forgo any phenomenological account of the ways in which intentionality or mental content itself becomes intelligible to us to begin with.

Type
Chapter
Information
Heidegger's Analytic
Interpretation, Discourse and Authenticity in Being and Time
, pp. 155 - 203
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2003

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Heidegger's Realism
  • Taylor Carman, Columbia University, New York
  • Book: Heidegger's Analytic
  • Online publication: 19 July 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511498060.005
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Heidegger's Realism
  • Taylor Carman, Columbia University, New York
  • Book: Heidegger's Analytic
  • Online publication: 19 July 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511498060.005
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Heidegger's Realism
  • Taylor Carman, Columbia University, New York
  • Book: Heidegger's Analytic
  • Online publication: 19 July 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511498060.005
Available formats
×