Heidegger and Logic: The Place of Lógos in Being and Time 9781472546661, 9780826424082, 9781441137586

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For my family

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank John Vella and Wayne Martin for their help with this project, and Frederick Olafson for his early support of it. I would also like to thank the philosophy department at University of California, San Diego for my years there studying Heidegger, logic, and philosophy with many superb and diverse faculty, students, and staff. Thank you also to the philosophy department at University of California, Los Angeles for my time there studying logic. I would also like to thank Tom Crick and Sarah Campbell at Continuum for their expertise and warm assistance. Finally, I want to thank my parents, Don and Charlene, and Diana Zlotnick for their gracious support, and my beautiful wife, Marianne, for many hours of (mostly) cheerful assistance, and unremitting devotion. Thank you all.

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Introduction

Comparatively little has been written about Heidegger’s philosophy of logic, and much of it has been misleading. One reason for this is that much of it has not clearly articulated the importance of logical issues in Heidegger’s work, particularly the texts from 1924 to 1929, the axis of which is of course Being and Time (BT, 1927b). There is then a tendency to conclude that Heidegger maintains a relationship with logic only antagonistically. The purpose of this book is to clarify Heidegger’s philosophy of logic from the BT era. My principal claims are that (i) Heidegger’s discussions of logic from this era take place in the context of a novel account of meaning/lógos that is the basis for an account of the scope and foundations of Aristotelian categorical logic, and that (ii) can be extended to serve as the basis for a novel account of contemporary mathematical logic. A traditional view is that intelligibility is fundamentally a feature of discursive thought. Heidegger argues that discursive thought and its normativity derive from and articulate the intelligibility of the world itself conceived as a structured range of possibilities available for human being or Dasein. To construct a system of logic is to articulate a part of the world: its inferential possibilities. The normative constraints on discursive thought required for construction of any deductive calculus are grounded in an original and implicit familiarity with the consequential possibilities of the world, what Heidegger calls an understanding of being (Seinsverstehen). Heidegger’s account of logic is thus a coherent part of his principal philosophical project, articulating the meaning or lógos of being (Sein). I introduce themes historically in order then to explore them in more detail according to their philosophical connections. Although I raise some fundamental criticisms in the final chapter, I tend to focus somewhat less on criticisms of Heidegger’s account in order to make more room for a basic exposition, resulting in a liberal use of the principle of charity. The exposition comprises three interrelated tasks, the first of which is to draw together the main strands of Heidegger’s thoughts on logic in order to

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present a coherent position to the extent possible. This includes both sketching the development of Heidegger’s earliest account of logic from his doctoral and postdoctoral studies at Freiburg, and detailing the more mature account he presents in the texts from 1924/25 to 1929 while at Marburg and again at Freiburg. The second task is to argue that not only does Heidegger have a philosophy of logic that we can articulate in its development from nascence to maturity, but that it also has an important place in the BT project as a whole. Logical issues motivate Heidegger’s earliest, neo-Kantian writings, and play an important part in the development of his hermeneutic phenomenology and its temporally interpreted analytic of Dasein (Daseinsanalytik) in BT. A better understanding of Heidegger’s philosophy of logic and its coherence within the architectonic of BT makes possible a better overall understanding of this project. While the first two tasks are largely historical, the third task is less so: showing that Heidegger’s philosophy of logic is relevant to contemporary philosophy of logic. Heidegger directs most of his comments on logic at various philosophical logics prominent in Germany in the latter half of the nineteenth century that combined Aristotelian categorical logic with neoKantian accounts of the nature of concepts, judgements, and inferences. Since mathematical logic supplanted categorical logic nearly a century ago, Heidegger’s account of logic might appear hopelessly anachronistic, despite indications in his earliest writings that he intends his comments to apply to any system of formal logic. But although mathematical logic exhibits greater expressive scope and specificity due to a more sophisticated conception of logical form, it presupposes the same normative constraints on discursive thought that Aristotelian logic presupposes, he would argue. So despite differences in expressive power, categorical and mathematical logic both articulate facets of the inferential structure of the world. Since Heidegger claims to have clarified the ontological foundations of the normativity of discursive thought, he also claims to have clarified the foundations for any system of logic, including mathematical logic. Heidegger’s account of the normativity of discursive thought is then at the heart of his hermeneutics of meaning, where normativity is a fundamental meaning structure presupposed by the theoretical attitude that is necessary for knowledge. Although papers on Heidegger and logic have appeared in journals and anthologies, only two books have appeared in English that directly concern the subject: Thomas Fay’s Heidegger: The Critique of Logic (1977a) and David White’s Logic and Ontology in Heidegger (1985). The former appeared before the publication of important Gesamtausgabe (GA) volumes 1 (1912–16) and 26 (1928b), and although the latter appeared after their publication, it

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does not focus on crucial texts such as GA 24 (1927a) and 26. Both authors assume that Heidegger’s confrontation with logic only begins in earnest in 1929 with the allegedly anti-logic address ‘What is Metaphysics?’ (WIM, 1929d), and both look to works after 1929 to account for Heidegger’s remarks in WIM, and his view of logic as a whole from the late 1920s.1 They see the address as primarily announcing the beginning of an uncomfortable relationship with logic that lasts the rest of Heidegger’s career, rather than a summation and amplification of some important logical and ontological implications of BT. They do not then make sufficient use of the relevant texts from 1925 to 1929, and so neglect to give an account of the unity of Heidegger’s view of logic from the BT era. Neither then sufficiently defends Heidegger against the charge of irrationalism. There is a tradition of interpreting Heidegger as an irrationalist that begins with Carnap’s criticism of Heidegger’s use of language in WIM and persists to this day. Michael Friedman, whose A Parting of the Ways (2000) is a recent and sympathetic contribution to a rapprochement between the analytic and Continental traditions in Western philosophy, nevertheless presupposes that Heidegger is hostile towards logic when he claims at the end of the book that philosophy faces a choice between ‘formal logic as the ideal of universal validity’ and a ‘philosophy of the mathematical exact sciences’ (represented by Carnap) and renouncing that ideal, logic, and ‘“exact thinking” generally’ (represented by Heidegger).2 Because they refer to Heidegger’s later writings to make sense of claims he makes in the 1920s, Fay and White miss Heidegger’s account of logic in the BT era. As a result, they miss Heidegger’s best defence against the claim that he is an irrationalist: the coherence and plausibility of the account of the foundations and scope of logic from this period in the context of his account of meaning/lógos. They therefore miss an opportunity to move the discussion beyond the unchallenged presupposition that Heidegger and logic are incompatible. We then miss a clear view of the place of logic in Heidegger’s existential (existenzial) architectonic. Heidegger’s discussion of logic is connected to his critique of epistemology, which he undertakes in order to begin thinking about being. Without a systematic exegesis of the proper texts, we are not in a position to see how Heidegger’s discussions of logical issues cohere with the larger project of critiquing the tradition in philosophy that he later claims begins with Plato’s division of reality into the noumenal and the phenomenal, and that finds its fullest expression in Descartes’ substance dualism. Crucial discussions of logical issues, for example, discussions of the copula, assertion, and truth (1927a), and of inference, principle, and

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lógos (1928b), do not become coherent parts of a more general discussion of Heidegger’s early project. This is ironic given that some of these discussions were originally to have been published as part of BT. Because the publication of BT was never completed, its architectonic is larger than the work itself, so studying it requires that we read the book alongside other relevant texts from the era and view them all as constituting a problematic yet sufficiently coherent whole.3 Heidegger has a sufficiently coherent account of logic as well, but it too must be extracted from various texts from the era in order to make its coherence apparent. My motivation for writing this book is then to help update Heideggerian scholarship with an extended discussion of the philosophy of logic from the BT era. Since Heidegger continued to write and teach for decades after BT, it is appropriate to ask why I restrict this discussion to this era. I have already stated part of the answer to this question: since the other two books on the subject that have appeared in English have focused on works that appeared after 1929, the unity and plausibility of the discussions of logic from 1925 to 1929 have been systematically ignored. Furthermore, Heidegger’s writings on logic from the BT era outnumber his remarks on logic from later writings, and they are more systematically articulated. Given that Heidegger’s account of logic from this era has yet to be articulated completely, is comparatively unambiguous, and is necessary for an understanding of his later remarks on logic, the need for a discussion of his account of logic from this period is more pressing. Not only do we understand better the account of logic from the BT era as a result, but we also understand better its important place in Heidegger’s transcendental project. Although this book does not include a survey of all of Heidegger’s writings on logic, some attention must also be paid to his earliest, neo-Kantian writings, since these focus on those logical issues that help motivate his existenzial project in BT. The earliest writings have logical issues as their focus and are the origins of the transcendental account of logic that Heidegger develops in the texts from 1925 to 1929. By BT Heidegger has reformulated his earlier critique of logic as a critique of modern epistemology and its Cartesian presuppositions. Since these discussions have important consequences for Heidegger’s philosophy of logic, the purpose of Chapter 1 is to prepare a discussion of the account of logic from the BT era with a discussion of the manner in which logic serves as the focus of the earliest writings, and with a discussion of the critique of epistemology and the ontological interpretation of possibility Heidegger offers in BT. Two overlapping discussions constitute the core of Heidegger’s account of logic in the BT era. The first discussion is the subject of Chapter 2, and

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concerns the nature of concept and judgement and their articulation in assertoric language. Heidegger’s principal claim here is that discursive thought and language are secondary comportments (Verhalten) to the world that presuppose a more fundamental understanding of being. Language and thought articulate being, and the copula – the is of assertion that plays a combinatory role with respect to subject and predicate (e.g., Snow is white) – is a particularly important expression of being in assertoric language. Since judgements and assertions may be either true or false (but not both), the copula is intimately related to truth-value, since an inflection of to be ostensibly binds subject and predicate in a predicative verbal unity that may then be judged true or false. And since truth-value is bivalent, a discussion of the copula and truth must refer to a discussion of negation. Connecting Heidegger’s accounts of the copula, truth, and negation thus clarifies his account of judgement and its articulation as assertion. Heidegger argues that to treat the intelligibility of the copula as fundamentally that of a conceptual/verbal unifier is to distort its character. The unity of the judgement/assertion presupposes the unity of the entity it ostensibly articulates, and Heidegger insists that entities are only available (zuhanden) for that particular entity that has an understanding of being and so is characterized by being-in-the-world (in-der-Welt-sein). So while the copula combines subject and predicate to create a verbal unity, that unity only exhibits meaning insofar as it articulates a more fundamental unity that is available prior to its discursive articulation. The unity that the copula effects may be judged true or false, depending on whether it ‘agrees’ with its object or not, and since Heidegger reinterprets Aristotle’s claim that assertion is apophantic, and so exhibits something as it already is, it is unsurprising that Heidegger argues that truth is not fundamentally characteristic of thought or language but of the world conceived in a particular way. The correspondence between assertion and object that traditionally constitutes the nature of truth is only possible because entities in the world are already uncovered. This notion of truth as uncoveredness (Entdecktheit) is thus ontological, since it is grounded in the disclosedness (Erschlossenheit) of being, and so not ontical or concerned with entities. Disclosedness thus makes possible any comportment to particular entities, including the comportment in which judgements and assertions about particular entities are formulated and assayed according to their veracity. Since truth-value is bivalent, and so is intimately related to negation, Heidegger’s account of judgement includes an account of negation, and he offers a novel account of the problem of the negative judgement. Since Heidegger characterizes truth as the disclosedness of the world that

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allows for the possibility of uncovering entities and making assertions about them, it is unsurprising that he characterizes negation not fundamentally as a feature of thought or language, but of disclosedness. Not only does Dasein disclose itself and the world as constituting an irreducible unity available for articulation in language, but this unity is differentiated and structured such that it always exhibits ranges of bivalent possibilities: is or is not a hammer, is or is not available, is or is not made of wood and iron, etc. This fundamental differentiation between and among entities allows for the possibility of thematically formulating thoughts and assertions that may then be judged true or false: judging that Snow is white is true or that Snow is black is false is possible because snow is already uncovered as white and not black. The second discussion at the core of Heidegger’s account of logic in the BT era concerns the nature of inference and the unity of logic, and is the subject of Chapter 3. We can connect Heidegger’s account of the ontological foundations of judgement and assertion with a novel account of intelligibility that he develops in his account of the ontological foundations of inference, and which he amplifies in his critique of epistemology. Two concepts stand out from this account: ground and lógos. Heidegger generally speaks of ground as that which is the condition for the possibility of something else, for example, a cause is the ground of its effect. Expressions may serve as grounds for other expressions in the form of reasons, and it is this notion of ground as implication that is traditionally most relevant to an account of the nature of logic. Heidegger argues that the principle of sufficient reason, as the fundamental principle of logic conceived as the normativity of discursive thought, articulates a conception of intelligibility as fundamentally a feature of judgement. It thus illustrates the conception of ground as conformity to the normative demands of discursive thought. Heidegger argues further that this conception of intelligibility is wrong, and that ground is not fundamentally a feature of discursive thought but of the world that discursive thought articulates. A system of logic describes the inferential part of the world and articulates inferential possibilities of the world itself. Rational justification is an important example of ground, but it articulates a more fundamental, ontological understanding of ground as consequence. Dasein is characterized by an understanding of being as an implicit familiarity with the possibilities of the world, where the world is the unified meaning structure and overall context in which entities intelligibly show themselves. An understanding of being is thus an implicit familiarity with the lógos of worldhood itself, an important articulation of which is discursive

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thought and language. Lógos then finds its ground in the temporal unity of being-in-the-world that Heidegger describes in Part Two of BT and other writings from the era. He denies that logic conceived either as the normative constraints on rational thought or as a class of artificial object languages characterizes intelligibility fundamentally. Rather, he gives an ontological account of intelligibility that he thinks explains how the derivative intelligibility of any system of logic is possible. Since the focus of Heidegger’s account of logic is explicitly Aristotelian logic, and since mathematical logic supplanted Aristotelian logic a century ago, his discussions of concept, judgement, and inference might appear to possess limited value. In Chapter 4 I argue rather that these discussions provide Heidegger with the resources to construct an account of mathematical logic as well. In the first part of this chapter I argue that the hermeneutics of categorical logic can be extended to include a hermeneutics of mathematical logic. Mathematical logic is both a broader and more precise system of logic than is syllogistic logic due to a more sophisticated conception of logical form. Nevertheless, artificial language and natural language can articulate the same intelligible unities. The world is structured in such a way that we can articulate and infer claims about snow and its whiteness using inferential models of the world that may be categorical, propositional, predicate-functional, modal, etc., according to varying concepts of inferential form that are available as linguistic equipment. So we can, with Aristotle, construct a theory of syllogistic reasoning that allows us to make sound inferences within limits imposed by our choice of logical form. Set theory allows for more sophisticated inferential modelling than does syllogistic theory because it can be used to construct predicate-function languages that are more precise, expressive, and concise than is the language of categorical logic. This discussion is speculative in that it attributes to Heidegger an implicit account of mathematical logic, but it is an account that coheres with Heidegger’s own requirements for an account of logic, and helps show more clearly the coherence and plausibility of his unique orientation to logic. Heidegger combines hermeneutical phenomenology and ontology to construct a transcendental architectonic for a radical metaphysics that contains a radically reinterpreted ‘realism’.4 A result is his novel view of symbolic logic as derivative, since genuine logic on this view is the study of something more fundamental, the inferential significative structure of the world itself. While the Aristotelian tradition treats logic as the normative constraints on discursive thought, mathematical logic treats logic as a class of artificial object languages constructed metatheoretically using various informal and

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formal concepts, for example, informal concepts of reference and the formal concepts of set theory. If pressed on the issue, Heidegger would argue that metatheory itself presupposes normative constraints on discursive thought as necessary conditions for the possibility of constructing object languages, and that he has provided an account of the foundations of normativity. Tarski’s semantic definition of truth as satisfaction has played a significant role in the development of contemporary philosophy of logic, and while it is not monolithic, it does exhibit a limited orthodoxy such that most contemporary discussions of truth either attempt to build on Tarski’s efforts or use those efforts as a foil while developing an alternative. Tarski attempts to offer a version of the correspondence theory of truth that can serve in the construction of formal semantics. Heidegger offers an account of how correspondence is possible that is at the same time the basis for an account of how it is possible to treat truth as satisfaction, and thus offers an account of truth that is implicitly an account of how formal semantics is possible. A discussion of Tarski’s semantic definition of truth thus highlights the point of contact between Heidegger and contemporary philosophy of logic. In the second part of the chapter I conclude that Heidegger is not the irrationalist many take him to be. Beginning with the logical positivists there is a tradition of characterizing Heidegger’s remarks on logic as indicating the intent to revise, flout, or eliminate the laws of logic. But this tradition mischaracterizes Heidegger’s claims and so fails to appreciate Heidegger coherent and plausible account of the foundations and scope of logic. And while there have been attempts to defend Heidegger from the charge of irrationalism, they commonly fail to provide a sufficient defence, usually because they fail to provide the exegesis necessary to extract a coherent account of logic from the works of the BT era. There have been recent attempts to provide such an exegesis, but they have been limited in length. This book is a contribution to that exegetical project. The difficulty of interpreting Heidegger arises both from the difficulty of his thought and the notorious difficulty of his idiom. Translators and commentators have employed various and sometimes contradictory conventions for translating Heidegger’s terminology in an effort to clarify his positions. It is helpful to highlight several important examples. All German translations not previously published are mine. I follow Hubert Dreyfus and others by using being with a lower-case b to translate Sein, in order to indicate that Heidegger does not think being is a genus. Macquarrie and Robinson capitalize the B in order to mark the ontological difference, Heidegger’s distinction between entities and their being. In order to

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indicate that Heidegger does not think being is a being, I follow Olafson et al. in using entity to translate Seiende. I have also followed Dreyfus in using available in place of ready-to-hand (zuhanden), although I leave vorhanden untranslated in order to avoid confusing locutions such as occurrent (Dreyfus) and present-at-hand (Macquarrie/Robinson). In order to minimize confusion between existence as the being of Dasein and existence as the mere presence (Anwesenheit) or Vorhandenheit of entities other than Dasein, I typically do not translate Existenz, existenzial, or Existenziale. Heidegger uses three terms that translate as logic: lógos, Logik, and Logistik. When speaking of meaning ontologically and so most generally, Heidegger usually employs the Greek term lógos, which he identifies as the intelligible (verständlich) structure of the world, or meaning as such. He often speaks of lógos in such a way that it includes logic, but in the sense that a system of logic articulates and so presupposes lógos, and so is distinguished from it. At times Heidegger places Logik in quotation marks in order to indicate that he distinguishes general logic from lógos, but he also sometimes uses Logik as a synonym for lógos. Heidegger also uses Logik to refer both to the mechanics of a system of logic and to various interpretations and applications of it. So while in one context Heidegger may use the term to refer to the content of a system of logic, for example, categorical and mathematical logics, in another he may use it to refer to philosophical logic, for example, the Marburger School of neo-Kantian transcendental logic. He sometimes uses Logistik (logistics) to refer to the actual content of a system of logic as distinguished from a philosophical account of how such systems are possible. Translators and commentators often use symbolic logic or formal logic synonymously with logistics. Understanding Heidegger results neither from merely internalizing his idiom and architectonic nor from recasting them entirely in external language and concepts, but from a continuous dialectic between the two interpretative tendencies. Since many readers come from outside the relatively narrow tradition of Heidegger scholarship, somewhat more emphasis must be placed on using language that is familiar enough to facilitate understanding without fundamentally misconstruing Heidegger’s meaning. Good Heideggerian scholarship therefore effectively creates a fairly fluent metalanguage for discussing Heidegger’s claims, comprising both Heidegger’s idiom and the traditional language of Western philosophy. Heidegger’s deconstruction of traditional metaphysics is not a wholesale rejection of its language and concepts, but rather a hermeneutical reinterpretation that grounds them in more fundamental concepts of a radical metaphysics as ontology. So while Heidegger may create a term of art with

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novel connotations that he thinks is necessary to describe something familiar in a more fundamental way, for example, Dasein (human being), he may also employ a familiar term from traditional metaphysics to refer to a novel and more fundamental phenomenon, for example, truth (uncoveredness/disclosedness). In the end, mixing idioms is pedagogically necessary for the student because in this period Heidegger finds it philosophically necessary. Fluency in the metalanguage is therefore necessary for an understanding of Heidegger that can explain what his arguments mean, as well as assess them and compare them to the arguments of other philosophers. Since the potential audience for this book includes those who are not students of Heidegger, I have interpreted Heidegger using both his own idiom and language he does not use, trusting the reader to judge for oneself the extent to which the book can contribute to one’s understanding of Heidegger. To the extent that this is ‘bad’ Heidegger it is at the same time simply good pedagogy.

Chapter 1

Logic and Metaphysics

As we stated in the Introduction, the first principal claim of this book is that Heidegger’s philosophy of logic in the BT era is part of his transcendental account of lógos/meaning. We require some context against which its prominent features can stand in relief. The architectonic of BT developed over a period of years, and nascent forms of discussions that eventually become part of BT appear in the works from Heidegger’s first years at Freiburg, 1912 to 1923. It is ironic, given Heidegger’s reputation as an irrationalist, that a survey of his writings from his doctoral and postdoctoral years at Freiburg to the publication of BT while at Marburg reveals a continuous and penetrating engagement with logic and logical issues. All of his earliest writings (1912 to 1916) concern logic, and suggest that he views transcendental logic as the issue he expects to occupy him for the remainder of his philosophical career. Heidegger maintains this focus through the Husserlian years at Freiburg, 1916 to 1923, and in the Marburg lectures associated with BT, particularly the lectures from winter 1925/26 (1925b), summer 1927 (1927a), and summer 1928 (1928b). In 1916 Heidegger appends a short Conclusion (Schluß) to his Habilitationsschrift in which he argues that the neo-Kantian formalism of the work must somehow cohere with the requirement that logic be grounded in the active, temporal, and pre-reflective and pre-logical life of the subject, and he develops his strategy for meeting this requirement in BT and the Marburg lectures. The Schluß thus indicates important developmental links between Heidegger’s earliest writings and the works from the BT era. Since the account of logic he gives along the way is an important part of the critique of Cartesianism that makes up much of Division I, to understand better Heidegger’s account of logic from this era is to understand better an important part of the context within which Heidegger develops his account of logic in the BT era, and a central task of BT. Insofar as Heidegger’s account of logic from this era is part of a larger critique of modern epistemology and its allegedly Cartesian orientation, that critique and its related discussions form an important part of the context as well.

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I have accordingly divided this chapter into two parts. In the first part I discuss Heidegger’s neo-Kantian logical training in the context of the dominance of Hermann Lotze and neo-Kantianism in the study of logic in Germany beginning in the latter half of the nineteenth century and continuing into the 1920s. A look at Heidegger’s earliest writings allows us to connect his arguments to discussions of both the larger context of the study of logic in Germany at the time and the reasons Heidegger eventually sought to revise it radically in the 1920s. These writings demonstrate a sustained critical commitment to the study of logic and logical issues, showing a young Heidegger attempting to cohere an Aristotelian-Kantian framework with developments in German philosophical logic. In the Schluß that coherence is threatened, and it is Emil Lask’s theory of meaning that both induces Heidegger’s aporia and helps determine the strategy he takes to resolve it via the analytic of Dasein. The account of logic from the BT era is thus a refinement of the transcendental view of logic Heidegger struggles to develop in his earliest writings, and that refinement is part of a larger critique of epistemology and its allegedly Cartesian presuppositions. It is also necessary then, in the second part of this chapter, to recount relevant aspects of the architectonic of BT with respect to how they bear on his critique of modern epistemology and his radical reinterpretation of knowing as a secondary and derivative comportment.

1.1 Early Logical Writings The sporadic literature devoted to Heidegger’s study of logic has appeared while relevant volumes had yet to be published. For this and other reasons no extended discussion of the account of logic from the BT era has appeared in English. The increase in attention to Heidegger’s earliest writings has brought an increase in attention to his discussions of logic, although most of it has remained focused on those earliest writings.1 In the Foreword to the first edition of Frühe Schriften (1972), Heidegger describes his earliest writings as ‘helpless early attempts in which I knew nothing of what later vexed my thinking’, and so appears dismissive towards the suggestion of a developmental link between the earliest writings and those that followed (1972:55/IX). But as Jean-François Courtine notes, in the next sentence he appears to qualify this claim by indicating a connection between ‘the question of logic, the question of being, and what would become the question of language’, suggesting a developmental link not only between the earliest writings and the writings from the BT era, but between the earliest writings

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and the later writings as well:2 ‘These first works already indicate the beginning of a new path, the initial attempt to clear a road that is still uncleared: the question of being as the category problem, the question of language in the form of a theory of meaning’ (1972:55/IX). Between the early attempt to explain being categorically and the discussions of language and being in the later writings is the attempt in BT to explain being in a radical theory of meaning/lógos in which the intelligibility of language is secondary and derivative with respect to the practical intelligibility of the world as equipment available for activity. As Kisiel, Crowell, and others have argued, there are then important developmental links between the early logical writings and BT.3 The first is a commitment to a ‘transcendental project’4 that initially takes the form of a transcendental logic as a theory of logical categories that explains how objects as such are possible. Following Heidegger’s work with Husserl that project becomes a transcendental phenomenology in the 1920s, an important feature of which is Heidegger’s claim that logic has no transcendental role. The neo-Kantian transcendental project of a theory of knowledge thus gives way to a more fundamental transcendental project as a phenomenological theory of meaning, which as hermeneutics locates meaning fundamentally neither in a ‘phenomenological immanence’ nor a ‘transcendental consciousness’ but in the world itself, conceived anew. The second developmental link is the influence of Lask, and I follow Kisiel and Crowell in arguing that this influence appears both in the Habilitationsschrift and its aporetic Schluß, and in the account of meaning from the BT era in which logic is grounded in the pre-logical structure of the judging and inferring ‘subject’, Dasein.5 Given Heidegger’s intensive study of the history of philosophy, we cannot understand the place of logic in these or any of his writings unless we understand in some detail how Heidegger coalesces diverse influences in novel ways that are decisive for his account of logic. In order to make more room for our discussion, we will focus on Aristotelian-Kantian, neo-Kantian, and neo-scholastic influences, and so somewhat less on Husserlian/ phenomenological influences that have been covered extensively.6

1.1.1 Neo-Kantianism As a doctoral student at Freiburg, Heidegger receives most of his logical training in the shadow of Heinrich Rickert, the principal figure in the Southwest Germany or Baden school of neo-Kantianism that included Wilhelm Windelband, Nicolai Hartmann, and Emil Lask. The other dominant

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school of neo-Kantianism was the Marburg school, and included Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, and Ernst Cassirer. Already we can point out that Heidegger’s logical training includes his own participation in an ongoing debate between schools of neo-Kantian thought regarding the proper character of the transcendental project. Heidegger also learns logic as philosophical logic, as not merely a deductive calculus but a wider theory of logical objects and judgement, a science of science itself. It is transcendental in that it is an account of how objects of knowledge are possible for discursive thought, and thereby tends to reduce meaning to the intelligibility of discursive thought and knowledge – a reduction Heidegger later rejects as insufficient for the task of providing transcendental conditions. As neo-Kantian, this ‘logic’ presupposes with Kant the essential completeness of Aristotelian categorical logic as ‘a closed and completed body of doctrine’, and so raises an important issue regarding the applicability of Heidegger’s account of categorical logic to other systems of logic that we will discuss in Chapter 4.7 Heidegger studies logic against the backdrop of an age that is largely anti-metaphysical. With the dissipation of Hegelianism and the continued ascendancy of the natural sciences and attendant physicalist philosophies, neo-Kantianism arises in the last decades of the nineteenth century as at once both a ‘refuge for the remnants of metaphysics’8 and a distinct challenge to metaphysics, particularly Hegelianism. It marks an attempted compromise between the anti-metaphysical ethos of the age on one side and the goal of grounding empirical knowledge in transcendental, nonempirical conditions on the other. On the one hand, the neo-Kantian emphasis on the Lotzean ‘realm of validity’ allows for a distinction between descriptive and prescriptive/normative laws in order to preserve a field of study that is non-spiritual/non-supersensible, but also importantly nonempirical – a Fregean ‘third realm’. On the other hand, the Kantian project is from the beginning ‘anti-metaphysical’ in that it explicitly seeks to impose limits on speculative reason, which in neo-Kantianism becomes the project of a transcendental logic as a ‘science of science’ that is non-empirical yet rigorously law-governed in a way that grounds empirical laws themselves.9 Both schools attempt to rehabilitate the Kantian epistemological framework, although they then modify it in ways that set them apart from Kant and opposed to one another. For Kant, transcendental refers to the conditions for the possibility of knowledge, where knowledge is only possible of objects of judgement. For knowledge to be possible the world must conform to the structure of judgement, where conforming to the structure of

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judgement constitutes the object as experienced. Experience is thus limited to what can be judged, such that intelligibility and meaning/lógos enter at the level of the transcendental constitution of experience and the objects of knowledge. Since neither the transcendent object of metaphysics nor the non-conceptual sense datum of empiricism conforms to judgement, neither is a possible object of knowledge: the transcendent object is in principle precisely that which does not conform to judgement, and sense data that do not cohere with judgement are nil, since ‘intuitions without concepts are blind’. Following Lask, Heidegger later separates meaning from knowing to make the former fundamental and the latter derivative by identifying transcendental conditions not immediately with the conditions for knowing but meaning. In BT Heidegger then argues that the possibility of knowing derives from the more fundamental ‘realm’ or ‘space’ of meaning as understanding (Verstehen). The sense in which neo-Kantianism opposes the anti-metaphysical ethos of the age is represented by its confrontation with psychologism, deeply influenced by the anti-psychologistic arguments of Bolzano, Frege, and Husserl. Psychologism seeks to reduce the meaningful content of logic to the law-governed structure of the real acts of the psychical-empirical subject. At the core of the rejection of psychologism is the distinction between the real, dated, psychic act of judging, for example, 2 + 2 = 4, and the ‘ideal’, atemporal, and public content of that judgement, that 2 + 2 = 4. An analysis of the empirical structure of the act can never uncover the normative force that demands assent to the claim that 2 + 2 = 4. Psychologism thus cannot account for the nature of judgement, since it cannot account for its essential normativity. The issue then becomes how to characterize the content of judgement. Frege’s account is his theory of thought and function, and Husserl generalizes this account to become first an account of the essential structures of ‘phenomenological immanence’, and later an account of the noematic structures of transcendental consciousness that stand in relief following the reductions. Lotze’s theory of validity (Geltung)10 treats logic as the study of judgeable content as valid meaning structure, of that which is intelligible as either true or false, and that allows a transfer of truth-value so conceived from one judgement to another, as inference. Logical objects are neither sensible nor supersensible, and so do not exist but rather ‘hold’ in a distinct domain of meaning. Meaning is then identified with the intelligibility of objects of judgement/knowledge as valid, where the conditions for valid/invalid meaning structures (inferences) constitute transcendental conditions. For Lotze and the neo-Kantians he influences, logic then includes not just a deductive calculus but also a

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theory of concepts, judgements, and inferences – the elements of logic in the Aristotelian-Kantian tradition – as ideal, valid meaning structures. The two principal schools that emerge are distinguished from the original Kantian project by their rejection of the transcendental status of intuition and the resulting logical idealism. For Kant, the pure forms of intuition – space and time – mediate between the pure forms of thought and the manifold of undifferentiated sense data via the schematism to make the pure forms of thought available as categories of the understanding. Kant argues that because the pure forms of thought are purely formal they require an a priori application to pure intuitions if they are to apply to experience itself. ‘Concepts without intuitions are empty’, and since the pure forms of thought are a priori they are then impotent with respect to the construction of experience and the constitution of objects of knowledge unless they receive determinate spatio-temporal content. In the schematism, the pure, a priori forms of intuition mediate between the pure, a priori forms of thought and the manifold of otherwise undifferentiated sense data according to the temporal unity of the pure, synthesizing ego as transcendental apperception. The result for Kant is a fundamental dichotomy between two interactive but discrete a priori faculties, understanding/spontaneity and intuition/receptivity. Neo-Kantianism rejects the Kantian thesis regarding the independence of pure intuition and the dichotomy of a priori faculties that results. All representations, including space and time, originate in the understanding alone, constructed from purely conceptual a priori content. A principal issue is then the relationship between transcendental logic and what follows from it, and the two schools distinguish themselves from one another according to how they conceive this relationship, particularly with respect to the place of sensory data, mathematics, and values. The greater the tendency towards logical idealism and monism, the greater is the tendency towards a more robust transcendental logic that marks a clear distinction between the sciences (natural and logical) and the humanities. Marburger neo-Kantianism represents the tendency towards a strong logical idealism and monism as a reaction against the duality of a priori faculties in Kant’s original architectonic. The logical element of Marburger logical idealism is characterized by a pronounced logicism, both as an attempt to reduce mathematics to logic and as an attempt to reduce time and space to logical concepts. All of human knowledge is then objectively grounded in the meaning structures of logical space, or a space of meaning as validity or logical intelligibility, where the logical-transcendental conditions of meaning are immediately the conditions of knowledge. The result is a robust transcendental logic that in its monism exhibits a concomitantly

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comprehensive logical unity. Baden neo-Kantianism addresses the fact-value dichotomy that allegedly remains unexplained by Marburger logical monism, and so emphasizes the ideality/validity of logic as normativity, aligning with well-known Fregean/Husserlian theses employed in the refutation of psychologism.11 By locating the ideality of logic in the normativity presupposed by judgement, it thereby connects validity with normativity as the most fundamental meaning structure. It thus grounds the duality of fact and value (Wert) and their normative structures in a unifying theory of judgement in which the conditions for the possibility of asserting facts are at the same time the conditions for the possibility of recognizing and applying standards. There is then a transcendental ‘ought’ (Soll) as well as an ‘is’, since the normative character of the meaningful content of a true judgement ostensibly guarantees that there is in principle a standard for anything to be that thing or sort of thing, and this normative structure determines the standards for correspondingly true assertions. Lask in particular develops this aspect of Baden neo-Kantianism, and it has resounding repercussions both for Heidegger’s account of truth in the BT era and the related hermeneutics of logic as ‘the metaphysics of truth’. By limiting the extent to which fact and value can be separated, Baden neo-Kantianism attempts to ground the humanities in a justifying science of science, and so in effect offers a transcendental deduction of the ‘validity’ of a wide range of human expression. A transcendental logic remains, since categorical-logical conditions ground all forms of cognition and ‘meaningful’ expression, but it is united not by an extreme logicism, but by the ideality of meaning as fundamentally normative. It does not share the strong logicism of the Marburger project, since although both are ideal sciences, mathematics and logic are nevertheless distinct. Although Baden neo-Kantianism denies the Kantian thesis that space and time are a priori intuitions, it also denies the Marburger thesis that space and time are reducible to logical concepts, and so retains a strong AristotelianKantian element in identifying logic and thought with form as distinct from intuition and matter. A result is a variety of theories of how form and matter are unified despite their difference, both in the object of representation and in the judgements that articulate that object. The faculty of understanding thus organizes the manifold of sensible material according to the categories to represent objects, but without pure forms of intuition, since form is now distinct from sensible material so as to remake the dichotomy between thought and intuition as that between form and matter. In his first published work, ‘Neuere Forschungen über Logik’ [‘New Research in Logic’] (NFL, 1912), Heidegger recapitulates the Lotzean thesis

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that logic is an ideal science of validity. Whereas empirical phenomena exhibit temporal and spatial extension and so concern the actual (tatsächlich), logical phenomena simply exhibit validity; they do not occur but rather ‘hold’ in a domain fundamentally distinct from both the empirical and the supersensible: ‘[Principles of logic] are ideal relations concerning conceptual content between the objects of thought generally, for which it is completely irrelevant whether, when, and how they are thought’ (1912:22).12 Since transcendental logic constitutes the objects of knowledge, the science of transcendental logic is therefore the science of knowledge itself. And since the focus of knowledge is truth/falsity, logic is then the science of that which may be true or false, the judgement: ‘[t]he singularity of the judgement is marked by the determination that each judgement makes with respect to the disjunction “true or untrue”’ (1912:31). To assert a truth requires a previous insight into truth – a thesis from Husserl’s Logical Investigations – and that this insight be distinguished from a mere feeling of certitude by direct evidence (Evidenz): ‘Evidence is “not an accessory feeling” (Husserl), but insight into the objective state of affairs’ (1912:39). The epistemological foundation of empirical evidence is then a more fundamental kind of evidence as insight into the ideality of objectivity as such.13 Both Heidegger’s early neo-Kantian transcendental logic and his later hermeneutical logic share the thesis that the language of deductive calculation as such is insufficient for fundamental philosophical explanation. Heidegger here distinguishes ‘genuine’ logic from formal or symbolic logic, or ‘logistics’: [L]ogistics does not go beyond mathematics and is not able to reach genuine logical problems . . . the limit lies in the application of mathematical symbols and concepts (in general the concept of function), which covers up the meanings and meaning shifts of judgements. (1912:42) Although Heidegger refers beyond categorical logic to include mathematical logic as a form of ‘logistics’, he refers to the study of ‘meanings and meaning-shifts of judgements’, or of the conditions that make judgement possible.14 Systems of symbolic logic presuppose meaning as given and so use symbols in order to formalize what can be articulated. That a neo-Kantian would maintain this distinction between symbolic and ‘genuine’ logic is not surprising, since symbolic or ‘general’ logic is an empty formalism that can express and infer judgements, but which cannot itself complete the transcendental task of explaining how knowledge is possible.

