Volume 24 (2012): Edition 1 (April 2012)

The problem of the right access and the formal indication. The phenomenological hermeneutics of facticity, Heidegger’s first philosophical program, cannot be understood from the usual idea that opposes hermeneutical ontology to the primacy of method; On the contrary, its fundamental problem is that of the “right access” to factical life. The importance of this problem contains a mutual implication between the subject (factical life) and the method. It is concerned with the determination of the original Gegebenheit of factical life and with the modes of its apprehension. This paper aims at explaining the status and function of the specific phenomenological means required by this problem.

lntentional ontology. Heidegger and the transformation of Husserlian phenomenology. The article will look inside in what Heidegger said in his first course in Marburgo about the issue of intentionality as the basis for a “fundamental ontological investigation.” Through the first Heidegger’s lessons, especially Freiburg, aspects of the Husserl’s idea of intentionality who suffered a hermeneutic appropriation by Heidegger, will be deployed. The text will focus on the relationship between Husserl’s intentionality and categorial intuition in order to interpret them through the light of hermeneutic and understanding intuition that Heidegger speaks in his 1919’s Kriegsnotsemester.

The notion of Befindlichkeit in Heidegger’s phenomenological way. Heidegger’s phenomenology of Befindlichkeit and the different kinds of affection was initiated still before Being and Time, and developed in its essential features till the end of the 1930’s. The current paper argues that, since its very origins in a philosophical framework, back to the translation of the affectiones in Augustine, the notion of Befindlichkeit sets the beginning of a structural understanding of existence - displayed both at the ontological levei of Grundstimmungen (such as anguish, boredom or reservedness), and at the ontic level of different factual Stimmungen. Any comprehensive analysis of those affections counts on a tripie background with a Wovor, a Worum and the full-fledged exercise (Vollzug) of such and such affective understanding. In Being and Time this analysis is dedicated to fear, in its different nuances. But this phenomenon was already dealt with in Heidegger’s Lectures on Augustine (1921) and will reoccur in the Beiträge (1936-38). A reading of this conceptual evolution will here ground a defense of the phenomenological character of Heidegger’s way of thinking.

Language and facticity in Heidegger’s lecture of Saint Augustine. The phenomenological analysis of the Confessions of Saint Augustine gave to Heidegger the opportunity to radicalize the deconstruction of the theoretical path do God and to discover the factical life under the “formal indication” of “the historical”. In Book X of the Confessions Heidegger found an authentic experience of temporality, breaking down with the cosmological concept of time characteristic of Greek philosophy and of metaphysical tradition. The confrontation with such an experience is inscribed in Heidegger’s interpretation of the augustinian concept “cura’‘, that Heidegger will incorporate in Sein und Zeit, as an “existential” accountable for the whole Daseins’s existential structure. So, the phenomenological description of “care”, in the double modality of authenticity or unauthenticity in the Freiburger Vorlesung de 1921 will also lead the heideggerian’s investigation in Sein und Zeit in the direction of the ambiguity of both Daseins’s existence, which moves back and forward, and of Dasein’s language, which swings between Rede und Gerede.

The Person and the Inpersonal: confronting Max Scheler’s phenomenological thought with Heidegger’s. This essay starts from a similarity between the thought of Max Scheler and Martin Heidegger in their correspondent approaches to the way the being of the human as non-substantial. Both Scheler’s notion of “Person” and Heidegger’s notion of “Dasein” are conceived of as acts, always already determined by their being-in-the-world, and not as substantial entities with a kind of identity previous to their “actuality”. Nonetheless, Scheler and Heidegger extract from that originally common thought divergent pathways of thinking: whereas the first one addresses the mode of being of the Person, the second derives to the “impersonal” (das Man). This text aims at showing precisely the way of that divergence.

