Showing is allowing to be seen or grasped. The notion of pointing or showing (zeigen) is central to Heidegger’s conception of phenomenology both before and after Being and Time. Heidegger introduces his conception of phenomenon as something that shows itself (das Sichzeigende, SZ 28; GA14:99).

In his earliest work, Heidegger endeavored to develop a conception of thought oriented around judgment and logic that was neither psychologistic nor exhaustively captured through the formalisms of mathematical logic (GA1:22, 33/BH 33, 39). Thus Heidegger’s early conception of thought was very much the one that he would later refer to as rational thinking (das vernünftige Denken) and thinking as judgment (dem urteilenden Denken, GA6.2:65/N4 40).

Signs are ways of showing things to us. The German word translated as “sign,” Zeichen, is a sign of any kind, the meaning of which is understood. A sign is distinct from an indication (Anzeichen, SZ 78), which is a “symptom” of something going on elsewhere.

In this chapter, I discuss Heidegger's conception of responsibility for self. The chapter has two sections. In section one, I discuss Heidegger's conception of authenticity and the manner in which it is supposed to express responsibility for self. In section two, I then discuss Heidegger's notion of our everyday conception of self based on the social roles we occupy.

According to the forensic notion of a person, a person is to be understood primarily in terms of behavior for which she may be praised or blamed. Such behavior involves actions and consequences for which an individual can be held responsible. The key to this idea of being responsible for action is that one is somehow regarded as the source of the action. Persons are the kind of agents that are capable of acting on the basis of their own deliberations. This is why the question whether a person can be held responsible for a given action is regarded as at all to the point. The extent to which one is held responsible for one's actions, the extent to which one may be praised or blamed for one's actions, reflects the spectator's evaluation of the extent to which one performed that action independently of coercion.

There is a close historical connection between the notion of a person and that of an agent who can be held accountable for his or her actions. Use of the term “person” or rather “persona” (literally: “mask” or “role”) to refer to individuals actually originated in Roman law courts where it referred to individuals capable of bearing legal responsibility for their actions.

In this chapter, I look at Heidegger's critical response to Husserl's Cartesianism and his effort to articulate a conception of human existence that undercuts the methodological solipsism that provides the general epistemological and metaphysical framework for Husserl's analysis of experience. Heidegger's conception of human existence is intended to undermine the Husserlian assumption that sense and meaning are things that are intelligible in the terms set by methodological solipsism.

The contemporary philosophy of mind has been considerably interested in the merits and demerits of internalist and externalist conceptions of the mental. According to internalists, it is possible to understand at least some contents of the mind in the narrow terms provided by introspection and first-person awareness that does not appeal to any knowledge of other persons or objects outside of the person in question. It is thus possible to investigate such contents of consciousness in a manner that is methodologically solipsistic. Externalists, by contrast, argue that there is no interesting notion of mental content left over once one abstracts from the relations of persons to the public institutions that constitute our linguistic conventions. The externalist argues that these conventions are themselves underwritten by the objects belonging to a shared environment. It is the natural kinds into which objects fall in our environment that give determinate structure to the concepts that persons have.

Heidegger has a wide reputation for his efforts in breaking down the inner–outer distinction of post-Cartesian epistemology and philosophy of mind. Instead of thinking of understanding on the model of a subject that confronts an object, he suggests that we understand human existence as being-in-the-world.

This chapter consists of three parts. In the first part, I discuss Heidegger's analysis of language. According to this analysis of language, we are able to articulate our understanding and affectedness by our environment through language. In the second part, I turn to the way Heidegger's account of truth provides the basis for a general theory of significance (“Bedeutsamkeit”) that is, in turn, the basis for a theory of non-linguistic and linguistic meaning. Truth is the condition for the possibility of the concerns we have as human beings. These concerns structure our understanding of the world in a way that is incomprehensible independently of the spatial world in which we move as agents. Our concerns provide a holistic pattern of significance that cannot be understood in a methodologically solipsistic manner, although we must engage in a kind of existential disengagement to fully appreciate them. The pattern of significance that governs us as agents in the spatial and temporal world is, in turn, the basis for Heidegger's account of sense (“Sinn”) and meaning (“Bedeutung”).