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Heidegger maintains a distinction between ‘genuine’ and symbolic logic in his later account of lógos in BT and related texts, but there relinquishes the claim that logic is transcendental, since only hermeneutical ontology is truly transcendental, as only it attends to the fundamental conditions for meaning. Heidegger’s doctoral dissertation, Die Lehre vom Urteil im Psychologismus: Ein kritisch-positiver Beitrag zur Logik [The Theory of Judgement in Psychologism: A Critical-Positive Contribution to Logic] (LUP, 1913), refines many of the neo-Kantian themes from NFL. The first part of the book is a sustained attack on the psychologistic assumptions of Wundt, Maier, Brentano, Marty, and Lipps, while the second part is a positive account of the nature of logic that sharpens and expands the tentative arguments of NFL. In both his negative and positive accounts of logic Heidegger maintains the Lotzean claim that logic is the science of validity, but he reiterates the claim that symbolic logic, including the new ‘mathematical’ logic of Frege and Russell, is insufficient for an analysis of the structure of judgement, and so further reveals his Baden sympathies. Heidegger argues that the strict formalism of mathematical symbolism is insufficient to explain how the elements of judgement – the object, the semantic/conceptual content, and the copula or assertoric is of the judgement that binds subject and predicate to form a predicative unity that may be judged true or false – cohere to make judgement possible: Here is the place for a systematic critique of the theory of judgement in mathematical logic. It would show how its formal character separates it from the vital problems concerning the sense of judgements with respect to their structure and conceptual significance. (1913:174n/115n) It is the purely formal character of symbolic logic that separates it from transcendental logic and an account of the unity of form and matter in judgement, where form is identified with the ideality of thought, and matter with the sense data of intuition. The transcendental issue is then how this unity is possible, and in the Schluß Heidegger indicates that he thinks that current neo-Kantian strategies for clarifying this issue require reformulation. A significant feature of LUP is that Heidegger augments his account of validity with an analysis of negative judgements in a way that anticipates themes from the view of logic he develops in the BT era. Heidegger begins to explore the connection between truth and negation, and he maintains focus on it throughout his subsequent writings on logic, culminating in the

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infamous account of negation and the nothing (das Nichts) in ‘What Is Metaphysics?’ In LUP he explores the connection between truth and negation in negative judgements in order to make several neo-Kantian points about validity and the ideality of logic. To claim An apple is not an orange is to assert both the truth of the assertion and that its conceptual content is negative: it is true that an apple is not an orange. But this means that the copula takes an alternate form: is not. Heidegger thus distinguishes logical from grammatical form, since the grammatical form of the copula is inessential with respect to the content of the judgement, and so it matters not whether one asserts It is not the case that an apple is an orange, An apple is not an orange, or An apple is a non-orange, etc. Regardless of grammatical form, the copula formally articulates a conceptual unity that in the case of negative judgements is itself irreducibly negative.15 In categorical logic, validity is a relationship between assertions with respect to truth-value: an argument is valid if and only if the truth of its premises guarantees the truth of its conclusion. Heidegger concludes that validity is fundamentally bimodal: ‘If something does not exist, I cannot say: “it exists, but only as something nonexistent.” However, that which is not valid is nevertheless valid – only this validity is a non-validity’ (1913:184/125). Validity and invalidity (Nichtgelten) are equiprimordial modalities of validity as such. In response to the argument that the negative judgement is a counterexample to the claim that logic concerns the merely valid, Heidegger argues that the negative judgement rather illustrates a fundamental characteristic of validity. In the next chapter we will look at Heidegger’s later claim that this connection between negation and truth is made possible not by the bimodal character of validity, but by the fundamentally bimodal character of being: whatever is exhibits a differentiated, determinate, and structured unity that at the same time signifies what it is not. 1.1.2 Lask and the Habilitationsschrift Lask re-conceives the transcendental project in two respects. The first is that he relocates transcendental conditions from the immediate conditions for knowledge to the immediate conditions for meaning as truth, and so makes knowledge secondary and derivative with respect to lógos as truth. By detaching truth from knowledge and identifying it with meaning, Lask detaches meaning from knowledge, and so locates transcendental conditions at the level of meaning. He thus returns to Aristotelian-scholastic themes regarding truth and assertion, but as part of a Kantian transcendental project, and so he seeks to avoid Aristotle’s conception of truth as

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correspondence, and with it complete Aristotelian realism. The second respect is that Lask denies any role for pure apperception in the unity of transcendental conditions, and so denies any role for subjectivity in the conditions for the possibility of meaning. This transcendental logic influences Heidegger’s view of logic in the Habilitationsschrift, and in the Schluß it leads him to an aporia. Heidegger’s response in the BT era involves maintaining the thesis that transcendental conditions are conditions for the possibility of meaning, while denying the theses that subjectivity has no place in the unity of transcendental conditions and that the space of meaning is the ideality of validity. Lask praises Kant for having originated a transcendental project that improves on pre-critical philosophy by converting ‘the concept of being into a transcendental-logical concept’.16 By distinguishing between formal and transcendental logic, Kant recognizes a realm of enquiry that is distinct from both the sensible (the purview of empiricism) and the supersensible (the purview of metaphysics) as a transcendental-logical realm of pure meaning. From the beginning, Lask conceives the transcendental project as a philosophical approach that is distinct both from empiricism on the one hand and metaphysics on the other, and that, as Steven Galt Crowell states, ‘expresses the hegemony of the logos over all extralogical philosophical starting points, the rapprochement of logic and ontology’.17 But he rejects the Kantian conception of transcendental philosophy as a theory of cognition as judgeable experience, and in its place erects a transcendental theory of truth as being, an ontological theory of truth he describes as alétheiology.18 In characterizing the transcendental as a purely logical realm, Lask strips it of any constituting subjectivity, denying the Kantian thesis that the unity of transcendental subjectivity grounds the categories as objectively valid. For Lask, Kant fails adequately to distinguish the transcendental, psychological, and metaphysical senses of logic, and so does not completely isolate transcendental logic as a discrete (and fundamental) realm of philosophical enquiry.19 Although Kant offers a transcendental justification of cognition, he does not offer an adequate justification of transcendental reflection itself. Lask’s goal is then to re-conceive transcendental philosophy by re-conceiving transcendental logic and categorical form not as grounded in the cognitive unity of the conceptualizing–judging–inferring subject, but as the logical structure of truth as the intelligibility of objectivity as such. Lask thus conceives the transcendental standpoint not as an ungrounded reflective turn that somehow reveals the unity of subjective representations in pure apperception, but as direct access to the transcendental

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structure of being itself, which for Lask turns out to be reflexive nevertheless. His account of the categories is thus an ontological theory of objectivity as such, but as the being of objects ‘prior to any contact with subjectivity’.20 So although Lask retains the central Kantian thesis that the categories constitute the objectivity of objects, he denies that they are thus direct conditions on the possibility of knowledge. While ‘the domain in which the logical is sovereign is in itself unrestricted’, since it is the domain of purely objective meaning, the domain of ‘the logical that discloses itself in knowledge is perhaps restricted’.21 The categories are then direct conditions on the possibility of truth, since they constitute its logical and thus ontological structure. With a re-conception of the unity of transcendental conditions comes a re-conception of Lotzean validity. Although the categories certainly apply to being, being does not apply to the categories, such that they ‘hold’ neither in the object nor in the cognitive subject, but in themselves. The realm made perspicuous by the transcendental standpoint is thus the ‘domain of validity’ as a realm of lógos as such.22 The traditional dichotomy between sensible and supersensible entities, which Kant too ultimately maintains in a critical reformulation, is then recast as a more basic dichotomy within ‘the totality of what is at all thinkable’ between entities (sensible or supersensible) and non-sensible validities.23 Insofar as the realm of transcendental reflection is the valid, and transcendental reflection constitutes the crux of philosophical thinking, the crux of philosophy is the study of validity. Kant’s failure to recognize ‘the sphere of validity as the object of his own transcendental philosophy’ leaves his transcendental project fundamentally ungrounded, since he thus lacks a fundamental account of transcendental reflection itself.24 Transcendental conditions are thus located neither in objects à la Aristotelian realism, nor in transcendental consciousness à la Kant and Husserl, but in a ‘third realm’ of meaning as truth. The subjectivity of cognition plays no role in the transcendental constitution of objects, since that role is left to the categories as basic determinations of being.25 He detaches categorical form from synthetic cognition and locates its unity not in transcendental consciousness, but in the formal conditions for objectivity as such. The transcendental standpoint thus lays bare lógos as logical form, as the ideal inferential structure in the light of which all objects (sensible or supersensible) are intelligible. Transcendental logic thus refers to the formal structure of truth as the ground of all objectivity and normativity, and it is this isolation of truth as the theme of transcendental reflection that Heidegger appropriates and then modifies. If transcendental

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conditions are conditions for the possibility of meaning as truth, then they are not directly conditions for the possibility of knowing, but for the possibility of objects that are somehow themselves intelligible. Lask thus marks no distinction between what is and what is true about it, and argues that (categorical) logical form constitutes the very objectivity and intelligibility of objects in themselves. Truth thus ‘penetrates the object itself’; but not from outside or from any act of judgement by a cognizing subject, but as inhering: ‘the thing itself and truth about it are one and the same’.26 Lask thus claims to obviate Kantian scepticism towards things in themselves, since while knowledge remains problematic in that falsity and error are always possibilities for any finite cognizing subject, truth does not, since truth is fundamentally the intelligible structure of things themselves. Truth is then ‘boundless’ in that it ranges over all possible objects: something is only in that it ‘stands in logical form’.27 Lask thus marks a distinction between original or ‘paradigmatic’ truth as the lógos of objects and the ‘derivative’ Aristotelian-Kantian truth as correspondence between assertion/judgement and object. He thus offers an account of the foundations of normativity, since objects themselves exhibit the normative structure that is the standard for the veracity of any assertion/judgement about that object. Transcendental conditions are prescriptions for the possibility of something, rules for what counts for anything to be that thing or kind of thing. Individual objects are themselves ‘individual unities of meaning’ or ‘individual “truths”’, such that the objects of various inquiries constitute transcendent unities of meaning or truths, be they physical objects, psychical objects, psychological objects, etc.28 Since truth is identified with meaning, Lask distinguishes a primordial and ontological concept of meaning as the intelligibility of objects from any derivative and epistemological concept of meaning as reference.29 Whereas scientific knowledge ‘consists in submission to the physical thing, to categorically organized material’ such that ‘only the object material and not the object is known’, transcendental knowledge consists in articulating the categorical form of the object in its inherent pre-reflective intelligibility.30 As an account of original truth, Lask’s account of meaning is then an account of original normativity, of the standards both for what is required for any object to be that object and that kind of object, and of the derivative standards for the veracity of thought and language about it. The crux of Lask’s account of meaning and normativity concerns how logical form inheres in objects themselves in a unity of form and matter (Form-materialverhältnis/Urverhältnis). Following Lotze’s distinction between what is (the object) and what holds (the object’s intelligibility), Lask argues

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that what is valid is valid of something, such that the ‘form-character’ of validity is a ‘dependence’ or ‘unavoidability of being toward . . . and for an other [i.e. matter]’.31 Since no transcendental subject organizes matter, categorical form is not a function of a ‘legitimizing thinking subject’, but of an ‘impersonal logical truth-content’.32 The categories are not applied to being in order to synthesize and organize it according to a schema, but are rather ‘a determinate way of being of matter, a determinate objective involvement (Bewandtnis)’.33 Form and matter are then moments of a larger unity in which the formal moment is a ‘moment of clarity’ that constitutes the object’s intelligibility.34 As the intelligibility of matter, form has no independent status, and so there is no ‘relation’ between form and matter that must be maintained in an act of cognition. Form is not imposed upon matter by a subject, but is rather that in the light of which matter is intelligible.35 This involvement of form and matter is structural, since form permeates all of what is in all its particularity and interrelatedness. Since Lask identifies the intelligibility of objects with lógos conceived as the structure of truth that grounds all normativity, he identifies intelligibility with a normative structure that is formal, inferential, and ideal. Lask importantly marks a distinction between something that ‘stands as logically bare and pre-objective only before the “immediate,” unreflected, and theoretically untouched dedication and surrender’, and its ‘reflection as an object’ in which ‘the matter must be legitimated theoretically merely as a “something” that “is given” or “is there” (“es gibt”)’.36 He thus marks a distinction between constitutive categories, which determine the matter of objects as immediately given to pre-reflective intuition, and reflexive categories, which are formal and empty but which organize categories themselves treated as objects for transcendental reflection. So while the constitutive categories concern matter and thus the total differentiation, determination, and particularity of being itself, the reflexive categories concern form, and thus in their ‘emptiness’ concern the unity of being’s universality. The Form-materialverhältnis thus indicates a categorical duality. Given the pure objectivity of meaning as truth, the matter given and intuited prior to reflection and theory is that which form illuminates as meaning, as ‘the relatedness of the valid to the outside’.37 Thus the ‘irrationality of matter’, its ‘opaqueness, impenetrability, incomprehensibility’, is illuminated by the determination of matter according to formal principles that concede the particularity of what is given while demanding that it comply with universal norms.38 Meaning is therefore manifest for intuition in a pre-reflective and pre-thematic givenness that applies both to constitutive categories, in which matter is manifest, and in reflective categories, in which

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the category itself is manifest. Transcendental reflection itself exhibits a moment of pure givenness of the categories as pre-reflectively and prethematically lived (erlebt). So just as there is an empirical intuition of the object-matter in viewing a tree, so there is a categorical intuition of the object-form according to categories in thematizing the tree as an object. The strong emphasis on the role of reflexivity in Lask’s conception of transcendental logic is surprising given that he denies any role for subjectivity in the unity of transcendental conditions. He thus seems to espouse a dogmatism, since he can offer no guarantee that the inherent intelligibility and reflexivity of objects can be intelligible for a subject, and so can offer no guarantee that the ‘paradigmatic’ truth of the object as meaning grounds predicative truth for a subject. Crowell points to a related aporia in Lask’s work that Heidegger confronts in the Schluß and attempts to resolve in BT via the analytic of Dasein.39 The aporia concerns the very possibility of categorical intuition and Lask’s expansion of transcendental reflexivity, and appears as an explanatory gap between the categories as purely objective determinations of being on the one hand, and as subjectively and pre-reflexively lived on the other. Lask must distinguish two kinds of intelligibility, corresponding to the categories insofar as they are prereflectively and pre-discursively lived and intuited on the one hand, and insofar as they are themselves made objects of discursive thought in transcendental reflection on the other. Since the subject supplies nothing for the former, the livedness of the subject in which categorical intuition is possible is no more than a formal ‘prejudicative correlate’ of the intelligibility of the object. It thus becomes difficult to discern a coherent conception of subjectivity, since while the subject appears otherwise merely receptive in Lask’s scheme, it yet ostensibly achieves transcendental reflection. Because Heidegger wants to prove his bona fides to his Catholic sponsors and win philosophical favour with both the Catholic and secular faculty at Freiburg, he chooses a topic for his Habilitationsschrift, Die Kategorienund Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus [The Theory of Categories and Meaning in Duns Scotus] (KDS, 1915), that allows him to bring together medieval and neo-Kantian themes in a vehicle for pursuing his own philosophical interests. Heidegger had wanted to write on the ideality of number, so his compromise takes the form of finding anticipations of neo-Kantian ideality in Duns Scotus’ (now believed to be Thomas of Erfurt’s) Grammatica Speculativa (GS). Heidegger indicates his philosophical indebtedness to Lask by dedicating KDS to him, although he mentions him infrequently in the text. Since Heidegger principally uses GS as a vehicle for his own

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logical-phenomenological research, we can treat KDS as an extension of the neo-Kantian project begun in NFL and continued in LUP. Scholasticism has both dualistic and monistic tendencies that Heidegger sees reflected in neo-Kantian thought. On the one hand, there is a tendency towards dualism in positing a fundamental relation of analogy between thought and being (and between God and world), and Heidegger claims to have discovered an intentionality of analogy in GS that yields a markedly Laskian transcendental logic and theory of meaning. On the other hand, there is a tendency towards monism in attempting to solve the neo-Kantian category problem (Kategorienproblem), and the failure of the neo-Kantian schema to solve this problem motivates Heidegger’s turn in the Schluß away from a transcendental account of categorical thought and towards a transcendental account of active, temporal life. The first half of the category problem concerns demarcating the determinations of being into coherent regions, each exhibiting concomitantly determinate objects and concepts: The particular sciences study different object areas or that under different viewpoints . . . one recognizes the particular object areas as relatively determined reality areas. This suits a certain structure and constitution according to its kind. We see ourselves standing before a task commonly summarized under the name ‘theory of categories’. (1915:210–11/152–3) Heidegger’s discussion of the transcendental unum in Chapter One of Part One is the occasion for his own distinctions between mathematical, natural, and metaphysical domains, and so goes some way towards Heidegger’s original goal of writing on the ideality of number. However, these domains are unified as domains of being, and so in the orientation towards the second half of the category problem – a unifying account of reality in terms of the transcendentals ens, unum, verum, and bonum – scholasticism tends towards monism, culminating in the unity of a necessary being. Heidegger here seeks the transcendental unity of being both in a Laskian account of meaning and a phenomenology of the intentionality of categorical judgement, but eventually forces concessions from both sides in the elaboration of his account of transcendental unity as the temporal unity of being-in-theworld in BT. Scotus (Erfurt) seeks to explain the relation of analogy between thought and being as the relation between the universality of forms of thought to the particularity of material being. The upshot in GS is a theory of the modes of signification (modi significandi) that attempts to explain how a

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system of grammar is possible as analogue of the structure of being. However, Heidegger makes it clear in the Introduction that he does not intend to give a close exegesis of GS, but rather to pursue some of its conclusions as he sees them, and document their significance for his own developing theory of meaning and a priori grammar. A neo-Kantian thesis that Heidegger finds implicit in GS is that one cannot account for the scope and foundations of logic through ‘psychological investigations into the development and composition of psychological representations’, but only ‘through unambiguous determinations and clarifications of word meanings’ in conceptual analysis (1915:186/127). A related thesis that Lask emphasizes is that in transcendental reflection the logical unity of the categories is manifest such that categorical relations become perspicuous as demarcating regions of being, with concomitantly demarcated objects and areas of study for the sciences (1915:186–7/127–8). Heidegger locates the first thesis in scholasticism’s alleged focus on conceptual content: ‘[Scholasticism] tries to maintain focus on descriptive contents’, and does not ‘deteriorate its analyses of meaning into empirical-genetic explanations, but rather seeks to hold the objective semantic content’ (1915:201/ 143). He locates the second thesis in the theory of the modi seen as a theory of categorical meaning: [A] ‘morphology of meanings’ that stands in essential connection with the theory of categories, inasmuch as it lays out the different categorical formations of ‘meaning in general’ and lays the ground for all further treatments of the problems of logical sense and validity. (1915:203/145) GS thus mirrors Heidegger’s own project in that it brings together a theory of meaning (Bedeutungslehre) and a theory of categories (Kategorienslehre) in a discussion of the transcendental unum that explains both the diversity and unity of being in the category problem. Heidegger’s discussion of the transcendental verum in Chapter Two of Part One is then the occasion for a neo-Kantian discussion of validity with respect to the logical and the psychological, and he continues with the theme of the ideality of meaning in his discussion of the distinction between linguistic form and content in Chapter Three. Heidegger here maintains an AristotelianKantian conception of judgement as the combination of subject and predicate effected by the copula is to produce the conceptual unity necessary to be intelligible as true or false. The capacity for truth-value in this sense is then ‘that manner of being (“being true”) for which we today have the felicitous expression “validity”’ (1915:269/211).

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Two implications of Heidegger’s identification of the discussion of analogy in GS with a Laskian-Husserlian theory of meaning are relevant for our discussion. The first is that Heidegger sees the analogy of being in GS as exhibiting an analogue with the reflexive category in Heidegger’s Laskian scheme. Heidegger notes that the modi themselves exhibit active and passive modes, and focuses on the sense in which the determinate givenness of being in modus essendi has an active mode that he can exploit for an interpretation of the categorical character of the modus essendi activus as reflexive (1915:317–21/259–63). Heidegger sees the inclusion of the modus essendi activus alongside the modus cognoscendi activus as the inclusion of the concept of the immediacy and givenness of categorical intuition alongside the concept of the immediacy and givenness of empirical intuition. Following Lask, Heidegger has replaced a transcendental unity of empirical conditions with a transcendental unity of both empirical and categorical intuition, and thus follows him in expanding the concept of givenness beyond the givenness of sensible matter to include the givenness of categorical form. He also follows Lask by conceiving all of being as inherently intelligible, as articulating diverse regions of being for study and grounding them in the unity of lógos as the truth of givenness. Whatever ‘shows itself’ can be ‘grasped directly’, as ‘unitary’, such that ‘[o]ver the immediate there can be no doubts, probabilities, and deceptions . . . it has as it were nothing between itself and the apprehension (simplex apprehensio)’ (1915:213/155). The second implication is that Heidegger sees the analogy relationship – here the subject–object relation of knowledge as original transcendence – as intentional, and claims that ‘intentionality is the “domain-category” of the logical realm’ (1915:283/225). As Crowell notes, Lask ‘nominally adopts Husserl’s conception of intentionality’, but does not, like Heidegger, follow ‘the revolutionary critical implications of Husserl’s phenomenology’.40 Heidegger attempts to extract a subject–object intentionality from Lask’s theory of meaning, and looks to GS for anticipations of this account. A Husserlian conception of intentionality is then at the heart of Heidegger’s phenomenology of categorical judgement: Whereas Lask took the concept of validity to be ultimate – the ‘category of categories’ that renders the logical space of meaning intelligible – Heidegger holds validity to be capable of further analysis because of its very intentionality. ‘Intentionality,’ and not validity, ‘is the defining category [Gebietskategorie] of the logical realm.’41

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Heidegger thus sees the perspicuity of ‘what shows itself’ in immediate empirical and categorical intuition as demanding a directly descriptive and hence phenomenological method of investigation. The inclusion of the modus essendi activus with the modus cognoscendi activus demands a reformulation of the intentionality of the subject–object relation, since it can no longer take the form of a judgement act related to judgement content, but rather the more fundamental form of a pre-reflective, prethematic, and so pre-cognitive relationship of ‘subject’ to ‘object’, act to content, noesis to noema. Heidegger thus faces the challenge of offering an account of subjectivity according to Lask’s scheme that coheres with the alleged reflexivity of the modus essendi activus. Lask’s insistence on the objectivity of form and meaning thus makes the relational demands of the Husserlian intentional model appear Procrustean. Since Heidegger seeks a Laskian theory of meaning that includes a phenomenology of intentionality, and since intentionality leans on a conception of intentional subject, Heidegger must confront the tension between the relational demands of intentionality and the purely objectivist demands of Lask’s theory of meaning. He confronts that tension directly in the brief Schluβ he adds to KDS in 1916, marking a significant turn towards a new philosophical orientation that occupies him for the rest of his life. His concern amounts to a Laskian formulation of the Kategorienproblem in KDS, that the unity of the differentiated categories is objective (1915:400/342). Heidegger thus confronts the aporia inherent in Lask’s work, highlighted as it is given Heidegger’s simultaneous commitment to an intentionality of validity. He points to GS and claims that its theory of meaning includes a ‘fundamentally problematic space of subjectivity’, and that what is missing is ‘the conscious formulation of the judgement problem into the subject-object relation, and thus the standing-in-relation of the category to the judgement’ (1915:402/344). Following Lask, Heidegger has a strong conception of reflexivity as the givenness of both constitutive and reflective categories as lived. But reflexive categories are not ‘without relation to the objectivityconstituting judgement totally’, such that ‘a merely “objective” general theory of objects necessarily remains incomplete without inclusion of the “subjective side”’ (1915:404/346). Since the objective validity of logic must be explained with reference to the givenness of the categories as lived, judgement and discursive thought must be connected with a pre-reflective space of meaning as the active life of the subject or ‘living spirit’ (lebendiger Geist) (1915:410/352).

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The thesis that subjectivity has no role in the unity of transcendental conditions distinguishes Lask both from Kant and from other neo-Kantians, and so is insufficient to explain Heidegger’s later claim that ‘Lask was unable to free himself from the conviction of his contemporaries that NeoKantianism had the vocation to renovate philosophy’ (1927a:178/253–4). Lask goes wrong as a neo-Kantian by insisting on the strict ideality of the space of meaning, and he compounds the problem by insisting on the strict objectivity of meaning. Heidegger must therefore reject a thesis he has maintained until now, that transcendental logic must be a theory of categories with respect to a conception of the space of meaning as objective validity. Whatever sense validity has is to be located in a subject– object relation: [O]bjectivity only has sense for a judging subject. Without this subject one can never expose the entire sense of what one means by ‘validity.’ Whether this means a unique ‘is’ or ‘ought’ or neither or rather something that can only be conceived according to more fundamental groups of problems contained in the notion of living spirit, and which are certainly closely connected to the problem of values, one cannot here decide. (1915:405/347) And whereas Heidegger has argued for the neo-Kantian claim that transcendental logic must be distinguished from both the empirical sciences and metaphysical speculation, he no longer maintains the same distinction between validity and actuality, and so no longer maintains the same distinctions between transcendental logic, metaphysics, and empirical science. An analysis of what he eventually calls the ‘subjectivity of the subject’ requires both metaphysics and an analysis of actuality so as to yield a properly transcendental account of the livedness of the subject as the ground of predicative logic and formal validity: ‘One is generally unable to see logic and its problems in their true light unless the context within which they are interpreted is translogical. In the end, philosophy cannot do without its proper optic: metaphysics’ (1915:405–6/347–8). An account of meaning as pre-reflective truth that accords a reflexive character to transcendental unity requires a more robust subject in order to account for a form-matter relation. With this, Heidegger thinks he has the elements of a subject–object model that is sufficient for a phenomenology of its intentional structure. However, he cannot detail the analysis of the living spirit he proposes in 1916 until he first develops a phenomenology of the intentionality of pre-reflective life, and this requires an intentionality of the temporal and thus historical character of the living subject: ‘The living

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spirit as such is in essence historic spirit in the broadest sense of the word . . . History and its interpretation as a teleological philosophy of culture must become a meaning-determining element for the category problem’ (1915:407–8/349–50). From his immersion in phenomenology beginning in 1916 emerges the hermeneutics of Dasein in the 1920s. The Schluß thus marks the point at which Heidegger turns from a Husserlian phenomenology of the intentionality of categorical judgement as fundamental transcendence to what becomes a hermeneutical phenomenology of the intentionality of the temporal life of Dasein. Heidegger thus turns from a categorical ontology to an existenzial ontology, and so turns from a categorical phenomenology of the intentionality of transcendence as knowing to an existential phenomenology of the intentionality of radical transcendence as the temporal structure of being. In doing so he turns from Lask’s thesis that meaning is the purely objective givenness of ideal truth to the modified thesis that meaning is the givenness of truth as disclosedness, as the subjective-objective unity of Dasein’s activity. Heidegger thus reinterprets the space of meaning not as the ideality of logical space or validity, but as the practicality of existenzial space, the ‘there’ (Da) of disclosedness. In describing the ‘subjectivity of the subject’ that understands being, Heidegger replaces Lask’s dogmatic assumption that objects in themselves are intelligible as subjective ‘prejudicative correlates’ with an argument for how the predicative truth of judgements is grounded in the ontological truth of a disclosedness that in its unity exhibits both ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ moments. The Schluß thus also marks a turn from a conception of meaning as lived categorical lógos to a conception of meaning as lived existenzial lógos, as the practical space of meaning that grounds logic as predicative. So long as Heidegger accepts Lask’s thesis that meaning is truth, he must then work to show that the ‘subject-object’ dynamic forms a coherent whole that does not leave the judging subject and the logic of judgement ‘homeless’.42 Heidegger thus turns from a conception of transcendental unity as the ideality of validity towards what becomes, in successively more comprehensive and unifying transcendental analyses, the unity of meaning as understanding, Existenz, being-in-the-world, disclosedness, care, truth, and temporality.43

1.2 The Analytic of Dasein I have de-emphasized the influence of Husserl and the years 1916 to 1923, during which Husserl and Heidegger are together at Freiburg. Although

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Heidegger studies Husserl’s Logical Investigations earlier, his personal association with Husserl begins in 1916 with Husserl’s arrival at Freiburg, and develops while Heidegger is at war and in the following years. From 1919 to 1923, when he leaves Freiburg for his position as professor at Marburg, Heidegger works as Privatdozent and Husserl’s assistant, and lectures on phenomenology. During this time Heidegger develops the hermeneutical– ontological–phenomenological–transcendental project of BT. In 1916 Heidegger thus has not developed the philosophical perspective that allows him to ground objectivity and logic in the active life of the ’subject’. The project of ‘making logic philosophical again’ as a ‘metaphysics of truth’ begun in the Schluß finally emerges, after the turn to hermeneutical phenomenology, as part of a larger deconstruction of epistemology in which Heidegger argues that knowledge is a secondary and derivative comportment or ‘mode of being’ for Dasein. The central task of philosophy is not then a theory of knowledge but an interpretation of being as grounded in Dasein. Heidegger adopts a phenomenological standpoint that is uniquely practical so as to allow a hermeneutical (hermeneutische) redescription/reinterpretation of a range of related traditional metaphysical concepts, and in so doing brings together phenomenology, hermeneutics, and ontology to bear on the history of Western philosophy so as to understand its motivating concepts. Here he finds what he argues are the clues for reinterpretations of those concepts that are at once ancient and modern, and that have been obscured by centuries of metaphysically ungrounded thinking. The neo-scholastic category problem that Heidegger tentatively attempts to reinterpret according to a modern, neo-Kantian framework ultimately points back for him to the ancient and ineradicable question of being, and so back to Aristotle. Heidegger’s phenomenology is thus from the start oriented towards the issue of being, as whatever shows itself and so exhibits a minimum of determination and intelligible structure that is amenable to articulation. Rather than recount the development of BT,44 I have limited our discussion to relevant features of the resulting architectonic, in order to make room for a discussion of how these features form part of the context within which Heidegger develops his account of logic. In the texts from the BT era Heidegger still speaks of logic as grounded in metaphysics, and so this account differs from later remarks, which characteristically refrain from using the language of traditional metaphysics. This is because the BT project is explicitly a radical metaphysics in the sense of a hermeneutical deconstruction (Destruktion) of traditional metaphysics. In the ‘Postscript to “What Is Metaphysics?”’ (P, 1943), Heidegger characterizes

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the approach to metaphysics in BT as transitional in that it seeks to overcome metaphysics, and ‘such transitions . . . within certain limits . . . must continue to speak the language of that which they help overcome’ (1943:231/1). Unlike the Denken of the later writings, the radical metaphysics of BT does not tend to abolish the concepts and idiom of traditional metaphysics, but rather to reinterpret and re-ground (Grundlegung) them in radical ontology. Heidegger therefore retains much of the language of traditional metaphysics in BT and related texts, but as radically reinterpreted in the context of his hermeneutics of being. He thus speaks of the analytic of Dasein as an analysis of the ‘subjectivity of the subject’, and speaks of logic as the ‘metaphysics of truth’, employing language not found in the later writings, where Dasein itself appears infrequently.45 But now a radical metaphysics must ground logic, and it is clear from the lectures that by the early 1920s the analytic of the ‘living spirit’ that he poses as a project in 1916 has become the analytic of Dasein and its ‘temporal interpretation’. The discussion of validity as the fundamental presupposition of logic and therefore all enquiry has given way to a discussion of being as the fundamental presupposition of all enquiry, including the study of logic. Since this account of logic is part of a larger critical discussion of what Heidegger argues are the Cartesian presuppositions of modern epistemology, in order to provide sufficient context for a discussion of Heidegger’s account of logic from this era it is useful to recount aspects of the architectonic of BT. For reasons that will become clearer, we must emphasize the question of being and Dasein’s understanding of being, the secondary status of knowledge, and the temporal structure of the world as the space of lógos in which Dasein projects possibilities. 1.2.1 The Question of Being Heidegger takes it as phenomenologically given that in any approach to the question of being we already have an understanding (Verstehen) of something like being, if only implicitly and inchoately, since otherwise there would be no question to formulate. To clarify this question is to clarify the meaning or lógos of being, a project that has proven so notoriously difficult in the history of Western philosophy that it has largely been abandoned as hopelessly ambiguous (1927b:21/2). Heidegger famously restarts this project by re-examining the ‘necessity, structure, and priority’ of the question. Two tasks emerge for Part I of BT. The first task is a temporal interpretation of Dasein, in order to show how the meaning of being is grounded in the existenzial character of the being of that entity for which

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being is an issue. Describing the existenzial structure of Dasein’s constitutive being-in-the-world (in-der-Welt-sein) is then the subtask that Heidegger takes up in Division I, while its temporal interpretation is the subtask he takes up in Division II. Heidegger’s second task is thereby to prepare for a discussion of how being in general is connected to temporality, a discussion that was to have appeared as Division III of Part I (1927b:38/17). ‘Time and Being’ was never published as part of BT, but its content appears in the lectures from summer 1927 (1927a), and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929b). Frederick Olafson’s exegesis clarifies how the goal of Heidegger’s second task is then to connect being in general with temporality by articulating an account of being as presence (Präsenz) that appears in the lectures.46 An interpretation of being-in-the-world in terms of temporality lays bare the task of interpreting being in general as the temporality of Präsenz, which Heidegger describes in the title of Part I as the ‘Explication of Time as the Transcendental Horizon for the Question of Being’ (1927b:63/39). Heidegger begins with Aristotle’s attempt to formulate the question of being in order to indicate its difficulty. While being is ostensibly the most universal concept, its universality is not that of a class or genus, since to treat being as a class is to reduce it to the sum of all particular entities and so obliterate the concept of being as such (1927b:22/3). We cannot deduce being from more universal concepts, since there can be none, and neither can we exhibit it through less universal concepts, since the concept of the sum of all entities does not amount to the concept of being as such (1927b:23/4). Nevertheless, the universality of being is ostensibly selfevident, since the intelligibility of inflections of to be indicates an ongoing understanding of being, however implicit and inchoate (1927b:23/4). Heidegger expresses the ambiguity of the universality of being as the question concerning the unity of being in general, which he describes in Basic Problems of Phenomenology (BP) as Präsenz. He expresses the indefinability of being in terms of categories as the ontological difference: although being is always the being of entities, the being of entities ‘“is” not itself an entity’, and neither is it a property of entities (1927b:26/6). If the universality of being is not categorical, then being is not particular in any way that would make it either an entity or a property of an entity, and so its unity is somehow irreducible. Heidegger’s task is then to clarify the ambiguous relationship between entities and their being in a way that retains this holistic character. He then expresses the ambiguity of the self-evidence of being as the need to study our pre-critical understanding of being (Seinsverstehen). To ask a question is to enquire or seek after something, and every enquiry is in some sense ‘guided beforehand’ by what is sought (1927b:24–5/5). To

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enquire after the cause of an event is to be guided by some initial understanding, however implicit and inchoate, of that which would explain the event as an effect. Without some incipient understanding of what would count as the answer to a question, no answer or even question is possible. So with respect to the question of being, some implicit and inchoate understanding of being must motivate the question and guide the attempt to answer it, or no question would be possible (1927b:25/5). Since our pre-critical understanding of being makes the question of being possible and guides the attempt to answer it, formulating an explicit concept of being requires that we study it (1927b:25/6). Whereas knowing (Erkenntnis) is explicitly thematic and involves the discursive articulation of thought in language, understanding (Verstehen) is importantly pre-thematic, pre-discursive, and pre-verbal.47 As we will see, it is also importantly pre-logical, although it does not lack lógos. That Dasein understands being means then that one is implicitly familiar both with entities other than oneself as well as with the existenzial entity that one is, whether or not one explicitly raises being as a theme for enquiry. As we will see, understanding importantly makes knowing possible as a secondary and derivative comportment, a ‘founded mode of being’ for Dasein. Ontology must then interrogate the characteristic manner of being of that particular entity that understands and enquires after being, for which being, including its own being, is an issue (1927b:27/7). Although there is a circularity in saying that the question of being must be formulated with respect to a particular entity’s characteristic manner of being, it is not vicious, Heidegger argues, since one may discuss the manner of being of particular entities without an explicit concept of being, for otherwise it is inconceivable how enquiry is at all possible (1927b:27/7–8). Just as one may enquire after the cause of an event despite only an implicit and inchoate understanding of what could be the cause, so one may enquire after being despite only an implicit and inchoate understanding of being in general. The circularity of Dasein’s relationship to being rather demonstrates for Heidegger the unity of Dasein’s characteristic manner of being as being-in-the-world, which in BT then takes the form of an argument for the claim that being-in-the-world is the ground of being. Heidegger often speaks of unities – both entities and onto-temporal unities such as being and time – in Husserlian language as horizonal. Unities are totalities that are never exhausted from a single perspective, since unity (Einheit) in this sense includes every possible perspective, and yet which show themselves only from a single perspective.48 Other perspectives remain present when, for example, one looks at an entity, since the given perspective signifies other possible perspectives and their unity in the entity.

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However, they are present in the mode of absence, since although they are signified in any given perspective, they are not directly given in it, and so mark the horizon of the entity as a unity. Being in general is being in its unity or totality, the horizons of which are the temporal dimensions of Präsenz. It is not then exhausted from any single perspective, although Heidegger also argues that one understands being only from the perspective of a specific historical situation. Dasein projects possibilities of being according to a constitutive temporal structure that exhibits a horizonal unity in the unity of the ‘ecstases’ future, past, and present. An understanding of being is thus an understanding of the temporal unity of being. As an active, temporal entity, Dasein uncovers (entdeckt) both itself and the world together in a fundamentally unifying uncovering Heidegger calls disclosedness (Erschlossenheit), and so uncovers the intelligible structure of itself and the world in a phenomenologically irreducible unity. Although in the texts from the BT era Heidegger disavows neo-Kantianism, a transcendental project remains, and its transcendental character is already apparent.49 In accordance with the ontological difference, Heidegger marks a distinction between enquiry concerning particular entities and enquiry concerning being as such (1927b:31–5/11–15). The former is ontical enquiry, and includes not just the positive sciences, but also any systematic investigation (Wissenschaft) that takes particular entities as its theme: for example, physical sciences, social sciences, ethics, aesthetics, etc. Enquiry that takes being in general as its theme is then ontological. Heidegger argues that the question of being has ‘ontological priority’ because an understanding of being makes comportment as such possible, including the theoretical comportment that characterizes knowing. The ontical sciences study entities, and the basic concepts of any science ‘determine the way in which we get an understanding beforehand of the area of subject-matter underlying all objects a science takes as its theme’ (1927b:30/ 10). Ontological enquiry is ‘more primordial, as over against the ontical enquiry of the positive sciences’, because its basic concept being is in a transcendental sense more primordial than entities. To articulate the question of being in general is to articulate the central concepts of ontology, and therewith the transcendental conditions for the ontical sciences, for knowing as commonly understood (1927b:31/11). Since ontology must clarify the concept of being, formulating the initial question of being is its fundamental task, and so exhibits ontological and thus transcendental priority. The ontological difference then generates both the question of the meaning of being and Heidegger’s philosophical project, and determines the formulation of and attempt to answer that question, as it entails

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a distinction between kinds of enquiry that helps determine the content and structure of BT. What principally distinguishes Heidegger’s transcendental project from Kant’s is that Kant assigns transcendental conditions to a pure synthesizing subject while Heidegger assigns them to the irreducibly unitary ontotemporal structure of being-in-the-world. In several texts from the BT era Heidegger argues that Kant’s failure to recognize the unity of the spontaneity of the understanding and the receptivity of sensibility in the temporal unity of the transcendental imagination in the schematism marks a failure to see through the ontological implications of his own transcendental project.50 As a result, Heidegger argues, Kant fails to give an account of how knowledge is possible that is not pejoratively subjective and immanent. Being-in-the-world has ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ moments or horizonal aspects, but it is nevertheless an importantly unitary phenomenon that is neither constructed from nor analysable down to categorical elements, but is rather described phenomenologically as a hermeneutic whole. For Kant, the unity of reality is the unity of pure apperception, where the principal issue is the juris question of the objective validity of the categories. For Heidegger in the BT era, the unity of reality is ultimately the temporal unity of being-in-the-world that grounds the possibility of anything showing itself as intelligible, including the objective validity that characterizes categorical thinking. The issue here for Heidegger is not whether the categories are objectively valid in a constitutive sense, but how the objective validity of categorical thinking is possible as grounded in the more fundamental temporal unity of being-in-the-world. As transcendental, the BT project is concerned with the crux of the Kategorienproblem, the unity-in-diversity of being. While an entity exhibits ontical unity in that it exhibits possibilities that constitute its horizonal limits, being exhibits ontological unity in that it exhibits the structure of temporality as its horizonal limits. To reflect on being is to reflect on its unity, such that ontology is reflection on the temporal unity of being as Präsenz. Ontology thereby adopts a transcendental standpoint from which we articulate the irreducibly unitary phenomenon of being-in-the-world that grounds all meaning. Ontical sciences such as logic (the study of logical entities) have a secondary and derivative status with respect to ontology, since although they study the being of entities (e.g., a chemist studies the characteristic ways of being of chemical entities), they do not study being in general. Rather, they articulate regions of being laid bare by a prior understanding of being in some way. Ontology studies not entities but their being, and so it studies the transcendental conditions on any enquiry whatsoever.

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However, it does not lay the foundations for scientific method by correcting the latter’s internal logic after the fact, as it were, but rather articulates precisely how such an enquiry is possible with respect to regions of being that Dasein articulates through activity in the world (1927b:30–1/10). 1.2.2 Ontology and Epistemology Central to the analytic of Dasein from Division I is Heidegger’s critique of the allegedly Cartesian presuppositions of modern epistemology, particularly substance dualism and its internal–external metaphor. After introducing the analytic of Dasein in Chapter I, Heidegger begins to describe Existenz or Dasein’s characteristic manner of being as being-in-the-world. Since the lived ‘subjectivity of the subject’ Dasein is existenzial and not categorical, its determinations are not categories but Existenzialien or structural features of Existenz. Existenz and categoriality thus mark ‘two basic possibilities for characters of being’, corresponding to two basic kinds of entities and their corresponding forms of interpretation: ‘an entity is either a “who” (existence) or a “what”’ (1927b:70–1/45–6). In Chapter II he then identifies Existenz with the being-in of being-in-the-world, and distinguishes Dasein from other entities by describing Dasein as an entity that has a world. Here Heidegger raises the issue of knowing, and argues that having a world is more fundamental than theoretically knowing it, a secondary and derivative (abkünftiger) mode of being for Dasein (1927b:¶13). Heidegger’s goal is to show that knowing does not constitute transcendence or a fundamental point of contact with the world, and so to show the need for a more basic concept of transcendence. Cartesian assumptions about the nature of subject as the private realm of mental representations, and the world as purely objective and transcendent, have generated the modern tradition of treating philosophy fundamentally as epistemology that has obfuscated the fundamental task of clarifying the concept of being. By dividing the world into erstwhile discrete subjects and objects and attempting to conceive the point of contact between the two as knowledge, modern philosophy sets for itself the task of explaining how knowledge as fundamental transcendence is possible, typically expressed as the problem of reference.51 Since Heidegger rejects both substance dualism and the concept of being as substance, his principal criticism of Descartes is not that he fails to show how an immaterial substance can make ‘contact’ with a material substance. However, the historical failure of the principal arguments of substance dualism to secure such a point of contact, and ground a conception of transcendence as knowledge, points to Heidegger’s reason for his critique.

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The Cartesian model of transcendence as knowing cannot accommodate a phenomenological and so ontologically necessary52 description of the world as an irreducible phenomenal whole, and so it cannot accommodate a phenomenological description of both the world as properly ‘transcendent’ and Dasein as properly ‘subjective’. The Cartesian model of the world as transcendent precludes an understanding of Dasein as an entity that is unique in that it has a world, and so it misconceives the ‘subjectivity of the subject’ by rendering Dasein worldless (weltlos), thereby ironically reducing it to the status of an entity other than itself (1927b:93/65). But the world is ‘the structure of one of the constitutive items of being-in-the-world’ – the other item being Dasein – such that both are constitutive moments of the irreducible unity of being-in-the-world (1927b:92/64). It is to this unity that Heidegger connects the concept of transcendence, as the fundamental and irreducible having a world that makes the derivative intentionality of discursively knowing the world possible. The analytic of Dasein must then include an analytic of worldhood (Weltlichkeit), since it is the character of the world that remains unexplained and at stake: Neither the ontical depiction of entities within-the-world nor the ontological Interpretation of their Being is such as to reach the phenomenon of the ‘world.’ In both of these ways of access to ‘Objective Being’, the ‘world’ has already been ‘presupposed’, and indeed in various ways. (1927b:92/64) As an entity that has a world, Dasein understands itself in the world, as activity, and it understands the world as the fundamental context for activity. The Cartesian model precludes the pre-thematic givenness of the world and thus the unity of being-in-the-world, and so it distorts both the ‘subjectivity of the subject’ and the worldhood of the world as structural features of being-in-the-world (1927b:92/64). By casting transcendence as the problematic of having a world, and as such the very premise of his project, Descartes ensures that he cannot explain transcendence, since he thinks of Dasein’s characteristic manner of being as knowing and not being-inthe-world as understanding.53 Heidegger thus replaces transcendence conceived as the intentionality of predicative thought with a more fundamental transcendence that he identifies with Dasein’s constitutive understanding of being. Heidegger’s task is then to describe the unity of the world and Dasein’s being-in-the-world, such that Dasein can both have a world, and so in one sense constitute a condition on the possibility of the world, and yet be in the world as an entity.

