Continental Philosophy - Science topic

Heidegger's philosophy is a significant contribution to understanding the meaning of lived experience.

There are many differences between Heidegger and previous versions of the “hermeneutic circle”:

1) Heidegger never recover the “circle of the hole and the part” present in romantic hermeneutics (e. g. Schleiermacher).

2) Heidegger’s version of the circle has an ontological character: Dasein is the being that understands the being he is. In this previous understanding of himself rest also an implicit understanding of being in general, that makes possible the explicit formulation of the question about the sense of being.

3) This ontological aspect of hermeneutics distinguishes Heidegger from Dilthey, who sees hermeneutics as the methodology of spiritual sciences.

4) Heidegger’s formulation of the circle is a critique of the metaphysics of presence and the subject-object relation (an aspect absent on biblical and judicial hermeneutics).  

5) Heidegger develops the pre-structure of understanding (Vorhabe, Vorgrif und Vorsicht), an element absent in previous versions of the circle.

6) In Heidegger’s later thinking the hermeneutic circle is related to the “turn” or “Kehre” of the being itself along the history.

There are also many differences between Heidegger and Gadamer that are not usually mentioned. In the Cambridge Companion to Gadamer, you can find a non-exhaustive comparison between Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s versions in the article by Jean Grondin: “Gadamer’s Basic Understanding of Understanding.

Good luck,

Andrés.

Jonathan,

I think Kant's big idea, whether one thinks it's a good one or not, is the idea of a form of sensibility, and thus a form of intuition. (The former is a capacity; the latter is the aspect of presentational content it produces.)  So if we speak in terms of content, not only is it the case (in perceptual contexts) that not all content is conceptual, but the remainder is not mere qualia (or Humean impressions). Intuition itself has form and content: spatiotemporal form (for us) and magnitudes of qualitative content--saturation of color, intensity of pressure. He calls the latter the "matter" of perceptual content. Famously, intuitions are different in kind from conceptual content and cannot be reduced to it. Intuitions are how the matter of experience is given. 

But this idea of the form of intuition, analyzed in the Aesthetic, remains consequential throughout the entire work of the Critique. The categories, to be "deduced", must be shown to be meaningful in terms of space and time. In the Dialectic, metaphysics, as he understands it, (claims about the world-whole, God and self that are made independently of experience), fails precisely because no spatiotemporal interpretation can be given to key aspects of its claims. (This is, in fact, the critique of reason proper, i.e. his critique of metaphysics. And in so far as metaphysics takes on its task using the resources of reasons alone--pure reason--independently of the conditions of sensibility, it ventures into "transcendental illusion." 

(The analysis of the idea of the thing in itself actually gets a treatment similar to these ideas of reason, but there are important disanalogies.)

If we don't generate our own objects (as God might), then we must sense them to some extent, in some manner, in order to be cognitively related to them. In order to distinguish something from oneself, and from something else, he argues, the sensing must have an order. What is sensed must be arrayed in a way adequate to make these distinctions. This is a condition on any finite intellect. (In fact, Kant can be read as saying that this is quite a separate claim from the claim that ourforms of intuition are space and time. The latter may simply be a de facto specification.)  The means to order cannot follow, but must precede, making these distinctions. The means implies its own, sensible, content. The array part. The form. Arguably, this was Kant's big idea.

Hi Mary,

In addition to the German etymology and semantic analysis offered by Artur Braun, there are Greek resonances you may wish to consider.

Heidegger specifically points out Aristotle's distinctions between Potentiality and Actuality (SZ 38/BT p. 63): what is essential in a preliminary conception of Phenomenology is not "actuality;" for "Higher than actuality stands possibility." This hints at potentiality beyond the modal character of the Dasein of human beings, as well as beyond ontical Seienden. The venerated "incomparable" Greeks named in the subsequent paragraph are interpreted as essentially concerned with more than the "grammar" of Being as indicated in Plato's Parmenides, Aristotle's Metaphysics, VII, 4, and Thucydides. 

But, actually, those "formal indications" and text locations are not at all "simple" distinctions. Nonetheless, they may render some clarity, depending upon your intentions.

Wishing you fortitude in your researches toward the completion of your Thesis project!

Josef

Also Bourdieu's symbolic violence is pretty much the same. 

And Gayatri Spivak's "Can the Subaltern speak", also treats the same subject - the powerful classes ability to force its signs onto the dominated classes.

FYI: one could categorize all truths as being either true by virtue of meaning (analytic), or else true not solely by virtue of meaning (synthetic). This would cover all the cases. However, people sometimes pack knowledge claims into them, so that some truths are knowable simply by paying proper attention to the meanings, while some truths are knowable by paying proper attention to both the meanings and the world. On this way of defining them, there might be a third kind of truth: unknowable truths.

