Heidegger on Concepts, Freedom and Normativity

Abstract

This book offers a fundamentally new account of the arguments and concepts which define Heidegger's early philosophy, and locates them in relation to both contemporary analytic philosophy and the history of philosophy. Drawing on recent work in the philosophy of mind and on Heidegger's lectures on Plato and Kant, Sacha Golob argues against existing treatments of Heidegger on intentionality and suggests that Heidegger endorses a unique position with respect to conceptual and representational content; he also examines the implications of this for Heidegger's views on truth, realism and 'being'. He goes on to explore Heidegger's work on the underlying issue of normativity, and focuses on his theory of freedom, arguing that it is freedom that links the existential concerns of Being and Time to concepts such as reason, perfection and obligation. His book offers a distinctive new perspective for students of Heidegger and the history of twentieth-century philosophy.

Mainstream Analytic Philosophy, The Method of Cases and Tacit Presup-positions. A Metaphilosophical Evaluation through the Lens of Heideggerian Hermeneutics

“…A proper description of Heideggerian hermeneutics is complex, since hermeneutics is necessary for Heidegger, since he argues that human understanding (Verstehen) is influenced by social practices, perhaps most clearly expressed in the way Heidegger describes the existential structure discourse (Rede). There is further serious debate about the degree to which understanding contains interpretation (Auslegung) and whether interpretation or the as-structure of understanding is conceptual-linguistic (Carman 2003;Golob 2014;xxxx). Since I want to make this paper accessible to a wide audience and not dependent on a Heideggerian account of understanding, I leave these technicalities aside and focus on a narrower conception of Heideggerian hermeneutics as presupposition analysis, with which a wider audience will be able to agree.…”

“…18 Similarly, for early, Kant-inspired Heidegger (1995, understanding, and thereby belief, are grounded in the spatial and temporal properties of the world. Early Heidegger was in particular inspired by the A-edition of Kant's (1954) Kritik der reinen Vernunft, with a particular focus on the schematism chapter (Sherover 1971;Golob 2012Golob , 2014Matherne 2019;xxxx). Schemata function roughly the following way.…”

“…2 For instance, Wrathall (2002) compares Davidson's account of language at length with that of Heidegger's-presupposing commensurability-and Carman (2003) relies on the externalism of authors like Putnam and Burge to argue for a Heideggerian version of meaning externalism. Similarly, Golob (2014) Therefore, instead of following the now popular practice of showing that phenomenology is continuous with analytic philosophy, I rather challenge the dominance of analytic philosophy on normative metaphilosophical grounds. I argue that at least some influential versions of mainstream analytic philosophy (henceforth MAP), that rest on the method of cases (henceforth MOC), do not possess methodological tools to systematically identify presuppositions that determine the structure of their arguments, which, if true, poses a significant challenge to these versions of MAP, particularly since competitor approaches such as Heideggerian phenomenology, on which my argument in this paper mainly rests, put a particular emphasis on the genealogical and systematic identification of presuppositions.…”

Beauvoir on Women's Complicity in Their Own Unfreedom

“…Although Dasein is fundamentally free at an existential or “ontological” level, division I of Being and Time concerns itself with Dasein in an “inauthentic” mode of existence. This analysis, as Sacha Golob argues, is “Heidegger's attempt to understand one of the central and distinctive ways in which Dasein may fail to be free” (Golob , 245)…”

“…Similarly, Heidegger argues that inauthentic, unfree modes of existence are characterized by an attitude of “stubbornness [ Versteifung ] about the existence one has achieved” (Heidegger 1927/1962, 308, translation modified). This stubbornness leads Dasein to take the social roles and self‐understandings presented to it by das Man as somehow unquestionable and essentially binding on it, thereby concealing from itself its existential freedom and the understanding that the only norm binding on Dasein qua Dasein is that “there are no norms binding on Dasein qua Dasein” (Golob , 239).…”