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Heidegger must then explain the ontologically unifying significance of the being-in (in-Sein) of being-in-the-world: [I]f we inquire about Being-in as our theme, we cannot indeed consent to nullify the primordial character of this phenomenon by deriving it from others . . . in the sense of a dissolving or breaking up . . . [This] splits the phenomenon asunder, and there is no prospect of putting it together again from the fragments . . . What is decisive for ontology is to prevent the splitting of the phenomenon – in other words, to hold its positive phenomenal content secure. (1927b:170/131) Heidegger’s holism is ontological not simply because entities only show themselves in a systematic interrelatedness with other entities that precludes atomism, but also because they only show themselves insofar as they presuppose the world as the irreducibly unified context within which entities show themselves as intelligible. Unlike other entities, Dasein is a being that has a world and projects possibilities, and for whom being is an issue. Other entities do not have an understanding of being, and so while they exhibit possibilities of being that Dasein projects, they do not themselves project such possibilities, and so are importantly worldless. To treat Dasein as an aggregate of various constituent parts is to strip it of its constitutive worldhood, and so distort its characteristic manner of being (1927b:81–2/55–6). In Chapter III Heidegger describes worldhood as an open, and so in a fundamental sense spatial environment (Umwelt) for practical activity (1927b:93–5/65–6). He then distinguishes the being of entities other than Dasein from Dasein’s characteristic manner of being as being-in-the-world by describing the worldless character of entities other than Dasein and comparing it to the way in which having or disclosing a world is constitutive for Dasein. Entities other than Dasein primordially show themselves as equipment (Zeug), as zuhanden: ‘ready-to-hand’ or available for use in activity.54 The intelligible structure of the entity is fundamentally what that entity will or will not allow, and it signifies (bedeutet) possibilities for Dasein concerning what Dasein can and cannot accomplish with the entity as a piece of equipment in a given practical context. To use a tool is to understand its practical significance, which is at the same time to project the possibilities that entity exhibits. A hammer first shows itself pre-thematically, and so it is first intelligible as something that one may simply pick up and use to drive or remove nails, and this practical intelligibility is then structured by reference to the structure of Dasein’s activity – Dasein’s reasons, motivations, methods, goals, strategies, concerns,

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etc. –and to the larger structure of the world that activity articulates in part (1927b:¶15). To use a hammer is to understand its original intelligibility as a tool for building a house, and the structure of the project of building a house – the goals, materials, methods, and overall practical significance of the project for the agent in the world – combine to articulate part of the intelligible structure of the world as a range of practical possibilities. When the hammer breaks and cannot be used, its intelligibility as a tool then stands in relief, and a kind of reflection is forced in which the hammer’s availability is compared to its larger context and found wanting. Furthermore, the intelligibility that now stands in relief is present in the mode of absence, since the hammer is present, but as unavailable. To find the hammer’s availability wanting with respect to its larger practical context is in effect to detach and suspend the hammer as tool from its wider practical context and so isolate it as a substantial bearer of denumerable properties. Prior to this reflection the hammer is intelligible only implicitly as what it will or will not allow; after this reflection the hammer is intelligible as an explicit theme for discursive thought. This reflection is repeatable, and is possible even when the entity is available simply by considering the entity as detached from its context, as if it were broken and its availability stood in relief as wanting. Abstraction then is this reflection in which the entity is compared with its practical context in order to understand the entity as vorhanden, as a discrete item with so many denumerable categorical properties we may then articulate discursively in a variety of ways, including natural language and the language of mathematics and logic.55 As abstraction, knowing is then a kind of ‘deficiency’ in that it brackets the unity of being-in-the-world so as to isolate the world as an object for thematization (1927b:88/61). This deficiency thus signifies the status of knowing as a derivative comportment: But a ‘commericium’ of the subject with a world does not get created for the first time by knowing, nor does it arise from some way in which the world acts upon a subject. Knowing is a mode of Dasein founded upon Being-in-the-world. (1927b:90/62) What is fundamental for philosophy is not then the problem of knowledge but the meaning of being, not epistemology but ontology as the temporal interpretation of being-in-the-world. Heidegger is describing the way in which he thinks concepts are formed, and his account retains two Kantian elements in radically reinterpreted

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ways. Heidegger agrees with Kant that concepts are formed in reflection, although he grounds reflection not in the transcendental unity of understanding as an explicitly thematic faculty, but in the transcendental unity of Dasein’s understanding or constitutive openness to signification. He also appears to agree with Kant that a concept is a rule concerning what is common to different objects, since he appears to have just described the ontological conditions that he thinks make the discursive articulation of rules for entities considered as ‘objects’ with discrete properties possible. Knowledge is founded upon Dasein’s capacity to reflect on what it already more or less understands in order to abstract entities from their wider significative context so as to raise them as explicit themes for discursive thought. The theoretical attitude required for knowledge is then a secondary and derivative comportment that Dasein achieves through reflection in which entities are considered as if they were for the moment unavailable, and so are in a sense neutralized with respect to the wider context within which they exhibit their original intelligibility. Heidegger’s discussion of knowledge is of course closely connected to his discussions of assertion and truth, and in the next chapter we will look at these connections and how they bear on his account of logic. By rejecting the thesis that knowledge has a privileged status as the exemplar of transcendence, Heidegger also rejects the thesis that logic conceived broadly as the normative constraints on discursive thought has a concomitantly privileged status. Dasein exhibits various comportments or ways of being, some of which are more fundamental than others. Every comportment – running, singing, looking, inquiring, judging, knowing, etc. – presupposes an understanding of being and articulates the world by projecting a range of possibilities. Knowledge requires concepts and so is explicitly thematic, while an understanding of being is pre-conceptual and pre-thematic. Both an understanding of being and knowledge are characteristic comportments of Dasein, but the former is fundamental. Knowing thus presupposes that Dasein has a world, that there is (es gibt) a world open for Dasein to endeavour to know. Knowledge does not then constitute a communion between subject and object, but is made possible by an already ongoing and fundamental communion that does not involve substantial subjects and objects in the traditional sense. Dasein does not establish contact with a world through knowledge, but rather is constituted by already having a world in a way that makes knowledge possible as a kind of reflection on what is pre-thematically given and more or less understood. Whereas the Lotzean ‘realm of validity’ (Geltungsbereich) constitutes the space of meaning in the writings from 1912 to 1916, the world constitutes

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the space of meaning in BT. The intelligibility of an entity as a range of practical possibilities exhibits its determinations by reference to the larger context of the structure of the world as the totality of practical significations. The unity of the world is now described fundamentally as a unity not of logical but of practical significations. The result is a novel account of meaning that is a direct challenge to orthodox accounts in that it denies the traditional thesis that knowledge is the exemplar of transcendence. Heidegger thus follows Lask in characterizing transcendental not as referring to the conditions for the possibility of knowledge, but to more fundamental conditions for the possibility of meaning, and so follows him in placing the question of meaning before the question of knowledge. The totality of significations is grounded in Dasein’s disclosedness (Erschlossenheit), in Dasein’s characteristic manner of being as an entity that discloses and so has a world prior to any theory, and so which ‘never means anything like “to obtain indirectly by inference”’ (1927b:105/75). Heidegger introduces disclosedness in order to show that the unity of the world as the milieu of meaning is grounded in the unity of Dasein’s constitutive understanding of being that characterizes being-in-the-world. Since understanding is fundamentally practical, implicit, and significative, the irreducible unity of Dasein’s being-in-the-world means that Dasein is constituted by having a world. The being-in of being-in-the-world does not then refer to mere physical containment, but also to the sense in which in being in the world Dasein at the same time has a world (1927b:¶¶12–13). Being-in the world then refers to the sense in which Dasein is always ‘ahead’ of entities it encounters, as it were, since as an entity that understands being Dasein has the character of already being-alongside (Sein bei) entities – not by standing beside an entity, but by being-already-in (Schon-sein-in) a world of entities and so capable of projecting their possibilities. Being-in-the-world is having a world in the sense of disclosing a there (Da) as an openness in which entities show themselves as ranges of possibilities. And just as being-in is not containment, the there is neither in geometric space nor is it geometric space itself, but rather characterizes this openness itself, and so refers to an original, ontological sense of spatiality that makes geometric space possible as a derivative theme for ontical sciences. Dasein and the world are structural moments of worldhood, such that the transcendental conditions for meaning are the conditions for the unity of worldhood as ‘subject’ and ‘object’. So although Heidegger maintains Lask’s thesis that transcendental conditions are conditions for the possibility of meaning, since the conditions for meaning are the conditions for worldhood, he rejects Lask’s theses that the subject has no transcendental role and that the space of meaning is ideal.

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In Chapter V Heidegger describes what he argues are the three fundamental existenzial features or structural Existenziale of being-in-the-world, and their connection to the disclosing/uncovering that Heidegger describes as the ‘primordial phenomenon of truth’ in Chapter VI. The first is Befindlichkeit, which is sometimes translated as ‘attunement’ or ‘state of mind’, but which I prefer to leave untranslated in order to avoid ambiguous and Cartesian language. This refers to what Heidegger argues is the sense in which having a world essentially involves finding oneself already active in a specific historical situation under circumstances that matter, for example, faring well or poorly, and in a way that is ontologically constitutive. To disclose a world is to project possibilities from which Dasein chooses in order to act, and which yet presuppose activity, since it is only in acting that Dasein discloses a world and projects possibilities. The unity of Dasein’s understanding of being is then such that an understanding of being must take the perspective of a specific historical situation that matters to Dasein as constituting the context and the ground of one’s activity. The second Existenzial is understanding, the exemplar of which is Dasein’s understanding of being. Discourse is the third Existenzial, and is connected with Befindlichkeit, understanding, and thus disclosedness in ways that are important for Heidegger’s account of logic, since Heidegger’s discussion of discourse contains his hermeneutics of judgement and assertion. The possibilities Dasein projects are unified and structured, and so exhibit a ‘totality-of-significations’, exhibiting aspects, dimensions, interrelations, etc. As intelligible they are scrutable, amenable to discursive articulation as explicit themes for interpretation. Heidegger often refers to a ‘totalityof-signification’ as an as-structure, appropriating Aristotle’s thesis that assertion is apophantic, that it articulates a structured state of affairs just as it is:for example, Snow is white articulates the state of affairs in which snow shows itself as something white. Since language and logic are closely connected, we will discuss discourse and its connection to logic in the next chapter when we discuss Heidegger’s critique of Aristotle’s account of assertion as apóphansis. In Chapter VI Heidegger concludes Division I by describing the unity of the three equiprimordial Existenziale as care (Sorgen). This initial description of the unity of Dasein as care is redescribed in greater generality in Division II as the unity of temporality, where its connection with projecting possibilities is made more explicit. Dasein always finds itself already active in a specific historical situation, such that one is ever choosing from among projected possibilities by regarding a specific past that informs the projection of possible futures, and is never discharged from so choosing

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as long as one acts, since whether and what one chooses fundamentally matters to Dasein. To disclose a world is to find oneself in a specific historical situation that is only disclosed insofar as one acts, and which yet makes action possible by providing the historical context against which possible futures intelligibly stand in relief. Since as being-in-the-world Dasein has no choice but to choose and act, Dasein’s finitude involves a radical freedom. Choice involves selecting from projected possibilities, and projecting possibilities has a temporal structure that Heidegger describes in Division II and augments in the lectures. As we will discuss in the next chapter, since truth is fundamentally disclosedness, to describe the unity of Dasein’s disclosedness as care is to connect care with truth, and describe the unity of the latter in terms of the former. 1.2.3 Possibility and Temporality What remains is to indicate how the temporal structure of projecting possibility is the temporal structure of Dasein as care, and to show how this grounds the apophantic character of disclosedness, and with it the apophantic character of discursive thought as a derivative comportment. It is in this context that Heidegger radically reformulates his earlier neo-Kantian account of judgement. In the next chapter we will discuss Heidegger’s hermeneutics of judgement and its articulation in language as assertion. As an explicitly thematic comportment, judgement is secondary and derivative with respect to understanding. An important conclusion Heidegger draws is that the lógos of inference – the intelligibility of the inferential structure of the world that Dasein uncovers in the activity of drawing inferences – is fundamentally exhibited not at the level of discursive thought but at the more fundamental level of understanding. Since a central claim of Heidegger’s is that discursive thought articulates possibilities of being, we need to highlight how the temporal structure of possibility bears on Heidegger’s ontological critique of epistemology. As an entity characterized by being-in-the-world, Dasein projects possibilities. Although we have employed Heidegger’s concept of projecting (entwerfen) or ‘sketching/outlining’ possibilities, we have not yet described it explicitly. The first thing to say is that we have been using possibility in the widest sense to include logical possibility, empirical possibility, and the ontological possibility that Heidegger argues grounds the former two. Logical and empirical possibility are ontical possibilities of logical and empirical entities respectively. As ontology, Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology involves a radical deconstruction of traditional metaphysical conceptions

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of being as an entity. We should then expect Heidegger to deconstruct possibility ontologically, so as to ground possibilities of entities in possibilities of being that are themselves grounded in Dasein’s characteristic manner of being as being-in-the-world. That Heidegger uses Seinkönnen and not the usual Möglichkeit to express possibilities of being for Dasein indicates both that he aims at an ontological reinterpretation of possibility (by Sein-), and that this reinterpretation is somehow identified with what Dasein can do (by the modal können or can), and so with Dasein’s constitutive activity in the world.56 Two tasks then remain for us in this chapter: to show how Heidegger grounds ontical possibility in ontological possibility, and so connect possibility with being in general and its temporal structure, and to show that, as an entity that understands being by projecting its possibilities, Dasein is constituted by projecting possibilities in a way that is decisive for Heidegger’s critique of epistemology and hermeneutics of logic. Heidegger introduces Seinkönnen in his discussion of understanding as an Existenzial in Chapter V, ¶ 31, and claims that Dasein ‘is in every case what it can be, and in the way in which it is its possibility’ – Dasein in an important sense is the possibilities it projects (1927b:183/143–4). It is then the possibilities of a particular entity that are ontological and so ground the possibilities of all entities: in projecting its own possibilities through activity, Dasein concomitantly projects possibilities of other entities. The structure of Dasein’s activity is intelligible only with reference to the intelligible structure of the world, and vice versa, such that in articulating itself as a range of possibilities for activity Dasein articulates the world itself as a range of possibilities concomitantly structured. This is not to say that Dasein creates the possibilities of the world, but that it projects and so ‘illuminates’ them as intelligible against the context of activity (1927b:184–5/145). The practical and active character of understanding thus becomes apparent in claims such as, ‘understanding is the Being of such potentialityfor-being’, since he identifies understanding with the projection of possibilities in activity, and so identifies Seinkönnen as an Existenzial (1927b:183/144). Since understanding characterizes disclosedness and projecting possibilities characterizes understanding, projecting possibilities characterizes disclosedness, and so is a structural feature of Dasein’s existenzial constitution. Understanding is then structured as projecting possibilities (1927b: 184–5/145). As an entity that understands being/discloses a world, Dasein projects possibilities of being, and in so doing exhibits a constitutive purposiveness or for-the-sake-of (Worumwillen) that is temporally structured and constitutive for activity (1927b:182/143). To say that ontical possibility derives from ontological possibility is then to refer to Dasein’s constitutive

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understanding/disclosing as the ontological ground of any ontical conception of possibility (1927b:183–4/144). Seinkönnen are not abstract possibilities but possibilities of the world that are at the same time Dasein’s own. In order for Dasein to take up a course of action one must implicitly understand the intelligible possibilities that entities in the world exhibit with respect to that course of action for Dasein. To play chess is to understand how the board, pieces, and rules are available as equipment for playing chess. Since Dasein’s activity is structured, it articulates structured ranges of possibilities, and so discloses the world as the total range of intelligible structure. Thus the tree before me shows itself as something to be climbed for one purpose, cut down for another, or avoided for yet another, and in every case refers to the world as a whole as the overall significative context for activity. The freedom to take up possible courses of action that characterizes Dasein’s understanding as concernful, and therewith the temporal structure of choice, is at the same time the freeing of ranges of structured possibilities of the world as more or less available. Since understanding has the structure of actively projecting possibilities, it is characterized by ontological possibility as such (1927b:184–5/145). Dasein thus understands itself and its world in terms of possibilities that may then be characterized and studied as vorhanden, and it is upon this reflective turn that knowing is ‘founded’ (1927b:185/145). As care, Dasein ever finds itself active in a specific historical situation that constitutes the context and ground of Dasein’s activity by mattering to Dasein, and thus demanding choice at all times regarding possible futures that stand out as intelligible only against that background and all its interrelated, temporally referenced significations. As forced to choose, Dasein projects possibilities for choice of itself and the world, and in projecting ‘stretches itself’ into a future, thereby leaving itself stretched behind as a past that is present as absent, since it is past, yet present in its absence as part of the ground for further action (1927b:461–2/409). Projecting possibilities is then temporally structured, and it is the ecstatic and horizonal structure of temporality as such (Temporalität) that grounds that structure, and with it Dasein as care.57 As the fundamental unity of the ecstases past, present, and future as the horizons of temporality, Temporalität is distinguished from Zeitlichkeit, or the ontical conception of temporality as a sequence of discrete ‘nows’ that Temporalität makes possible as a derivative, vorhanden conception of time.58 The unity of being in general is Präsenz, the possibilities of which are structured according to the three ecstases past, present, and future. Presence treated as Vorhanden, or the presence (Anwesenheit) of a discrete ‘now’, is the isolation of one ecstasis as a

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substantial and mathematical unit that may then be treated as an entity and counted, and so is an abstraction from the original structure of Temporalität (1927b:¶¶80–1). Since the temporal structure of care is the unifying theme of the analytic of Dasein, and since disclosedness has the character of care, the temporal structure of care is the temporal structure of disclosedness. Since disclosing is projecting possibilities, the temporal structure of care is then the temporal structure of projection and thus understanding, such that temporality ‘is the meaning of the being of that entity which we call “Dasein”’ (1927b:38/17; ¶68). As practical, Seinkönnen is easily distinguished from logical possibility or the mere absence of formal contradiction (1927b:183/144). As we will see in the next chapter, Heidegger argues that the formality of negation as a logical operation exhibits the secondary and derivative manner of being characteristic of discursive thought, such that a conception of possibility expressed in terms of negation is ontical. But neither is Seinkönnen empirical possibility, since the latter is a possibility of entities as vorhanden natural objects, signifying merely ‘what is not yet actual and what is not at any time necessary’ (1927b:183/143). To treat possibility as empirical contingency requires that one reflect on the ‘totality of involvements’ that constitutes the unifying context for activity, and characterize it categorically as nature (1927b:184/144–5). However, even ‘the “unity” of the manifold presentat-hand, of Nature, can be discovered only if a possibility of it has been disclosed’ (1927b:184/144–5). Seinkönnen is then the ‘primordial phenomenon’ of possibility, and both grounds and is distinguished from ontical possibility. Since understanding is projecting possibilities of being, Seinkönnen thus grounds both logical and empirical ontical possibility (1927b:188–9/148). Dasein thus is Seinkönnen in the sense of being the possibility of disclosedness itself: ‘possibility as an existentiale is the most primordial and ultimate positive way in which Dasein is characterized ontologically . . . Dasein is Being-possible’ (1927b:183/143–4). In disclosing a world and projecting possibilities, Dasein is more or less capable of a reflection in which the fundamentally practical and implicit possibilities of activity are characterized categorically/conceptually as possibilities of entities and their properties. Entities may be logical or empirical, such that ontical possibility is understood as either logical or empirical according to the constitutive requirements for one kind of vorhanden entity on the one hand and another kind of vorhanden entity on the other. A discussion of Seinkönnen helps prepare a discussion of how Heidegger thinks logic’s formalism is a range of linguistic equipment available for articulating the inferential possibilities of the world Dasein uncovers in the

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activity of drawing inferences. Language is discursive thought further articulated according to syntactic and semantic rules, and a system of logic is a special case of language. Discursiveness is a possibility Dasein exhibits with more or less attention to detail. Towards one end of a continuum lies the capacity for simply identifying items for study, as when an amateur naturalist simply recites the names of various plants and animals in an unsystematic way. At the other end of the continuum lies the capacity to schematize in various ways in order to systematize domains of possible objects and their properties, and so eventually to isolate and describe the purely formal object in a variety of inferentially structured languages. Our task now is to look specifically at how Heidegger grounds logic in practical lógos, and so how systems of logic articulate inferential possibilities of the world that Dasein projects in the activity of drawing inferences.

Chapter 2

Concept and Judgement

Lotze’s Logik1 becomes a starting point for a number of transcendental logics that emphasize the ideality of the Kantian transcendental unity of apperception, and that connect neo-Kantianism to contemporaneous perspectives on ideality, including those of Frege and Husserl. As a principal introduction to logic for German students, the book divides into three parts according to the then-standard Doctrine of the Elements of categorical logic, concepts, judgements, and inferences.2 It makes sense then to pursue Heidegger’s account of logic according to this schema, since Heidegger’s account of logic is explicitly an account of Aristotelian categorical logic, and he principally directs his polemical remarks on logic towards neoKantianism. In the Kantian schema, the spontaneity of the understanding combines concepts (subject and predicate) to construct judgements that may be articulated in assertion and assayed according to their veracity. As the ‘[re]presentation of the unity of the consciousness of several [re]presentations, or the [re]presentation of their relation so far as they make up one concept’, the judgement is itself a concept.3 Since the elements of judgements are concepts united in a concept, and since conclusions are judgements of inference, the primary character of the Kantian faculty of understanding (Verstand) is as a unified conceptualizing–judging–inferring faculty. As we have seen, Heidegger denies the primacy of any such faculty, and argues that conceptualizing–judging–inferring comportments are secondary and derivative, and grounded in the fundamental ontologicaltranscendental unity of being-in-the-world. Our focus in this chapter is then Heidegger’s hermeneutical deconstruction of concepts and judgements, the first two elements of categorical logic. Kant treats logic as the ‘science of the necessary laws of the understanding and reason in general, or – which is the same – of the mere form of thinking’.4 Neo-Kantianism modifies this thesis to cast normativity as validity, and validity as ideal meaning structure.5 By 1916 Heidegger

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confronts an aporia: he wants to preserve the normativity of logic, but he also sees the need to relate it back to the temporal, lived activity in which it is conspicuous as normative. He must then reject both Laskian theses that the subject has no role in transcendental unity and that transcendental unity is ideal. Further, he rejects the thesis that logic has a transcendental application, and relocates transcendental conditions to Dasein’s constitutive disclosedness in an attempt to ground logic in temporal, lived activity. Although conceptualization remains a possible comportment, Heidegger rejects the thesis that conceptual representation is the fundamental comportment towards the world. With the analytic of Dasein then comes a hermeneutics of logical formalism that includes a hermeneutics of concepts, judgements, and inferences. Heidegger’s hermeneutics of judgement is part of his hermeneutics of assertion (Aussage) as judgement articulated in natural language, principally from BT and Basic Problems of Phenomenology (BP, 1927a). The unity of the judgement is a principal theme in both the Aristotelian-Kantian treatments of judgement and in Heidegger’s treatment in BT and BP. To judge that snow is white is to represent snow and its property of whiteness as a conceptual unity in thought. To assert Snow is white is then to articulate that judgement in natural language by representing snow and whiteness in a verbal unity. Ostensibly, the unity of the judgement/assertion refers ultimately to the unity of the state of affairs in the world in which snow is white. Aristotle offers an account of the copula that he thinks explains how conceptual/verbal unities can adequately correspond to their unified objects. In the Aristotelian-Kantian tradition, adequate correspondence constitutes the nature of truth, so a discussion of judgement and assertion must include a discussion of truth. Since truth-value is bivalent, a discussion of negation and the negative judgement must also be included. I have therefore divided this chapter into three sections according to Heidegger’s hermeneutics of the copula, truth, and negation, in the context of his hermeneutics of judgement and assertion. Throughout these discussions Heidegger argues two primary interrelated claims. The first is that the Aristotelian-Kantian tradition distorts these three concepts by treating them fundamentally not as characteristics of being-in-the-world, but as characteristics of discursive thought. The second is that, as a result of treating discursive thought as a fundamental and not a derivative comportment, these traditions cannot explain how the conceptual unity of the judgement/verbal unity of the assertion can adequately articulate the already intelligible unities of objects and states of affairs.

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2.1 The Copula It is felicitous to begin an examination of Heidegger’s philosophy of logic proper with a discussion of his account of the copula, since here Heidegger connects being with discursive thought and language as it relates to logic. In attempting to formulate the question of being, Heidegger discusses the ways in which discursive thought and language articulate being, particularly in the form of assertoric sentences. In the Aristotelian-Kantian tradition, the copula combines subject and predicate in a verbal unity that may then be judged true or false. To assert Socrates is a man is ostensibly to use is to bind the subject Socrates with the predicate man precisely in order to articulate the unitary phenomenon of Socrates-the-man. This is of assertion is therefore closely connected to truth-value, since it is expressed in two possibilities, is true or is false. The copula is therefore seemingly both a feature of categorical logic and an expression of being, and since Heidegger is principally interested in the question of being, it makes sense to begin an examination of his philosophy of logic with a discussion of that which he thinks is logic’s most explicit articulation of being. And because the is of assertion connects being with bivalent truth-value, it makes sense to follow the discussion of Heidegger’s treatment of the copula with discussions of his treatment of truth and negation. 2.1.1 Assertion, Discourse, and the Copula We have said little about the Existenzial discourse (Rede), reserving this topic for a discussion of Heidegger’s hermeneutics of judgement and assertion. Since practical intelligibility precedes the reflective turn in which what is originally zuhanden becomes vorhanden and so an explicit theme for interpretation (Auslegung), the ‘intelligibility of something has always been articulated, even before there is any appropriative interpretation of it’ (BT, 1927b:203/161). Discourse is then ‘the Articulation of intelligibility . . . it underlies both interpretation and assertion’ (1927b:203–4/161). Dasein articulates both itself and the world through activity, through projecting possibilities: As understanding, Dasein projects its Being upon possibilities. This Being-towards-possibilities which understands is itself a potentiality-forBeing, and it is so because of the way these possibilities, as disclosed, exert their counter-thrust [Rückschlag] upon Dasein. The projecting of the understanding has its own possibility – that of developing itself [sich auszubilden]. This development of the understanding we call

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‘interpretation’ . . . it is . . . the working-out of possibilities projected in the understanding. (1927b:188–9/148) The practical intelligibility of the zuhanden is articulated simply by using tools, and comprises two moments: the intelligibility of the activity as a possibility (e.g., sculpting) and the concomitant intelligibility of the thing itself (the marble/sculpture). The ‘thrust’ of activity articulates both Dasein and, in a concomitant ‘counter-thrust’, the world itself. Both Dasein and the world are then open to interpretation through Dasein’s projection of possibilities, such that interpretation articulates in assertoric language the fundamentally practical intelligibility of the world as equipment. Assertoric language is then derivative with respect to understanding, and as we have seen articulates an intelligibility that is already practically given in a significative fore-having (Vorhabe), although it may always remain covered to some extent. That which is zuhanden exhibits a significative ‘totality of involvements’ that is practical, and exhibits a pre-predicative structure that may be further articulated discursively: The ready-to-hand comes explicitly into the sight which understands. All preparing, putting to rights, repairing, improving, rounding-out, are accomplished in the following way: we take apart in its ‘in-order-to’, that which is circumspectively ready-to-hand, and we concern ourselves with it in accordance with what becomes visible through this process. (1927b:189/148–9) That which is taken apart then ‘has the structure of something as something’, and so shows itself as, for example, a hammer or a chair, such that, ‘[t]he “as” makes up the structure of the explicitness of something that is understood’ (1927b:189/149). In assertion, ‘the “as” does not turn up for the first time; it just gets expressed for the first time, and this is possible only in that it lies before us as something expressible’ (1927b:190/149). The totality of involvements signified in a fore-having thus exhibits a pre-predicative as-structure – what Heidegger also calls the existentialhermeneutical as or hermeneutical as – which as explicitly articulated in assertion then exhibits a predicative as-structure or apophantical as (1927b:201/148). This distinction marks the difference in intelligibility between, for example, the hammer as too heavy and the hammer as articulated in the assertion, The hammer is too heavy (1927b:196/154). Assertion thus exhibits three ‘primary significations’ (1927b:196/154). The first is that the assertion is a pointing out (Aufzeigen) of entities, which at the same time is a ‘letting an entity be seen from itself’ (1927b:196/154).

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In the Introduction to BT, Heidegger speaks of the lógos of the phenomenon as that which shows itself, and it is in activity that entities show themselves primordially, as equipment. So when Heidegger claims that in this signification ‘we adhere to the primordial meaning of [lógos] as [apóphantikos]’ (1927b:196/154), he means that the assertion exhibits the entity itself, and not an ideal meaning (Husserl) or representation (Kant). Further, the entity shows itself as something, exhibiting a minimally determinate and unified structure that is normative in that the lógos of the assertion, its content and truth-value, derives from the lógos of the entity itself. The intelligibility of the assertion, its apophantical as-structure, derives from the intelligibility of the entity it exhibits, the entity’s hermeneutical as-structure. The second primary signification of assertion is then predication, since The hammer is too heavy exhibits the hammer as a substantial bearer of the property of being too heavy by exhibiting it as a subject (hammer) bound to a predicate (too heavy) by the copula is. In the assertion, the hammer is abstracted from its practical context, and so there is a ‘narrowing of content’ to exhibit the hammer as discrete bearer of properties. Predication then ‘is what it is, only as a pointing out’, such that this signification ‘has its foundation in the first’ (1927b:197/155). The third signification is that assertion is communication, since the assertion is ‘something which can be passed along in “further retelling”’, but which nevertheless exhibits the entity itself (1927b:197/155).6 Assertion is then grounded equiprimordially in both understanding and discourse, since it is the primordial intelligibility of disclosedness, its scrutability or amenability to discursive articulation, that grounds language in general as articulation of being, and assertoric language in particular as articulation of being in the mode of being-true (Wahrsein). As the ‘articulation of intelligibility’, discourse articulates both practical intelligibility and the derivative intelligibility of discursive thought and language. It is then connected to language not merely as characterizing language, but as characterizing a more fundamental phenomenon, disclosedness, that makes language possible: If discourse, as the Articulation of the intelligibility of the ‘there’, is a primordial existentiale of disclosedness, and if disclosedness is primarily constituted by Being-in-the-world, then discourse too must have essentially a kind of Being which is specifically worldly. The intelligibility of Being-in-the-world – an intelligibility which goes with a state-of-mind – expresses itself as discourse. The totality-of-significations of intelligibility is put into words. (1927b:204/161)

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A hermeneutics of knowledge must then include a hermeneutics of language and interpretation as grounded in discourse. Heidegger thus rejects the Lotzean ‘theory of “judgement” which is oriented to the phenomenon of “validity”’, and which neo-Kantianism treats as ‘a “primordial phenomenon” which cannot be traced back further’ (1927b:198/155). That Lotzean validity appears primordial ‘is due only to its ontologically unclarified character’ (1927b:198/155), and an ontological clarification of judgement requires that we ground judgement and logic in the disclosedness of being-in-the-world: If the phenomenon of the ‘as’ remains covered up, and, above all, if its existential source in the hermeneutical ‘as’ is veiled, then Aristotle’s phenomenological approach to the analysis of the [lógos] collapses to a superficial ‘theory of judgment’, in which judgment becomes the binding or separating of representations and concepts. (1927b:202/159) The hermeneutics of assertion is then the starting point for a hermeneutics of logic, since it includes a hermeneutics of concepts and judgements: Binding and separating may be formalized still further to a ‘relating’. The judgment gets dissolved logistically into a system in which things are ‘co-ordinated’ with one another; it becomes the object of a ‘calculus’; but it does not become a theme for ontological Interpretation. The possibility and impossibility of getting an analytical understanding of [synthesis] and [diairesis] – of the ‘relation’ in judgement generally – is tightly linked up with whatever the current status of the ontological problematic and its principles may be. (1927b:202/159) We may then point to the ‘phenomenon of the copula’ as the crux of the hermeneutics of assertion, since it is this inflection of to be that binds subject and predicate in a unity that we then describe in its apophantic structure as both synthesis, since there is a conceptual/verbal combining, and as diairesis, or as permitting analysis into constitutive elements (1927b:202/159–60). 2.1.2 Aristotle, Lotze, and the Negative Copula Aristotle’s treatment of the copula has important consequences for traditional conceptions of logic, and provides Heidegger with a clue to the hermeneutical reinterpretation of the copula and logic. Lotze attempts to refine the Aristotelian account of apóphansis in a theory of the negative

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judgement. Heidegger argues that both accounts treat the intelligibility of the copula as fundamentally a characteristic of discursive thought, and so fail to show adequately how the intelligibility of the negative assertion is related to the intelligibility of its object. Most of BP is either a de facto part of BT as originally envisioned, or collateral material that extends themes from BT in important ways. Heidegger’s discussion of the copula in BP amplifies the discussion of assertion and discourse from BT, focusing on Aristotle’s claim in De Interpretatione that assertoric language is apophantic: it exhibits that which is just as it is.7 To exhibit something in an assertion is thus to submit the assertion to the tribunal of truth: that is exhibitive which can have the character of being-true or being-false with respect to the various ways in which something is (1927a:180/255–7). Aristotle sees a close connection between truth and being, since he thinks the truth-value of a judgement/assertion concerns the being of its object. Heidegger argues that although Aristotle is correct to say that assertoric language is apophantic, he presupposes a metaphysics that obscures the ontological significance of apóphansis. Nevertheless, Aristotle’s account is oriented to the appropriate issue concerning the relation between truth and being, and so serves as a reference point from which one can ‘see this connection between truth and copula and . . . interpret it ontologically’ (1927a:180/255–7). After explaining the Aristotelian treatment and its failure, Heidegger’s task is then to reformulate apóphansis in terms of fundamental ontology. Because Aristotle thinks being must be either something phenomenal or intelligible, and because he thinks being is not itself a being, he must explain being as something merely intelligible. Aristotle himself thus expresses something like the ontological difference by recognizing that, despite that a participle is a nominalization of a verb and nouns ostensibly refer to objects, the participle being does not refer to a being (1927a: 181/257–8). Inflections of to be exhibit the same characteristic: in Socrates is a man, Socrates refers to a particular person and man refers to a property, but is refers to no object. Rather, it signifies (‘consignifies’) the synthesis or ‘a certain combining’ that brings the subject and predicate together into the unity required for assertion (1927a:181/257–8). Aristotle sees that subject and predicate refer to particular things and concludes that, since all that is left to explain is the combination of subject and predicate, and since being is not itself an entity, being must be nothing other than the combining itself. The general features of Heidegger’s criticism are already apparent. Since Aristotle thinks being must be something merely intelligible, the combining effected by the copula must take place in the intellect alone, such that truth-value is fundamentally characteristic of what can be

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thought in a judgement/verbalized in an assertion (1927a:181–2/257–9). Aristotle’s account of the copula has roots in Plato’s division of reality into the phenomenal and the noumenal: being must be either something phenomenal or merely intelligible, and since being is not an entity it must be something merely intelligible. Heidegger thinks this dichotomy entails a metaphysics of cognizing subjects and phenomenal objects – discretely sequestered from one another except when knowledge establishes a point of contact between the two – that distorts the phenomenal character of being-in-the-world as an irreducible unity. The result is modern philosophy, which treats epistemology as first philosophy and the ‘problem’ of reference as its fundamental issue. Reference is then ‘problematic’ because the holistic character of being-in-the-world has been distorted by the Procrustean demands of Plato’s initial distinction. Lotze’s theory of the negative judgement in the ‘small’ Logik illustrates the fundamental flaw of the Aristotelian account, that the is of assertion is treated fundamentally as a copula. Lotze states that the copula ‘combines as well as separates’,8 and argues that if the is of assertion is a ‘combinatory concept’, then allegedly negative assertions (S is not P) must be re-conceived as special cases of combination, since negation strictly speaking is not a combination at all (1927a:199/282–4). If a negative copula is a contradiction, then negative assertion is impossible (1927a:199/282–4).9 Lotze argues instead that the ostensibly negative judgement (Snow is not black) is actually two positive judgements: a judgement about a subject matter (Snow is black) and a judgement about the veracity of the first judgement (‘Snow is black’ is false) (1927a:199/282–4). Not only is the is of assertion a combination of subject and predicate, it is a combination of judgements: a principal judgement about the propositional content of the assertion and a secondary judgement about the veracity of the principal judgement (1927a: 199–200/282–5). Heidegger credits Lotze with attempting to explain the connection between the is of assertion, truth-value, and negation, but he argues that Lotze’s insistence that the is of assertion be thought of as fundamentally combinatory obscures the issue. An assertion ostensibly says what something is, and so says something about its unity, about that which makes it what it is: Snow is white ostensibly articulates the unitary state of affairs in which snow is white. To conceive the is of assertion as fundamentally a copula is to presuppose that two or more discrete items require combining. But although Snow and white must be combined to express Snow is white, the intelligibility of the is derives not from the combination itself but from the unitary state of affairs in which snow is white. The verbal subject and predicate must be combined, but only to effect a secondary

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and derivative unity, the judgement as assertion, that articulates a primary unity, the entity or state of affairs. If the is of assertion is fundamentally a copula, then the conceptual/verbal unity it effects renders the world intelligible, rather than articulating an intelligible unity already more or less apparent, and so is to yield to the view that the world cannot be experienced until a point of contact is established through knowledge. Lotze is then committed to the view that having a world amounts to making judgements, such that cognition is the primary comportment to the world: From Lotze’s theory of judgment, intertwined with the Neo-Kantian conception of knowledge as judgment, there arises a specific conception of the objectivity of objects and with it the conception of the being of beings as being-judged in a true judgment. This being-true is identified with that to which the judgment refers, the object [standing-over-against in knowing]. Being-judged is equal to objectivity as standing-over-againstness, and objectivity, true judgment, and sense [Sinn] are identified. (1927a:201–2/285–8) Heidegger’s target is then any account of logic that equates meaning with logical content and thus knowledge, and so which equates truth with judgeability by construing worldhood as transcendental judgement. The decisive move as Heiegger sees it is to focus exclusively on the judgeable content of assertions in an account of objective validity, a move Heidegger identifies both in Husserl’s early (Logical Investigations) and later works (Ideas), as well as neo-Kantianism: Sense [Sinn] designates that which is judged as such in a true judgment. It is this, the sense, that is true, and what is true is constituted by nothing but objectivity. The being judged of a true assertion equals objectivity equals sense. This conception of knowledge, which is oriented toward the judgment, the logos, and which therefore became the logic of knowledge . . . The view that knowledge equals judgment, truth equals judgedness equals objectivity equals valid sense, became so dominant that even phenomenology was infected by this untenable conception of knowledge. (1927a:201/285–6) If the is of assertion is not fundamentally combinatory then two possibilities emerge. The first is that truth is not fundamentally a correspondence between judgement/assertion and object that only takes place after the

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combination of subject and predicate, but is rather characteristic of the unity of entities and states of affairs in the world itself. Heidegger claims then that truth is fundamentally the disclosedness of being-in-the-world that grounds the possibility of uncovering entities, and so maintains a version of the Laskian thesis that transcendental conditions are conditions for meaning, and that meaning is truth as alétheia/uncovering. Unlike Lask, Heidegger identifies truth and the transcendental conditions for meaning not with the ideality and objectivity of thought, but with the practicality of being-in-the-world that makes discursive thought possible. The second possibility is that negation is not fundamentally a characteristic of discursive thought/language but of worldhood itself. If the problem of how a negative copula is possible is obviated, since the is of assertion is not fundamentally a copula, then the intelligibility of is not must derive not from its verbal or conceptual character but from the character of the unitary entity or state of affairs the negative judgement/assertion articulates. As we will see, Heidegger thus argues that negation is possible in thought and language precisely because worldhood is fundamentally bimodal, exhibiting both what is and is not, and so is differentiated by intelligible structure, requiring both an is and an is not for its articulation in discursive thought/language. 2.1.3 The Copula and Intelligibility Heidegger confronts a traditional philosophical orientation that he thinks systematically obfuscates the fundamental character of the is/is not of assertion. In particular the tradition obfuscates the issue of unity (Einheit), for it obfuscates the nature of the unity of the judgement/assertion on the one hand, the unity of the object on the other, and the unity of the relationship between the two. Lotze attempts to clarify the issue of unity with a discussion of how the is of assertion can be negative, by connecting the is/is not of assertion more explicitly with truth and negation, but his reliance on the Aristotelian thesis that the is of assertion is fundamentally a combination of subject and predicate in thought or language alone yields the ‘problem’ of how reference is at all possible, and obfuscates both the character of negative judgement/assertion and the character of negation. Nevertheless, Heidegger argues, the Aristotelian account of the copula exhibits several virtues that point out the way for a sufficient account of apóphansis. Heidegger reformulates apóphansis in terms of discourse and the asstructure, and connects it to his conception of first philosophy as phenomenology, as the study of the lógos of phenomena, of that which ‘shows itself’ (1927a:209/297–8). To assert Snow is white is not to make a claim

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about the words in the assertion per se, but about snow itself. Furthermore, this fact is not explained by an appeal to the mechanics of combining concepts or words, but by an appeal to the intelligibility of the unified structure of the object or state of affairs that the assertion ostensibly articulates. Communication thus does not involve merely ‘handing over words, let alone ideas, from one subject to another, as if it were an interchange between the psychical events of different subjects’, rather, as apophantic, assertion is a sharing of ‘the same understanding comportment toward the being about which the assertion is made’ (1927a:210/298–300). To assert Snow is white is primarily not to share the concepts or words snow and white, but to exhibit snow itself in its whiteness. Assertion thus does not have a ‘primary cognitive function but only a secondary one’, since something ‘must already be unveiled if an assertion about it is to be possible’ (1927a:210/298–300). The intelligibility of the assertion lies not fundamentally in cognition, although cognition is possible as a derivative comportment, but in the unitary entity or state of affairs the assertion articulates. Heidegger thinks that Lotze is correct to insist that an account of the is of assertion must be adequately connected to an account of negation and truth-value, such that the grounds for truth and validity are at the same time the grounds for falsity and invalidity. We can prepare our discussion of Heidegger’s account of truth by connecting some general claims about truth to apóphansis. Being-in-the-world is characterized by discourse, such that whatever shows itself is always more or less scrutable, or amenable to articulation. That which the assertion exhibits thus always displays a more or less determinate as-structure. Assertion then expresses a specific determination of what is in which the various aspects of the object of the assertion are not just differentiated but disparted, or exhibited in their systematic interconnectedness: It is only from this display character that the predicative structure of assertion can be determined. Accordingly, predication is primarily a disparting of what is given, and in fact an exhibitive disparting. This disparting does not have the sense of a factual taking apart of the given thing into thing-pieces but is apophantic: it dis-plays the belonging-together of the manifold determinations of the being which is asserted about. In this disparting, that being is at the same time made visible, exhibited, in the unity of the belonging-together of its self-exhibitive determinations. This exhibition in the sense of assertion both disparts and displays, and as such it is determinant. Disparting and determination belong together with equal

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originality to the sense of predication, which on its part is apophantic. (1927a:209/297–8) Assertion is at once both synthesis and diairesis, and so exhibits its object as a synthetic unity that is at the same time determined according to its structural elements, and so is both held together as a unity and held ‘apart’ as comprising determinate structural moments.10 To assert Snow is white is to exhibit not primarily a relationship between words, but between the structural moments of the determinate state of affairs in the world in which snow is white. In so doing one then differentiates the snow from its whiteness and from other entities and their properties, and indicates a range of concomitantly structured possibilities, for example, that it can melt, cool a burn, change colour, etc. As we will see in more detail in our discussion of his account of negation, Heidegger thinks that differentiation is a fundamental characteristic of the lógos of being. But he does not think that negation itself is a fundamental characteristic, since negation per se is an expression of discursive thought/ language. Rather, the not articulates the fundamental differentiation that characterizes the ways in which entities shows themselves. A baseball shows itself as a range of structured possibilities, as something spherical to be thrown and caught, and that is more or less wieldy with respect to various abilities and purposes. But the range of possibilities that the baseball comprises includes what the baseball is not and what it cannot endure or allow. A baseball is an object one may use for various purposes, but it is not a car; it is spherical, but it is not hexagonal; it may be thrown, but not swallowed by a hummingbird. To assert A baseball is not a car is to articulate a unified range of structured possibilities that at the same time indicates what is not possible. An understanding of being is then an understanding of entities in their differentiation. And entities are not monolithic: they exhibit dimensions, components, aspects, etc. That a baseball is not a car means that it exhibits various characteristics but not others, some of which may vary without it ceasing to be a baseball, and some of which may not. As apophantic, assertions are dispartative, and so articulate a network of internal and external relations in both their differentiation and structural unity. Once differentiation is no longer thought of as fundamentally a feature of discursive thought/language as negation, the issue of the negative copula is dissolved in its original sense and redescribed as grounded in a more fundamental bimodality: being and not-being. Heidegger’s discussion of the dispartative character of the intentionality of assertion is then another way of describing what he thinks is the irreducibly unitary character of

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being-in-the-world. Since he thinks being-in-the-world is not something comprising various atomic components somehow pieced together, it is unsurprising then that Heidegger conceives of it as exhibiting a fundamental unity-in-differentiation, and that he conceives of the apophantic character of assertion as necessarily dispartative. There is a tension between Heidegger’s hermeneutics of the lógos apóphantikos of assertion in Chapter V and his argument against realism in Chapter VI of BT. Since Dasein’s disclosedness of a world is original transcendence and so unproblematic, no proof or demonstration of the existence of an ‘external’ world is required: ‘Dasein . . . in its Being . . . already is what subsequent proofs deem necessary to demonstrate for it’ (1927b:249/205). Dasein already is transcendence, such that any ‘proof’ of transcendence is a posteriori and so explanatorily otiose. And if the transcendence to be proved is the intentionality of knowing, then the issue of transcendence is obfuscated as a result of treating Dasein as an erstwhile worldless entity whose confrontation with a world is inherently questionable. However, the upshot of the hermeneutics of assertion is that the lógos apóphantikos is grounded in the intelligibility of the entity the assertion ostensibly articulates. The result is a tension between Heidegger’s disavowal of realism as demanding proof and his hermeneutic grounding of the intuition at the heart of Aristotelian realism that the true assertion articulates something as it is, that the standard of truth is the thing itself. In so doing, Heidegger identifies truth/falsity as a mode of being – being-true/false – and identifies the copula as the logical connective in categorical logic required for predication. In order to make better sense of the ‘realist’ intuition at the heart Heidegger’s hermeneutics of judgement/assertion, we must then turn to an account of his hermeneutics of truth.