Stephen,

I think the sorts of things you mention are not what Kant has in mind when he speaks of noumena. For one thing, for Kant, noumena cannot be sensed; they have no sensible properties. The things you mention have temporal extension, which for Kant, along with spatial extension, is the very form of sensibility.

We are able to think of things independently of their sensible properties, according to Kant. Something may appear in space and time, but it may also be considered, independently of this appearing and the sensible conditions of this appearing, as the thing which is the source of the appearance. We can only know it (cognize it) as it appears in space and time, says Kant, but we can think of it independently of these conditions, as the thing in itself.

Some writers have taken pains not to equate the thing in itself with the noumenon, despite the fact that neither can be sensed. Part of the reason for this, I think, has to do with the role the notion of a noumenon plays in Kant's theory of freedom. For more on the distinction between the thing in itself and the noumenon see ch. 3 of Henry Allison's "Kant's Transcendental Idealism."

German Idealism evolved from Hegel's historical dialectics. Hegel tried to attribute reality to Kant's transcendental philosophy. Therefore Hegel introduced time as a substantial method to make the link between ideas and the implementation of ideas by reality. Boths parts were in positive opposite, while Fichte and Schelling put both reality and idea in a differential relation. In fact they prepared the highway for the philosophical deconstruction formulated by Derrida and reduced the philosophical reality to a preliminairy reality.

If the critique of transcendental realism is simply the recognition that we do not have unmitigated access to the world as it is in itself anyone who thinks it through will I believe subscribe to that critique. All human knowledge we know anything about is "all to human". Even contemporary physicists are constantly coming up with a kind of sense of "What are things REALLY made of?" TR is a no-brain er. But it is worth taking into account that it is a no-brain er. It's a recognition of our epistemic limitation.

On the other hand, Kant's Noumena as I understand it, is simply the unknown. When Mathew speaks of the phenomenal as empirical idealist existence it seems that he is attributing that to Kant. I have some sympathy with that accusation but I know that Kant would horrified to find that it might be true. For ironically empirical idealism has more than a suspicious Berkely-an sound to it. Kant regarded that kind of idealism a monstrosity.

I myself have little problem with any of that anymore because I believe that everything that is, is real but in different ways. Myths are real myths, dreams are real dreams, One really does win or lose a game, even if a game is not an object, it is not something one can pick up or ask what it is made of. There is an important sense in which winning and loosing are subjective. What kind of reality is the game, if it is not an inter-subjective phenomenon, or maybe preferably in my opinion, an inter-subjective reality, like a conversation, or a communal celebration or a...... .

Hi Mathew,

As Fink writes in his/Husserl's 6th, phenomenology has to be experienced, not read. He goes on to emphasize that reading rather experiencing leads to the bewildering feeling of looking at a bedazzling text written queer language that does not yield any clarity or understanding. Furthermore, Husserl's body of work represents a process of experimenting with phenomenological thinking rather than a coherent system of thought and this might be proved as confusing even more. Here are my $.02 on how to start, they represent my own experience and yours is likely to be different and reflective of your natural attitude and lifeworld. Husserl's starting point was mathematics and the origin of logic and he devoted most of his energy to dissect the roots of logical thought. Since you are most interested in the methodological aspects of phenomenology (which Fink considers as the theory of method) I recommend that you start with Husserl's 5th, continue with Heidegger's basic problems of phenomenology and then move to Fink's 6th. Fink attempted to close the gaps in Heidegger's and Husserl's views of phenomenology and built a better (my personal view) platform combining both. As a companion text, I would look at Bruzina's excellent research on Husserl and Fink and peek at Schutz's investigations of the lifeworld. In any case, my recommendation is start your own reduction as soon as possible and as you read the texts so that you will be thinking and swimming at the same time. The longer path in the natural realm is the shortest in the transcendental. Pending on your level of interest and dedication, this might take longer than you think so take a deep breath and prepare for a marathon.

Good luck and hope it helps,

Ronnen

PS

I would wait with the French phenomenological offspring until completing the above.

Two important concepts for Gadamer complicate the account of understanding given above. Prejudice, or a fore structure of meanings with which we approach a text within a tradition of interpretation. Secondly distanciation, the process by which the text severs it's connection with the author, context, and time. He is reacting against the epistemological hermeneutics of Dilthey, and denying that you can develop a method for achieving authorial meanings. Ontological hermeneutics is basically claiming to tell us what happens to us every time we understand a text, that is, we achieve a fusion of horizons..