Reading Cassirer’s philosophy of myth: early signs of Heidegger’s late philosophy? In 1928, Heidegger’s book review of the second volume of Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (The Mythical Thought) was published in the Deutsche Literaturzeitung. Cassirer’s text date of 1925, hence it is possible that Heidegger had read it even before the publication of Being and Time. What makes both texts worthy of a closer examination is the fact that several central motifs and terms of Heidegger’s later philosophy are already present in these two texts. Heidegger focuses particularly on Cassirer’s reflections on the representation of mana (Mana-Vorstellung) in mythical thinking. This representation involves not only the distinction between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the ‘uncanniness’ or ‘not-at-homeness’ that befalls mightily the Dasein, but also the distinction between the sacred and the profane and that of the four world regions (Weltgegenden) and its organization in form of a cross. Although not everything that Heidegger announces is interpretable as full awareness of the future impact of these traces, one would wonder if the density with which they appear would be mere accident. Thus, the article contributes to the debate on the issue of the emerging of Heidegger’s late thought and its origins which can be traced back to the stage of genesis, or rather, the final draft of Being and Time.

In this paper we shall analyze the possibility of an ethical reading in Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. We shall show in what form the theoretical horizon of Sein und Zeit permits us to think an original Ethics, an Ethics of being-in-the-world the base of which can be no other than human finitude.

This paper intends to present the main lines of Heidegger’s philosophical program, as it was first presented in the book “Being and Time” and has been consistently developed in the later steps of his philosophical career. The adopted approach consists in confronting the program with Metaphysics, intended as a discipline concerning being, his structure and modes, having its own theoretical body of theses and history. This is not just one more point of view, among others, but the main question of Heidegger’s thought, which has, since his early years, put him in the way to thought. And this in two regards: not only because underlying Metaphysics stands the great question of being, his meaning and ground, that human beings bring with them as a fundamental purpose of their existence and history, but also because, as a science, it presents a structure which has become problematic and, therefore, demands to be clarified and examined in his presuppositions and limits. The interpretation here proposed of Heidegger’s thought in its whole tends to be read as a repeated essay of proceeding to a new instauration of Metaphysics through a constant dialogue and discussion of its fundamental theses concerning being. The main contribution that Heidegger intends to bring to this topic concerns the proposal of a new way of understanding being: an existentialistic one instead of the naturalistic approach of Greek essentialism. In Heidegger’s approach, temporality, in its human mode of occurrence, acquires a peculiar relevance to a new conception of being as a process of coming to presence.

Our goal is to point out the tremendous importance of the “es gibt” concept in heideggerian philosophy through the analysis of few texts of the 1921 to 1923 period. It will lead us to the emerging heideggerian conceptualization of phenomenology, where “seeing” means interpreting or understanding. To be able to see is the same as to be able to interpret. Right from the first courses, this terme is associated to the word “phenomenology”. What does it mean? The understanding of life as pre-theoretical sphere with the philosophy’ conceptual and objectivizing tools, included those of the husserlian phenomenology, unsatisfied Heidegger: for him, we need to emancipate ourselves from the deeply anchored obsession of theoretical. Is the phenomenological seeing not a topicalization, thus an objectivation, namely a theoretical activity? We have to regain the possibility of an a-theoretical intuition which shows a phenomenology considered in the specifics terms of the “opening to the experiential real life sphere”, as a behavior, an attitude, a “to relate to something’‘.

Within the Seinsfrage, the question of being, the «who» question, or Werfrage, arises at once. Who is this «who»? In other words, who am I? Questioning the being, inevitably means questioning ourselves. Would it thus be possible to conceive of a subject without being? This question, paradoxical as it may appear, nevertheless has a historiographical legitimacy, if we consider that «phenomenological anthropology», as the young Heidegger conceived it, precedes in effect the formulation of the Seinsfrage. From his very first lectures in Fribourg, an access into subjectivity, apprehended as a «wordly ipseity », is thereby opened. While criticizing Natorp who unreservedly denied such a possibility, Heidegger yet ends up conceding the point almost entirely. This, at least, is our hypothesis: the «I» exists only at the cost of a tension between facticity and existence, a tension which, in the eyes of Natorp, leads to a confirmation that the «I», strictly speaking, cannot be – and this allows us therefore a glimpse into the legitimate possibility of a Werfrage without Seinsfrage.

It is only approximately one year before Sein und Zeit was published that Heidegger read Kant for the first time with attention and interest. Has this late reading had an influence on the treatise that Heidegger was writing? The thesis that we stand for is that Kant’s main influence shall be found in no passage of the treatise in particular, but mostly in the decision of adopting the form of a treatise.