2.2 Truth As lógos apóphantikos, assertion is identified with truth, since as the verbal unity achieved through the copula, it is intelligible as that which may be judged true or false with respect to its object. Heidegger’s hermeneutics of judgement/assertion and the copula is then identified with a hermeneutics of truth, since the intelligibility of the assertion as true/false derives from the intelligibility of entities themselves. Although the is of assertion couples subject and predicate to form a conceptual/verbal unity, its fundamental character is not exhibited in the coupling itself but in the intelligible unity of the entity the assertion articulates. In the Aristotelian-Kantian tradition

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this relation is conceived as correspondence: a judgement or assertion is true just in case it adequately corresponds to its object, and false otherwise. While Heidegger does not deny that we may speak of the truth-value of assertions insofar as they adequately correspond to objects, he denies that correspondence fundamentally characterizes truth. Rather, ‘the primordial phenomenon of truth’ is uncovering (Entdecken) entities, grounded in disclosedness, which makes correspondence possible as a secondary and derivative conception of truth (1927b:257/214). Heidegger’s account of truth is thus an essential part of his ongoing discussion of how discursive thought and language are grounded in the disclosedness of being-in-the-world. It is important then to note the place of Heidegger’s discussion of truth in BT. Heidegger describes Dasein’s unity, as an entity that has a world, in successively more unifying transcendental descriptions as Existenz, being-in-the-world, disclosedness, care, and temporality. In Chapter VI Heidegger summarizes the unity of disclosedness as care, and in ¶44 he identifies Dasein as care with truth. The discussion of truth then occupies a central place in the philosophic narrative of BT, since as the climax of Heidegger’s discussion of care it is the axis for the turn to the discussion of temporality in Division II. After grounding truth in disclosedness and describing the unity of disclosedness as care, Heidegger turns to describe care as the temporal unity of Dasein and being. The discussion of truth thus both concludes Division I and introduces the theme of Division II, and so provides the connecting link between the central theme of BT, that the lógos of being is temporality, and the account of logic we are attempting to clarify. Once we have looked at Heidegger’s criticisms of traditional correspondence theories of truth, we will turn to look at his own positive account of truth as disclosedness/uncoveredness. Our discussion will prepare both a subsequent discussion of Heidegger’s account of negation and bivalence, and a discussion in Chapter 4 of how Heidegger would view Tarski’s semantic definition of truth as satisfaction. 2.2.1 Ontical and Ontological Truth The traditional, Aristotelian conception of truth comprises two basic theses: (i) that the ‘locus’ of truth is the judgement/assertion, and (ii) that truth lies in the ‘agreement’ of the judgement or assertion with its object (1927b:257/214). Heidegger claims that these theses follow from Aristotle’s distinction between subject and object, and the attendant distinction between subjective representations of things and objective things themselves: ‘Aristotle says that . . . the soul’s “Experiences”, its noemata (“representations”),

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are likenings of Things’ (1927b:257/214). Once this distinction is accepted as fundamental, the conclusion that truth can only be adequate correspondence between subjective representations and objective things via assertion is inevitable. If truth is conceived as correspondence that ‘has the formal character of a relation of something to something’, then ‘[e]very agreement, and therefore “truth” as well, is a relation’ (1927b:258/215). The principal issue for any theory of truth as correspondence is thus how a subjective representation can ‘agree’ with an object: ‘In the adaequatio, something gets related . . . With regard to what do intellectus and res agree? In their kind of Being and their essential content do they give us anything at all with regard to which they can agree?’ (1927b:258–9/216). Despite the problematic character of reference, Kant claims that Aristotle has essentially completed the science of logic, and so presupposes the Aristotelian conception of truth without discussion: ‘The nominal definition of truth, that it is the agreement of knowledge with its object, is assumed as granted.’11 Heidegger mentions several strategies traditionally employed to explain how agreement is possible. What they share in common is an ‘“epistemological” problematic as regards the subject-Object relation’ (1927b:259/216), in which the goal is to show how a subjective consciousness can make contact with an objective world via knowledge, and so transcend its own immanence and return ‘with one’s booty to the “cabinet” of consciousness after one has got out and grasped it’ (1927b:89/62). As we have seen, Heidegger thinks such a strategy distorts the phenomenal character of being-in-the-world by reducing it to an aggregate of atomic elements. The problem is compounded if one takes the strategy of arguing that truth is itself immanent to consciousness, for then the problem becomes how to make sense of ostensibly ‘objective’ knowledge that at the same time always remains ‘“within the sphere” of the subject’ (1927b:259/216). Heidegger rejects the Fregean/Husserlian strategy employed in his earliest writings of marking a significant distinction between the real act of judging or asserting and the ideal content of the judgement or assertion as a defence against psychologism. Heidegger now argues that this distinction itself exhibits the ‘epistemological problematic’, since it begs the question regarding how an ideal content can relate to a real object (1927b:259/216). The distinction distorts the unitary character of being-in-the-world by separating the ideal content of a judgement or assertion from the real act of judging or asserting, such that they are ‘broken asunder into two ways of Being – two “levels” which can never be pieced together in such a manner as to reach the kind of Being that belongs to knowing’ (1927b:259/216).

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Heidegger confronts what he argues is a tradition of treating worldhood as an ontical aggregate of so many discrete elements somehow pieced together via knowledge that distorts the unitary phenomenon of worldhood, and so a tradition of treating truth as a concomitantly ontical relation of correspondence between entities. Correspondence theories of truth fail ultimately because they do not address the issue of being, but naïvely take the assertion to be ‘an extant complex of words that are themselves extant’ (1927b:205/291–2), and so offer an account of truth as simply an extant relationship between one vorhanden entity (the assertion) and another (its object). A problem thus arises concerning how a combination of discrete, extant items in the assertion can correspond to the discrete, extant items about which the assertion is made, since the alleged combination takes place precisely in order to articulate the intelligibility of the object itself: [W]e not only require a general delineation of what pertains to the complete concept of the logos – that it is not enough to say, in going beyond nominalism, that signification, what is thought, and what is belong to the logos – but that the essential thing is the portrayal of the specific contextural interconnection of these phenomena which belong essentially to the whole of the logos. This contexture must not merely come about after the fact by a process of composition under the constraint of things. Instead, this relational whole of word, signification, thinking, what is thought, what is must be determined in a primary way beforehand. We must ask: In what way can the ground-plan of this whole be sketched so that the specific structure of the logos can then be drawn in? (1927a:207/294–5) Since an assertion allegedly comprises both an asserting and a reference to something that is asserted to be, a theory of truth must explain how this relation between asserting and asserted is possible, how the intelligible unity of the assertion is related to the intelligible unity of the object itself. Since correspondence theories cannot explain this relational whole, another account must be sought in the possibility that an assertion articulates a relational whole that is somehow available prior to that articulation. If the Aristotelian conception of truth cannot clarify the nature of reference, then neither can it clarify the claim that assertion is apophantic: [K]nowledge is still supposed to ‘give’ the thing just as it is. This ‘agreement’ has the Relational character of the ‘just as’ [‘So Wie’]. In what way is this relation possible as a relation between intellectus and res? From these

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questions it becomes plain that to clarify the structure of truth it is not enough simply to presuppose this relational totality, but we must go back and inquire into the context of Being which provides the support for this totality as such. (1927b:259/216) If Aristotle cannot explain reference in terms of a conception of truth as adequate correspondence, then he has failed to justify the claim that assertion articulates its object just as it is. The ‘problem’ of reference characterizes a fundamental and ongoing philosophical confusion, and it is therefore no accident that ‘no headway has been made with this problem in over two thousand years’ (1927b:259/216). Heidegger concludes that justifying the claim that assertion is apophantic requires a conception of truth not as fundamentally a correspondence between assertion and object, but as the intelligible unity of the entity just as it shows itself. Truth must fundamentally characterize not the conceptual/verbal intelligibility of judgements/assertions, but the pre-conceptual and pre-verbal intelligibility of disclosedness. An account of truth must then do justice to the intuition motivating Aristotelian realism that the standard of truth in any conception of truth must ultimately lie with the object of the judgement of assertion itself. Both Aristotle and Heidegger think that to claim that the standard for the veracity of any judgement/assertion lies with the object is to claim that it is the unified manifold of ways in which the object is that is this standard: the being of the object determines what counts as a true or false judgement/ assertion about it. Aristotle attempts to justify this intuition with a conception of truth as correspondence that refers to two conceptions of intelligibility, the intelligibility of the judgement/assertion and the intelligibility of the object. But while he claims that the latter makes the former possible, he never clearly shows how. And since he marks a clear distinction between the intelligible and the phenomenal, he is at pains to explain how the phenomenal world can exhibit any intelligibility at all, let alone an intelligibility that somehow makes possible the intelligibility of judgements/assertions. Since the conception of truth as correspondence cannot preserve the claims it is intended to preserve, it fails to do justice to the realist intuition it ostensibly clarifies. Since Heidegger thinks that an ontical account of truth obscures its fundamental character, he sets himself the task of offering an ontological account of truth that justifies the ‘realist’ intuition, and he concludes that truth must fundamentally be characterized not by a correspondence

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between an assertion and its object, but by the being of the object just as it shows itself: [T]o the lógos belongs unhiddenness – a-létheia. To translate this word as ‘truth’, and, above all, to define this expression conceptually in theoretical ways, is to cover up the meaning of what the Greeks made ‘self-evidently’ basic for the terminological use of alétheia as a prephilosophical way of understanding it. (1927b:262/219) The truth of an assertion is therefore identified not fundamentally with the conceptual/verbal character of the judgement/assertion, but with the uncovering of its object: ‘The Being-true (truth) of the assertion must be understood as Being-uncovering’ (1927b:261/218). Heidegger does not argue that there is no sense in which judgements/assertions may exhibit veracity in that they correspond to objects, but that the correspondence per se does not fundamentally characterize truth. Truth is uncovering entities just as they show themselves, in their intelligibility as structured unities that are open to discursive articulation. Heidegger’s goal is then to show how correspondence is possible as a derivative conception of truth. Since being is only an issue for that entity that is characterized by being-in-the-world, in order to clarify his claim that truth is uncoveredness Heidegger turns to a discussion of how he thinks truth as uncoveredness is grounded in the disclosedness of being-in-the-world. Heidegger’s usage of uncovering (Entdecken), unhiddenness (Unverborgenheit), and shows itself (zeigen) refer to his usage of phenomenology: [H]ere we are expressing nothing else than the maxim . . . ‘To the things themselves!’ . . . ‘Phenomenology’ neither designates the object of its researches, nor characterizes the subject-matter thus comprised. The word merely informs us of the ‘how’ with which what is to be treated in this science gets exhibited and handled. To have a science ‘of’ phenomena means to grasp its objects in such a way that everything about them which is up for discussion must be treated by exhibiting it directly and demonstrating it directly. (1927b:58–9/34–5) Phenomenology directly concerns not this or that particular entity, but what it means for an entity to be, the being of beings: ‘[A]ny exhibiting of an entity as it shows itself in itself, may be called “phenomenology” with formal justification’ (1927b:59/35). But that which shows itself perhaps

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has hitherto gone unnoticed or otherwise remained ‘covered’. To discover a species of animal is to uncover and exhibit something that has previously been hidden, and this involves exhibiting it in its particularity. In identifying phenomenology with ontology Heidegger thus identifies uncoveredness with being, and since all uncovering is grounded in Dasein’s openness to being, truth as uncovering is grounded in Dasein’s disclosedness: [D]isclosedness is that basic character of Dasein according to which it is its ‘there’ . . . With and through it is uncoveredness; hence only with Dasein’s disclosedness is the most primordial phenomenon of truth attained. What we have pointed out earlier with regard to the existential Constitution of the ‘there’ and in relation to the everyday Being of the ‘there’, pertains to the most primordial phenomenon of truth, nothing less. In so far as Dasein is its disclosedness essentially, and discloses and uncovers as something disclosed to this extent it is essentially ‘true’. Dasein is ‘in the truth’. (1927b:263/220–1) Truth as correspondence derives from truth as uncoveredness, and uncovering entities is grounded in disclosedness. Disclosedness is then the ‘primordial phenomenon’ of truth: as care, Dasein projects possibilities of the world and itself, and in this sense is the openness to being in the light of which entities show themselves. But uncovering is always more or less complete, since Dasein is finite and so is always open to being from an individuated and so limited historical perspective that always covers-over phenomena to some extent. As disclosedness, Dasein both uncovers and covers-over, such that, ‘[i]n its full existential-ontological meaning, the proposition that “Dasein is in the truth” states equiprimordially that “Dasein is in untruth”’, since only insofar as Dasein uncovers itself and other entities ‘have such entities, as possibly encounterable within-the-world, been covered up (hidden) or disguised’ (1927b:265/222). What then ‘gets demonstrated’ when, for example, I assert truly that the picture on the wall behind me is askew (1927b:260–1/218–19)? There is a common but initially inchoate sense in which the assertion The picture is askew stands in a relation to the picture itself. But how do we characterize this relation? Clearly Heidegger does not think this relation is anything ‘constructed’ or ‘pieced together’ from components. He does not then think that the assertion is related to a merely subjective or ‘psychical’ representation requiring a knowing-relation that must be constructed (1927b:260/217). Rather, we characteristically suppose that the true assertion

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is related to the thing itself, such that when I turn around to face the picture in order to verify the assertion, I comport myself to that very entity that is ostensibly the standard for assaying the veracity of the assertion. To assert anything to the contrary is simply to deny what shows itself in the phenomenon of truth: Asserting is a way of Being towards the Thing itself that i s. And what does one’s perceiving of it demonstrate? Nothing else than that this Thing is the very entity which one has in mind in one’s assertion. What comes up for confirmation is that this entity is pointed out by the Being in which the assertion is made – which is Being towards what is put forward in the assertion; thus what is to be confirmed is that such Being uncovers the entity towards which it is. (1927b:260–1/217–18) The assertion is related to the entity just as it is, such that the truth of the assertion is dependent on the entity just as it is uncovered: the apophantic as of the assertion derives from the hermeneutical as of the entity uncovered (1927b:266/223). Uncoveredness is therefore not representation, since the very concept of representation presupposes something uncovered that gets represented (1927b:261/218). Rather, uncoveredness refers to entities just as (so wie) they show themselves. Heidegger again refers to the doublesignificance of apóphansis, and connects it to phenomenology: asserting requires both an assertion and an object of the assertion, and the is of assertion indicates, among other things, what something is and so exhibits that entity – ‘points out, “lets” the entity “be seen”’ – just as it shows itself. The characterization of truth as correspondence thus systematically obscures truth’s fundamental character as uncoveredness while implicitly presupposing it: Assertion and its structure (namely, the apophantical ‘as’) are founded upon interpretation and its structure (viz, the hermeneutical ‘as’) and also upon understanding – upon Dasein’s disclosedness. Truth, however, is regarded as a distinctive character of assertion so derived. Thus the roots of the truth of assertion reach back to the disclosedness of the understanding. (1927b:266/223) Judgement and assertion depend upon an original comportment to something showing itself. Heidegger concedes that the intelligibility of the conceptual/verbal unity of the judgement/assertion stands in a relation to

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the intelligible unity of the uncovered object, but he concludes that it is the latter that makes the former possible. Truth as agreement is thus possible because the assertion is itself an entity, and so can either be used or studied and compared with what it exhibits (1927b:266/223). In constructing the assertion, a relation of more or less agreement arises between the assertion and its object, and that relation itself may be treated as a vorhanden entity: When the assertion has been expressed, the uncoveredness of the entity moves into the kind of Being of that which is ready-to-hand within-the-world. But now to the extent that in this uncoveredness, as an uncoveredness of something, a relationship to something present-at-hand persists, the uncoveredness (truth) becomes, for its part, a relationship between things which are present-at-hand (intellectus and res) – a relationship that is present-at-hand itself. (1927b:267/224) If the ontological difference is not noted, then there is a tendency to treat being as an entity, and to treat truth as fundamentally an ontical relationship of agreement, and so to obscure the derivative character of that relationship and the phenomenon of uncoveredness. Since Dasein is finite, one is always capable of error, of asserting that which is not uncovered as asserted. Untruth is then a mode of truth, since coveredness is a mode of uncoveredness: Truth (uncoveredness) is something that must always first be wrested from entities . . . The goddess of Truth who guides Parmenides, puts two pathways before him, one of uncovering, one of hiding; but this signifies nothing else than that Dasein is already both in the truth and in untruth. The way of uncovering is achieved only in krínein lógo – in distinguishing between these understandingly, and making one’s decision for the one rather than the other . . . Dasein is equiprimordially both in the truth and in untruth. (1927b:265/222–3) Dasein discloses the world as a range of structured possibilities, and so discloses both the possibilities of knowing and not knowing as modes of being for Dasein. Dasein thus concomitantly uncovers the possibilities of true and untrue judgement/assertion: error and falsity do not call into question truth as uncoveredness, but rather presuppose it (1927b:269/226). As an entity that has a world and understands being, Dasein is thus constitutively normative, projecting both the possibility of being-correct and being-incorrect as Seinkönnen.

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2.2.2 Truth and Normativity Truth has a central place in the architectonic of BT in that it characterizes both the existenzial unity of disclosedness that is the subject of Division I and its redescription as temporality that is the subject of Division II. By arranging our discussion according to the Doctrine of the Elements of categorical logic, we have placed truth at the centre of our discussion as well, since truth-value characterizes the intelligibility of judgements and inferences as elements of logic. As correspondence, truth is then identified with lógos apóphantikos, with the normativity of assertion-object agreement. Truth is thus at the heart of the normative/valid character of logic in the Aristotelian-Kantian tradition, and in Lask we see an attempt to go beyond the identification of truth and normativity with knowledge to identify them more fundamentally with meaning as precondition for knowledge. Heidegger offers a version of this identification, but grounds meaning not in ideality but existentiality. In doing so he seeks to ground the normativity of truth as correspondence between judgement/assertion and object in the fundamental normativity of disclosedness as the space of meaning, and given the importance of truth for Heidegger it is necessary to ask whether Heidegger succeeds or not. Ernst Tugendhat argues that Heidegger fails to ground ontical truth in ontological truth because he cannot show that disclosedness is normative in a way that could ground the normativity of assertion. Assessing this argument requires that we focus on the connection between truth and the temporal unity of disclosedness. Heidegger claims to have obviated the need to explain how a negative copula is possible, since the is of assertion is not fundamentally a copula. But this means that the intelligibility of negation must also derive from something more fundamental than the assertion itself, since the is not, like the is, articulates a prior intelligible unity. The possibility of falsity must lie with the possibility of truth, such that both are grounded in disclosedness. In BT Heidegger grounds the possibility of truth-value in Dasein’s uncovering and covering-over as equiprimordial possibilities of disclosedness (1927b:265/222). The ‘double possibility’ of being-true and beingfalse characterizes lógos generally, but since Aristotle does not justify the claim that assertion is the ‘primary “locus” of truth’, he does not justify the claim that ‘lógos is that way of Being in which Dasein can either uncover or cover up’ (1927b:268/225). But in Division II of BT Heidegger does not describe the temporal structure of disclosedness in a way that shows how it grounds the normativity of truth. Heidegger’s description of that temporal structure appears in the 1925 lectures Logik: Die Frage nach der

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Wahrheit [Logic: The Question Concerning Truth] (LFW, 1925b), and gains coherence once connected to the hermeneutics of negation in WIM. The account of falsity/error in §13 of LFW builds on the familiar hermeneutics of assertion as apóphansis in §12. Heidegger offers the perceptual example of mistakenly identifying an object in the forest as a doe when it later turns out to be a bush (1925b:187–190). To assert That is a doe is in principle to subject the assertion to a test of its veracity, and the standards for veracity are only intelligible against the temporal structure of projection that determines the possibility of articulating the ‘doe’ as something. To do so is then to expect that something to exhibit a unique history that is more or less uncovered, and to project concomitant possible futures of it. The totality of significations of the entity articulated more or less correctly as a doe signify possible pasts and futures, as well as other possible perspectives on the entity, in reference to which the standards for assessing the veracity of the assertion are intelligible. The structural unity of temporal significations, or ‘phenomenological chronology’, makes it possible that finite Dasein can both assert truly, That is a bush, and assert falsely, That is a doe (1925b:197–207). If after further scrutiny the ‘doe’ turns out to be a bush, it is nevertheless the case that something is uncovered, although incompletely and so in this case as a source of error. In order to be incorrect, something must be uncovered as that which I initially take to be a doe, but which turns out to be a bush. Uncovering is then akin to palaeontology. Like the palaeontologist uncovering the tip of a bone that turns out to be part of a complete skeleton, Dasein uncovers entities more or less completely, beginning with what is most ‘proximal’. And like the palaeontologist, Dasein more or less uncovers entities as they are – even when uncovering is incomplete, it is nevertheless a limited perspective on the entity itself, and so exhibits a minimum of intelligibility in the possibilities it exhibits. A problem immediately arises for Heidegger’s account of truth that he addresses in ¶44 of BT, but which continues to attract attention. If truth is fundamentally uncovering, and if only Dasein uncovers, then truth is relative to Dasein. But the conception of truth as correspondence is ostensibly absolutist, as 2 + 2 = 4 is ostensibly true irrespective of whether or not anyone uncovers it. Heidegger’s account of truth thus seemingly contains an equivocation: in lieu of an absolutist notion of truth Heidegger offers a relativistic account, and while he uses the common term truth, he uses it as a synonym for uncovering, and so refers to something much different than that to which common usage refers. Truth is ostensibly intersubjective, atemporal, and thus objective, while Dasein is temporally and spatially finite.

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The universality of any logical, mathematical, or natural law is thus relativized: ‘Before being discovered the Newtonian laws were neither true nor false’ (1927a:220/313–15).12 In order to avoid changing the subject, Heidegger must therefore show both (i) that the common conception of truth yields his conception of truth, and (ii) that his conception of truth yields the common conception of truth. He must show (i) in order to show that one cannot maintain a conception of truth as correspondence without also maintaining at least an implicit conception of truth as uncoveredness, and he must show (ii) in order to show that one cannot maintain a conception of truth as uncoveredness without recognizing that there is some context in which it is appropriate to speak of the truth-value of judgements/ assertions as agreement. Unless he can establish this biconditional relationship between the two accounts of truth, Heidegger is guilty of equivocation by substituting his account of truth for an essentially unrelated account. Heidegger addresses (i) with the argument for the claim that every enquiry presupposes uncoveredness, since without something uncovered there is no object for enquiry and thus no enquiry. To conceive of truth as correspondence is to presuppose that the object of a judgement/assertion exhibits an intelligible unity that is the standard for judging the veracity of the judgement/assertion, such that the correspondence of the judgement/ assertion to the object presupposes the uncoveredness of the object: ‘the idea of agreement is one to which theory had to come on the basis of the primordial phenomenon of truth’ (1927b:262/220). That Heidegger addresses (ii) is less obvious. One might conclude that Heidegger advances an account of truth as uncoveredness in lieu of an account of truth as correspondence such that the latter is not appropriate in any context. But Heidegger does not make this claim; rather, he claims repeatedly that correspondence does not characterize ‘the primordial phenomenon of truth’, and repeatedly refers to uncoveredness as the basis on which it is possible to speak of correspondence at all. Heidegger allows that there is a context in which it is appropriate to speak of the truth-value of judgements/ assertions, but he argues that this conception of truth is secondary and derives from a more fundamental conception of truth as uncoveredness. One speaks of an assertion as true, but only because one presupposes the uncoveredness of the object as exhibiting the standard for judging the veracity of the assertion. Heidegger’s account of truth must then ‘proceed from’ the common conception of truth as correspondence for it to remain relevant.13 But if uncoveredness is limited by the temporal constraints on Dasein, how can truth transcend temporal constraints? Heidegger responds by

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claiming that to uncover something is to uncover a structured range of possibilities that is itself transtemporal: to discover a variety of plant is to uncover a range of possibilities concerning its present state, history, and future prospects. Something is uncovered as having a past that precedes its uncovering (1927a:220/313–15). Eternal truths are eternal in that they are uncovered just as something that persists through any particular uncovering, but only insofar as they are uncovered at all, relative to Dasein. Heidegger’s claim thus seems to entail a paradox: on the one hand, all truths are relative to Dasein; on the other hand, Dasein uncovers some truths as eternal. Heidegger claims that ‘Before being discovered the Newtonian laws were neither true nor false’, yet he also claims that these laws are uncovered as universal and therefore as transcending any particular instance of uncovering. Ernst Tugendhat argues that Heidegger fails to meet both conjuncts of this requirement, and that the relativism of truth as uncoveredness thus dooms it to irrelevance. Uncoveredness precludes a conception of truth as correspondence, since it precludes an account of truth that contains an account of the rational justification that is essential to an account of truth as correspondence. This is not to suggest that truth is reducible to rational justification, since one may assert what is true without justification and assert what is false with it, but rather to articulate the realist intuition at the heart of apóphansis, that truth is somehow essentially related to rational justification such that it is ultimately the object itself that exhibits the standard for what counts as a true or false assertion about it. Unless truth is essentially related to rational justification, no assertion can correspond to an object. Since Heidegger conceives of uncovering in such a way that truth and error/falsity equally exhibit their objects, he has no account of how one can be more or less rationally justified to make an assertion, and no account of how one perspective can be superior to another in such a way that an assertion can correspond to its object. Heidegger thus only succeeds in establishing what Husserl had already established, that the ‘copy theory’ of truth as correspondence is untenable. When Heidegger claims that the truth of an assertion presupposes that its object is uncovered ‘just as it is in itself’, he concludes no more than Husserl’s claim that the intentional object is an aspect of the object itself (1927b:260–1/217/218).14 Husserl argues that correspondence is only possible if the ostensibly subjective representation is after all a dimension of the thing itself, ‘the same thing, only in another mode of givenness’.15 The noematic intelligibility of the object is a dimension of the object itself, such that an assertion articulating this relationship between the

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thing and its noematic correlates must be said to correspond to its object. Heidegger formulates his thesis about truth in three ostensibly equivalent ways intended to clarify the apophantic character of assertion. The first characterizes the assertion as an exhibition of its object ‘just as it is in itself’, and so refers to the relation between the assertion just as it exhibits an object and the object just as it shows itself.16 This formulation makes use of Heidegger’s distinction between the apophantical as and the hermeneutical as, and illustrates their relationship. A pithier version follows: if a true assertion exhibits its object just as it is in itself, and if the relation between true assertion and object is an identity, then the true assertion exhibits the object in itself.17 The third formulation, which goes beyond Husserl by identifying truth not with the intentionality of judgement/assertion but with the fundamental intentionality of disclosedness as transcendence, eliminates both the ‘just as’ and ‘in itself’ and characterizes truth simply as uncovering.18 Tugendhat allows that Heidegger intends uncovering to be equivalent with exhibiting/pointing out an object just as it is in itself, but argues that Heidegger’s attempt to go beyond Husserl’s rebuttal to the copy theory of correspondence is not justified by any argument, and is ‘not even recognizable as an independent step’.19 In the first formulation Heidegger refers to the particular manner in which an entity shows itself, whereas in the third formulation he refers simply to the fact that the object is at all uncovered. Heidegger clearly thinks the two formulations are identical, but the latter suggests for Tugendhat that Heidegger thinks that what is essential about a true assertion is not that it exhibits its object just as it is (in itself), but that it exhibits at all. So from the formulation in which the truth of an assertion is characterized as a relationship of agreement between a conceptual/ verbal unity and the more fundamental intelligible unity of the object and its properties, Heidegger produces a formulation in which the truth of an assertion is characterized as mere exhibition. Tugendhat concludes that uncovering is ambiguous. On the one hand, Heidegger offers an account of how we can speak of assertions as being true or false, and so he offers an account of truth in which true assertions ostensibly uncover while false assertions do not. On the other hand, he characterizes truth and falsity as equally apophantic: truth is uncovering as such, where the as such seemingly precludes discriminating between assertions that more or less uncover.20 Heidegger thus cannot distinguish alétheia from apóphansis, and so cannot follow Aristotle in distinguishing mere uncovering from an uncovering that exhibits a privileged perspective on the entity itself. As a result, Heidegger allows no possibility that judgements/assertions may exhibit more or less rational justification, and so may

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more or less correspond to an object. Rather than argue that ‘a false assertion fails to uncover’, Heidegger must argue that both truth and error/ falsity uncover equiprimordially, such that in a false assertion the object ‘is in a certain sense uncovered and yet disguised’, and Tugendhat claims this argument is simply too incoherent for Heidegger to have advanced (1927b:264/222).21 Heidegger thus fails to distinguish between ‘givenness in general’ and ‘self-givenness’, between ‘givenness as such’ and ‘the possibility of a superior mode of givenness’.22 Because Heidegger fails to distinguish uncovering in general from uncovering in the specific sense of exhibiting an object just as it is in itself, ‘even the truth of the assertion does not lie in how it uncovers, but in the fact that it uncovers in general’.23 So despite the apparent insights gained by enlarging the concept of intentionality as the radical transcendence of disclosedness, by conflating apóphansis and alétheia, ‘there results an overall loss’, such that the account of truth as disclosedness ‘becomes trivial’.24 Instead of enlarging a conception of truth as correspondence by explaining how it derives from a more fundamental conception of truth as uncovering, Heidegger substitutes a new conception of truth that ‘already bypasses the problem of truth’, and so which has no relevance for it.25 Heidegger addresses the second conjunct of the biconditionality requirement with the argument for the claim that only a conception of truth as uncovering can explain how a conception of truth as assertion is possible. Tugendhat allows that Heidegger ‘goes beyond’ Husserl by describing intentionality as the radical transcendence of disclosedness, but he does not connect Heidegger’s account of intelligibility with his account of the intentionality of truth in a way that illuminates Heidegger’s account of the origins of the normativity of worldhood. Connecting Heidegger’s account of intentionality with his account of intelligibility both illuminates his account of truth and calls into question the claim that Heidegger’s usage of uncovering is ambiguous by further illuminating his argument for the claim that the three formulations of truth are equivalent. In order to show how his critique of intentionality is related to an attempt to enlarge the concept of truth as correspondence, one must show how Heidegger’s critique of intentionality both exhibits the main features of Husserl’s critique of the copy theory and carries them forward into a new interpretation of the phenomenon of truth. In particular, one needs to show that Heidegger’s radicalization of intentionality maintains something like Husserl’s claim that the noematic intelligibility of the object is a dimension of the object itself. The two structural moments of worldhood, Dasein and the world, correspond to a moment of ‘spontaneity’ on the one hand and ‘receptivity’ on

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the other, although these moments are not neatly isomorphic with reason and sensibility as they are in the Kantian scheme. Dreyfus connects this dichotomy to truth by referring to the ontological difference: ‘just as . . . reality and being depend on Dasein’s practices but the real and beings do not, so truth is dependent on Dasein, but not what the truth is true of.’26 Olafson points out further that the spontaneity-receptivity dichotomy is at work in both LFW and BT in related ways. In the Kantian scheme the I think is atemporal, and as such is pure spontaneity, but as schematized by the transcendental imagination, the I think is related to sensibility and thus receptivity, and so given a ‘temporal interpretation’ that makes synthetic knowledge possible.27 Heidegger too characterizes temporality in terms of spontaneity and receptivity, but the ‘linkage’ of the two constitutes the I think for Heidegger, and is ‘not just a necessary condition for the achievement of nonanalytic knowledge by the “I think”’, since Heidegger denies that the I think is atemporal, since it is time as Temporalität.28 While in BT Heidegger characterizes temporality ‘for the most part in terms of “project” and “ecstasis,” and thus in a way that strongly emphasizes the spontaneity of the “I think”’, in LFW he characterizes temporality as concomitantly receptive, since the spontaneity of projecting possibilities is at the same time a ‘letting oneself be given in advance that to which one’s project refers’.29 As Sichgebenlassen – as both letting (-lassen) something be given for oneself (Sich-) and as having something be given (-geben-) for oneself – Dasein both projects possibilities and is open to what it projects, comprising both spontaneity and receptivity as equiprimordial moments of activity (1925b:340).30 The structure of Dasein’s active projection of possibilities is a spontaneity that articulates the structure of the world itself, involving a concomitant receptivity to the structure uncovered. Since assertion exhibits a unity that is already more or less understood and uncovered as determinate in a way that indicates the normative conditions for that entity, uncovering is always minimally determinate: to uncover an entity is to uncover a minimum of intelligible determinacy that is amenable to articulation in an assertion. But if uncovering is always minimally determinate, then it is clearer why Heidegger thinks the three formulations of truth are equivalent. Since Heidegger denies that what is uncovered is in any sense a representation of an object, the determinacy uncovered must be that of the entity itself. The truth of an assertion thus derives from the entity’s determinacy just as it is in itself. However, Dasein’s temporal/spatial finitude precludes the possibility of absolute uncovering: all uncovering is limited, such that what is uncovered is always only a dimension or aspect of the thing itself. Heidegger’s thing itself thus importantly stands in contrast to Kant’s ding an sich: whereas the latter is merely intelligible, the object

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considered from no phenomenal perspective at all, the former is the full range of possibilities the object exhibits, or the object considered from every possible noumenal and phenomenal perspective. A common epistemological view is that knowledge is asymptotic: regulative ideas perhaps guarantee that absolute knowledge may ever be approached, while the finitude of discursive reason guarantees that it is never actually achieved. Heidegger has an asymptotic conception of falsity as well: absolute error may be approached but never actually achieved, since even error presupposes that a minimum of intelligibility has been uncovered about which one may prevaricate or otherwise assert a falsehood. Unless I uncover something about an entity, I have nothing about which I might lie or be mistaken with respect to that entity. If I am to be mistaken there must be a reason I am mistaken, and that reason and the possibility of exhibiting it ultimately lies with the entity uncovered. If I notice no more than ‘something’ out of the corner of my eye as I drive down the road, I have uncovered something that exhibits the possibility of being noticed as a mere ‘something’, and in that alone I have uncovered a minimum of intelligible determinacy that the entity itself exhibits. True and false judgements/assertions thus both exhibit aspects of the entity itself, such that Tugendhat is incorrect to deny that Heidegger allows that ‘in the false assertion the entity [is] partly uncovered and partly concealed’, since every falsity presupposes that something of an object is uncovered with respect to which one asserts falsely.31 Heidegger thus denies that a robust scepticism is possible because, although one may raise doubts concerning whether or not correspondence has been achieved in a particular case, there can be no doubt concerning whether or not Dasein encounters entities themselves (1927b:271–2/229). But if Dasein discloses the world in a temporally and spatially limited context, then what is uncovered is but an aspect of the thing uncovered. So when I judge the bush in the distance to be a doe, I do not thereby fail to uncover the bush at all. Rather, I uncover the bush itself as mistaken for a doe in a certain context: I can only judge/assert falsely That is a doe if I have already uncovered a dimension of the bush’s intelligibility as something that can in a certain context be taken for a doe. Furthermore, even when I judge/assert that the bush is a doe I still refer to the bush as the standard for judging the veracity of my judgement/assertion, which is made explicit when I later discover that the bush is not a doe. So when he claims that truth and falsity/error are equiprimordial, Heidegger does not argue that truth and falsity/error equally exhibit their object in every case, but that true and false assertions both exhibit a minimum of uncovered intelligibility.

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As we will discuss in more detail in the next chapter, since the temporal structure or ‘phenomenological chronology’ of Präsenz grounds truth as disclosedness, in projecting temporally interrelated possibilities Dasein discloses the world as a space of consequence: what shows itself as a doe may or may not turn out to be a bush. Among the interrelated possibilities of an entity are then its inferential possibilities, and these may undergo a ‘narrowing of content’ in reflection to produce the concept of formal inference. The temporal structure of truth makes inference possible, both as an activity in one moment and as the articulated inferential structure of the world as space of consequence in the other. Inference is then grounded in Dasein’s constitutive freedom: as temporal, Dasein ‘stretches’ itself into a projected future such that the world is disclosed not as a static but a dynamic ‘there’ that is the space of consequential relations that we may articulate formally as inference. An ontological concept of truth informs an ontological concept of inference and validity, and since the lógos of being is temporality, the structure of normativity is temporal. This is to say that temporality is the overall context that suffers the ‘narrowing of content’ in discursive thought/language, which in the case of logic means a bracketing of temporal restrictions in the concept of the formal object and its properties. But the formal possibilities thereby articulated are possibilities of the world itself, available for Dasein in the activity of drawing inferences. The normativity of inference is already available for Dasein, such that it is the normativity of being-in-the-world that grounds the normativity of logic as formal inference. Heidegger thus undoes the anti-verificationist restrictions on objectivity imposed by Lask in arguing that a discursive thought capable of rational justification and recognizing a ‘superior’ uncovering is grounded in the normative disclosedness of being-in-the-world. Heidegger thus extends Husserl’s critique of the copy theory by arguing that it is the pre-reflective, radical intentionality of disclosedness that exhibits the standards for judging the veracity of judgements/assertions, such that what is uncovered in an object is an aspect or possibility of the object itself, ‘the same thing, only in another mode of givenness’. Tugendhat’s longstanding argument is important, for it cuts to the issue at the core of Heidegger’s account of truth: how close of a connection between truth and being can Heidegger maintain in a consistent account of truth as disclosedness/uncovering? But the argument proceeds from an incomplete assessment of Heidegger’s thesis that falsity is equiprimordial with truth, and so it does not establish that Heidegger conflates uncovering and exhibition. If Heidegger’s argument is that truth is not just the fact that something is uncovered, but also the normative determinacy of what is

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uncovered, then he has formally satisfied the biconditionality requirement. If he has shown that the three formulations are equivalent, then he offers a reason for distinguishing apóphansis from alétheia, since while the latter is the fundamental intentionality of uncovering objects in which all normativity is grounded, the former is the derivative intentionality of discursively articulating what is already uncovered. Because he does not appreciate the manner in which Heidegger intends his account of uncovering to be an account of discursive normativity itself, Tugendhat fails to clarify Heidegger’s claim that truth and falsity/error both exhibit their object equiprimordially, and so he does not show that Heidegger cannot justify the claim that alétheia and apóphansis are closely related but distinct.

2.3 Negation Negation is intimately related to truth, since it is in virtue of negation that we commonly think of truth-value as bivalent. That A is true if and only if ~A is false and A is false if and only if ~A is true appears axiomatic. The connection between truth and negation might thus appear prosaic until we put the issue in metaphysical terms expressing its ancient formulation in order to emphasize its profundity: How can it be the case that something is not the case? Although Heidegger offers a hermeneutics of negation that coheres with his hermeneutics of truth, comparatively little has been written on this coherence in a way that connects his discussions of truth in BT and related texts with his discussion of the origins of negation via the nothing (das Nichts). As we have seen, Heidegger argues that being is fundamentally characterized by unity-in-differentiation: whatever is shows itself as a structured unity of possibilities indicating both what it is and what it is not. Two corollaries follow that we have also introduced, and that we can now examine in more detail: (i) not-being is a mode of being and (ii) uncoveredness is fundamentally bimodal, where bimodality at the primordial level of understanding makes bivalence possible at the secondary level of discursive thought/language. Since Heidegger thinks that the normative intelligibility of logic derives from the normative intelligibility of understanding, it is unsurprising that he argues that the intelligibility of negation as a logical operator and as a fundamental feature of discursive thought/language derives from the intelligible unity of the world as understood: judgements/ assertions are intelligible as true or false because the world is uncovered as fundamentally differentiated, such that negation articulates a feature of worldhood itself.