In the third part of the chapter, I turn to a discussion of the breakdown of the holistic structure of significance that first reveals to us that very functional structure of significance. The breakdown of significance at the same time leaves a place for an account of nature that is independent of what we care about and provides a way for Heidegger to provide a revised version of Husserl's phenomenological reduction which side-steps Husserl's commitment to methodological solipsism.

In this chapter, I discuss the claim that average everyday social practices serve as the condition under which anything is intelligible to us. Against a widely held interpretation of Heidegger, I argue that the average everyday social practices to which one conforms as a member of society do not provide the unique source of intelligibility. Heidegger does think that there is an ultimate source of all intelligibility, or rather of all disclosure and significance. This is his notion of temporality. Temporality is supposed to make our ability to understand language and everyday social practices themselves intelligible to us. Only a very rich notion of temporality is up to this job. This notion of temporality already contains an essential relation to space, language, understanding, social roles, and moods in itself, so Heidegger's claim about temporality as the source of intelligibility is less exciting than it first seems to be. But temporality still has an important unifying function to play in connecting the various dispositions that are fundamental to human existence together in a human life.

Heidegger's grounding of knowledge claims and practical engagements in everyday experience has suggested to many philosophers that his position should be assimilated to that of Wittgenstein and pragmatists such as Dewey. There are, indeed, important resemblances between Heidegger's critique of the philosophical tradition, and those developed by Wittgenstein and Dewey. According to a view that is generally ascribed both to Wittgenstein and pragmatists such as Dewey, meanings do not exist independently of the practices and institutions that give structure to the beliefs of particular individuals. Institutions in society provide the standards against which the grasp of meanings is measured.

In this book, I explore the account of experience developed by Edmund Husserl and critically modified and transformed by Martin Heidegger. I develop the nature of the relation between our awareness of the world and the temporal structure of our experience as it is articulated by Husserl in his phenomenology and then transformed by Heidegger in his own existential conception of phenomenology. The connection between our capacity to come to terms with our environment, the directedness of our consciousness and behavior at items in our environment, and the temporal character of our experience is an intimate one. It is the merit of both Husserl and Heidegger to have explored this connection to a degree not easy to find elsewhere in the history of philosophy, and at the same time to have developed fundamentally different accounts of how the connection in question is to be understood.

GENERAL REMARKS

The concept of a private experience (“Erlebnis”) provides the methodological starting-point for Husserl's investigation of the different kinds of objects that populate our shared, public and objective world and the structures that allow us to understand that world. Heidegger rejects the notion of a private experience, indeed the very notion of Erlebnis, that has its heyday at the end of the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century. However, Heidegger continues to give central importance to the other German term for experience, Erfahrung. This notion of experience lacks the connotation of private, subjective experience that is characteristic of the notion of Erlebnis.

In this chapter I first introduce Heidegger's conception of human experience against the background of his critique of Husserl's consciousness-based conception of experience. I then discuss the manner in which Heidegger comes to understand human experience as a process of disclosure. I argue that this conception of human experience as disclosure is based on a critical interpretation of Husserl's notion of Evidenz against the background of a new inter-pretation of Aristotle. I then look at the way Heidegger appropriates and transforms Husserl's theory of categorial intuition so that it forms the basis for his own conception of truth as disclosure. Then I look at the manner in which Heidegger uses the notion of truth as spatial and temporal disclosure to undermine the subjective implications of the notion of consciousness and intentionality. I conclude with some of the skeptical implications of Heidegger's own conception of truth.

INTENTIONALITY, THE CONCEPT OF A PERSON, AND HUMAN EXISTENCE

Heidegger claims that it is a reading of Brentano's discussion of the different senses of being in Aristotle that initially sets him on his philosophical path. In fact, Heidegger initially comes to study Husserl through his interest in the way that Husserl has developed Brentano's philosophical reinterpretation of the scholastic notion of intentionality. This interest in Brentano is, in turn, motivated by Brentano's philosophical reconstruction of key scholastic doctrines using the resources of Aristotle's thought.

After writing a dissertation on the problem of psychologism in the theory of judgment that is already strongly influenced by Husserl's Investigations, as well as by Ideas 1, Heidegger goes on to discuss the scholastic theory of intentionality, meaning, and categories in his habilitation (1915).