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2.3.1 Negation and Being Heidegger’s idiom in WIM is particularly turgid and cryptic. He uses the obfuscatory term the nothing to refer to the fundamental differentiation that he argues characterizes the world, and which negation articulates in discursive thought/language. So in order to clarify Heidegger’s discussion of the relationship between truth and negation, we must first clarify what he does and does not mean by the nothing. Although Heidegger claims that the nothing refers to fundamental differentiation, he does not equate fundamental differentiation with pure non-being. Rather, he argues that differentiation is fundamentally characteristic of being itself; not-being is not the absence of being but a mode of being, and so a manner in which an entity can be uncovered. Once we have clarified these claims we can turn to discuss his argument for the claim that the bimodal character of being makes formal negation possible for discursive thought. Heidegger claims that the sciences (Wissenschaften) are ontical, since they only concern particular physical, logical, literary, or social entities, etc. If we ask what the sciences study beyond particular entities, the answer must be ‘nothing’. While at first one might take this usage of the word is trivial, an ‘accident’ or ‘only a manner of speaking’, the issue becomes more complicated if one asks science to comment on the term itself (1929d:95/3). Since the sciences deal solely with entities, they cannot really say anything at all about nothing, and yet they give it a name, nothing (1929d:96/4). If the ontical sciences taken as a whole have the totality of entities as their theme, then this usage of the term refers not just to the absence of this or that entity, but to the absence of every entity, since they do not raise being as a theme for enquiry, such that the only conception of nothing available to them is that of the absence of any entity. That science does not study nothing thus seems to entail somewhat more than one might first suppose: science cannot even talk about nothing, since science can only talk about particular entities, and talk about nothing violates the laws of logic (1929d:97/4–5). Using the term nothing as anything other than an informal manner of speaking to indicate the limits of what the sciences can discuss is contradictory. Sciences study particular entities; they cannot study that which is expressly the absence of any particular entity. It is unclear then how we can use the term at all, if that to which a term refers determines its meaning (1929d:96–7/4–6). As we will see when we turn to discuss Carnap’s criticisms of Heidegger in Chapter 4, any attempt to treat the nothing as a referring expression reveals the meaninglessness of the term understood in this way. But although the law of non-contradiction

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seemingly renders talk of nothing futile, the term nevertheless seems intelligible in some minimal sense, for we easily understand that the sciences study entities, and beyond that nothing. The result is an apparent paradox: on the one hand we cannot talk about nothing, since the term literally refers to no thing, and to talk is to talk about something. On the other hand, precisely to deny that we can intelligibly use the term nothing suggests that we possess some sense of its meaning, or we would not be in a position to deny its intelligibility in the first place (1929d:98/6). Heidegger then asks whether there is any sense in which nothing is intelligible by way of a discussion of what it means to talk about the totality of all entities, or entities as a whole (das Seiende im Ganzen). Although Heidegger thinks that this usage of the term violates the law of non-contradiction, he asks whether we presuppose another usage that does not refer to the absence of entities. So rather than assume that the nothing can only be a species of negation – an assumption that entails a contradiction when combined with the assumption that the nothing is a referring expression – he asks whether it is the case that negation is dependent upon the nothing understood in another sense: Do not the ‘not,’ negatedness, and thereby negation too represent the higher determination under which the nothing falls as a particular kind of negated matter? Is the nothing given only because the ‘not,’ i.e., negation, is given? Or is it the other way around? Are negation and the ‘not’ given only because the nothing is given? That has not been decided; it has not even been raised expressly as a question. (1929d:97/5–6) Only if there is an intelligible sense of the nothing as a non-referring expression that precedes negation is it at all possible that we can coherently speak of nothing and not ‘be misled by the formal impossibility of the nothing’ (1929d:98/6). What follows in the address is then Heidegger’s argument for the claim that ‘the nothing is more original than the “not” and negation’ (1929d:97/6). Calling into question the legitimacy of the claim that the nothing is the negation of entities as a whole requires clarification of what we mean by entities as a whole. When we use the term nothing to refer to the negation of the totality of all entities, we presuppose not only our capacity to negate but also our capacity to think about the totality of all entities, however implicitly and inchoately: ‘The totality of beings must be given in advance so as to be able to fall prey straightway to negation – in which the nothing itself would then be manifest’ (1929d:98/7). But simply to negate the totality of all entities is insufficient to give us nothing in this sense, since both the totality of all

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entities and its negation are treated incorrectly as entities (1929d:99/7). Heidegger’s discussion is reminiscent of Kant’s claim that it is impossible to cognize the totality of all possible representations: ‘The absolute whole of all appearances . . . is only an idea; since we can never represent it in image it remains a problem to which there is no solution.’32 Although Heidegger rejects the Kantian thesis that the possibility of the world as a whole can only be a representation, he nevertheless marks an isomorphic distinction between understanding the totality of all things as an entity, which is impossible, and understanding and presupposing a systematic coherence to the world as a whole, which is necessary.33 There is then an intelligible sense in which we can talk about being in the milieu of entities as a whole, since in our understanding of being we are familiar with the unity of the world as a structured range of projected possibilities: As surely as we can never comprehend absolutely the whole of beings in themselves we certainly do find ourselves stationed in the midst of beings that are revealed somehow as a whole . . . an essential distinction prevails between comprehending the whole of beings in themselves and finding oneself in the midst of beings as a whole. The former is impossible in principle. The latter happens all the time in our existence . . . No matter how fragmented our everyday existence may appear to be, however, it always deals with beings in a unity of the ‘whole,’ if only in a shadowy way. (1929d:99/7) Heidegger refers once again to the unity of disclosedness, which we have seen involves both an ontical and ontological holism. Dasein uncovers entities only as interrelated in so many ways with other entities, and uncovers entities as entities only in the light of the temporal unity of being. To uncover entities is to understand what it is for something to be, and for something to be is for it to signify in a manifold of ways the structural unity of the world as a whole as the open region of being. So while we do not know entities as a whole, or understand it as an entity, we do understand it as the temporal unity of projected possibilities of being, because we have an understanding of being as Präsenz. At this point in the address Heidegger returns to a theme from the discussion of care in Chapter VI of BT, that anxiety reveals the unity of disclosedness (1927b:¶40). Although we cannot conceive the absence of all entities, we can learn something from observing our failure to do so, since through this failure we exhibit the nothing not as the absence of

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entities but as a mode of being of entities, and so exhibit the limits of intelligibility. In WIM Heidegger broadens this discussion to include profound boredom as another ‘attunement’ that exhibits the unity of disclosedness. Profound boredom is not insouciance towards this or that entity but towards all entities, towards the possibilities of the world taken as a whole, and understood in its unity as a range of temporally structured possibilities (1929d:99/7–8). Profound boredom includes a vain wish for release precisely from the possibilities of the world, an unsatisfiable longing for discharge from the tedium of worldly commerce. While in profound boredom the unity of the world fails to arouse us, in the experience of profound anxiety it distresses us. Our very commerce with the world harrows us as we strive vainly to comprehend the world as a whole, to ‘get a grip’ on things and settle our disquiet, and our distress arises precisely from our recognition that we ‘can get no hold on things’, that things as a whole elude our grasp (1929d:101/9). But our attempt to get at things as a whole is precisely an attempt to parse the totality of things from what it is not, from nothing. In profound anxiety we thus carry out the contradiction of attempting to comprehend what cannot be comprehended, and since what we fail to comprehend is precisely that which constitutes the unity of the world and oneself, a malaise results. The nothing revealed in anxiety is original differentiation, original ‘nihilation’, but it is neither an entity nor the totality of entities. But as other than entities as such, neither is it pure non-being. At this point Heidegger has directed the audience back precisely to the ontological difference, for his claim is that, as other than entities as such, the nothing characterizes being as such: The nothing is neither an object nor any being at all. The nothing comes forward neither for itself nor next to beings, to which it would, as it were, adhere. For human existence, the nothing makes possible the openedness of beings as such. The nothing does not merely serve as a counterconcept of beings; rather, it originally belongs to their essential unfolding as such. In the Being of beings the nihilation of the nothing occurs. (1929d:104/12) As ‘[i]n the Being of beings’, the nothing is characteristic of being, such that original differentiation is the ontological difference itself. This is because as disclosedness, Dasein implicitly distinguishes entities from that in the light of which entities are entities, being, and it is in this distinction itself that we find the nothing as original nihilation. In the failure to comprehend entities as a whole and its negation, one is left with the very

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unity of entities as a whole – not as an entity, but as the being of entities, the milieu in which entities are intelligible as entities. To attempt and fail to comprehend entities as a whole is to face anxiety and confront the original, ontological difference between being and entities, and therewith to be thrown back into the irreducibly unitary world of individuated entities and their possibilities. In profound anxiety we thus carry out an experiment in determining the limits of what can be articulated discursively.34 We cannot eliminate the totality of things so as to set the limit on the totality of things as a whole. The sense of alterity we attempt to formulate as the absence of every entity eludes us, leaving only alterity as differentiation among entities and their possibilities. We cannot recuse ourselves from our constitutive understanding of entities in their unity, from our constitutive commerce with entities in an irreducible world of interrelated possibilities. Our attempt to confront the absence of all entities is thus a profound failure, and elicits an unsettling disquiet as we are forced again to confront the world of possibilities that oppresses us (1929d:101/9–10). Profound anxiety reveals our failure to comprehend the totality of beings, and in so doing reveals the unintelligibility of the nothing conceived as the negation of the totality of all things: ‘The nothing does not remain the indeterminate opposite of beings but reveals itself as belonging to the Being of beings’ (1929d:108/16–17). To be something is to be a this and not a that: for something to be it must be what it is as it is, and so must not be something else or in some other way. We cannot intelligibly comprehend the nothing as alterity in the sense of the absence of all entities, but only as alterity in the sense of differentiation within and among beings, as the ontological ground of individuation. The nothing thus reveals itself not as the absence of being, but as a modality of being characterizing disclosedness itself: ‘What oppresses us is not this or that, nor is it the summation of everything present-at-hand; it is rather the possibility of the ready-to-hand in general; that is to say, it is the world itself’ (1927b:231/186–7). If the nothing is a modality of being, and if an understanding of being characterizes the disclosedness of being-in-the-world, then it is equivalent to say that in the face of which one is anxious is one’s own being-in-the-world (1927b:232/187). 2.3.2 Negation and Truth Although the upshot of the nothing for logic is that, as a modality of being, it is the basis on which a formal conception of negation is possible, interpreters tend not to explicate the details of the connection between the nothing

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as a modality of being and as the origin of negation.35 Indeed, Heidegger himself fails to explain clearly that the connection concerns the nothing as the ground of individuation in the world, such that it is possible, as Edward Witherspoon writes, ‘to grasp statements about particulars and thereby to explicate what makes it possible for us to understand the symbolizations of formal logic’.36 It is not in virtue of negation that the nothing is intelligible; rather, it is in virtue of the nothing as a modality of being that formal negation is intelligible. The nothing ‘makes itself known with beings and in beings expressly as a slipping away of the whole’ that takes with it the possibility of the negation of the whole, only to leave the world as differentiated undisturbed in its unity. The world ever remains the ineradicable and unified range of structured possibilities that are projected only as differentiated: I can make tea only if I can, among other things, distinguish the tea, water, kettle, and cup from what each is not, and if I can delineate one possibility (e.g., selecting a cup) from another (e.g., brewing the tea), where these possibilities are temporally referenced with respect to one another. One cannot conceive of the absence of all entities precisely because one is constituted by uncovering entities/projecting their possibilities. So when Heidegger claims that ‘The nothing itself nihilates’ (1929d:103/11), he means that differentiation does not derive from anything more fundamental, and so is not then a species of negation, but rather shows itself as a fundamental mode of being. Nihilation at its most general is not differentiation between being and non-being, but between the unity of being and individuated entities. The nothing is therefore primordial in two interrelated respects. The first is that it is a modality of being: an entity is uncovered as an intelligible unity, just as it shows itself and not otherwise. The second respect is that, as characteristic of being, the nothing makes individuation and thus articulation of entities possible: In the clear night of the nothing of anxiety the original openness of beings as such arises: that they are beings – and not nothing. But this ‘and not nothing’ we add in our talk is not some kind of appended clarification. Rather, it makes possible in advance the revelation of beings in general. The essence of the originally nihilating nothing lies in this, that it brings Da-sein for the first time before beings as such. (1929d:103/11–12) As original ‘nihilation’ or alterity, the nothing thus makes discursive articulation of alterity via the ‘not’ possible. Formal negation in judgement/ assertion is then derivative, for not only do we not find formal negation in

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the experience of profound anxiety, but to negate a judgement/assertion is to presuppose a familiarity with entities in their differentiation, since before a judgement/assertion about an object can be negated there must first be an entity uncovered that signifies both what it is/is not: The not does not originate through negation; rather, negation is grounded in the not that springs from the nihilation of the nothing. But negation is also only one way of nihilating, that is, only one sort of behavior that has been grounded beforehand in the nihilation of the nothing. (1929d:105/13) Formal negation thus stands in relation to the nothing as discursive thought in general stands in relation to an understanding of being, precisely because the nothing characterizes an understanding of being, and formal negation characterizes discursive thought. The intelligibility of an assertion derives from the intelligible as-structure of its object, as the intelligibility of discursive thought derives from the intelligibility of the as-structure of the world ‘as a whole’. As the overall significative context within which any entity can be uncovered, the world is the overall as-structure. The interrelationships between concepts in any kind of rational inquiry are thus not intrinsic to the concepts themselves, but rather articulate interrelationships intrinsic to the overall as-structure of the world (1929a:298–9/431–2). Concepts are not fundamentally related by an inferential structure inherent in discursive thought; rather, discursive thought uses inference to articulate the asstructure of the world itself. Negative and positive judgements/assertions are then fundamentally related not by an intrinsic connection between positing and double-negation considered as concepts, but by the dispartative unity of the world. That A is equivalent to ~~A is not fundamentally a relation between A and ~~A; rather, asserting A is equivalent to ~~A schematizes a structural feature of the world itself, that it can be the case that something is not the case. Tugendhat’s criticism shows that it is tempting to think of Heidegger’s account of truth as univalent, since the bivalence of truth-value is grounded in disclosedness as irreducibly unitary, and so to ask how a bivalent conception of truth as correspondence derives from a univalent concept of truth as uncovering. To be wrong or to dissemble requires that it be the case that one is wrong or that a belief or assertion is untrue; so even if I am wrong to judge the bush in the distance to be a doe, I must first have uncovered what might seem to be the univalent phenomenon of judging the bush in the distance to be a doe. Since there can be no counterconcept to being, there can be no counterconcept to uncoveredness: thought or talk about

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the negation of uncoveredness must on Heidegger’s view be as contradictory as thought or talk about the negation of the totality of all entities, since coveredness must itself be uncovered if we are to think or talk about it at all. If truth is uncoveredness and coveredness is a mode of uncoveredness, then truth seems unconnected to falsity, such that Heidegger has no real account of truth-value. Heidegger’s account of negation via the nothing helps clarify his claim that uncovering itself is bimodal and makes possible the bivalent character of correspondence. When we try to think about alterity most fundamentally we find that we cannot conceive of an alternative to disclosedness, since alterity is already maximally general at the level of differentiation within and among entities, and cannot be extended so as to negate disclosedness itself. When Heidegger claims that the nothing makes formal negation possible for discursive thought, he is claiming that discursive thought requires the ability to grasp particulars, and grasping particulars is possible because an understanding of being is characterized by an original familiarity with differentiation in the world itself. I may wrongly take this to be that, or dishonestly assert this to be the case when I believe that to be the case, but both error and falsity presuppose that I am in principle prepared for this to turn out to be that, or for something not to be the case when I believe or assert that it is. An understanding of differentiation is necessary in order to recognize any entity as an entity, since to recognize something is to recognize, more or less, what it is as it is, in distinction from what and how it is not. Since beings are only intelligible insofar as they can be differentiated from one another and in themselves, identity and difference equally characterize disclosedness: Identity does not then basically refer to an empty uniformity stripped of difference. On the contrary, it means the entire richness of real determinations in their compatibility without conflict. Identity is not the negative concept of the absence of all differentiation. It is, conversely, the idea of the uni-sonous unity of what is different. (1928b:68/85) To think of either identity or difference as a mere privation of the other is to abstract it from the context in which either has any intelligibility, and so is to miss an aspect of the unitary character of disclosedness. Insofar as science does not avail itself of a conception of the nothing as a mode of being, it cannot then give an account of the truth-value it presupposes as fundamental. Rather than a phantasm to be dismissed, the nothing is an aspect of the ontological condition for the possibility of science itself, such that the question of the nothing becomes a substantive metaphysical

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question (1929d:109/17–18). But the metaphysics required to articulate the intelligibility of the nothing is not the traditional ontical metaphysics of entities, but a radical, hermeneutical metaphysics that grounds traditional metaphysical concepts such as truth in the ontology of Dasein. Insofar as science presupposes the systematic individuation of entities and their properties as a necessary precondition for articulating the truth-value of assertions about entities and their properties, science presupposes the nothing as a condition for its own possibility. In this context Heidegger issues the infamously cheeky appraisal of logic that many interpreters have highlighted as a declaration of independence from the dominion of logic for radical metaphysics: If the power of the intellect in the field of inquiry into the nothing and into Being is shattered, then the destiny of the reign of ‘logic’ in philosophy is thereby decided. The idea of ‘logic’ itself disintegrates in the turbulence of a more original questioning. (1929d:105/14) Heidegger puts logic in quotation marks in order to indicate that his target is not logic per se but any account of formal logic as the fundamental realm of lógos, and so any account of formal negation as a fundamental condition on the possibility of worldhood. Such a ‘logic’ transposes the relation between differentiation and formal negation, and it is the ‘reign’ of such a conception of logic that Heidegger derides, not the legitimacy of formal logic per se. He thus does not seek to discredit logic but certain philosophies of logic, while providing an account of the very foundations and scope of logic in its proper context. The focus of this chapter has been Heidegger’s hermeneutics of concepts and judgements, particularly judgement’s articulation in natural language as assertion. Heidegger’s principal claim is that the intelligibility of judgements/assertions derives from the intelligibility of the world itself. In particular, he argues that the intelligible unity of the judgement/assertion as a conceptual/verbal complex made possible by the copula, and that may thus be judged true or false, articulates the intelligible unity or as-structure of the object of the judgement/assertion. The bivalence of the truth-value of judgements/assertions articulates the bimodal character of uncovering: a judgement/assertion can stand in a relation of more or less correspondence to an object only if that object is more or less uncovered as it is. Negation, which is required for judgements/assertions to exhibit truthvalues, derives from the fundamentally bimodal character of disclosedness: a judgement/assertion is true or false only if its object is more or less uncovered as it is and not otherwise. The third element in the traditional

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Doctrine of the Elements of categorical logic is the doctrine of reasons/ conclusions or inferences. As validity/invalidity concerns the transfer of truth from premises to conclusions, the character of one’s conception of truth has important consequences for the character of one’s conception of validity and inference, and with it the formal unity of logic as a whole. Our focus in the next chapter is then Heidegger’s hermeneutics of inference and the conception of the unity of logic that follows.

Chapter 3

Inference and Lógos

Inference deserves its own discussion for several reasons. One reason already given is that it is one of the elements of categorical logic, and Heidegger offers a hermeneutics of categorical logic. Another reason is that inference is connected to truth, a central concept in both logic and Heidegger’s developing account of it. In categorical logic, validity is an inferential relationship between judgements regarding the transfer of truth from premises to conclusions. A theory of truth thus informs a theory of inference as validity, so it is necessary to look at how Heidegger’s hermeneutics of truth informs a hermeneutics of inference.1 A further reason is that in Heidegger’s scheme Dasein projects possibilities as consequences, and so exhibits a consequential structure in activity that is articulated formally in logic as inference. In the activity of drawing inferences, Dasein makes use of the available consequential structure of worldhood. Formal inference, or inference with respect to formal objects and their properties, is grounded in the pre-reflective consequential structure of the world, ground as such. The focus of the first half of this chapter is then Heidegger’s hermeneutics of inference as derivative of ground as consequence. It becomes apparent that Heidegger’s discussion of ground is at the heart of his transcendental account of meaning as the practical lógos of beingin-the-world. Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz [Metaphysical Foundations of Logic] (MFL, 1928b) is particularly useful for understanding Heidegger’s hermeneutics of logic in that Heidegger explicitly states here the ‘basic problems of a philosophical logic’ requiring hermeneutical interpretation, and connects them to the central theme of BT, that the lógos of being is time. I have thus focused on the exposition of ground in MFL because it most explicitly connects ground, logic, and temporality.2 Since the lógos of being is time, logic as derivative normative meaning structure is grounded in the temporal structure of being-inthe-world, and so ultimately in original temporality/Temporalität. Logic is then grounded simultaneously in (i) ground, since the inferential structure of logic is grounded in the consequential structure of being-in-the-world,

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and (ii) lógos, since temporality provides the consequential structure of intelligibility for worldhood. Connecting inference and lógos by way of ground allows us then to make sense of Heidegger’s summary claim that ‘logic is the metaphysics of truth’. If logic is the metaphysics of truth as the normativity of disclosedness, grounded in lógos as temporality, then Heidegger identifies truth with lógos as temporality, uniting logic, truth, and radical metaphysics in a discussion of the unity and place of lógos in the BT scheme. The focus of the second half of this chapter is then lógos as temporality, and its connection to inference in the idea of logic as the metaphysics of truth. The hermeneutics of inference and its connection to lógos by way of ground completes Heidegger’s hermeneutics of categorical logic, and invites a motivating question for Chapter 4: what are the prospects for extending it to a hermeneutics of mathematical logic as well?

3.1 Ground and Logic Heidegger principally directs his polemical remarks on logic to the Kantian/ neo-Kantian tradition of treating logic as the ‘science of the necessary laws of the understanding and reason in general, or – which is the same – of the mere form of thinking’.3 On this view, logic is a theory of the normative constraints on discursive thought, as a theory of formality or of what can be thought or said in principle (Satz) about any possible object and its properties (1928b:2/1–2). Logic thus presupposes both ‘subjective’ elements in the judging acts in which one formulates particular statements (Sätze), and ‘objective’ elements in validity and categorical/judgeable content. Logic thus concerns the normativity of thought and its articulation in categorical language in its connection with possible objects of thought. The critical response to psychologism highlights the further claim that, although logic presupposes judgement ostensibly on the part of a judge, it does not directly concern particular thoughts or acts of thinking per se, but thinking as such, and so is formal with respect to its ‘subjective’ elements, particular concepts, judgements, and inferences. On the other side, ‘thinking is a thinking about something . . . a definite object, i.e., to a definite being which in each case confronts us, a physical thing, a geometrical object, a historical event, a “linguistic phenomenon”’ (1928b:2/1–2). As apophantic, determinative thought concerns determinative entities, related in their diversity, to which various fields of investigation correspond: Scientific investigation of this thinking is in each case correspondingly different: the logic of thinking in physics, the logic of mathematical

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thinking, of philological, historical, theological, and even more so, of philosophical thinking. The logic of these disciplines is related to a subject-matter. It is a material logic. (1928b:3/2–3) Logic’s formality thus extends to its objects as well, since although thought concerns definite objects, logical thought concerns only possible objects as such, and so regards them not according to their content but only insofar as they are at all objects: [L]ogic pure and simple – a ‘general’ logic, which relates neither to a thought determination of nature nor to one of space or of history – logic pure and simple has for its theme thinking about X . . . but the object of thinking is always a definite object . . . If I now consider thinking in general, then what the thinking is about is irrelevant. Yet the irrelevance of an object does not mean no object at all. Rather in each case there is an object, but it does not matter which object. It is anything that can be thought . . . Thinking taken as thinking about something, with any subject-matter, is formal thought, in contradistinction to material, content-relevant thought. This formal thinking is not without an object, but is very much object-oriented, though neutral with respect to content. General logic, as knowledge of formal thinking, is thus formal logic. (1928b:3/23) Logic is not just ontical in that it concerns entities, but formally ontical in that it concerns the entity as the formal object and its properties, the object as such. The formalism of traditional logic thus requires a metaphysical grounding that explains both logic and, insofar as a philosophical material logic means a metaphysical logic, its connection to philosophy. But a ‘technical and academic logic’ does not ‘furnish a conception of philosophy’, but ‘leaves the student outside philosophy, when it does not actually drive him from it’ (1928b:5/5–6). Logic must be explained in its possibility and in its connection to concrete thought and philosophy, and so must become philosophical: There is need for another logic, but not for the sake of providing more entertaining and appealing classroom material. We need another logic solely because what is called logic is not a logic at all and has nothing in common anymore with philosophy . . . logic should change; logic should become philosophical! (1928b:5/5–6)

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At stake then are a conception of philosophy, a conception of logic’s formalism, and a conception of philosophical logic. Heidegger thus hopes to isolate the basic laws of thought in the tradition, represented by Leibniz, in order to interpret them hermeneutically in their unity (1928b: 19/23–5). Given an understanding of the conceptual unity of the normativity of logic, Heidegger argues, we can begin to explore its transcendental conditions in the unity of being-in-the-world, temporality. The traditional principles of thought are those of identity, noncontradiction, excluded middle, and sufficient reason. Two sets of issues arise, corresponding to the principles themselves on the one hand, and their ground or the conditions for their possibility on the other. The first concerns the principles themselves insofar as they are differentiated yet unified in thought: what are the determinate principles of thought, and how are they united in their plurality (1928b:19/23–5)? The second issue concerns the details of grounding the laws of thought hermeneutically in the temporal structure of Dasein’s freedom: [O]bligation and being governed by law, in themselves, presuppose freedom as the basis for their own possibility. Only what exists as a free being could be at all bound by an obligatory lawfulness. Freedom alone can be the source of obligation. A basic problem of logic, the lawgovernedness of thinking, reveals itself to be a problem of human existence in its ground, the problem of freedom. (1928b:19–20/23–6) The identification of ground with reason and judgement that Leibniz maintains obfuscates the laws both in their interconnection and in their unity as grounded in something more fundamental. As we saw in Chapter 2 when we looked at the normative character of disclosedness as the ground of the dispartative character of judgement/assertion, disclosedness involves a minimum of uncovering, and thus a minimum of intelligibility of entities, and so grounds the possibility of a conceptualizing–judging–inferring comportment in which that intelligibility is thematized in discursive thought: ‘Determinative thinking is uncovering or concealing . . . it is either true or false. To be false is a negative mode of being true, to be un-true. Thinking is as such always in some form an uncovering, a being-true’ (1928b:20/25–6). Discourse characterizes disclosedness in the strong sense that there is no disclosing a world without something showing itself as minimally intelligible, and without the possibility of articulating that intelligibility in thought and language.

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3.1.1 Ground as Inference Only an entity that is finite and radically free can be obligated normatively, to meet principled standards of intelligibility by providing reasons rooted in truth, and so can demand reasons and enquire after entities by exploring essential, causal, inferential, or intentional grounds. At the centre of traditional logic lies the concept of ground as valid/invalid inference, and insofar as logic is grounded in Dasein’s temporally structured freedom, ground is itself grounded in freedom and requires a hermeneutical interpretation: How is it that the truth of thinking and thinking itself must have something like a ground – and can have a ground? What does ground as such mean? How are ground and Dasein related to one another? How are ground, truth, lawfulness, freedom connected with one another with regard to thinking? (1928b:20/25–6) Using Leibniz’ discussion of the principle of sufficient reason as his example, Heidegger argues that traditional metaphysics has rightly connected ground with truth and hence with being, but it cannot clarify their connection, since traditional conceptions of ground, truth, and judgement remain (hermeneutically) unclear. Heidegger’s hermeneutics of logic is part of the larger hermeneutical account of how a conceptual comportment is possible as grounded in being-in-the-world, connected as it is to the assertion as lógos apóphantikos: To think . . . is to determine . . . determining something as something . . . The question is, what does this ‘as something’ imply, this reference to another from which something given is supposed to be determined? To what extent is there presupposed here the basic form of that kind of grasping we call conceiving and the concept? How is conceptualizing related to grounding and thus to truth and lawfulness? How are concept and freedom connected? (1928b:20/25–6) As we have seen, the Aristotelian-Kantian tradition treats cognition as a unity of concepts, judgements, and inferences, where inferences are judgements relating judgements to one another, and judgements are concepts relating concepts to one another: [T]he basic element of lógos is the concept. Therefore the doctrine of the concept is to precede the doctrine of the lógos (qua judgment). On the

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other hand, thinking then operates once again to connect and link individual propositions into particular forms of connection: A is B, B is C, therefore A is C. This linkage of judgments is called inference. We thus arrive at the three major divisions of logic: the doctrine of the concept, of the judgment, and of the inference. (1928b:23–4/30–2) Heidegger finds the unity of conceptual comportments in the temporal unity of Dasein’s freedom, describing the space of meaning/lógos not as a conceptual unity à la Lask, but as the temporal unity of activity (1928b:24/30–2). The transcendental unity of lógos as practical signification grounds the derivative unity of lógos as articulated in concepts, judgements, and inferences. Inference in categorical logic thus concerns (i) truth, since the rules for asserting conclusions respect the transfer of truth from one judgement to another, and (ii) ground, since as a transfer of truth-value inference concerns grounding judgements in other judgements. In his doctrine of judgement, Leibniz constructs an account of lógos as judgement from an account of truth as correspondence, and so for Heidegger both represents the metaphysical tradition that mistakenly attempts to ground metaphysics in logic, and provides a cue for a hermeneutical reinterpretation of logic as the metaphysics of truth as disclosedness. Leibniz develops a conception of ground as inference from a correspondence theory of truth as inclusion, and stands out as unique for Heidegger in that he represents both a look back at ancient formulations of logic, truth, and judgement, and a look forward to the modern task of a transcendental account of their unity. Using the Aristotelian model of judgement, Leibniz offers a theory of the copula and correspondence: subject and predicate are related to one another in a true judgement just in case the predicate is included or contained in the subject: [T]he predicate or consequent is always in the subject or antecedent, and the nature of truth in general or the connection between the terms of a statement, consists in this very thing, as Aristotle also observed. The connection and inclusion of the predicate in the subject is explicit in identities, but in all other propositions it is implicit and must be shown through the analysis of notions; a priori demonstration rests on this.4 Since this relation of inclusion ostensibly explains how a judgement can correspond to an object, ‘the predicate’s inclusion in the subject is equated with being true and so defines the concept of truth as such’ (1928b:34/43).

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Further, the logical inclusion of the predicate-concept in the subject-concept indicates an existential inclusion: the predicate-concept is contained in the subject-concept in a true assertion because the object to which the predicate-term refers really inheres in the object to which the subject-term refers: ‘Inclusion is as such an inclusion in lógos, a logical inclusion; and as intending the being itself, it is an ontic inclusion’ (1928b:35/44).5 To say that the predicate is in the subject is to say that it is identified with it. The most fundamental truths – the principle of sufficient reason, the laws of identity, non-contradiction, and excluded-middle – are therefore original identities: The primary truths are those which assert the same thing of itself or deny the opposite of its opposite. For example, ‘A is A,’ ‘A is not not-A,’ or ‘if it is true that A is B, then it is false that A is not B or that A is not-B.’ Also ‘every thing is as it is,’ ‘every thing is similar or equal to itself,’ ‘nothing is greater or less than itself,’ and others of this sort. Although they themselves may have their degrees of priority, nonetheless they can all be included under the name ‘identities.’6 Heidegger describes original identities further as truths ‘for which no reason can be given’ (1928b:53/65). Such truths are self-evident in that they are their own reasons or justifications for being true, and in this sense are not ‘groundless’, but ‘are themselves ground’, and so ‘are in no need of a grounding, of a deduction’ (1928b:35/44). All other truths are derived, and can be divided into two categories.7 Necessary truths (vérités de raison) are analytic: All bachelors are unmarried men is true because an analysis of the concepts bachelor and unmarried men reveals that the former means the latter, such that to assert the negation of the judgement is to violate an original truth, the law of non-contradiction. Contingent truths (vérités de fait) are not necessary because, although Snow is white is true just because snow means something white (among other things), the negation of the judgement does not violate an original truth: to think of snow as possibly not white is not a contradiction, but simply contrary to a natural contingency.8 Leibniz’ discussion of the principle of sufficient reason presupposes a theory of inference that follows from his theory of truth. Truth is correspondence in the manner of inclusion, such that valid inference concerns the preservation of truth-value so conceived. Since truth-value so conceived presupposes that the intelligibility of the judgement exhibits the intelligibility of its object, the intelligibility of valid inference as a relationship between true judgements, itself exhibited in judgement, exhibits the

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intelligibility of relationships of objects themselves. Leibniz must then give an account both of how a multiplicity of determinations can find its unity in a subject – that a ball is at once round, green, light, smooth, etc. – and how it is that the unity of all possible determinations is included in the unity of every possible subject: The multiplicity of what belongs together, in order to be able to be a possible coherent whole, requires a unity of belonging together. This must be, however, a unity in advance, for only in such a way can it function as a standard for the coherence of things or for the incoherence of what was presumably coherent. The coherence of multiplicity, as belonging appropriately together, requires a unity that regulates in advance. Reduction to identity, as a whole of mutually compatible and coherent determinations, is, as a mode of judging about beings, only possible metaphysically if the being itself is constituted by an original unity. Leibniz sees this unity in the monadic structure of substance. Thus the monadic structure of beings is the metaphysical foundation of the theory of judgment and for the identity theory of truth. (1928b:102/126–7) The unity of thought as normative is thus conceptual for Leibniz, since the theory of truth at the heart of his account of logic is ‘possible only on the basis of the monadological metaphysics of substance’, entailing that logic ‘has essentially metaphysical foundations’, and portraying it as ‘nothing other than the metaphysics of truth [as inclusion]’ (1928b:102/126). Corresponding to necessary and contingent truths are their respective principles, the principles of non-contradiction and sufficient reason. Since contingent truths are ultimately necessary in divine knowledge, the principle of sufficient reason must somehow derive either from the principle of non-contradiction or from that from which it derives. Since truth is inclusion as identity, the fundamental principle of knowledge is the principle of identity, A = A, while the principles of non-contradiction and excluded middle, ~(A ∧ ~A) and A ∨ ~A, and the principle of sufficient reason derive from it. Heidegger finds Leibniz’ discussion of the principle of sufficient reason ambiguous in a way that illustrates a confusion characterizing traditional logic’s treatment of inference. While the forms of inference are used, categorized, and described, they are never adequately explained, how they are possible in their unity. On Leibniz’ account, the principle of sufficient reason presupposes a conception of inference as a conclusion made with respect to preserving truth-value. Whatever the deductive rule for drawing an inference, every inference is ostensibly truth-preserving: categorical

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logic is ostensibly sound.9 But the problem of reference that characterizes correspondence theories of truth also characterizes a conception of inference based on preserving truth so conceived. If the intelligibility of a true judgement is somehow connected to the intelligibility of its object, then the inferential relationships between judgements must somehow be connected to relationships between entitles, and we should expect a theory of inference that identifies truth with being to clarify the connection. Leibniz’ account of the principle of sufficient reason illustrates traditional logic’s failure to offer a theory of inference that clarifies this connection. On the one hand, the principle is ostensibly a normative constraint on discursive thought and so a logical principle. On the other hand, it appears to be a constraint on things in the world and so a metaphysical principle. Since he presupposes a conception of truth as correspondence, Leibniz is unable to clarify the relation between truth and being, such that he is unable to clarify whether the principle is epistemological, metaphysical, or both. The principle ostensibly requires that every judgement be justified by reason, such that judgements may be related to one another inferentially with respect to whether or not they preserve truth-value. Since it presupposes an insufficient conception of truth, the principle exhibits an insufficient conception of inference. Insofar as the conception of truth as correspondence that Leibniz presupposes obscures the relationship between judgements and their objects, Leibniz is unable to clarify how inference concerns both conceptual/linguistic intelligibility and the intelligibility of entities in the world. Furthermore, although both the principle of non-contradiction and sufficient reason are said to derive from the principle of identity, their exact connection to one another, which we should expect to be explained with respect to their common derivation, is never clarified (1928b:52–4/64–7). So when Leibniz asserts that nothing is without reason, he presupposes a conception of ground as formal inference, as a deduction according to reason and the transfer of truth-value from one judgement to another. While a correspondence theory of truth ostensibly explains how a judgement refers to an object, this theory of inference ostensibly explains how inferential relations between judgements can refer to consequential relations between objects. But if every determination is included in a subject, then Leibniz has identified what can be with what can be known: Leibniz’s tendency as a whole is in a certain sense that of a ‘rationalist.’ He strives to conceive being from the viewpoint of ratio and conceives the esse facti from the viewpoint of ratio . . . there is, furthermore, behind this

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tendency the Scholastic tradition, which precisely in this problem exerts its influence in a central way. The ideal of cognition as such is seen in the scientia Dei. (1928b:43/53) Ideal knowledge is divine knowledge, transcending space, time, context, and perspective, and includes knowledge of original identities: all knowledge derives from original identities, and every determination is something known at least to God. If ground means something serving as the condition for something else – a formulation that ceteris paribus applies both to relations between judgements and relations between objects – then Leibniz conceives of ground in terms of knowledge, and conceives of the principles of knowledge as the conditions for there being anything whatsoever. Knowledge is the point of contact between subject and object, since without a subject’s knowledge there is no object, and vice versa. Since something can be only if it is known (at least by God), then lógos is identified with the intelligibility of thought as such. But although the principle of sufficient reason ostensibly requires that everything have a grounding reason, it does not explain but merely presupposes what we mean by reason (1928b:109–12/136–9). But if we lack a clear conception of reason while identifying it with ground, then we lack a clear conception of ground and the normativity of principle itself. Given Heidegger’s hermeneutics of truth as disclosedness, we should expect a concomitant hermeneutics of validity and inference as grounded in disclosedness. Just as Heidegger grounds an ontical conception of truth as correspondence in an ontological conception of truth as disclosedness, so he grounds an ontical conception of inference as syllogistic validity/ invalidity in an ontological conception of inference as originating in ground as such. And just as he argues that the truth of judgements/ assertions articulates the intelligibility of the world as disclosed, so he argues that the inferential relationship of validity/invalidity articulates the consequential intelligibility of the world as the space of grounding relations. If ground is connected to truth and truth requires a hermeneutical reinterpretation that connects it as disclosedness to being, then the hermeneutics of ground must connect ground with disclosedness, and so with the lógos of being as time. Since Leibniz fails to enquire after the ground or possibility of identity as such (1928b:124/154–5), he fails to isolate the ‘primordial’ conception of truth as the radical transcendence of disclosedness that grounds propositional truth, and so fails to clarify the concept of ground as anything more fundamental than categorical inference (1928b:128/159–61).

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3.1.2 Ground as Consequence Leibniz claims that the principles of non-contradiction and sufficient reason are the two principles of knowledge of contingent and necessary truths respectively, and that they both derive from the principle of identity. However, their grounding in a larger unity is purely conceptual (1928b:109/135–6). And although he seeks to ground metaphysics in logic, Leibniz implicitly grounds his philosophy of logic in a metaphysical monadism. The upshot for Heidegger is that Leibniz presupposes the principle of sufficient reason implicitly and does not explain how it is possible. Leibniz thus cannot clarify whether it is a logical or metaphysical principle, or indeed the significance of principle itself, and so he cannot clarify the relationship between logic and metaphysics, and thus the proper character of a philosophical logic (1928b:109/135–6). Leibniz represents traditional accounts of logic by conceiving ground as ‘foundation for a true assertion’, as reason or ratio, an epistemological conception of lógos, such that apóphansis is identified with the structure of judgement (1928b: 110/136–7).10 But we can identify four ‘concepts’ of ground to which the principle of sufficient reason is said to apply, and which must be explained in their unity: We can . . . see . . . four variations on what we can mean by ‘ground’ and, correspondingly, four possible ways of grounding, explaining, and giving grounds: essence, cause, argument (in the sense of a ‘truth’), and intention. The general-formal character of ground is ‘the first from which.’ But this neither exhausts the idea of ground nor are the four concepts of ground grasped in their interconnection with sufficient radicality and clarity, since their origin and order remain obscure. (1928b:111/137–8) We can formulate ground formally as that which conditions something else, so that the formulation ranges over all essential, causal, inferential, and volitional conditioning relationships. The ‘first from which’ must then be explained as the unity of these four concepts, and insofar as this conditioning characteristic grounds a plurality of modes of being, the hermeneutics of ground must follow the cue that each mode of being has its ground, that ‘ground pertains to being’ (1928b:111/137–8). The hermeneutics of being must then include the principle of sufficient reason ‘as a basic problem of metaphysics, which includes logic, the metaphysics of truth’ (1928b:112/138–9). The elements of the principle of sufficient reason must be explained in their own interconnection and

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unity, since as a principle it ostensibly establishes ground as having normative force, and yet as the statement of ground it ostensibly also establishes the possibility of principle (Satz) as something that grounds: ‘The nature of the principle in this principle is itself to be attained only by clarifying the essence of ground as such’ (1928b:112/138–9). Heidegger points to Schopenhauer as having first distinguished ground as cause and as argument in the principle of sufficient reason (1928b:113/139–41), but argues that he misses its ‘central problem’, that it somehow articulates what is already determinately given as differentiated, and so cannot pursue an account of ground as anything other than ‘objective’ ground as cause and ‘subjective’ ground as argument, somehow related in knowledge. He thus misses a more fundamental characteristic of ground, that it involves bivalent choices according to normative standards: [T]hree formulations can be set up schematically to clarify somewhat the problem behind the real formulation of the principle of sufficient reason: 1.) There ’is’ a reason why anything exists rather than nothing; 2.) There ‘is’ a reason why this exists rather than anything; 3.) There ‘is’ a reason why it exists in such a way rather than in another way. The principle of sufficient reason is the principle of ‘rather than,’ the principle of the primacy of something over nothing, of this thing over that, of in this way over another way. Right away it is becoming clear that the emphasis in this principle lies on the factually existing beings, on factuality in the broadest sense, and that a definite choice, as it were, is made in what is factual in contrast to what is still possible. In this conception, then, the principle depends upon the connection of possibility and actuality. (1928b:114/141–2) These three formulations of the principle highlight its fundamentally dispartative character, and indicate the need to connect ground to truth as disclosedness. If logic is formal inference and formal inference articulates ground in the form of ‘argument’, then ‘the problem of ground is the central problem of logic’ (1928b:217/280–2). Heidegger restates the problem of reference as the problem of explaining how the ground of ‘objective’ truth is related to the ground of ‘subjective’ certainty, since, as ‘insight’ into truth, certainty ‘always presupposes truth’ (1928b:119/ 147–8).11 Since the principle of sufficient reason is normative, and since truth as disclosedness is the ground of normativity, a hermeneutics of the principle must explain how ground is connected to normativity and the hermeneutics of judgement/apóphansis (1928b:121–2/150–2).

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The statement of this connection presupposes the hermeneutics of intentionality as the radical transcendence of disclosedness that takes up the bulk of Division I of BT, and that Heidegger restates in various forms throughout the lectures from the era. In MFL Heidegger retraces this line of thought in §§9–13, culminating in a discussion connecting ground to the temporal structure of Dasein’s freedom as care in §13. By connecting ground to freedom and temporality, Heidegger seeks to explain how ‘ground pertains to being’ in a way that grounds logic in being-in-the-world as the space of lógos as consequence. Here Heidegger connects ground with Dasein’s being-in-the-world as freedom, and so refers both to the discussion of being-in-the-world as care in Division I of BT, and the discussions of the ecstatic structure of temporality that grounds freedom in Part Two of BT and Part Two of BP (BP, 1927a): Temporality temporalizes itself primarily out of the future. This means that the ecstatic whole of temporality, and hence the unity of horizon, is determined primarily out of the future. That is the metaphysical way of saying that the world, which is grounded in nothing else than the ecstatic totality of the time horizon, temporalizes itself primarily out of the forthe-sake-of. This for-the-sake-of is, in each case, the for-the-sake-of of willing, of freedom, i.e., of the transcending being-toward-oneself. (1928b:211/272–4) That time is the lógos of being means that, as an entity constituted by its disclosure of a world in activity, Dasein is existentially structured according to the temporal structure of activity. As we have seen, being-alongside entitles in activity exhibits a teleological for-the-sake-of (Worumwillen): Dasein discloses the world through activity as care, and as care activity is purposive. In BT Heidegger discusses the forthe-sake-of in the context of describing the teleology of projecting possibilities as the objects, methods, tools, materials, and goals that constitute activity. In MFL Heidegger characterizes it further as the ‘primary character of world’ and the ‘primal phenomenon of ground as such’ (1928b:213/275–6). Dasein discloses the world through activity, such that being-in-the-world exhibits both the determinations of the world as it shows itself and the determinations of the teleology of activity, together in an irreducible unity. As active and teleological, Dasein exhibits an implicit familiarity with ground as practical consequence, since by virtue of the temporal unity of activity Dasein projects the world as a range of temporal and so consequential possibilities. As care, activity is importantly future-directed in the projection

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of possibilities, although the possible futures projected in activity are intelligible only against the background of a ‘making-present’ that stretches back towards one horizon in the past and forward towards the other in the future (1928b:211/272–4). The temporal structure of freedom as care is then the temporal structure of being-in-the-world as disclosedness, as radical transcendence or ‘having’ a world. As ‘world-entry’, transcendence itself is grounded in something more basic – time. The medium of Dasein’s projection of being as possibility and consequence is temporality, such that being is intelligible only as temporal: the lógos of being is time. The understanding of being that characterizes the active being-alongside entities of transcendence is then an understanding of temporality: Being-in-the-world, transcending toward world, temporalizes itself as temporality and is only possible in this way. This implies that world-entry only happens if temporality temporalizes itself. And only if this happens can beings manifest themselves as beings. But insofar as this is possible only on the basis of the understanding of being, the possibility of the understanding of being must reside in the temporalization of temporality. Beings enter ‘into time’ in and with the temporalization of temporality and the world-entry of beings; beings become understood and determined as intra-temporal. (1928b:211–2/272–5) Ground is connected with truth, since to ask after grounds is to orient oneself towards the normativity of truth, and truth is the normativity of disclosedness. Insofar as truth is the focus of logic, ground too is brought to the centre of the discussion regarding logic (1928b:212–13/275–6). As connected to truth, ground and the possibility of giving grounds originate in the temporal structure of freedom, such that in clarifying the connection between ground and truth, and between ground and being, one clarifies how giving grounds is possible only because Dasein discloses a world as the temporal space of consequence. The temporal/teleological structure of freedom is then the ‘ground of ground’ itself: The inquiry into the essence of grounds can be put into a formula which formulates the problem as: Why do we ask, not just factically but essentially, qua Dasein, about the why? Why is there anything such as a why and a because? Because Dasein exists, i.e., because transcendence temporalizes! To transcend, however, is the ecstatic being-toward-itself

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in the mode of the for-the-sake-of itself. The for-the-sake-of, as primary character of world, i.e., of transcendence, is the primal phenomenon of ground as such. Because we are in the manner of an existing that transcends, in the manner of being-in-the-world, and the latter is temporalization, we therefore ask about the why . . . the for-the-sake-of is . . . the ground of ground. (1928b:213–14/275–8) Transcendence is world-entry, the projection of worldhood as an irreducible ecstatic unity of Dasein and world in activity. Dasein can enquire after entities as they show themselves, and so ask after reasons and give grounds, because worldhood has the temporal/teleological structure of a space of consequences that matter. Only an entity that is radically free can project possibilities while simultaneously holding before itself the responsibility of meeting norms of truth and rationality with respect to those possibilities, and only an entity that is temporally structured can understand being/disclose a world in free activity (1928b:213–14/275–8). Since ground is itself grounded in freedom, the transcendental character of ground lies in its temporal character, as a condition for the possibility of worldhood. Ground thus fundamentally characterizes the unity of worldhood that ‘surpasses’ entities, and so is neither an entity, a property of an entity, nor an ontical relationship between entities, but a transcendental condition on entities intelligibly showing themselves: The essence of ground differentiates itself into diverse sorts of ‘grounds’ (e.g., the four causes), not because there are different beings, but because the metaphysical essence of Dasein as transcending has the possibility of first establishing world-access for diverse beings. (1928b:214/276–8) The ‘coherent manifoldness’ of various modes of ground is not ontical but ontological, since it characterizes the temporal unity of transcendence that makes access to entities possible, without being a unity of entities (1928b:214/276–8). That ground pertains to being thus means that ground is characteristic of world as the realm of being, so that ground too surpasses entities and is bound up with the conditions on entities showing themselves as entities. As characteristic of being, ground too is projected temporally in free activity, and so originally shows itself in the intelligibility of practical consequences. The ‘manifoldness of possible groundings’, or various sciences (Wissenschaften), thus find their coherence not in the unity of an ‘objective’ world or a ‘subjective’ knower, but in their radical unity as

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being-in-the-world as the space of free activity and consequence. As intelligible, entities show themselves as differentiated into kinds, but only in light of the temporal structure of Dasein’s purposive activity. Heidegger presumably first describes freedom as the hermeneutical ‘ground of ground’ before then connecting it to temporality and lógos as the ultimate ‘ground of ground’ because connecting ground directly with freedom explicitly maintains a (radically modified) ‘subject–object’ dynamic, with elements of both spontaneity and receptivity in the unity of being-in-the-world. Being-in-the-world is a unity of the ‘subjectivity of the subject’, or Dasein as temporally and teleologically structured activity on the one hand, and a structured range of possibilities of the world projected as more or less available on the other. The structure of the world as differentiated regions of being on one side and the concomitantly differentiated and structured fields of enquiry after grounds on the other constitute the two ‘moments’ of being-in of any enquiry. To be alongside (bei) entities in the world is to project their possibilities by actively encountering and dealing with them, one possibility of which is articulation in discursive thought according to principles. Logic as the normative constraints on discursive thought thus presupposes both a consequential and temporal structure of world projected on one side, and an understanding of being as implicit familiarity with ground as practical consequence on the other. Lógos thus fundamentally characterizes not discursive thought and judgement/inference per se, but the available consequential structure of being-in-the-world that discursive thought presupposes and articulates inferentially. To connect ground with freedom is then to connect logic with temporality as the lógos of being.

3.2 Lógos and Logic Leibniz attempts to ground truth as correspondence in the principle of identity as inclusion, and identifies ground with judgement/inference and reason as exemplified in the principle of sufficient reason. According to Heidegger, he fails to clarify ground, reason, principle, and how epistemology is ultimately related to metaphysics because he fails to clarify their unifying concept, truth. Much of the First Major Part of MFL thus focuses on how Leibniz represents the tradition by correctly bringing truth to the centre of logic to make logic the metaphysics of truth, but incorrectly identifies truth with judgement and correspondence. Since ground is tied to truth, ground too is at the centre of logic, conceived as formal inference.

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Ground must therefore be connected to truth as disclosedness, and the Second Major Part of the course divides into a hermeneutics of truth and a hermeneutics of ground, united in a hermeneutics of logic as the metaphysics of truth as disclosedness. Both the hermeneutics of truth and the hermeneutics of ground follow the trajectory of the familiar ‘problem’ of BT from (i) truth, ground, and the intentionality of judgement to (ii) radical transcendence and worldhood to (iii) temporality. Temporality is then the ultimate ground of truth, inference, and logic, and the basic presupposition of the summary claim that logic is the metaphysics of truth. The space of lógos as inference is grounded in the ‘space’ – the temporality – of lógos as practical consequence. Since the lógos of being is time, temporality is identified with lógos as such, and so connects ground and logic with lógos and the ultimate transcendental conditions on having a world. Ground is then closely connected with lógos, since a formal theory of inference – in this case syllogistic theory – is grounded in the temporality that characterizes lógos as such. Lógos as the normative structure of categorical logic is thus grounded in lógos as temporality, and in this sense is connected to truth in Heidegger’s summary claim that logic is the ‘metaphysics of truth’. A discussion of ground not only completes Heidegger’s hermeneutics of logic with a hermeneutics of inference, but it highlights the summary issue of the unity of logic, since it indicates how logic is grounded in temporality. Our discussion therefore divides into two smaller discussions, a discussion of how logic is grounded in lógos as temporality, and a closely related discussion of logic as the metaphysics of truth. A result is that the close connection that logic and logical issues have with the central place of truth in the architectonic of BT stands in greater relief.

3.2.1 Lógos and Temporality In the Second Major Part of MFL, in the Second Section (‘The Problem of Ground’), Heidegger makes two passes at the ‘problem of BT’ as connected to ground. The second of the two, as we have already seen, occurs in §13 and connects ground explicitly with freedom, and indicates temporality as the ‘transcendental horizon’ of freedom. The first is longer and occurs in §§11–12, and since it treats temporality somewhat more explicitly, it is useful for connecting ground to the transcendental unity of lógos. Corresponding to the turn from truth as the intentionality or transcendence of judgement to truth as the radical transcendence of disclosedness is a turn from a transcendental account of lógos as judgement and inference to a

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transcendental account of lógos as practical consequence. Also corresponding is a turn in conceptions of worldhood in BT from a Kantian transcendental project as ‘the ontology of “nature”’, and a conception of world as a unity constructed from so many erstwhile discrete elements, to a hermeneutical transcendental project as ‘fundamental-ontological’, and a conception of world as the temporal milieu of being (1928b:170/219). Each hermeneutic turn is towards a new and more fundamental conception of the phenomenon as grounded in temporality. Heidegger again characterizes the for-the-sake-of as the primary feature of worldhood: If we thus keep in mind the [for-the-sake-of] characteristic of the highest idea, the connection between the doctrine of ideas and the concept of world begins to emerge: the basic characteristic of world whereby wholeness attains its specifically transcendental form of organization is the for-the-sake-of-which. World, as that to which Dasein transcends, is primarily defined by the for-the-sake-of-which. (1928b:185/237–9) Only through purpose is a world projected, and only in freedom is there purpose, such that a freely purposive for-the-sake-of characterizes the very unity of worldhood: But a for-the-sake-of-which, a purposiveness (Umwillen), is only possible where there is a willing (Willen). Now insofar as transcendence constitutes the basic structure of Dasein, being-in-the-world must also be primordially bound up with or derived from the basic feature of Dasein’s existence, namely, freedom. Only where there is freedom is there a purposive forthe-sake-of, and only here is there world . . . Dasein’s transcendence and freedom are identical! (1928b:185/237–9) Since Dasein only projects possibilities of entities in activity that is ultimately directed towards Dasein’s own possibilities/Seinkönnen, freedom characterizes transcendence or having a world as the ground of all possibility (1928b:189–90/243–6). Freedom is not willing itself, but ‘the intrinsic possibility of willing’ that comes not before but with the for-the-sake-of: In freedom, such a for-the-sake-of has always already emerged. This self-presentation of the for-the-sake-of resides in the essence of freedom. There is not something like for-the-sake-of somewhere extant, to which then freedom is only related. Rather, freedom is itself the origin of the

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for-the-sake-of. But, again, not in such a way that there was first freedom and then also the for-the-sake-of. Freedom is, rather, one with the forthe-sake-of. (1928b:191/247) As the space of practical consequence, the world is structured according to the purposive character of projecting possibilities in activity. Freedom is ‘world projection’, and since worldhood is characterized by purposiveness, freedom just is the projection of a unifying for-the-sake-of. As we have seen, the world is not for Heidegger an entity or totality of entities, but original nihilation, and the context for entities that transcends entities themselves. Whereas other entities only show themselves as restrictions, as one range of realized possibilities rather than another, Dasein is ‘excessive’ in projecting a world that transcends or surpasses entities (1928b: 192–3/247–50). The unity of transcendence and freedom as ‘world-entry’ and original nihilation is temporality: Dasein, on the basis of its metaphysical constitution, on the basis of being-in-the-world, is always in its very possibility already beyond all beings. And in this being-beyond it does not come up against absolute nothingness. Rather, on the contrary, in this very being-beyond Dasein holds before itself the binding commitment as world and in this counterhold first can and even must hold itself to beings. Now we have the task of understanding temporality with regard to this basic phenomenon of transcendence. (1928b:196–7/252–5) As we have seen in our discussion of the nothing, in surpassing and nihilating entities Dasein confronts not nothingness but worldhood itself as the unity and possibility of entities. The unity of transcendence as freedom is its purposive structure or for-the-sake-of, which as future-directed is fundamentally temporal. Ground as consequence is possible only where there is freedom and thus transcendence, and freedom/transcendence is only possible where temporality ‘shows itself’ as the lógos of being. Heidegger thus spends the bulk of §12 sketching the basic discussion from BT and BP of the ecstatic and horizonal character of Temporalität as the ground of the ‘common’ conception of time as a datable sequence of discrete ‘nows’, and its Aristotelian formulation.12 The upshot for our discussion is that, as a unity of horizonal ‘ecstases’ and the most fundamental of phenomena, temporality ‘shows itself’ as arising from itself or ‘temporalizing’, and does so as a unity of expecting, retaining, and making-present (1928b:202–3/262–3). The structural unity of expecting a future while

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retaining a past in a making-present is not then a transcendental unity of conscious faculties, but an understanding of being as the very ground of any comportment or exercise of faculties whatsoever, and the transcendental unity of being as intelligible: [E]xpectancy, retaining, and making-present are not merely the way we grasp the then, the formerly, and the now, not merely modes of being conscious of them; they are rather the very origin of the then, the formerly, and the now. Expectancy is not a mode of being conscious of time, but in a primordial and genuine sense is time itself. (1928b:203/263) Although the three ecstases are equiprimordial insofar as they are constitutive moments of temporality, they are structured with respect to one another as future-directed, such that ‘having-been’ is only intelligible insofar as something is retained with respect to possible futures as consequences. Making-present includes retention of a past and projection of possible futures, and possible futures are only intelligible against the background of what has already shown itself. Nevertheless, temporality as a whole only ‘temporalizes’ ‘out of a future’ in such a way as to give transcendence and world-entry a future-directedness that grounds the purposive for-the-sake-of that characterizes the unity of worldhood (1928b:206/266–7). As worldentry, transcendence has directedness and movement, since as care it is purposive and active, and the origin of that purposive directedness is the future-directed unity of temporality: ‘transcendence has its possibility in the unity of ecstatic momentum’ (1928b:208/270). As surpassing entities, the world ‘is nothing in the sense that it is nothing that is . . . yet something that “is there”’; as ‘the self-temporalizing temporality’, it ‘is the nothing which temporalizes itself primordially, that which simply arises in and with temporalization . . . nihil originarium’ (1928b:210/271–2). The world arises with temporality, and since temporality is the lógos of being and the world is the space of lógos as consequence, the world as the space of consequence arises with temporality and lógos as such. As a theory of ground as inference, logic is then grounded in ground as consequence, which is itself grounded in freedom and worldhood, and thus in temporality. But in connecting logic to lógos as temporality, Heidegger provides little detail regarding how the structure of ground as formal inference ostensibly articulates the structure of ground as consequence.13 How is the purposive for-the-sake-of structured such that when Dasein articulates what can only be thought or said about entities one must articulate consequence as formal inference? With respect to categorical logic the question

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more specifically becomes: How does Dasein articulate the for-the-sake-of as a conditional if-then? We cannot completely fill this lacuna, but we can provide enough detail to suggest some of what might follow. To do so we must expand our discussion of ground as consequence while remaining consistent with the rest of Heidegger’s discussion of logic and temporality. The formal if-then of categorical logic derives somehow from the structure of ground as consequence. In ontology we articulate consequence using an if-then, since the purposive for-the-sake-of that structures consequence is the temporal structure of projecting possibilities that depend on other possibilities, requiring an if possibility X, then possibility Y in order to describe the phenomenon. One possible future realizes itself only out of what has already come to pass and is underway. As future-directed, the for-the-sake-of directs itself primarily towards the consequent possibility, guaranteeing, as it were, that it ‘follows’ from antecedent possibilities in a way that can be described as if X then Y. But although Heidegger’s transcendental account of consequence is in ways isomorphic with Kant’s transcendental account of causality, it is not identical, since the former is a hermeneutical grounding of the conceptualizing–judging–inferring comportment presupposed as fundamental by the latter. The antecedent–consequent structure of the for-the-sake-of in projecting possibilities thus grounds any conception of causality as an antecedent–consequent relationship between temporally discrete ‘events’ marked by discrete and sequential ‘nows’. That logic and ground as formal inference are grounded in ground as consequence thus means that the apophantical if-then of formal logic is grounded in a hermeneutical if-then of consequence that is projected in the activity of drawing inferences. But the if-then of formal logic is the retention of the concept of ground, of one thing serving as the possibility for another, but only with respect to the concept of the formal object and its properties, the object as such. So while the concept of ground as causality is itself an abstraction from ground as consequence, the formal if-then is a further abstraction from consequence and temporality: not simply the ‘narrowing of content’ to arrive at a vorhanden entity or class of entities, but at the vorhanden entity as such, the formal object, completely abstracted from any specific determination yet applicable to all. It is then a further abstraction of the entity from its ‘phenomenological chronology’, the temporal unity of the zuhanden entity Heidegger describes in the winter 1925/26 lectures (1925b). The formal if-then of the conditional in categorical logic is thus directed at what can be thought or said about the object and its properties, abstracted from time and content and applied only as far as the concept of the formal object permits. From the ‘narrowing of content’ results not just

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the concept of object, but the concept of the formal object and its properties as the object articulated in categorical expressions related by formal inference in a relationship of validity/invalidity. The formal object is then the limiting case of ontical abstraction, of the ‘narrowing of content’ from zuhanden possibilities of entities to the formal possibilities of the vorhanden entity as such, by considering the entity as if it were atemporal, or time were ‘broken’ or somehow put out of commission. The hermeneutics of ground thus describes how the principle of non-contradiction and the concept of the formal object as that which cannot both exhibit and not exhibit a property, at the same time, are grounded in the temporal structure of consequence.14 The hypostatization of the formal object thus presupposes the very temporality the significance of which is ostensibly suspended, since the projection of the atemporality of the formal object is ultimately only possible on the basis of transcendence and temporality.15 The if-then of formal inference articulates whatever relationships are left standing when we consider what can only be thought or said about entities and their properties, putting out of commission other concepts of ground that explicitly refer to the spatio-temporal world, for example, causality. Left standing are apophantic and semantic relationships of truth and being, between what can be said of the world and the world itself, that are nevertheless formal and so abstracted from all matter or content. The world as determinate is ostensibly put out of commission, although it is at the same time presupposed, since the universality of formality requires that a system of logic apply to all objects in principle. At the heart of the issue concerning how the if-then of formal inference is grounded in ground as consequence is then the need to clarify how the very structure of formal inference presupposes the world, how the formal if-then articulates relationships of the world that hold between entities simply by virtue of being entities. Since the hermeneutics of truth identifies it as the disclosedness of a world, what can be said about entities always presupposes and articulates the world itself, and what can be thought or said about the world can be restricted further to formal relationships abstracted from all content. The formal relationship of inference in categorical logic as validity/invalidity thus articulates the consequential structure of the world that ‘shows itself’ as available in the activity of drawing inferences, and that is itself grounded in the fundamental consequential structure of temporality. Temporality is thus the issue that most fundamentally marks the difference between Heidegger’s and Kant’s transcendental projects. In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929b) and several of the lectures from the BT era, Heidegger lays out the connection between the hermeneutics of temporality and the Kantian treatment of time in the transcendental

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deduction and schematism, indicating temporality as the origin of transcendental unity in Kant’s own schema. The character of a transcendental project thus varies according to how it understands temporal unity as transcendental unity. Kant sought the unity of understanding/spontaneity and intuition/receptivity in the schematism, but failed to recognize the significance of the temporal unity of spontaneity and receptivity in the transcendental imagination, and so could not even begin to understand temporality and its connection to ontology in a fundamental way: We see then the peculiar productivity intrinsic to temporality, in the sense that the product is precisely a peculiar nothing, the world. Kant, for the first time, came upon this primordial productivity of the “subject” in his doctrine of the transcendental productive imagination. He did not succeed, of course, in evaluating this knowledge in its radical consequences, by which he would have had to, as it were, raze his own building with the help of the new insight. On the contrary, this great intuition was, in principle, lost. Nevertheless, this first advance into the transcendental imagination, which was for Kant only obscurely connected with time, was the first moment in the history of philosophy in which metaphysics endeavored to liberate itself from logic, and from a logic which had not found and never did find its own essence in metaphysics, but remained a training grown superficial and formalistic. (1928b:210–11/272–3) As a result, Kant fails to recognize the deeper significance of the schematism’s central place in the first Critique as the true locus of temporality and transcendental unity. For Kant, world-entry or transcendence is the unity of the conditions for the possibility of knowing the empirical world, where transcendental unity is obscurely connected to the temporal unity of the transcendental imagination. For Heidegger, transcendence just is meaningful activity in the world, where temporality is the transcendental unity of meaning as activity and consequence. Kant manages at least implicitly to bring time to the centre of ontology, although he seeks an ontology of empirical nature, and thus implicitly provides a starting point for an account of formal logic as the metaphysics of truth, grounded in a radical metaphysics of temporality.

3.2.2 Logic as the Metaphysics of Truth As connected to truth, ground can be traced from the intentionality of correspondence and the concept of ground as inference to the radical

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transcendence of truth as disclosedness and the concept of ground as consequence, grounded in temporality. As the ultimate ground of truth, inference, and logic, temporality is the basic presupposition of the summary claim that logic is the metaphysics of truth. The focus of the Second Major Part of MFL (‘The Metaphysics of the Principle of Logic and the Foundational Problem of Logic’) is wherein ‘the problem of ground is the central problem of logic’. By claiming that logic is the metaphysics of truth, Heidegger connects ground with truth at the heart of the possibility of logic, and divides his task into three parts: describing the problem of logic as the problem of ground, clarifying ground itself, and connecting ground to logic as the metaphysics of truth. The First Section (‘Exposition of the Dimensions of the Problem’) is devoted to the first part and retraces the basic problem of BT that connects being with truth as disclosedness, grounded in temporality. As we have seen, the Second Section (‘The Problem of Ground’) adds to that discussion by emphasizing the themes of worldhood and freedom as united in the temporal for-the-sake-of.16 The summary claim that logic is the metaphysics of truth must then be clarified with respect to the connection between ground and temporality as original lógos, and so in the third part Heidegger summarizes the account of ground as the central problem of logic in order to demonstrate its concomitant connection to truth. However, while the first two sections amount to over a hundred pages, the third part of Heidegger’s scheme amounts to but three pages (§14). As a result, just as the discussion connecting inference and consequence lacks detail in the clarification of the problem of ground, so the discussion connecting ground as consequence with original lógos lacks detail in the clarification of logic as the metaphysics of truth. We can provide some detail concerning how truth is connected to ground as consequence by detailing further how truth is connected to lógos as temporality, referring to Heidegger’s initial discussion of lógos in BT. The claim that logic is the metaphysics of truth can be stated succinctly: Truth and thus ground are at the heart of logic, such that a conception of logic depends upon a conception of truth and ground, and only a radical metaphysics of truth as disclosedness and ground as consequence can show how lógos as logical inference is possible. Leibniz seeks to found metaphysics on logic, but his monadology implicitly presupposes that logic is grounded in a metaphysical subject and founded on metaphysics. In any case, the problem of logic is not which category claims it, but how categoriality is at all possible: Only one thing is correct in the traditional and nowadays usual emphasis on the form of judgements as the center of logic, and that is that truth is

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shifted to the center. But then there must be a radical inquiry into the essence of truth. Metaphysics should not be transported into logic, or the converse. The point is not a division into disciplines, but the disciplines, moreover, are themselves the problem. (1928b:217/282) But although Leibniz fails to clarify truth, ground, and logic, he does not completely misdescribe them, since he locates truth and ground at the heart of logic, and so formally indicates the structural features to be hermeneutically reinterpreted. Truth is transcendental, since as disclosedness truth characterizes worldhood, and so constitutes the condition for the possibility of entities showing themselves as intelligible. As transcendental, truth makes uncovering entities possible, grounding the structure of apóphansis and judgement. Truth thus ‘resides in the essence of transcendence’, since the disclosure of the world just is the radical transcendence of being-alongside entities by encountering them and so projecting them temporally. Transcendence replaces intentionality as the fundamental theme of metaphysics, and since truth is the central theme of logic and truth is connected to transcendence at the heart of metaphysics, logic properly understood is the radical metaphysics of truth as the temporal disclosedness of being. As the science of judgement, logic ostensibly defines the laws of thought, traditionally listed as the principles of identity, non-contradiction and excluded middle, and sufficient reason (1928b:217–18/282). Leibniz identifies the principles of non-contradiction and sufficient reason as fundamental for analytic and synthetic truths respectively, and identifies the principle of identity as fundamental for truth generally. But although Heidegger places the principle of sufficient reason before the others in that they themselves presuppose it as grounding the relations of identity, non-contradiction, and excluded middle,17 he does not identify the principle of sufficient reason with a fundamental statement of ground (Grundsatz), since a statement of ground is not a principle for discursive thought per se, but the phenomenological description of ground as consequence that makes logical principles at all possible: Our claim is that the first grounding statement [Grundsatz – principle] of logic is the statement of ground. This claim, however, is not simply the reversal of the traditional order [of logical principles], but it is spoken out of the radicalization of logic toward metaphysics. The grounding statement of ground is not a rule and norm for making assertions; it is moreover the first grounding statement [Grundsatz] of logic as metaphysics. (1928b:218/282)

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This is not to claim that the statement of ground is not a principle, since it clearly possesses a normative ‘statement-character’. However, the normative significance of the statement of ground is not fundamentally as a principle, but as exhibiting that which makes principle and its normative force possible: Now the statement-character of this statement [of ground] also emerges from this. It is simply the first ground-statement . . . because it is the statement of ground. This means that all basic ground statements [Grund-sätze] are grounded in the statement of ground. (1928b:219/283) This is not to claim that the various principles of cognition follow deductively from the statement of ground as principle, but that principle as such presupposes an understanding of ground as consequence. Logical principles are grounded in ground not because they derive from a single fundamental principle of ground, but because any articulation of principles presupposes ground as consequence, and so ‘can only be interpreted from out of the ground of ground, i.e., from freedom, and that means from temporality’ (1928b:219/283–4). In §11 of Part One of Logik: Die Frage nach der Wahrheit (1925b), Heidegger introduces into his hermeneutics of truth a thesis he maintains in MFL, that Aristotle identifies lógos with principle but does not see that lógos as principle must be grounded hermeneutically in the lógos of being, despite drawing a close connection between truth and being. But principles are only intelligible as exhibiting normative force, and in his discussion of psychologism in §6 Heidegger identifies normativity as the theme of logic as the science of discursive correctness (Richtigkeit) (1925b:36–8). Logic as the metaphysics of truth is then the metaphysics of normativity articulated as formal principle. Disclosedness is the projection of normative possibilities, since whatever is uncovered exhibits a minimum of intelligibility and thus implicit minimal standards, temporally structured, for anything to be that thing or kind of thing, and for a range of possible thoughts and assertions about it. As uncovering or a-létheia, truth is then ‘privative’, realizing one range of possibilities rather than another (1928b:217/281).18 As pre-conceptual and pre-linguistic, ground as consequence is not fundamentally any particular principle or statement of ground, but the projection of normative possibilities in an understanding of being that precedes assertion. Ontology begins when being becomes an explicit theme for philosophical interpretation, such that, as lived, ground as consequence is pre-ontological. Since philosophical interpretation is discursive/linguistic, the statement of ground

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is itself adduced as a principle. But it does not follow from this, Heidegger argues, that the phenomena exhibited and articulated according to principles are themselves linguistic. To say that all principles presuppose an implicit statement of ground is not to assert that, as a law of discursive thought, the principle of sufficient reason is the foundation for anything whatsoever, and that lógos is thereby reduced to the intelligibility of judgements. Rather, the statement of ground is simply verbal articulation of something that precedes all assertion and makes all assertion possible in the first place, the temporal structure of being-in-the-world. Ground is thus connected to truth ultimately because disclosedness is temporal and so consequential: to uncover an entity is to project possibilities according to a unified structure of making-present that is informed by a past and directed towards possible futures. Given a transcendental account of ground as grounded in temporality, a radical metaphysics of truth and ground is possible in which traditionally ‘logical’ concepts such as judgement and inference are hermeneutically reinterpreted as grounded in temporality: Once the statement of ground has been provided with a transcendental exposition, its metaphysical contents can be easily read off in retrospect from the common formulation of the principle of reason . . . ‘Every being has its ground’ means that beings must, insofar as they disclose themselves as beings, ground themselves, because ground belongs to the being of beings. Nevertheless, ‘ground’ is conceived here much further and much more radically than the traditional concept of ratio. (1928b:218–19/283) Insofar as entities are at all phenomena and so show themselves and exhibit lógos, they ground themselves with respect to what can be thought or said about them, expressed in traditional logic as the principle of identity, A = A. When in constructing a categorical inferential system we follow the strict bivalence of being/not-being that characterizes determinations of entities, we thus use negation and stipulate an adherence to consistency as a principle of non-contradiction, ~(A ∧ ~A), and a corollary principle of excluded middle, A ∨ ~A. As the structure of truth as disclosedness and the ground of all lógos, temporality constitutes the ultimate transcendental condition for the possibility of meaning. Truth is transcendental because it characterizes the unity of entities that transcends all entities, the temporal disclosedness of the world (1928b:217/281–2). Like Lask, Heidegger constructs an alétheiology

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in which transcendental conditions are conditions on meaning conceived as truth, and in ¶44 of BT identifies lógos with truth as alétheia: ‘[T]o the lógos belongs unhiddenness – alétheia’ (1927b:262/219). Heidegger initially identifies lógos with truth in ¶7, where he identifies it with apóphansis and points to the hermeneutics of lógos apóphantikos and truth as correspondence detailed in BP. Unlike Lask, however, Heidegger does not identify truth and lógos with a logical third realm, but with what he argues is the more fundamental ‘space’ of being-in-the-world. Given the exposition of original temporality, the temporal character of lógos as consequence emerges more clearly. For something to show itself and exhibit lógos it must be temporally projected in activity. That disclosedness is temporal means that lógos as truth is consequential, thus allowing the possibility of a concept of ground, of one thing serving as a condition for another. Abstracted from spatio-temporal relations and applied to the concept of the formal object and its properties as such, the concept of ground undergoes a further ‘narrowing of content’ to become the concept of formal inference with respect to (i) a conception of truth as correspondence and (ii) a corollary conception of ground that is limited to what can be thought or said about an object and its properties in principle. And like Lask, Heidegger argues that lógos is not fundamentally cognized but pre-conceptually understood or lived. But unlike Lask, he does not locate lógos in ideality but in the consequential structure of worldhood, understood in the disclosure of possibilities and available in the activity of drawing inferences. The structure of possibilities of articulating ground as inference is thus part of the very structure of worldhood. This is why we do and must use rules and principles without having already developed a science of those rules and principles. Heidegger answers the claim that, as a kind of thinking, metaphysics must presuppose logic, since logic is the science of thinking that all thought presupposes: [T]he inescapability of rule usage does not in itself immediately imply the inescapability of logic. Using rules does not necessarily require a science of the rules of thought and certainly not a reasoned knowledge of these rules in the sense of traditional logic . . . Thinking and rules usage may be inevitable for the operation of all thinking, and thus also for establishing metaphysics as well, but it does not follow from this that the foundation consists in the use of rules. On the contrary, it merely follows that rule usage is itself in need of justification. (1928b:104/129) It is precisely the ability to apply this argument to any kind of thinking that undermines the claim that logic is presupposed by every science, since the

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argument trades on a confused notion of ‘presupposition’. It does not follow from the claim that all thought must use the rules of logic that all thought presupposes a science of logic, since a phenomenology of using rules shows that using rules does not require a science of those rules: one can draw a modus tollens inference without an explicit understanding of the principle of contraposition (1928b:104–5/128–31). If using rules required a prior science of those rules, then no justification for logic would be possible, for thought would then presuppose a ‘fully developed logic’, which is not the case (1928b:104/109). And if the use of rules is itself in need of justification, then logic has not explained its own rules, and we find ourselves forced to consider the possibility that they are grounded outside logic. By following the Aristotelian tradition of treating logic as the metaphysics of truth, Heidegger places truth at the centre of the BT architectonic. The hermeneutics of logic thus orients Heidegger to the central issues in his existenzial project: In going back to matters like truth as such, ground, concept, lawfulness, and freedom, we are seeking a philosophical logic, or better, the metaphysical foundations of logic . . . We seek a return to these basic problems, and thereby a concrete entrance into philosophy itself, by way of a critical dismantling of traditional logic down to its hidden foundations. (1928b:21/27) Logical issues are ultimately philosophical and tied to the central issues in Heidegger’s project, since his account of the foundations of logic takes up what he considers are the central issues of philosophy and hermeneutically reinterprets them. Two issues arise at this point with respect to the hermeneutics of logic at the heart of Heidegger’s BT project. The first concerns the adequacy of Heidegger’s hermeneutics of categorical logic. J. N. Mohanty has argued that Heidegger does not offer an extensive hermeneutical logic, but our consideration of the central concepts in that hermeneutics (concept, judgement, inference, negation, truth) suggests that if there is a shortcoming in Heidegger’s hermeneutics of categorical logic it is not so much the scope of its issues but the adequacy of his explanations.19 As this book is principally an exposition of Heidegger’s account of logic in the BT era, we can place the question of adequacy aside temporarily in order to consider the second issue arising at this point in a basic exposition of Heidegger’s account: To what extent is Heidegger’s hermeneutics of categorical logic also a hermeneutics of mathematical logic?

Chapter 4

Heidegger and Contemporary Logic

The principal claims of this book are that (i) Heidegger’s discussions of logic from the BT era are part of a novel account of lógos/meaning that is the basis for an account of the scope and foundations of Aristotelian categorical logic, and that (ii) they can be extended to serve as the basis for a novel account of contemporary mathematical logic. Categorical logic’s normative intelligibility derives from and articulates the normative intelligibility of the world itself, since in the activity of drawing inferences Dasein articulates inferential possibilities of the world. Justifying these claims comprises three interrelated tasks, and thus far we have undertaken the first two, both of which are historical-exegetical: drawing together the main strands of Heidegger’s thoughts on logic in order to present a coherent position to the extent possible, and showing that his philosophy of logic has a central place in his philosophy as a whole. Logical issues motivate Heidegger’s early writings, help motivate the phenomenological turn in the 1910s and the existenzial turn in the 1920s, and remain closely connected with the central themes of his transcendental project throughout the BT era. The third task is to show that Heidegger’s account of categorical logic can be extended to include an account of mathematical logic. Although Heidegger only offers a hermeneutics of categorical logic, the import of his discussion runs deeper, and informs an extended account of logical form that aims to show how any system of logic is possible. The first half of this chapter thus concerns what I argue is the implicit account of mathematical logic in Heidegger’s hermeneutics of categorical logic. Given the central place of truth in both traditional logic and Heidegger’s architectonic, discussions of truth in contemporary philosophy of logic become particularly interesting for our discussion, and we can highlight the point of contact between Heidegger and contemporary philosophy of logic by comparing his account of truth with Tarski’s semantic definition of truth as satisfaction.

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It becomes clear then that Heidegger’s reputation as an irrationalist must be reassessed in order to confirm his relationship with logic. A survey of the secondary literature devoted to Heidegger’s discussions of logic reveals a tendency to distort his claims by systematically misinterpreting his assumptions and goals. Beginning with the logical positivists’ uncharitable response and continuing to the present, commentators have too often seen a critical reaction to various overestimations of the scope of logic as a denial that logic has any real scope whatsoever. The tendency to portray Heidegger as an irrationalist tends to eclipse his actual account of the foundations of logic. The second part of this chapter thus focuses on Heidegger’s reputation as an irrationalist and the case for reassessment given the foregoing account. Here we will have arrived at a point from which we can look back on that account to discern noteworthy features of Heidegger’s overall relationship to logic in the BT era more clearly.

4.1 Mathematical Logic Including a brief discussion of number as derivative of temporality in ¶¶80–1 of BT, Heidegger mentions mathematics and number infrequently, despite an early interest in the ideality of number and an awareness and appreciation of developments in Fregean logic.1 Beginning in his earliest writings and continuing through the BT era, Heidegger implies repeatedly that (i) mathematical logic’s advances do not exempt it from the explanatory problems he thinks attend grounding metaphysics in logical form, and that (ii) whatever grounds categorical logic grounds mathematical logic as well. In his earliest published writing, Heidegger identifies the formalism of mathematical logic as insufficient for the task of grounding logic: [L]ogistics does not go beyond mathematics and is not able to reach genuine logical problems . . . the limit lies in the application of mathematical symbols and concepts (in general the concept of function), which covers up the meanings and meaning-shifts of judgements. (NFL, 1912:42) In the Habilitationsschrift he describes his neo-Kantian transcendental project as aimed at making possible ‘a systematic critique of the theory of judgement in mathematical logic’ that would ‘show how its formal character separates it from the vital problems concerning the sense of judgements with respect to their structure and conceptual significance’

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(KDS, 1915:174n). In 1928 he speaks of mathematical logic as ‘a new distortion of the problem’ of attempting to ground metaphysics in logic (MFL, 1928b:106/131–2), and in 1935, in Die Frage nach dem Ding [What is a Thing?] after the turn from radical metaphysics, Heidegger continues to identify ‘mathematical methods’ as variations on a formal inferential theme grounded in ontology, indicating that he maintains this view throughout his entire early period (1935b:122). However, Heidegger says very little systematically to justify implication (i), and still less to justify implication (ii). Although he marks a distinction between logical and grammatical form in his earliest writings, he says little about what distinguishes logical form in different systems of logic, and how they are nevertheless unified as distinct but related possibilities for formal inference. In order to justify the claim that Heidegger implicitly seeks to ground mathematical logic, we must then show how Heidegger can accommodate both the diversity and unity of logical form, and what this means for a hermeneutics of mathematical logic. Doing so requires extending the hermeneutics of categorical logic in ways I argue Heidegger would intend, while making two concessions to the principle of charity. The first is that we do not hold Heidegger to the erroneous claim that mathematical logic is a ‘theory of judgement’. Mathematical logic is rather a theory of open and closed sentences in deductive object languages. If we amend Heidegger’s claim to mean not that open and closed sentences are examples of judgement, but that whatever grounds the possibility of judgement in categorical logic grounds the possibility of open and closed sentences in mathematical logic, then we will have maintained the import of Heidegger’s claim while rendering it consistent with mathematical logic. The second concession is that we ignore Heidegger’s early support of logicism (1912: 42–3) – an interesting overestimation of the scope of logic on Heidegger’s part – since Gödel’s incompleteness theorem shows that mathematics is not grounded in logic, and Heidegger’s implicit hermeneutics of mathematical logic does not require logicism.

4.1.1 Systems of Logic One might argue that, since he only explicitly discusses Aristotelian logic, Heidegger has nothing to say about mathematical logic. While traditional logic conceives of logical analysis as including an analysis of the grammar of natural language, mathematical language does not, and whereas traditional logic emphasizes logic’s normative force for discursive thought,

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mathematical logic concerns a class of formally deductive object languages, such that a discussion of the normative constraints on discursive thought is extraneous. And since traditional logic does not clearly distinguish the concept of inference as a deductive rule from the concept of inference with respect to preserving truth-value, Heidegger’s account of traditional logic is largely irrelevant to discussions of issues such as soundness and completeness. Presently I want to address the first two objections and argue that if we focus on Heidegger’s argument for the claim that assertoric language is apophantic, we must conclude that Heidegger would intend his remarks about the intelligibility of traditional logic to apply to mathematical logic as well. A Fregean criticism of Aristotelian logic echoed by Carnap, Russell, and others is that it confuses the grammatical rules of ordinary language with the rules of quantificational symbolization. Frege argues that subject– predicate analysis is trivial and uninformative with respect to the content of a judgement, and that only a logic of functions can adequately express judgeable content.2 Carnap and Russell thus argue that subject–predicate analysis cannot express the logical form of relations – for example, S is greater than P does not entail P is less than S, strictly speaking – and so is unsuited to express the serial ordering necessary for mathematical logic.3 Since logical form cannot be reduced to grammatical form, subject–predicate analysis is unnecessary for logical analysis, and insufficient for a genuinely robust logical analysis. According to this line of thought, Heidegger confronts a system of logic that is already irrelevant at the time of his writing, rendering his criticisms irrelevant to discussions of mathematical logic. We have already seen that Heidegger argues in his early writings that grammatical form in natural language is not co-extensive with logical form. It is reasonable to expect him to accept that categorical logic is a weaker formal calculus than Fregean logic, since it is limited by the constraints of natural grammar. Consider the following: (i) Snow is white. (ii) ∀x(Sx ⊃ Wx) (Where Sx means x is snow and Wx means x is white). Although (i) and (ii) are not identical expressions – (i) is a sentence in natural language and (ii) is a closed sentence from a predicate-logic PL – they nevertheless articulate the same intelligible unity, that snow is white. However, PL is a more expressively powerful system of logic than a syllogistic logic in English, since it does not restrict logical form to the grammar of natural language. Frege’s earliest criticisms of Aristotelian

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logic remain relevant: mathematical logic can exhibit a brevity and disambiguation lacking in Aristotelian logic because it restricts logical form not to the grammar of natural language but to the requirements for clarification of conceptual/judgeable content.4 Consider Frege’s example:5 (iii) The Greeks defeated the Persians. (iv) The Persians were defeated by the Greeks. Since the only logical form it recognizes is subject–predicate form, Aristotelian logic must treat (iii) and (iv) as distinct judgements, since the subject in the former is part of the predicate in the latter, and the subject in the latter is part of the predicate in the former. But the distinction is merely rhetorical, since either judgement may be substituted for the other without loss of truth-value. A logic of multi-place predicates that adequately expresses relations thus expresses that content with brevity and clarity: (v) Dgp (Where Dxy means x defeats y, g represents Greeks, and p represents Persians) Another Fregean example illustrates the ambiguous conception of logical form in Aristotelian logic. Imagine a variant of ordinary language that makes use of only one grammatical predicate, is a fact.6 Consider the following expressions: (vi) The Red Sox defeated the Yankees is a fact. (vii) Grass is green is a fact. In Aristotelian logic judgeable content ostensibly arises from the combination of a grammatical subject and predicate. But in (vi) and (vii) the predicate is inessential. The expressions are distinct from one another because they exhibit distinct judgeable contents, but since they share the same predicate those contents are expressed only in the subjects and do not arise from a combination of subject and predicate. Since it allows meaningless predicates, Aristotelian logic can obscure the fact that content is judgeable irrespective of the grammar of natural language. That an expression comprises a grammatical subject and predicate is inessential so long as logical form is unambiguous. Mathematical logic disambiguates logical form not only by introducing multi-place predicates, but also by introducing quantifiers with bound variables, and identity. Consider

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that, although (viii) and (ix) ostensibly have different meanings, the difference is ambiguous: (viii) Every dog fears some cat. (ix) There is a cat every dog fears. Whereas the scope of the quantifier for Every dog is wide in (viii), it is narrow in (ix). This difference affects the logical consequence of the two sentences, since (viii) logically follows from (ix), but (ix) does not logically follow from (viii). Using identity plus quantifiers with bound variables within the scope of other quantifiers, we can make the distinction unambiguous: (x) ∀x[Dx ⊃ ∃y(Cy ∧ Fxy)] (Where Dx means x is a dog, Cy means y is a cat, and Fxy means x fears y) (xi) ∃y[Cy ∧ ∀x(Dx ⊃ Fxy)] (Where Cy means y is a cat, Dx means x is a dog, and Fxy means x fears y) This is not so say that syllogistic logic is without merit, but to point out its comparatively weak expressive capacity. Grammatical form in natural language may be treated deductively, but it does not exhaust the possibilities for logical form, such that any calculus constructed according to grammatical form lacks the expressive capacity of a calculus constructed according to a conception of logical form as function. And the greater the expressive sophistication of a deductive calculus, the greater is its realization of the regulative ideal of formalism, of attempting to say with universality and necessity what can be said in principle about objects and their properties. So while all systems of logic articulate the inferential structure of the world, they do so with more or less expressive sophistication, using a variety of available logical forms. Although Heidegger distinguishes logical form from grammatical form in his earliest writings, he says very little about the plurality and unity of logical forms in the history of logic. It is possible that Heidegger’s reference to ‘the theory of judgement in mathematical logic’ simply means that all logical form, including the formalism of mathematical symbolization, is reducible to categorical form, and such a view is consistent with his early support of logicism. J. N. Mohanty points to Heidegger’s claim that mathematical logic cannot raise problems of judgement from traditional metaphysics and logic regarding assertion, negation, copula, predication,

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and truth.7 But this view of mathematical logic is incorrect, since functional form is not reducible to categorical form, and Gödel’s incompleteness theorem precludes reducing mathematics to logic. Mohanty also points out that for Frege predication is an internal structure of thought, not judgement.8 Judgement is the recognition of the truth-value of a thought, where the predicative structure affirmed or denied in judgement is located in the judgeable content of the thought itself. No copula is necessary in Fregean logic, since subject and predicate are not bound in judgement but in the thought itself. This explains the unity of the proposition better, since the is of assertion is in the predicate, and function and argument are ‘made for each other’, and so do not require a copula for their unity. 9 Mohanty suggests Heidegger did not find these solutions satisfactory, but it seems just as likely that he was not fully aware of them.10 In any case, we learn more about the plausibility of Heidegger’s view of logic if we apply the principle of charity and assume that Heidegger recognizes a distinction among various logical forms, and ask how he might have explained both their plurality and unity as grounded in temporality. Since Heidegger thinks the is of assertion is not fundamentally a copula, the original predicative unity is not in the judgement but in its object. Frege too thinks predicative unity is located in the object, but in the object as thought. The predicative unity of the object and its properties in a hermeneutically grounded categorical logic, and the predicative unity of the thought in Fregean logic, are then unified for Heidegger as kinds of predicative unity for logical form, grounded in temporality. Both All P are Q and ∀x(Px ⊃ Qx) articulate a prior unity, but whereas Frege thinks that unity is in the thought, Heidegger argues that the predicative-functional ‘thought’ is derivative and grounded in temporality. Heidegger’s hermeneutics of judgement and apóphansis is a hermeneutics of predication, but he concludes that predication is not fundamentally a feature of judgement, but of the temporal structure of worldhood. By interpreting Heidegger’s position as recognizing a plurality of logical forms, we can discharge the requirement that logical form be reducible to categorical form, and observe how the resulting account of mathematical logic coheres with the rest of Heidegger’s account of logic and lógos. Mathematical logic is a development in the tradition of constructing formal calculi in order to say with the utmost generality and necessity what can be said about any object and its properties. What Heidegger argues about the allegedly derivative nature of language, logic, and knowledge can apply as well to mathematical logic. Systems of logic arise from the recognition of formal possibilities that allow us to extend our inferential projects,

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and we recognize these possibilities simply by using them, available and intelligible as they are. We articulate the formal possibilities explicitly as principles, and they inform the metatheoretical stance in the construction of formal object languages in mathematical logic. Mathematical and syllogistic logic are not different in kind on this view, but different with respect to their formal expressive sophistication. They are unified as approximations of the regulative ideal of a language that is sufficient for a linguistic model or theory of the inferential structure of the world, grounded in an understanding of being as consequential. A phenomenology of logic as hermeneutically grounded shows that we refer to the same general formal and normative possibilities no matter what system of logic we use, allowing different strategies for quantification, conjunction, inference, etc. Discursion requires thought and language to exhibit entities, and thought and language are dispartative and so conceptual and inferential, since they use concepts as rules for quantifying over massive disjunctions, for example, X is a dog iff X has properties Y (where Y can accommodate important ‘counterexamples’). Thought and language are intelligible precisely as discursive models of a part of the world. Logic is language/thought as explicitly inferential model, articulating inferential possibilities of the world that are intelligible in the light of Dasein’s activity of drawing inferences. All systems of logic in themselves are derivative, although they articulate a fundamental normativity and rationality of worldhood itself. If assertoric language means any language in which conceptual content is articulated in expressions that are submitted to the tribunal of truth, then mathematical logic is assertoric language. Two important conclusions follow for Heidegger. One is that mathematical logic is apophantic: it seeks to articulate objects and their properties just as they are, or are defined, and so it presupposes that objects are uncovered. Assertoric language articulates the intelligible unity of the world, and the greater the expressive power of a system of logic, the greater is its ability to articulate that intelligible structure. A further conclusion is that assertoric language need not be natural language, and so an articulation of being in assertoric language need not include an inflection of to be. Mathematical symbolization is then a sophisticated ‘artificial’ language that articulates the inferential structure of the world. So while ∀x(Sx ⊃ Wx) does not literally contain an inflection of to be, it nevertheless can exhibit the same unity articulated in Snow is white. That snow is white constitutes a range of causal and inferential possibilities that may be articulated using various more or less sophisticated linguistic strategies, one of which is the strategy of constructing open object languages using formal and informal metatheoretical concepts. So

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while it is true that Heidegger restricts the majority of his comments on logic to subject–predicate analysis, he need not, since his goal is to give an account of how assertoric language derives its intelligibility from its articulation of the intelligible unity of its object, and he could argue that his comments apply equally well to mathematical logic. 4.1.2 Hermeneutics and Metatheory In mathematical logic, metatheory is a metalinguistic discussion of a class of artificial, deductive object languages. Whereas an object language uses various stipulations, a metalanguage is the metadiscussion of an object language in which those stipulations are proved. The metatheoretical perspective is a theory of an object language that the object language itself cannot explicitly articulate without producing a number of antinomies. In order to meet the demands of formal correctness, an object language must not itself allow descriptions or proofs of its semantic constitution. Rather, that task falls to an object language’s metatheory. Thus the metalanguage is, to use Tarskian language, ‘essentially richer’ than the object language it studies: it contains every formula of the object-language(s) it describes, as well as expressions that cannot be asserted in the object language. The metalanguage comprises both natural language and the language of mathematics, and insofar as it includes natural language it allows a metadiscussion of concepts such as truth in two important and related senses. One is that it allows for a discussion of the formal correctness and material adequacy of the constitutive elements of an object language à la Tarski. The other is that metatheory must also allow a comparatively informal discussion in which we formalize concepts that are initially informal and ambiguous. Tarski thus seeks to formalize an informal, colloquial, and ‘common-sense’ notion of truth as correspondence. One conceives, organizes, discusses, and stipulates the object language in the language of metatheory, drawing on informal and formal notions in natural language and mathematics, particularly set theory. One typically constructs a predicate language PL by defining the symbols (sentence letters, connectives, parentheses, quantifiers, variables), formulae, and unique readability of PL, as well as concepts of satisfaction, validity, model, and proof theory, beginning with definitions of axioms and rules of inference. The semantics and proof theory must stipulate that a formula A of PL is deducible if and only if it is valid. Since it is in principle possible to construct models for sentences without regard to a proof theory, and to construct a proof theory without regard to model theory, two notions

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of implication – one guaranteed deductively and one guaranteed semantically – must be shown to be biconditionally related for PL to be complete. Soundness and completeness together ensure that, for any formula A and set of formulae Γ, A is deducible from Γ if and only if it follows logically from Γ. Truth becomes an important metatheoretical notion in large part because of the desirability of proving that deducibility entails semantic implication and vice versa. Mathematical logic is unique for our discussion in two important respects. One is that its formalism requires a distinction between orders of discussion, between the object language on the one hand and the metatheory in which one constructs and discusses the object language on the other. The issue of how a metadiscussion is at all possible is then a philosophical/ ’extra-logical’ problem, and we can speculate on what Heidegger could contribute to such a discussion. The other is that the two concepts of inference – inference according to a deductive rule and inference according to the preservation of truth in all models – must be shown to be biconditionally related in order for a language to be both sound and, if possible, complete. Nevertheless, Heidegger can argue that construction of an object language requires normative standards for metatheory itself, such that an object language articulates a more fundamental understanding of inference. Since Heidegger has offered an account of how a conception of logic as the normativity of discursive thought is possible, he could argue further that he has offered an account of how metatheoretical construction and discussion of artificial object languages is possible. Whereas the grammar of natural language is sufficient to articulate the inferential structure of the world in some contexts, it is insufficient to do so in others. The grammar of natural language alone cannot articulate all formal possibilities, such that more expressively powerful inferential languages must be constructed. Like Aristotelian logic, mathematical logic is logic in that it presupposes a metaphysics of truth. An issue is thus what Heidegger could say in more detail about discussions of truth in contemporary philosophy of logic. From Heidegger’s hermeneutical standpoint, the metalogical standpoint adopted in constructing an object language quietly presumes a transcendental authority that must be established elsewhere. Heidegger’s hermeneutics of categorical logic as grounded in the ontology of truth is his contribution to an explicitly transcendental project. Heidegger can broaden his discussion of inferential normativity as meaning structure to include any metatheoretical or transcendental position outside of a system of logic, for example, object languages, in the case of mathematical logic. The metatheoretical stance is typically conceived as a view from above, whereas

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Heidegger conceives it as a grounding in an understanding of being as consequence. The question of truth remains principal for several reasons. One is that truth is obviously an important issue in logic metatheory, and Heidegger offers an account of truth that constitutes a unique challenge to most traditional and contemporary views of it. Heidegger’s novel account of truth is also central to his philosophical project as a whole, connected as it is with the question of being. Since a discussion of truth addresses central issues in both the philosophy of logic and in Heideggerian philosophy, it is useful for initiating a discussion of Heidegger’s relevance to contemporary philosophy of logic. After some remarks on Heidegger’s account of truth and its relevance to metatheory in general, we can turn to discuss Tarski’s semantic definition of truth and a Heideggerian response. Truth is a central concept in categorical logic, since validity and soundness concern the ways in which judgements may be combined to produce arguments that exhibit certain forms regarding their ability to transfer truth from premises to conclusions. Kant articulates this conception of truth in the first Critique.11 The truth of a particular judgement ostensibly concerns the content of that judgement, such that a general standard of truth must be valid for all possible objects of knowledge, and so must range over all the varying contents of judgements that we take to constitute knowledge. However, a conception of truth as a criterion regarding the matter of knowledge is contradictory, since no general rule for judgements can itself articulate the content of every judgement. A general standard of truth must then be merely formal.12 As a formal standard for judgements, truth is a necessary but insufficient condition for knowledge, but as a necessary and universal condition for knowledge it is a fundamental presupposition of logic conceived as the normative constraints on discursive thought. Frege too argues that truth is the most fundamental presupposition of logic: The word ‘true’ can be used to indicate such a goal for logic [an idea of its nature], just as can ‘good’ for ethics and ‘beautiful’ for aesthetics . . . Like ethics, logic can also be called a normative science. How must I think in order to reach the goal, truth? . . . We must assume that the rules for our thinking and for our holding something to be true are prescribed by the laws of truth. The former are given along with the latter. Consequently we can also say: logic is the science of the most general laws of truth.13 Frege views logic as that normative discipline that analyses conceptual content, such that all true sentences share the essential meaning the true, while

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all false sentences share the essential meaning the false.14 Truth is fundamental, such that it cannot be defined, strictly speaking, since every definition of truth presupposes the truth of the definition itself, resulting in an infinite regress.15 Frege’s assessment of logic recapitulates the AristotelianKantian thesis that truth concerns form and not matter: ‘We expect logic to give us the answer to this question [how to attain truth], but we do not demand of it that it should go into what is peculiar to each branch of knowledge and its subject matter.’16 Like Aristotelian logic, Frege’s Begriffsschrift treats the issue of truth as fundamental because it treats truth as fundamental: without truth there is no logic. Discussions of truth in contemporary philosophy of logic are complicated by the fact that although the issue of truth is usually regarded as fundamental, truth is not always regarded so. Deflationism sees truth as something that must be explained away, since on this account is true is not considered a substantive predicate. Deflationism thus treats truth as a fundamental issue only because attempts at a substantive theory of truth must be rebutted, but it does not treat truth as a fundamental concept. Since truth is not explicable in formal object languages, discussion of it is relegated to metatheoretical discourse, perhaps as mere speculation, and so ever remains a candidate for philosophical elimination in various quarters. Rather than examine a variety of theories of truth in order to discuss how Heidegger might address each one, I want to suggest that all theories of truth attempt to explain various prominent characteristics of the phenomenon of truth that might be described as ‘generic’, and that Heidegger has resources to address these characteristics. By ‘generic’ characteristics of the phenomenon of truth I have in mind what Crispin Wright refers to as commonly accepted ‘platitudes’ that every account of truth seeks to explain, and that are compatible even with contradictory accounts of truth: ‘A truth predicate . . . is one which satisfies a small set of basic principles – most centrally, certain platitudes linking truth with assertion and negation.’17 One of Wright’s contentions is that these platitudes constitute a minimal conception of truth, ‘from which we have to be shown that we ought to move’ in order to advance a substantive theory of truth.18 A brief look at Wright’s discussion of truth platitudes is helpful in order to gain a clearer view of the phenomena Heidegger seeks to explain in his discussions of alétheia, and why it is that he thinks that all discussions of truth presuppose and articulate a conception of truth as uncovering. The first platitude is that to assert something is to assert something as true.19 This platitude motivates contradictory accounts of truth. On the one hand, correspondence theories hold that to assert Snow is white is equivalent

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to asserting ‘Snow is white’ is true, because the truth of the assertion lies in the agreement of the assertion to a particular set of objects. On the other hand, deflationism holds that what explains the platitude is the emptiness and therefore redundancy of the truth predicate. Heidegger would argue that we are confronted with the platitude at all because connecting assertibility with the usage of a truth predicate, however minimal, is an attempt to articulate the apophantic character of assertion. Even though they differ concerning the robustness of the predicate true, correspondence and deflationist theories of truth presuppose that the predicate is intended to exhibit an object just as it is (or is defined), and both tend to characterize truth as fundamentally linguistic. Since Heidegger recharacterizes apóphansis in terms of uncovering, he argues that the truth predicate serves to exhibit an entity just as it is uncovered, and so recharacterizes truth as fundamentally pre-linguistic. Although they may differ in certain respects, traditional accounts of truth tend to treat truth as fundamentally linguistic, and Heidegger has offered an account of how a linguistic conception of truth is possible and justified in its scope. Another platitude is that truth valuation is bivalent, and so concerns a Negation Equivalence: P is not true if and only if it is true that ~P.20 In metatheory bivalence is introduced using ~, and includes several steps. In stipulating the rules for well-formed formulae one stipulates that if A is a formula, so is ~A. In constructing a mechanism for assigning valuation, one then stipulates, if A is a sentence, then v(~A) = True if v(A) = False, and False if v(A) = True. Heidegger would argue that this fact about negation and its articulation using ~ indicates its fundamental importance for all of discursive thought: to think at all is to articulate differentiation, and to articulate differentiation is both to affirm and deny that various things are the case. As we have seen, Heidegger argues that negation is fundamental for discursive thought because discursive thought articulates being as fundamentally differentiated in its unity. The bivalence of discursive thought is possible only as an articulation of the bimodal character of being. Thus the stipulation for an object language that if A is a sentence, then v(~A) = True if v(A) = False, and False if v(A) = True is a refinement of that articulation in a unique linguistic context. Every discursive articulation of truth and negation structurally relates the two because being is characterized by differentiation, and differentiation makes intelligible structure itself possible. A third platitude is that to be true is to correspond to the facts. ‘Correspond’ should be interpreted non-technically, although it does indicate the intuitive motivation for consideration of a more technical usage of the term.21 Whereas the first platitude emphasizes the apophantic character of

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the assertion, this platitude emphasizes the apophantic character of that which the assertion is intended to exhibit. It thus seems platitudinous itself that the truth of the assertion is connected with the character of the object it is intended to exhibit, and Heidegger’s account of judgement is intended to explain the connection. The apophantic character of language is made possible by the apophantic character of alétheia: something shows itself only as a this or a that, exhibiting a unique as-structure that is at least minimally amenable to discursive articulation. Importantly related is the last platitude, that truth is not reducible to justification, since one can be justified in asserting what is false and unjustified in asserting what is true. Although platitudes one and three indicate that truth and justification are connected, truth is not reducible to justification, even under ideal epistemic conditions.22 Heidegger can maintain Wright’s claim that truth and justification are intimately related yet not equivalent. Heidegger argues that alétheia is intimately connected with the ontological conditions that make discursive justification possible, since uncovering is characterized by discourse: whatever is uncovered is in principle sufficiently scrutable and amenable to discursive articulation in an interpretation. But Heidegger does not claim that alétheia and discourse are equivalent. This would entail that whatever shows itself exhibits unambiguous justification for an interpretation, such that Dasein is discursively infallible. Heidegger argues rather that uncovering is always more or less ambiguous, since Dasein uncovers a world always in a unique historical context characterized by Dasein’s spatial and temporal limits. That Dasein projects possibilities indicates this finite character, as it does that Dasein projects horizonal ranges of possibilities that are more or less perspicuous and available. Furthermore, the characteristic ambiguity of the is of assertion exhibits the characteristic ambiguity of uncovering: the ambiguity of being-in-the-world itself guarantees that interpretation is inherently perilous, since discursive articulation just is the ever-uncertain attempt to exhibit what is uncovered, and what is uncovered is always to some extent ambiguous. Error and falsity characterize uncovering, such that discursive articulation carries with it platitudinous notions about truth as the ‘accurate’ exhibition of what is the case. Such notions are regulative for adducing justification for assertions that might be considered ‘accurate’, but truth so conceived is not equivalent to justification itself. Heidegger would thus claim that the metatheoretical stance in mathematical logic represents a refinement of the general project of discursively articulating the inferential structure of the world. He would thus also argue that metatheory presupposes a normativity for discursive thought according to

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which stipulations for an object language are formulated, and that he has offered an account of the origins of that normativity. 4.1.3 Disclosedness and Satisfaction Tarski’s account of truth represents the most significant attempt to offer a theory of truth that both meets the formal requirements of formal object languages and attempts to capture the metatheoretical significance of the term true. While it is not monolithic, it does represent a limited orthodoxy to the extent that most philosophers of logic either adopt something like his account or respond to it while offering an alternative. Tarski claims that his semantic definition of truth is not intended to exclude the possibility of any other conception of truth.23 However, he argues that ‘colloquial’ or natural languages are insufficient for offering a strictly formal definition of truth, since they are closed and so entail inconsistencies such as the paradoxes of the liar and of heterological words.24 And while in places he seems indifferent to the issue of whether or not there can be a ‘right’ conception of truth that is informal but substantial, he questions the notion, is sceptical of its prospects, and does not see what would be at stake in such a dispute. Tarski’s conditions for a ‘satisfactory’ definition of truth for formally deductive languages are that such a definition be ‘materially adequate’ and ‘formally correct’: it must accurately capture the meaning of the term true, and it must do so in a way that meets the demands of formal correctness.25 However, he does not propose to engage in a conceptual debate over the ‘proper’ meaning of true, and he does not consider it a criterion of a satisfactory definition of truth that such a definition ‘specify the meaning of a familiar word used to denote a novel notion’.26 Rather, Tarski seeks a formally correct definition of truth that articulates what he thinks is an already common conception of truth, and so seeks ‘to catch hold of the actual meaning of an old notion’.27 He thus seeks to offer a definition of truth that meets the formal requirements of a class of artificial languages while articulating what he thinks is the central conception of truth motivating any metatheoretical discussion of truth. Tarski thus limits the extension of the term true to assertoric sentences of a specific language, and so does not refer to ‘psychological phenomena’ (judgements, beliefs), ‘physical objects’ (specific linguistic expressions), or ‘ideal entities’ (propositions).28 Extending the usage of the predicate in theses ways is confusing and imprecise, and part of the project of attempting to solve the ‘philosophical

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problem of truth’ that he thinks is dubious.29 And since formal correctness concerns classes of symbols ‘of similar form’, the terms expression and sentence must refer not to individual physical inscriptions or utterances, but to ‘classes of inscriptions [or utterances] of similar form’.30 A satisfactory definition of truth is thus more accurately conceived as a satisfactory definition of true sentence.31 An intuition Tarski seeks to articulate is that truth is a semantic notion, and so concerns the relation of reference between linguistic expressions and the objects they denote and describe.32 He explicitly claims that a formally correct and materially adequate definition of truth must articulate Aristotelian correspondence, such that the formal semantics of artificial object languages must adequately articulate what he thinks is an obvious, orthodox, and intuitive sense of reference.33 Tarski thus conceives of material adequacy precisely as meeting certain conditions deriving from orthodox, informal, and ‘colloquial’ conceptions, and it is felicitous to think of formal semantics and formal definitions of semantic concepts such as truth as articulating these informal conceptions in the context of meeting additional, formal requirements. That Tarski sees the need to articulate informal conceptions of semantics and truth at all is noteworthy, since one can in principle construct a calculus without concepts that articulate informal notions of reference to ‘objects’. These are concepts of world, and are not mentionable or definable in any of the object languages under discussion. Since a materially adequate definition of truth must articulate ‘the classical conception of truth’, it must entail all equivalences of the form (T): (T) X is true iff p (where X is the name of a true sentence and p is the sentence itself).34 An example would be: Snow is white is true iff snow is white. (T) is a sentential schema intended to formalize the conception of truth as correspondence, and is ‘adequate’ if all equivalences of the form (T) ‘follow from it’.35 However (T) is not itself a definition of truth, since strictly speaking the definition of truth must be the conjunction of all instances of the form (T). Since it is possible for a language to exhibit an infinite number of such instances, a satisfactory definition of truth must be recursively constructed.36

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To ensure formal correctness, Tarski’s definition of truth must be formally semantic. Since formal semantics is complicated by logical antinomies that are entailed by semantically closed languages such as natural language, material adequacy is insufficient for a satisfactory definition of truth. The source of the antinomies is the premise that we can formulate a satisfactory definition of truth in a semantically closed language, in which one both uses and mentions semantic concepts such as reference. We thus mark a distinction between languages of different logical orders, such that the structure and semantic properties of one language is specified in another language that has the first language as its subject matter.37 A semantically open language is then the subject matter of an ‘essentially richer’ metalanguage.38 Since formulating the requirement that a definition of truth must meet the demand of material adequacy takes place in the metalanguage, the vocabulary of the metalanguage comprises not only whatever formal languages are necessary to construct a particular object language, but also various pre-conceptions and conditions such that ‘[t]he vocabulary of the metalanguage is to a large extent determined by previously stated conditions under which a definition of truth will be considered materially adequate’.39 The metalanguage must therefore be richer than the object language in a way that concerns Tarski’s requirement that a satisfactory definition of truth entails all equivalences of the form (T). X represents the name of a sentence that is used in one language, but that is mentioned in the language in which the name of the sentence is given, and so it represents an expression of a metalanguage that names a sentence in an object language. Since a semantically open language is one that does not both use and name/mention certain (perhaps all) sentences, X stands for the name of a sentence in the object language, and p stands for a sentence in the metalanguage that makes the same assertion as the sentence named by X. The metalanguage must therefore ‘be rich enough to provide for possibilities of constructing a name for every sentence of the object-language’.40 A metalanguage must then include ‘variables of a higher logical type than those of the object-language’, such that variables in a metalanguage may be satisfied by expressions containing variables in an object language.41 We can then define truth in terms of the formally semantic concept of satisfaction.42 It is important to note that while satisfaction is itself a semantic concept, since it concerns the relation between expressions and objects, it is not defined in terms of other semantic concepts. The criterion for determining which sequence of objects satisfies an expression depends on the individual expression and the sequence of objects that satisfies it. Thus,

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x is greater than y or x is equal to y is satisfied if and only if one of the disjuncts x is greater than y or x is equal to y is satisfied, while x is white is satisfied if and only if something is white. Truth-value is defined for relevant object languages as satisfaction: ‘[A] sentence is true if it is satisfied by all objects, and false otherwise.’43 Satisfaction is defined recursively by stipulating which objects satisfy simple open sentences, and then stipulating the criteria for satisfying compound open sentences. Since satisfaction is defined differently for each sentence depending on which feature of the world is being described,44 and since it is the world that determines what is described, any definition of truth in terms of satisfaction must stipulate that to predicate of a sentence that it is true we must refer to that sentence by name while asserting that it and all equivalent sentences stand in the same relation to the world, and so are satisfied by the same sequence of objects. This is just to say that, according to Tarski’s definition of satisfaction, an adequate definition of truth must entail all instances of (T). Tarski concludes that ‘the conditions for the material adequacy of the definition determine uniquely the extension of the term “true”’.45 The only conception of truth available to a formally deductive language is thus one that is constructed so as to be co-extensional with satisfaction.46 Satisfaction is then the central concept of a formal semantics that allows construction of various semantic laws for a class of languages.47 Tarski’s treatment of logical implication illustrates how his definition of truth as satisfaction ostensibly makes other semantic concepts possible. The need for an account of logical implication arises because ‘transformations of a purely structural kind’ – purely deductive implications or ‘transformations in which only the external structure of sentences is involved’48 – are insufficient for the class of formal languages they are intended to facilitate. We possess an informal conception of implication that includes both implication according to structural rules and implication according to valuation, but we require a conception of implication that is both materially adequate and formally correct. We have two concepts of implication that must be biconditionally related if we are to construct a language that is sound and complete.49 The concept of implication required is semantic, since it concerns implication on the basis of reference to objects, and can be formalized on the basis of the semantic definition of truth as satisfaction. Given a definition of satisfaction we define model, on the basis of which we define logical implication.50 Assuming that in the language under discussion we can substitute variables for corresponding constants in order to obtain open sentences from corresponding closed sentences, we can obtain a class of open sentences L’ from the class of closed sentences L. Any sequence of

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objects satisfying every open sentence of L’ is thus a model of L. We thus arrive at a definition of logical implication: The sentence X follows logically from the sentences of the class K if and only if every model of the class K is also a model of the sentence X.51 We may then define a class of sentences as contradictory if there is no model of it, and analytical if every sequence of objects is a model of it. The definition guarantees that from true sentences only true sentences may be inferred, and that a sentence is logically implied not on the basis of its meaning but on the basis of its form. And since the definition ‘agrees quite well with common usage [of the term logical implication]’, the definition is not only formally correct but materially adequate as well.52 Tarski claims to be indifferent to the question, ‘What is the right conception of truth?’ and claims that he does not consider his semantic conception of truth ‘the “right” or indeed the “only possible” one’. But he goes on to ‘confess’ that he does not understand ‘what is at stake in such disputes’, as ‘the problem itself is so vague that no definite solution is possible’.53 This passage is curious in that it begins with an expression of indifference towards the issue of whether there is a meaningful but non-semantic conception of truth, but ends with an expression of scepticism concerning its intelligibility. Later in the same essay Tarski sharpens his scepticism to an apparent rejection of the plausibility of a non-semantic conception of truth: ‘In general, I do not believe that there is such a thing as “the philosophical problem of truth”.’54 This is noteworthy, since Tarski claims that material adequacy principally involves articulating ‘the intuitive content of that [conception of truth] of Aristotle’.55 Assuming Tarski is sincere in his claim that he offers a limited definition of truth for a class of artificial languages, and so is indifferent towards the issue of whether or not there can be a robust philosophical conception of truth, his ambivalence towards the prospects for a robust philosophical theory of truth is compatible with Heidegger’s account of truth as disclosedness. Insofar as Heidegger argues that every linguistic conception of truth presupposes a more fundamental conception of truth as uncovering, he offers a robust philosophical theory of truth that includes an account of how a limited conception of truth as satisfaction is possible. Tarski seeks to formalize an informal conception of truth as correspondence, but he does not on this view presuppose any robust philosophical account of truth that might explain how such a limited conception of truth is possible. A philosophical theory of truth that includes an account of how a limited conception of truth as satisfaction is possible must be viewed as relevant to Tarski’s discussion of truth, and Heidegger offers just such an account of truth. On this Heideggerian view, the structure of an object language – its consistency, compactness,

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soundness, and completeness – is stipulated according to more general conditions that make metalinguistic discussion possible. But since he thinks every system of logic presupposes a metaphysics of truth, Heidegger would obviously challenge Tarski’s claim that he has no metaphysical commitments, and would claim to have given an account of the normativity of discursive thought necessary for any metatheoretical stance, and which formal semantics presupposes. Heidegger would respond to Tarski’s admission that the construction of formally deductive languages articulates more primitive notions by arguing that formal semantics is only possible as an articulation of formal possibilities of the world itself. An account of truth as satisfaction is then only possible given a more fundamental concept of truth as disclosedness. Heidegger can grant that Tarski’s definition of truth is legitimate for artificial deductive languages, and offer an argument for how that legitimacy is possible, but must dismiss Tarski’s scepticism regarding the prospects for a robust philosophical account of truth. Not only can we articulate an informal yet substantive conception of truth by clarifying the metaphysical foundations of discursive thought, but only a philosophical account of truth as disclosedness can adequately articulate truth as such, and all accounts of truth presuppose a metaphysics of truth as disclosedness. Tarski leaves open the possibility that there is a philosophically substantive account of truth that his semantic account of truth presupposes in some fashion, and Heidegger is poised to address Tarski’s scepticism regarding the likelihood of such an account of truth. If truth is grounded in disclosedness, and metatheory presupposes disclosedness, then both the criterion of material adequacy and its satisfaction are grounded in an understanding of being. And if discursion and its normativity are grounded in disclosedness, and formal semantics concerns the requirements for constructing linguistic models of objects, then both the criterion of formal correctness and its satisfaction are grounded in an understanding of being as well. There is then a tension between Tarski’s claim that his account of truth seeks ‘to catch hold of the actual meaning of an old notion’ of truth in a way that meets the demands of formal correctness,56 and his claim that he does not propose to engage in a conceptual debate over the proper meaning of the term true, and so does not consider it a criterion of a satisfactory definition of truth that such a definition ‘specify the meaning of a familiar word used to denote a novel notion’.57 There is then a tension between the requirements of formal correctness and material adequacy themselves, and it is reasonable to ask whether Tarski needs to articulate an informal notion of truth at all. It is in principle possible to construct a calculus without a

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metatheoretical discussion that explicitly articulates an informal notion of reference to the world. Tarski reduces truth to satisfaction, where satisfaction is defined according to membership in an ordered set. Languages constructed according to the demands of set theory are not descriptions of the world only if set theory is not part of the world. If by world one refers only to the empirical world, set theory is not part of the world. Heidegger claims however that the world is the full range of possibilities of being, including mathematical possibilities. If by world one means something like what Heidegger has in mind, then any language, including mathematical language, is a description of the world. A Heideggerian explanation for this tension in Tarski’s account of truth is thus that, although Tarski wants to construct a formal semantics, he is aware that semantics is only intelligible insofar as there is a world. Formal semantics presupposes meaning, and meaning is only possible insofar as a world is disclosed. Heidegger would thus argue that the requirement of material adequacy presupposes an understanding of being, since the principal criterion for material adequacy for Tarski is that his account of truth articulate the Aristotelian notion of correspondence by entailing all instances of (T), and Heidegger argues that the notion of correspondence is only possible on the basis of Dasein’s understanding of being. Heidegger would thus agree with Tarski’s claim that satisfaction assumes correspondence.58 Tarski reduces truth to satisfaction because he thinks only satisfaction can meet the demands of formal correctness while also entailing all instances of (T), where (T) schematizes the informal notion of correspondence that is the principal requirement for material adequacy. Heidegger argues that every notion of correspondence articulates formal possibilities of the world, and so would argue that any unique formalization of correspondence articulates concomitantly unique formal possibilities. To the extent that one seeks to construct artificial languages that represent a notion of truth, one seeks to ‘build in’ an articulation of being that renders that language intelligible beyond a mere game for manipulating symbols. Although a symbol game articulates possibilities of being, just as the rules of chess articulate various spatial and strategic possibilities, what renders the intelligibility of a symbol game logical is that the game articulates formal possibilities of the world. Heidegger would view the modesty of Tarski’s account of truth as a virtue, since it allows the possibility of adopting a semantic account of truth for artificial languages while still recognizing the fundamental character of truth as alétheia. A requirement of Tarski’s definition of truth is that the object language to which it applies not be

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closed, and so Tarski might charge Heidegger with attempting to give a definition of truth for natural language, rendering it inconsistent. But this criticism mischaracterizes Heidegger’s account of truth. Given that Heidegger does not seek to flout or revise the contents of any system of logic, he has no reason to deny that any attempt to give a rigorously formal definition of truth for natural language is futile. He does not offer a definition of truth for language per se, but an account of truth in terms of the understanding of being that precedes discursive articulation and makes assertoric language and a concomitantly derivative conception of truth as correspondence possible. Heidegger would thus claim that Tarski’s project is one of improving logistics. This is not to dismiss the importance of improving logical technique, but to claim that a meaningful discussion of the nature of logic includes an account of the ontological conditions that make logic possible. That there is a tension in Tarski’s account of truth between the demands of formal correctness and material adequacy suggests Heidegger would be ambivalent towards Tarski’s account of truth. On the one hand, he would view the modesty of Tarski’s account of truth as a virtue, since in principle it allows formulation of a substantive philosophical conception of truth à la Heidegger’s metaphysics of truth. On the other hand, Heidegger clearly does not want to restrict truth to language per se, and so he would view Tarski’s inclination to focus on the formal requirements of truth for artificial languages as an impediment to understanding the ontological character of truth. But so long as Tarski’s project is not construed as precluding a fundamental account of truth, Tarski’s success or failure at constructing a semantic definition of truth does not affect Heidegger’s success or failure at giving an account of the metaphysical presuppositions of any account of truth. Tarski’s semantic definition of truth for open languages is not wrong, but rather lacks an ontological foundation.

4.2 Irrationalism Given the foregoing interpretation of Heidegger’s account of logic and the central place of logical issues in his transcendental account of lógos, we are in a position to address a misleading interpretative tendency. It is useful to treat commentaries on Heidegger’s philosophy of logic according to how they stand on the issue of Heidegger’s alleged irrationalism. The logical positivists were the first to mischaracterize Heidegger as an irrationalist,

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and their arguments remain influential, with commentators typically looking to the later works for textual evidence. Unfortunately, the tendency to focus on the later writings also limits commentaries by those seeking to defend Heidegger against the charge of irrationalism as well. There is a tendency to treat Heidegger and ‘logic-based’ philosophy as two incompatible philosophical forces that first confront one another following the delivery of ‘What Is Metaphysics?’ (WIM, 1929d). One of the results of Chapter 1 is that we reject this thesis. Nevertheless, many commentators point to the following passage as the initial volley of a campaign to decry logic in the name of an incompatible fundamental ontology: If the power of the intellect in the field of inquiry into the nothing and into Being is shattered, then the destiny of the reign of ‘logic’ in philosophy is thereby decided. The idea of ‘logic’ itself disintegrates in the turbulence of a more original questioning. (1929d:105/14) Both unsympathetic and sympathetic commentators have referred to the passage as evidence for the claim that Heidegger seeks to discredit logic. But not only does Heidegger ‘confront’ logic much earlier, the ‘confrontation’ is never polemical in the sense of attempting to discredit logic. Heidegger does not seek to flout, revise, or eliminate logic in favour of ‘a more original questioning’, but to engage in ‘a more original questioning’ that shows how formal logic is at all possible. Heidegger’s goal is then to show the errors of certain philosophies of logic that in various ways overestimate the scope of logic, and so inhibit formulation of a more fundamental understanding of lógos. 4.2.1 Heidegger the Irrationalist The logical positivists were the first noteworthy respondents to Heidegger’s allegedly anti-logic ‘manifesto’, and they respond by accusing him of irrationalism due to a perhaps wilful misuse of language in WIM. They point to Heidegger’s idiom as the prime example of the alleged meaninglessness of metaphysical speculation, and argue, for example, that when Heidegger claims, ‘The nothing itself nihilates’ (1929d:103/11), he is guilty of the fallacy of reification, or ‘the superstition . . . that, to every word or phrase that can be the grammatical subject of a sentence, there must somehow be a real entity corresponding’.59 Consider the following sentence:60 (i) Nothing is outside.

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Consider this translation: (ii) ~∃x(Ox) (where Ox means x is outside) While in (i) Nothing is the grammatical subject of an English sentence, in (ii) it has been replaced by the negation of an existential quantifier. Nothing is not then a referring expression, since it does not pick out any object in any domain. When Heidegger asserts, ‘The nothing itself nihilates’, he asserts something like (iii): (iii) The nothing is outside. We might try to translate (iii) as follows: (iv) ∃x(Nx ∧ Ox) (where Nx means x is a nothing and Ox means x is outside) But in our attempt to render nothing as a referring expression in (iv) we have lost the meaning we must give it à la (ii). According to Carnap and Ayer, Heidegger is thus guilty of the fundamental error of assuming that because an expression can serve as a grammatical subject it must also refer to some object.61 Heidegger’s idiom is often novel at best, but the criticism sketched above misses its mark. Carnap and Ayer assume that Heidegger equates the nothing with negation as a logical operator, and that Heidegger wrongly concludes that it is nevertheless a referring expression. But as we have seen, a central conclusion in WIM is that the nothing is not only distinct from negation, but is what makes it possible. Further, his focus is not negation per se, but the ontological conditions necessary for articulating difference vis-à-vis negation. Another central conclusion is thus that the nothing is a modality of being, and Heidegger repeatedly argues that being is not an entity. If being is not itself a being, and if the nothing is a modality of being, then neither being nor the nothing can be a referring expression for Heidegger. Neither is the nothing the negation of the sum of all entities, but rather a feature of the unity of worldhood that transcends entities and makes their individuation as entities possible. His idiom is cryptic and difficult, but Heidegger is not guilty of the kind of irrationalism with which Carnap and Ayer charge him. Heidegger introduces novel locutions because he feels the need to construct an idiom that is sufficient for an analytic of Dasein, where ontology is the project of

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articulating being with conceptual clarity (1927b:25–8/6–8). Heidegger is not opposed to conceptual analysis, as his philosophical project is an attempt at a rigorous analysis of what he thinks are explanatorily fundamental concepts, and so is his attempt to make ontology conceptually rigorous. As we have seen, Heidegger is suspicious of the capacity of traditional philosophical locutions to clarify what he thinks are the fundamental concepts of philosophy. Rather than take the chance of having his analysis misunderstood due to the usage of commonplace locutions that he thinks do not do justice to the novel concepts he seeks to introduce or clarify, Heidegger either invents a new idiom or seeks to trace down the etymological roots of commonplace language to the philosophical insights that he thinks originally nourished them, but which he thinks have been obscured, perverted, or forgotten.62 So while Heidegger may be guilty of substituting one set of obfuscations for another, he should not on this account be accused of irrationalism. Once one understands what Heidegger means by locutions such as ‘the nothing’ and ‘nihilates’, one can see the extent to which Heidegger seeks to avoid irrationalism, consistent with his rebuttal in P to the charge that his view ‘decides against logic’, and that philosophy has no important place for logic, but is ‘only one interpretation of the essence of thought’ (1943:233/101). One might claim that, even if he does not seek the outright elimination of logic, Heidegger does seek to revise it drastically by introducing metaphysical concepts that distort logic’s character as the most formal and general of all disciplines. Evidence for the latter view is Heidegger’s claim that ‘logic should change; logic should become philosophical’, and ‘is founded upon metaphysics and is nothing other than the metaphysics of truth’. But as we have seen, Heidegger’s goal is not to remake logic but to establish its foundation and assess its scope. So although Heidegger seeks to ‘make logic philosophical’, he seeks not to remake logic itself but to remake the philosophy of logic. In pointing to the limitations of ‘mathematical’ logic with respect to its capacity to explain its own metaphysical foundations (‘genuine logical problems’), Heidegger marks a distinction between the content of logic or logistics (Logistik) and philosophical commentary on that content. Heidegger’s early appreciation of Russell and Whitehead is consistent with this distinction, and indicates his appreciation of ‘logistics’ in its proper sphere: ‘Bertrand Russell has developed the systematics and closure of logical problems in the most advanced way’ (1912:42). Albert Borgmann’s ‘Heidegger and Symbolic Logic’ (1968) builds on the logical positivists’ irrationalist interpretation, beginning with the assumption that fundamental ontology and logic are obviously ‘incompatible’, and

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includes an exegetical account of Heidegger’s motivations using his later works. Borgmann makes three claims. The first is that Heidegger only recognizes any significance for logic insofar as it is a problem to be solved, and so he explicitly seeks the elimination of logic: ‘To be sure, Heidegger grants to symbolic logic philosophical significance, but as a problem, not as a theory.’63 Two claims follow that are intended to explain Heidegger’s motivations. One is that Heidegger thinks that logic is the driving force behind modern ‘technicity’ and its dehumanizing effects. The other is that, since Heidegger thinks logic cannot ground itself, but requires something else for its foundation, it can have no regulative force in the examination of the ontological conditions that make logic possible. Such an examination, what Heidegger in later works calls Denken, must then be somehow alogical. Borgmann acknowledges that logical issues motivate much of Heidegger’s early writings, but claims that by BT Heidegger has formulated a dismissal of logic: ‘The judgement gets dissolved logistically into a system in which things are “co-ordinated” with one another; it becomes the object of a “calculus”; but it does not become a theme for ontological Interpretation’ (1927b:202/159). He refers to such passages as evidence for the claim that Heidegger seeks the elimination of logical thinking in favour of an allegedly more authentic form of discourse. While logic as Logistik serves well as a calculus of judgements, assertions, sentences, etc., it is inadequate and obfuscating as a criterion for meaningful philosophical discourse, and is incapable of interpreting or explaining itself.64 But the passage above implies a dismissal of logic only given the presupposition that Heidegger is antagonistic to logic. Heidegger does not claim that logical constraints are unnecessary for philosophical discourse, but simply that they are insufficient. He can consistently claim that philosophical discourse may not flout logical constraints while denying that the requirements of formalization are sufficient for philosophical discourse. Heidegger thus does not claim that logic is to be eliminated from ‘authentic’ philosophy, but merely that its requirements are insufficient to address the question of being. That logic is insufficient for the task of fundamental ontology does not entail that it is not necessary, that it has no regulative force. Dasein’s understanding of being is pre-logical, but ontology, which is discourse about Dasein’s understanding of being, is still subject to the normative constraints of logic. Borgmann equates a critical analysis of the foundations of logic with an attack on logic itself, and concludes that if understanding is pre-logical then it must be arational, and that if ontology examines the pre-logical then it is not itself bound by the laws of inference.

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He thus charges Heidegger with failing to mark a distinction between logic and philosophy of logic, arguing that because ‘[t]he technically most specific remarks speak of symbolic logic as a propositional calculus’, Heidegger therefore ‘does not clearly distinguish between the calculus and its interpretation’.65 But from the claim that Heidegger does not explicitly examine the content of logic or its metatheory it does not follow that Heidegger fails to mark a distinction between logic and philosophical commentary on it. Rather than argue that Heidegger criticizes any philosophy of logic that overestimates the scope of logic, Borgmann argues that Heidegger criticizes logic for overestimating itself: ‘Heidegger accuses symbolic logic of not being equal to its pretension that it is a philosophy of science.’66 Because Borgmann begins with the assumption that fundamental ontology and logic are incompatible, he is constrained to find a Heideggerian attack on logic itself, despite Heidegger’s comments to the contrary. His search for a Heideggerian attack on logic then leads him away from the writings of the BT era to look for an account in the later writings, particularly in Heidegger’s later discussions of logic’s alleged role in the development of technicity, uncontrolled technology and its dehumanizing effects.67 Borgmann therefore concludes that Heidegger has nothing constructive to say about the claim that logic always presupposes ‘a thoroughgoing reliance on the world’ in its semantics.68 Since Borgmann is bound to search for a Heideggerian attack on logic, he misconceives the attack on ‘worldlessness’ as an attack on logic itself, and not as an attack on the overestimation of logic that usually complements an overestimation of technology for its own sake. Edward Witherspoon has recently argued that, because Heidegger intentionally uses non-referring terms such as the nothing in order to demonstrate the limits of what can be thought, he espouses a kind of irrationalism. Witherspoon characterizes Heidegger’s misuse of language as an attempt to show or exhibit what cannot literally be expressed by strict reference. He thus maintains a thesis from Chapter Two that Heidegger uses non-referring terms such as the nothing in order to force his audience to see that fundamental alterity concerns differentiation among entities, and not between being and non-being. He also maintains the thesis that Heidegger argues that an original familiarity with ‘entities as a whole’ makes encountering individuated entities possible.69 But Witherspoon argues that Heidegger is wrong to think that he can intelligibly use non-referring expressions, since to exhibit without referring is ostensibly meaningless. Heidegger intentionally uses sentences that ‘appear to have cognitive content’, but which in fact do not, precisely in order to convey what he thinks is an

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essential insight. Because these so-called sentences are not really sentences at all, Heidegger’s idiom violates the most basic laws of logic (e.g., the law of non-contradiction).70 Heidegger seems to suggest that philosophical discourse must sometimes exhibit what cannot be expressed by reference, strictly speaking, but that it remains intelligible nonetheless.71 Witherspoon’s discussion raises a question that attends every facet of Heidegger’s mature philosophical project: What are the prospects for philosophy conceived as the discursive investigation of being, when being is not a being, and discourse is ostensibly always discourse about beings? Witherspoon concludes that Heidegger thinks that philosophical discourse is thus not subject to the laws of logic, since logic ostensibly concerns what can be said about particular objects, such that Heidegger espouses a kind of irrationalism. But while Witherspoon claims that Heidegger is wrong to think that philosophical discourse can exhibit that to which no reference is possible, he does not provide an argument for this view. Since Heidegger argues at length that philosophical discourse can exhibit that which is not an entity, for example, temporality, a direct response to the argument itself is necessary to demonstrate its defect. Heidegger argues that if one considers language merely as a verbal complex, one must characterize the apophantic nature of assertoric language as fundamentally a referential relationship between verbal complexes and their objects that only becomes intelligible with the formulation of the verbal complex itself. But Heidegger argues at length that a referential relationship only arises as articulation of an intelligibility that is more or less understood prior to any discursive articulation of it. By claiming that Heidegger cannot legitimately talk about that which is not an entity, Witherspoon in effect claims that the ontological difference is illegitimate. But while this claim cuts to the heart of the plausibility of both Heidegger’s philosophy of logic and his philosophical project as a whole, more is needed to show that Heidegger’s fundamental premises are wrong than the assumption that assertoric language is only meaningful if it is referential. Heidegger explicitly criticizes this very assumption, and characterizes it as part of the tradition of treating philosophy as the problematic of explaining how a ‘subject’ can breach its interiority to make contact with an ‘objective’ world via knowledge. Heidegger would thus argue that Witherspoon simply presupposes the model of intentionality he is at pains to criticize, and so does not directly rebut his criticisms at all. Since he presupposes what Heidegger is at pains to criticize, Witherspoon concludes too quickly that Heidegger is hopelessly confused.72 He thus

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encourages the view that Heidegger is an irrationalist; indeed, a presupposition at the beginning of his essay is that Heidegger and ‘logical’ philosophers such as Frege are at odds precisely over the legitimacy of logic itself.73 The only evidence offered for this claim is the infamous passage from WIM, without subjecting the passage to exegetical scrutiny. But the final word about the viability of Heidegger’s philosophical project is to be had after an extended discussion of the details of his arguments, and not simply by pointing out that Heidegger’s claims contradict what might in the end turn out to be an unsupported assumption. It is likely true that the plausibility of Heidegger’s central claims depends on the plausibility of the ontological difference. However, the test of that plausibility requires an assessment of Heidegger’s line of reasoning, and is not administered simply by pointing out that Heidegger contradicts a traditional claim. Witherspoon does not sufficiently appreciate Heidegger’s view that the normativity of assertoric language derives from and articulates the normativity of the world itself, and so he does not sufficiently appreciate Heidegger’s intention to secure an adequate foundation for logic. This intention is sustained sufficiently to allow Heidegger to avoid the charge of irrationalism, even if Witherspoon is ultimately correct and Heidegger is driven to contradiction. Heidegger’s treatment of logic may be insufficient or wrong, but more is needed to justify the claim that Heidegger is guilty of a wilful irrationalism that seeks to emasculate logic in the name of some allegedly ‘emotive’ or ‘merely poetic’ manner of talking about the world.

4.2.2 Reassessment and Conclusion As we noted in the Introduction, Fay and White defend Heidegger from the charge of irrationalism, yet still assume that Heidegger’s ‘confrontation’ with logic begins in 1929 with WIM.74 Both then look to later works to account for Heidegger’s remarks in WIM. They see the address principally as the beginning of an antagonistic relationship with logic that lasts the rest of Heidegger’s career, and not a summation and amplification of important logical and ontological implications of BT. Since they do not make sufficient use of the relevant texts, they neglect to give an account of the unity of Heidegger’s view of logic from the BT era. Since that account is the best defence against the charge of irrationalism, they then fail to defend Heidegger as intended. They also then miss a better view of the central place of logical issues in Heidegger’s existenzial architectonic. Once the discussions of logic from the BT era are seen as a coherent whole, WIM appears

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as a summation that precedes the more dramatic ‘turn’ from the existenzial project in the 1930s. A defence of Heidegger should then include an exegesis of the relevant texts, and so should acknowledge the continuous engagement with logic and logical issues that begins in Heidegger’s doctoral studies and continues throughout the development of the logical, phenomenological, and scholastic themes that become BT. It should also clarify the critical and analytic nature of Heidegger’s philosophical project by clarifying his idiom. This involves clarifying the nature of Heidegger’s critical remarks on logic in a manner that does justice to his distinction between logic and what he considers inadequate philosophy of logic. This then involves clarifying the thesis that the normative intelligibility of logic characterizes worldhood itself, and is available in the activity of drawing inferences. The understanding of being that discursive thought presupposes is thus pre-‘logical’, yet not thereby arational. As we saw in Chapter 1, recent contributions to the study of Heidegger’s transcendental project build on recent accounts of the philosophical development of BT, and contribute to an understanding of the place of logic in that transcendental project. Recent papers have shifted attention to the development of Heidegger’s view of logic from his doctoral studies through the BT era. A primary motivation for writing this book is then to extend the exegetical discussion, both for its own sake and for the resulting conclusions about the rationalistic dimensions of Heidegger’s early project. In Lask’s transcendental scheme, the irrational element is matter, which is never separate from form, since form is matter as intelligible. In Heidegger’s transcendental scheme, the irrational element is the facticity or ‘factness’ of disclosedness itself, where what is disclosed exhibits form, intelligibility, and normativity. That something is disclosed is irrational, while what is disclosed is not. Heidegger and Lask both concede a moment of irrationality, but neither can be said to offer an irrationalism as a result, since both argue that the very structure of worldhood is inherently intelligible and rational. For Lask this is because the structure of logic is the structure of the world, while for Heidegger this is because language articulates the consequential structure of worldhood, which is always minimally intelligible from any given perspective. Both also argue that forms of thought are given prior to reflection, but whereas Lask identifies them as categories, Heidegger identifies them as existenzial features of worldhood available in activity. Both then describe the normativity of formal correctness as something ‘understood’ or ‘lived’ prior to reflection, and in their attempts to ground logic both see the language of logic as derivative with

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respect to a deeper level of understanding of logical form. But although Lask and Heidegger both understand form and matter as a unity given prior to reflection, Heidegger accommodates a conception of a ‘subject’ that understands a world, while Lask has no room for a robust conception of a subject, since he views the world as something purely ideal and objective. If we are not mislead by Heidegger’s idiom to conclude with the logical positivists that he is guilty of basic formal fallacies, and if we are not misled by the red herring of looking to the later writings to explain a view of logic that is mature by 1929, then we must look to the coherence of that view of logic in the texts from that era in order to determine to what extent Heidegger is an irrationalist, if at all. And while Tugendhat and Witherspoon puts the issue in stark terms – the plausibility of Heidegger’s project ultimately depends upon the plausibility of the ontological difference – even the failure of Heidegger’s project as he sees it does not trump Heidegger’s intention to avoid irrationalism. The hermeneutics of categorical logic becomes a hermeneutics of mathematical logic when systems of logic are seen as unified as strategies for formal correctness that ultimately presuppose a metaphysics of truth as disclosedness. Mohanty points out there is room for further development in Heidegger’s hermeneutical logic, although it appears there is less room than he claims.75 In any case, this raises the issue of how a hermeneutical logic can bear on contemporary philosophy of logic, and an obvious criticism is that it presumes Heidegger’s ‘metaphysical’ system. Frederick Olafson argues that a Heideggerian response to a physicalist version of such a criticism is to argue that physicalism itself quietly presumes an unexplained transcendental standpoint that presumes disclosedness.76 This is not a simple tu quoque, as the Heideggerian point for Olafson is that all interpretation presumes an understanding of being as disclosedness, such that the transcendental standpoint quietly presumed by physicalism cannot justify the imposition of limits on metaphysics proposed by physicalism. The question for Heidegger in the BT era is not whether metaphysics is possible, but which metaphysics is sufficient to interpret being, and his answer is that only a radical metaphysics of truth as disclosedness is sufficient. But whether we treat what can be known as physical or logical objects, we reduce epistemology to the study of what can be known as object of knowledge, and so presuppose an ontical conception of worldhood as judgement. The logical object, or object as such, thus becomes the limiting case of the vorhanden entity, the minimal thing about which we can only say what can be said about anything whatsoever, and so the object simply as beholden to the normativity of discursiveness, that is, formally.

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Heidegger rejects the idealist character of Kantian and neo-Kantian transcendentalism in favour of a radical realism, and maintains the Aristotelian thesis that assertoric language is apophantic in order to establish that the intelligibility of the is of assertion derives from and articulates the intelligibility of the entity that is its object. Truth is then uncovering entities, where even negation articulates a manner of being that characterizes entities as they show themselves. Heidegger’s ‘realism’ extends to logic, since the very intelligibility of formal inference as normative characterizes worldhood itself. But like his metaphysics and transcendentalism, Heidegger’s ‘realism’ is idiosyncratic, since it obviates the need for a discursive proof of the reality of the ‘external’ world. In the Aristotelian tradition, reference concerns how the intelligibility of the conceptual/verbal complex is related to the intelligibility of its object, where the latter somehow grounds the former. Heidegger’s radical apóphansis is thus an aspect of his commitment to phenomenology, that understanding is familiarity with the manner in which entities show themselves. Rather than obfuscate the central tasks of philosophy, the concept of being clarifies them, according to Heidegger. The space thus opens for a discussion of the limits of epistemology, with Heidegger distinguishing himself by arguing against the modern view that epistemology is first philosophy and concerns possible objects of knowledge. Using Tarski as an example, we can construct a Heideggerian response to Tarski’s doubts about the viability of a robust account of truth in order to highlight Heidegger’s commitment to hermeneutics as a search for a genuinely transcendental standpoint. Heidegger would thus deny Tarski’s claim that construction of an object language does not commit us to any metaphysical presuppositions, and argue further that in limiting our discussion to logical objects and, in the case of mathematical logic, marking a distinction between orders of logical expression, we merely push the problem of the transcendental standpoint back one step. Every metalanguage can become an object language, but what makes the metatheoretical standpoint at all possible, and so unifies the infinite regress of metatheoretical standpoints, is the temporal unity of disclosedness, and that unity is only described from the hermeneutical-transcendental standpoint. From Heidegger’s perspective, the metatheoretical stance implicitly announces the issue of a transcendental standpoint, even though the logician perhaps dismisses it by pointing to the content of the object language as the proper object of study, and dogmatically insisting on maintaining attention on it. But this does not address the issue of how the metatheoretical standpoint is possible, and Heidegger’s argument is that only a properly transcendental account of logic as a particular application of language can address the

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issue sufficiently. When the object of study becomes logic itself, then the metatheoretical stance and its structural features become perspicuous for Heidegger as a comportment that is secondary and derivative with respect to understanding.77 The transcendental character of Heidegger’s project is then closely connected to its principal thesis, that there is a meaningful distinction between being and entities. Heidegger identifies transcendental philosophy with the study of the conditions for the possibility of lógos/meaning as truth, and identifies meaning as such with the meaning of being. Being characterizes the unity of entities, such that in the study of the grounds of that unity ontology becomes transcendental, concerning how meaning is possible both in its specificity and generality. The classical-scholastic theme that appears in transcendental form in the neo-Kantian Kategorienproblem thus reappears in Heidegger’s scheme not as a problem of the differentiation yet unity of categories, but the differentiation yet unity of disclosedness. To understand Heidegger’s hermeneutics of logic and the novel place of lógos in BT is then to understand better the hermeneutical-transcendental character of Heidegger’s project. The account of logic thus further highlights Heidegger’s idiosyncratic approaches to traditional philosophical themes, and idiosyncratic reformulations of traditional philosophical positions. The analytic of Dasein is metaphysics, but it is a radical metaphysics conceived as hermeneutical ontology. And while Heidegger’s project is transcendental, it is transcendental not in virtue of its account of the conditions for the possibility of knowledge, but in virtue of its account of the more fundamental conditions for the possibility of meaning that make knowledge possible. Heidegger separates himself from Lask and others who share this much in common by arguing that transcendental unity is not a logical unity but an existenzial and so consequential-temporal unity. That logic is grounded in temporality does not then implicate Heidegger as an irrationalist, since temporality itself grounds the normative and rational character of all lógos. Given the novelty of Heidegger’s concepts and idiom, the issue arises concerning their viability, both with respect to Heidegger’s philosophical project generally and his philosophy of logic in particular. Two obvious examples are the ontological difference and disclosedness. Since Heidegger’s philosophical project follows from his distinction between being and entities, it is reasonable to ask what is gained by the distinction. Heidegger systematically argues that discursive thought/language articulates the intelligibility of the world itself. Heidegger’s commitment to the realist intuition that intelligibility somehow concerns objects just as they are is thus bound

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with his commitment to the view that to be an entity is to exhibit a manner of being that can be intelligibly distinguished from the entity. Since Heidegger thinks that being is not a being, and presumably thinks that concepts are rules for what is common to different entities, he must also think that there can be no concept of being, strictly speaking. As Witherspoon points out, Heidegger is thus committed to the thesis that assertoric language is always exhibitive but not always referential, since we can ostensibly exhibit being without referencing it. Heidegger thus thinks he can intelligibly discuss that which is itself pre-verbal, for example, an understanding of being, both by referencing entities on the one hand and exhibiting that which cannot be referenced on the other, so as to indicate the limits of discursive thought. If the world is not an aggregate of atomic components somehow pieced together, but the unitary phenomenon of uncovering being through activity, then worldhood is the full range of possibilities of being and presupposes the ontological difference itself, since it presupposes that comportment to particular entities is only possible given an original and unifying temporal understanding of being. The plausibility of Heidegger’s notion of worldhood is thus a dimension of the plausibility of the ontological difference itself, and contains important implications both for Heidegger’s philosophy of logic and his larger philosophical project. Tugendhat’s criticism raises a related question regarding truth. It is reasonable to expect Heidegger to show that correspondence theories of truth and alétheia are biconditionally related in order for him to avoid the charge of equivocation. One who finds Heidegger’s conception of uncovering vague might either conclude that Heidegger cannot show that the two conceptions of truth are biconditionally related, or that he does so only trivially, and so does not genuinely enlarge the correspondence conception of truth. One might then ask what is gained by having a concept of disclosedness/uncovering. Heidegger’s answer is that if one’s goal is philosophical explanation, then an account of truth must describe the fundamental phenomenon of disclosedness/uncovering, and thereby abut the limits of what can be thought in thinking about the transcendental unity of phenomena. Since truth is a central issue in philosophy of logic, the plausibility of Heidegger’s account of truth constitutes much of the plausibility of his account of logic, and the novelty of Heidegger’s account of truth will likely affect how commentators view its plausibility. Both criticisms arise because Heidegger insists on a transcendental and so unifying account of phenomena, and he identifies unity with the ‘truth’ of being, its temporality. Heidegger sees systems of logic as possible articulations of the inferential

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structure of worldhood, and so identifies formal logic with the normativity of inference. He thereby offers an account of objectivity that includes an inferring subject, but does not then reduce it to mere rules of thought, but to the temporal structure of understanding that makes discursive thought possible. What unifies systems of logic for Heidegger is the transcendental unity of the conceiving–judging–inferring comportment of the ‘subject’, the temporal unity of worldhood that comprises the world as one moment and activity as another. The unity of Kantian ‘faculties’ is ultimately the temporal unity of comportments, where systems of logic are unified as various strategies for modelling and calculating possibilities of inference. Insofar as they question the concept of the temporal unity of phenomena, the criticisms regarding the coherence of being and disclosedness question the coherence of Heidegger’s transcendental project. I have tried to show that in the BT era Heidegger has a systematic philosophy of logic that is of central importance for his philosophy as a whole, and relevant to issues in contemporary philosophy of logic. Heidegger’s iconoclasm constitutes a coherent, well-developed, and sustained challenge to a set of philosophical orthodoxies. That Heidegger’s idiom has obfuscated some of his philosophical contributions is unfortunate, and a goal of this book has been to help lessen the confusion by clarifying some of his idiom and claims. Heidegger’s account of logic rejects a set of philosophical orthodoxies that are unified in part by the supposition that discursive thinking and logic are somehow constitutive for experience. Heidegger reverses the direction of this explanatory strategy by arguing that worldhood is possible not by virtue of discursive thought, but rather is what makes discursive thought possible. To the extent that it is coherent, mature, and sustained, Heidegger’s account of logic constitutes an estimable contribution to philosophical discourse in general, and philosophy of logic in particular. And while the iconoclasm of Heidegger’s views does not alone render them interesting, neither does it alone render them implausible. Heidegger offers a sharp challenge to a set of philosophical orthodoxies, but that he challenges a number of well-received views does not itself indicate the implausibility of that challenge. Iconoclasm is often identified with implausibility to conclude that the novel is likely unintelligible. But the plausibility of Heidegger’s views is to be decided not by an appeal to consistency with orthodoxy, but as a result of a close and sustained engagement with the content of those views. Despite criticisms, Heidegger’s discussions of logic in the BT era constitute a novel, relevant, and considered philosophy of logic, and a unique contribution to the ongoing project of constructing an account of the nature of logic.

Notes

Introduction 1 2 3

4

Cf. Käufer (1998). Friedman (2000:156). Heidegger published much of what would have been Part Two of BT as Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929b), and he covers most of the rest of what would have been Part Two in Basic Problems of Phenomenology (1927a), which also contains what would have been Division Three of Part One, ‘Time and Being’, in which Heidegger again connects the lógos of being with temporality by characterizing being as the temporal structure of presence (Präsenz). Cf. Olafson (1989:134–5; 1993:101–8). In BT Heidegger disavows characterizing his philosophy as realist, since realism traditionally refers to establishing the reality of entities insofar as they are presupposed to be independent of us with a demonstration or proof. For reasons that will become clear, it nevertheless makes sense to refer to Heidegger’s philosophy as a qualified, radical ‘realism’.

Chapter 1 1

2 3

4 5

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Theodore Kisiel, Steven Galt Crowell, and others have demonstrated that the BT project begins with Heidegger’s earliest Freiburg lectures on phenomenology, 1919 to 1923, against the background of Heidegger’s continuing engagement with Aristotle. The first lectures that articulate that project in a form that mostly survives publication of BT occur in 1924/25, after the move to Marburg: the 1924 lecture for the Marburg Theological Society, published as Gesamtausgabe (GA) 64 (1989) and translated as The Concept of Time (1992); the summer 1925 lectures published as GA 20 (1979) and translated as History of the Concept of Time (1985); and the winter 1925/26 lectures published as GA 21, Logik: Die Frage nach der Wahrheit [Logic: The Question Concerning Truth] (1976). For an extensive account of the development of BT from 1919 to 1927 see Kisiel (1993), and Kisiel and van Buren (1994). Courtine (1999:26). Following Kisiel (1993), Crowell (2001) explores the development of Heidegger’s transcendental account of meaning from neo-Kantian and Husserlian transcendental origins, and devotes considerable space to a discussion of the influence of Lask’s transcendental logic on Heidegger. He thus develops much of the context within which an extended discussion of Heidegger’s philosophy of logic can take place. Cf. also Crowell and Malpas (2007). Martin (2006) includes discussions of Heidegger’s transcendental account of judgement in the 1913 dissertation and his later treatment of the copula. Crowell (2001:12–13ff). I limit my discussion of Heidegger’s earliest writings to something short of these other discussions, since our goal with respect to these writings is not completeness, but rather sufficiently demonstrating an important developmental link between the earliest writings on logic and those from the BT era for purposes of contextualization. Cf. Mohanty (1988) and Käufer (2005). Fehér (1994) contains a helpful account of Heidegger’s Catholic/theological influences, as does Kisiel (1993).

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Kant (1781/87:Bviii) Safranski (1998:38). As Crowell points out, there is then a tendency in neo-Kantianism to waver between a view of transcendental philosophy as continuous with empirical knowledge, since it seeks to ground all laws in an a priori science of law as such, and a view of it as discontinuous with empirical knowledge, since this a priori science exhibits a distinctly (critical-) idealist tendency. Cf. Crowell (2001:26–8). Lotze (1843; 1874). Contrary to the strong logical constructivism of the Marburgers, Rickert argues that judgement is a unity of constitutive moments, a judgement of fact and a judgement of value. In a judgement the subject first unifies the erstwhile incoherent material of sense data according to the categories. Logical form is a necessary but insufficient ‘moment’ of judgement, since judgement also requires a moment in which formalized sense data are affirmed or denied with respect to the normative structure of what has been formalized, and so with respect to the ideality of truth/validity. What is is at the same time what ought to be affirmed, since the normative structure of what is dictates what is required for any true judgement concerning that object or kind of object. Whereas the Marburgers reduce being to logic, Rickert reduces being to value (Wert), to what ‘ought’ to be, transcendentally speaking. Valuation takes place because the judgement and its object matterto the judging subject – the object of judgement is not merely formal but an object that more or less interests the subject as relevant to one’s constitutive decision-making. In his discussion of care (Sorgen) in BT and related writings, Heidegger maintains a version of judgement as mattering to the ‘subject’ Dasein, but importantly generalizes this mattering to characterize not just judgement, which for Heidegger is derivative, but also understanding, which for Heidegger is fundamental. For Rickert, the object of judgement is then not merely a formal object but an object of human interest that can be characterized in a number of ways as theoretical, practical, ethical, aesthetic, etc., and which then serves as the basis for the various Wissenschaften, including both philosophy as science and as ‘world view’ Weltanschauung. Cf. Rickert (1902; 1915). All German translations not previously published are mine. Lotze’s Geltung anticipates Frege’s ‘third realm’, although Lotze is committed to an Aristotelian-Kantian conception of logic Frege rejects. Cf. Lotze(1843; 1874), Frege (1918:337). Husserl (1900/01:17). Heidegger erroneously characterizes mathematical logic as a calculus of judgements, complicating the account of his hermeneutics of mathematical logic in Chapter Four. J. N. Mohanty notes that Heidegger does not pursue the implications of this distinction between logical and grammatical form along Fregean lines with a discussion of the logic of functions, despite his familiarity with Frege. See Chapter Four. Cf. Mohanty (1988:120n). Lask (1911:28). Crowell (2001:38). Cf. Lask (1912). Lask (1911:250). Lask (1912:425). Lask (1911:129). Ibid. 15. Ibid. 6. Lask thus removes the limits on speculative reason imposed by Kant, since there is in principle nothing prohibiting an application of the categories to supersensible objects, provided there are such objects. Ibid. 131. Lask thus removes all ‘verificationist elements’ from transcendental reflection to produce ‘a “functional” concept of the object as the basis for a pluralistic doctrine of categories’. Crowell (2001:43). Lask (1911:109). Ibid. 125. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 122.

Notes 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

44 45

46 47

48

49 50 51

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Ibid. 32–3. Ibid. 70. Ibid. 66. Ibid. 75. As Crowell notes, Lask’s distinction between form and matter is not then categorical, but functional. Cf. Crowell (2001:47–8). Lask (1912:129). Ibid. 170. Ibid. 61. Crowell (2001:85–6). Ibid. 87. Ibid. 86. Cf. Heidegger (1915:283). Cf. Crowell (1992:222–39; 2001:76–92). This attempt at transcendental unity itself eventually proves problematic, marking Heidegger’s more famous ‘turn’ (Kehre) in the 1930s, this time away from an ontology of Existenz and towards an ontology that grounds Existenz in being as such. Cf. Kisiel (1993); Crowell (2001). His most comprehensive discussion of logic from this period is titled Metaphysical Foundations of Logic. Cf. Olafson (1987; 1993; 1998). Since what is given in understanding is pre-thematic, it is not the sort of intentional ‘given’ that Wilfrid Sellars discusses in his ‘myth of the given’. Rather, it makes the intentionality of discursiveness possible as a derivative comportment, the ‘conceptual content’ of which is then given only in a derivative way. Cf. Sellars (1997). So while Kant’s ding an sich is the entity purely as thought, or the entity from no perspective, Heidegger’s ‘thing itself’ is the entity as understood in the totality of its interrelated significations, the entity from every possible perspective. Cf. Crowell and Malpas (2007). Cf. Heidegger (1929b:89–142). In the later writings, in which the history of being is a central theme, Heidegger argues that the Cartesian project is itself part of a larger tradition that extends back to Plato’s division of reality into the phenomenal and the noumenal, and the resulting obfuscation of the pre-Socratic conception of being as presence. Cf. Heidegger (1935a and 1935b). Although Heidegger seeks a hermeneutics of logic in order to ground logical concepts in ontology, and a hermeneutics of possibility as Seinkönnen, he does not offer an explicit hermeneutics and ontological grounding of necessity. Heidegger would likely argue that the irreducible givenness of worldhood indicates an implicit understanding of this givenness as fundamentally necessary in a way that ontologically grounds necessity as a discursive and so derivative concept. Heidegger characterizes Husserl’s intentionality of consciousness as Cartesian in that it reduces the world to a totality of empty formal significations that are immanent to consciousness, and so presupposes the Cartesian model of a conscious subject making contact with the world only by thematically knowing it. Husserl famously ‘brackets’ the world and the empirical ego through a series of ‘reductions’ so as to arrive at the ‘transcendental standpoint’ from which pure transcendental consciousness then ostensibly becomes conspicuous in its essential and eidetic or ideal structure. But the bracketing of the world and empirical ego is never ‘lifted’, as Olafson puts it, and so Husserl never acknowledges the existence of the empirical ego and the world as anything more than ‘just a logical construction constituted by the transcendental ego’ (1987:19–20). Husserl has ‘two stories about consciousness, a transcendental story and an empirical story, and no ontological way of bringing them together’ (1987:20). Despite his intentions, Husserl detaches meaning from the world, and so renders the conscious subject worldless, by separating the world from its correlate noema/significations, and locating the latter ‘in’ the consciousness of the intending, noetic subject. While Macquarrie/Robinson translate zuhanden as ready-to-hand, I follow Dreyfus in using available, since it is more felicitous, and neutral with respect to kinds of entities, and so allows us to speak of abstract entities such as logical entities as available for Dasein.

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I find both present-at-hand (Macquarrie/Robinson) and occurrent (Dreyfus) awkward as translations of vorhanden, and so have followed Olafson in not translating it. Macquarrie and Robinson translate Seinkönnen as ‘potentiality-for-Being’, while Dreyfus translates it as ‘ability-to-be’. Heidegger specifically describes the temporal structure of care in ¶65 in Chapter III, Division II, and both amplifies and contextualizes that description in his discussion of the temporality of ‘everydayness’ in Chapter IV, ¶¶68–9. Cf. Heidegger (1925a; 1927a; 1927b).

Chapter 2 1 2 3 4 5

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11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Lotze (1843; 1874). Cf. Kant (1800). Ibid. 106. Ibid. 24. Mohanty criticizes interpreters for not having marked this modification, but he seems to suggest that the two theses are mutually exclusive. An aim of this book is to show that Heidegger’s account of logic is an account of the normativity of discursive thought precisely because Heidegger thinks of the normativity of validity as a meaning structure. Cf. Mohanty (1988:108). Assertion thus presupposes a crucially public dimension to the disclosedness of being-inthe-world as being-with (Mitsein), a dimension that is problematic as formulated in Chapter IV. Heidegger requires a public dimension for disclosedness, since disclosedness must exhibit the normativity required for any derivative judgement of truth-value, and publicness is a necessary requirement for the kind of rational and disinterested normativity truth ostensibly requires. But as Olafson points out, Heidegger fails to offer a robust account of being-with that helps explain how there can be a single public openness for a plurality of Daseins. As we will see, Heidegger sees the normativity presupposed by systems of inference as a meaning structure that Dasein uncovers through inferential activity, and so it is clear he understands the need for an account of truth that can provide a standard for veracity. He nevertheless fails to satisfy this requirement, and so fails to give an account of the public character of intelligibility that explains the public character of logical entities. Dreyfus argues that das Man, or the ‘they’ or ‘one’ of everyday intelligibility, is constitutive for Dasein in a way that accounts for the publicness of disclosedness. Cf. Olafson (1996); Dreyfus (1991); (1996). Aristotle (1984b:4.16b26). Lotze (1843:87). Ibid. 88. Mohanty’s claim that Heidegger offers no substantive account of the synthetic-analytic unity of the assertion via the copula appears curious, since he then proceeds to sketch Heidegger’s view of the dispartative character of assertion, Heidegger’s substantive account of this unity. Cf. Mohanty (1988:122ff). Kant (1781/87:A58/B82). Cf. Heidegger (1927b:226–7/269–70). Tugendhat (1969:250). Ibid. Ibid. 251. Ibid. 251–2. Ibid. 252. Ibid. 252–3. Ibid. 250–1. Ibid. 253–4. Ibid. 254. Ibid. 255–6. Ibid. Ibid. 258–9.

Notes 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

33 34

35 36

159

Ibid. 261. Dreyfus (1991:265). Olafson (1987:142). Ibid. 142. Ibid. 143. Ibid. 143. Ibid. 254. Kant (1781/87:A328/B384, A405–43/B432–71). Kant famously argues that the world as a totality is not a possible object of cognition, but that we must nevertheless presuppose that the world possesses a systematicity that is purposive for cognition. But while Kant argues that we cannot cognize things as a whole because the world as a totality is not a possible object of experience, Heidegger argues that the totality of entities is never uncovered as an entity. Heideggerian uncovering is distinguished from Kantian experience, since the latter is discursive and constructed; so while Kant speaks of the impossibility of conceiving the world as a whole as an object of cognition, Heidegger speaks of entities as a whole as something that is not itself understood as an entity. Nevertheless, the two claims appear roughly isomorphic: while we cannot ‘comprehend’ the whole of things, we nevertheless presuppose a unity of things as a whole. Cf. Kant (1781/87:A642–704/B670–732); (1790:181–6; §§61, 74, 75, 77). Heidegger continues to use the term ‘the nothing’ in order to emphasize the ironic failure to conceive of the negation of the totality of all entities, in order to force his audience to experience anxiety firsthand. By forcing his audience to entertain the notion of the nothing, Heidegger hopes to make explicit for his audience the anxiety that he claims is always ‘there’, if ‘only sleeping’ (1929d:106/14). He wants his audience to follow him as he exhibits the limits of intelligibility in our ability to think about the unity of being. It is in this context that Heidegger solicits the audience to experience firsthand the wonder evoked ‘when the strangeness of beings oppresses us’ (1929d:109/18), and so to raise for oneself the most fundamental philosophical question: ‘Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing?’ (1929d:110/19). Cf. Fay (1974; 1977a; 1977b); White (1985); Käufer (2005). Witherspoon (2002:98). Witherspoon’s discussion of the nothing is uncharacteristic in that he recognizes the connection with individuation. However, Witherspoon’s discussion serves his thesis that Heidegger espouses an irrationalism, a thesis I reject in Chapter 4 (2002:100–4).

Chapter 3 1

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3 4

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6 7 8

The issue of inference is complicated in mathematical logic by the distinction between syntactic and semantic forms of inference that must be biconditionally related for completeness. See Chapter 4. At the time of these lectures Heidegger also wrote ‘On the Essence of Ground’ (1929c), a more abstract statement of the hermeneutics of ground. Kant (1800:15). Leibniz (1686c:31). Leibniz’ theory of inclusion is a source of Kant’s conception of analytic judgements: ‘the predicate B belongs to the subject A, as something which is (covertly) contained in this concept A . . . Analytic judgments (affirmative) are therefore those in which the connection of the predicate with the subject is thought through identity.’ Cf. Kant (1781/87:A6/B10). Kant departs from Leibniz by arguing that synthetic judgements do not exhibit this relation of inclusion. Truth is then an extant relation between entities, and it is in this context that Leibniz posits the monads as fundamental subject-entities. Cf. Heidegger (1928b:§5). Leibniz (1686c:30–1). Leibniz (1686b:28). Contingent truths are only non-necessary for humans as finite subjects. Strictly speaking, all knowledge is a priori, since for God, who ostensibly possesses perfect knowledge, contingent truths are also deducible from original identities. Strictly speaking, finite subjects cannot

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Notes

then prove that the predicate is white is contained in the subject Snow, because the ‘proof’ that Snow means something white is stipulative and so circular. Contingent truths are a priori for God not because he cognizes the series of inferences resulting in the conclusion that, for example, Snow is white, since the series is infinite. Rather, the stipulation and its attendant infinite regress are the result of God’s will. So although contingent truths are not reducible to the law of non-contradiction, they are reducible to the principle of sufficient reason. Cf. Leibniz (1686b:28). In categorical logic, deducibility is identified with validity. Completeness does not then become an issue because categorical logic does not mark a distinction between a syntactic conception of inference as a derivation made solely with respect to a formal rule and a semantic conception of inference as a derivation made solely with respect to the transfer of truth-value from one expression to another. This distinction appears in mathematical logic in completeness and incompleteness theorems. We will look at how Heidegger’s hermeneutics of formalism would address such issues in Chapter 4. Although Heidegger discusses principle and reason, he says nothing about sufficiency. Cf. Husserl’s account of Evidenz as intuitive insight into the ideality of truth (1900/01: §§49–50). Cf. Heidegger (1925b). This is presumably an example of what Mohanty has in mind when he claims that Heidegger lacks a developed hermeneutical logic, since the exemplar for something similar that he gives, Husserl (1948), attempts to show how specific logical principles are grounded in the structure of lived experience. Cf. Mohanty (1988:130). But that Heidegger offers hermeneutical interpretations of concepts, judgements, inferences, negation, and the principle of sufficient reason is evidence against the claim that he has no hermeneutical logic, insufficient though that hermeneutics may be. Cf. White (1985:22–43). That a projection of atemporality is only possible as grounded in temporality is then the basis of the charge of relativism to which Heidegger responds in §44 of BT. Cf. Heidegger (1929c) for a shorter version of this line of thought. The principle of contradiction is less fundamental than the principle of sufficient reason, and giving grounds is more fundamental than consistency, since consistency is itself justified by an appeal to ground. Cf. (1928b:192/247–8). The principle of sufficient reason is then ‘the principle of “rather than,” the principle of the primacy of something over nothing, of this thing over that, of in this way over another way’. Ibid. 114/142. Again, Heidegger’s hermeneutics of concepts, judgements, inferences, negation, and principle is evidence contrary to Mohanty’s claim that Heidegger offers little in the way of such a hermeneutics.

Chapter 4 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

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Cf. Heidegger (1912:20). Frege (1879:52–5). Cf. Carnap (1930/31:137–9); Russell (1914:42–58). Frege (1879:47–78). Ibid. §3. Ibid. Mohanty (1988:113–14). Mohanty notes that the use of functions is not what makes mathematical logic mathematical, but rather the language of set theory in its metatheory. Ibid. 113. Ibid. Ibid. 114. Cf. Kant (1781/87:A59/B83-A62/B86). Ibid. A59/B83-A60/B84. Frege (1897:227–8).

Notes 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

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39 40

41 42

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Frege (1919:365). Frege (1897:228). Ibid. Wright (1992:174). Cf. Ibid. 34–5. Ibid. 174. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 40. Cf. Ibid. 24–9. Cf. Ibid. 1992:38–42. Tarski (1944:355–6). Ibid. 348–9; Tarski (1931:164). Ibid. 341, 343–5. Ibid. 341. Ibid. Ibid. 342. Ibid. 361. Ibid. 370n. Ibid. 342; Tarski (1931:152–3). While Tarski distinguishes sentences from sentential functions – sentence-like formulae containing variables in place of constants – I follow Quine and others by referring to the former as closed sentences and the latter as open sentences. Cf. Quine (1970:47). Tarski (1944:345). Cf. Tarski (1931:155). Tarski (1944:342–3). Cf. Tarski (1931:155n). Tarski (1944:344). Ibid. Ibid. 344–5. Ibid. 349–50. Tarski thinks it is always possible to make the metalanguage itself an object language, in order to specify in another metalanguage the semantic conditions for truth, consistency, well-formedness, etc., in the first metalanguage. In this way, every metalanguage is itself potentially an object-language, such that we end up with a ‘whole hierarchy of languages’. Ibid. 350. Ibid. Ibid. Certain terms of a metalanguage will be undefined: for example, logical terms (or, if . . . then, etc.). Cf. Ibid. 350–1. But semantic terms introduced into a metalanguage in order to construct an object language must be defined such that the meaning of concepts such as truth will then be both ‘completely clear and unequivocal’ and free from contradiction. Ibid. Ibid. 351. Ibid. 352–3. Given that satisfaction is a relation between expressions and objects, and that an expression can stand in this relation to an indefinitely large n-tuple of objects, depending on whether the sentence contains one or more variables, it is more appropriate to speak of satisfaction as a relation between arbitrary sequences of objects and certain expressions, where a sequence is defined as an ordered set. Ibid. 353. For example, x is greater than y describes a mathematical feature of the world, while Snow is white describes a physical feature of the world. ‘World’ here means whatever is capable of satisfying a sentence. Thus, x is a winged horse is satisfied by Pegasus, where Pegasus is not an object of the actual world, but of a possible world. Ibid. Ibid. 354. Ibid. 354. Tarski (1936b:410). This is the case only within the limits imposed by the implications of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. Any consistent axiomatic system in which we can formulate number theory is incomplete, since it is possible to formulate sentences that are logically true or false, yet unprovable.

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Notes

Cf. Ibid. 416–17. Ibid. 417. Ibid. Tarski (1944:355). Ibid. p. 361. Ibid. 360. Tarski (1944:341). Cf. Ibid. 343–5. Ibid. 341. There is a controversy concerning whether or not Tarski’s account of truth is a correspondence theory, strictly speaking. Two questions are relevant: does Tarski intend his account of truth to be a correspondence theory, and does he succeed? Interpreters have answered ‘yes’ to both questions (Davidson, Popper, Sellars, Platts), ‘no’ to both questions (Mackie, Haack, Keuth), ‘yes’ to the second question only (Field, Ayer), ‘no’ to the second question only (Vision), and ‘yes’ to the first question but ‘no’ to the second question (Kirkham). Cf. Kirkham (1992:170). The answer to the first question must be ‘yes’ for the simple reason that Tarski explicitly states as much. Richard Kirkham argues that the second question must be answered with a ‘no’ because a correspondence theory must maintain that the relation between a sentence and a state of affairs be a semantic relation, for example, the sentence expresses the state of affairs, and Tarski offers a theory of truth that only makes truth co-extensive with semantic concepts. Cf. Ibid. 170–3. Nevertheless, even if Kirkham is correct, that Tarski simply intends to schematize correspondence is enough for Heidegger to claim that any attempt to schematize a semantic relation – even if only so that instances of the schema and the relation are merely co-extensional – exhibits the same founded mode of being as does the semantic relation itself. Ayer (1946:43). Cf. Carnap (1932:69–73). Witherspoon (2002) addresses this criticism in some detail. Heidegger explicitly argues this point in the Introduction to BT, where he apologizes for his idiom by explaining that an ontical language is insufficient to discuss ontological concepts. (1927b:63/38–9). Borgmann (1968:141). Ibid. 148. Ibid. 147. Ibid. 148. Ibid. 150–1. Borgmann claims that Heidegger criticizes logic because logic’s formalism is an abstraction from the world that inspires a concomitantly abstract and dangerous overestimation of technology. Cf. Ibid. 157. Ibid. Witherspoon (2002:104–5). Ibid. 103. Ibid. 111. Ibid. 111. Ibid. 89. Käufer (1998) discusses this interpretative tendency at length. Mohanty (1988:130–1). Olafson (1987:253–9). Field’s early attempt to provide Tarskian semantics with a physicalist foundation simply pushes the problem of the transcendental standpoint from semantics to physicalism, while attempts to deny the robustness of the predicate is true, for example, deflationism, tend simply to avoid it.

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I. Heidegger: Primary Sources Heidegger, M. (1912), ‘Neuere Forschungen über Logik.’ Gesamtausgabe 1, Frühe Schriften. Frankfurt: V. Klostermann, 1978. — (1913), Die Lehre vom Urteil im Psychologismus: ein kritisch-positiver Beitrag zur Logik. Gesamtausgabe 1, Frühe Schriften. Frankfurt: V. Klostermann, 1978. — (1915), Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus. Gesamtausgabe 1, Frühe Schriften. Frankfurt: V. Klostermann, 1978. — (1912–16), Gesamtausgabe 1, Frühe Schriften. Frankfurt: V. Klostermann, 1978. — (1924), The Concept of Time. W. McNeill (trans.). Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. Gesamtausgabe 64, Der Begriff der Zeit. Frankfurt: V. Klostermann, 1989. — (1925a), History of the Concept of Time. T. Kisiel (trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Gesamtausgabe 20, Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs. Frankfurt: V. Klostermann, 1979. — (1925b), Gesamtausgabe 21, Logik: Die Frage nach der Wahrheit. Frankfurt: V. Klostermann, 1976. — (1927a), The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. A. Hofstadter (trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. Gesamtausgabe 24, Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenology. Frankfurt: V. Klostermann, 1975. — (1927b), Being and Time. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (trans.). San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row, 1962. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2006. — (1928a), ‘From the last Marburg lecture course.’ Pathmarks. W. McNeill (trans.). New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ‘Aus den letzten Marburger Vorlesung.’ Wegmarken (first edn). Frankfurt: V. Klostermann, 1967. — (1928b), The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic. M. Heim (trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Gesamtausgabe 26, Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leigniz. Frankfurt: V. Klostermann, 1978. — (1929a), The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. W. McNeill and N. Walker (trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Gesamtausgabe 29/30, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik. Frankfurt: V. Klostermann, 1983. — (1929b), Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (fifth edn). R. Taft (trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Gesamtausgabe 3, Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik. Frankfurt: V. Klostermann, 1973. — (1929c), ‘On the essence of ground.’ Pathmarks. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ‘Vom Wesen des Grundes.’ Wegmarken (first edn). Frankfurt: V. Klostermann, 1967.

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Index

alétheia 131, 133 apóphansis 151 Aristotle 5, 7, 20, 56 assertion as apóphansis 44 assertion 51, 53, 61 is of 52 as judgement 51 negative 56 primary significations of 53–4 Ayer, A.J. 143 Basic Problems of Phenomenology 34 being being-in-the-world 37 care (Sorgen) 44 Befindlichkeit (state of mind) 44 Discourse 44 understanding 44 categoriality as a character of 38 disclosedness (Erschlossenheit ) of 5 existenzial character of 33, 38 lógos (sein) of 1 the nothing as a modality of 85 as presence (Präsenz) 34 the question of 33 and thought 26 understanding (seinsverstehen) of 1 Being and Time 1 Bolzano, B. 15 Borgmann, A. 144–6 Carnap, R. 81, 143 Cassirer, E. 14 cognition 22, 95, 159 n32 Cohen, H. 14 the copula 52 Courtine, J. 12

The Critique of logic 2 Crowell, S. 13, 21, 25, 28 alétheiology 21 Dasein 31, 38, 158 n6 analytic of 31, 39 as an entity 39 knowing as a mode of 41 knowledge as a mode of being for 32 possibility 45 Seinkönnen 48 temporality 47 versus truth 72 world as a space of consequence 79 deflationism 131 Denken 33, 145 Descartes, Rene 3 Die Kategorien-und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus (The Theory of Categories and Meaning in Duns Scotus) 25 Die Lehre vom Urteil im Psychologismus: Ein kritisch-positiver Beitrag zur Logik (The Theory of Judgement in Psychologism & A CriticalPositive Contribution to Logic) 19 disclosedness (Erschlossenheit) 5, 134 enquiry 34, 36, 73, 81 ontical and ontological 36 evidence (Evidenz) 18 Form-materialverhältnis (form and matter) 17, 19, 24, 150 Frege, G. 15, 17, 19, 123, 124 Frühe Schriften 12

172

Index

Grammatica Speculativa 25–8 theory of the modes of signification (modi significandi) 26 ground 6, 91 as consequence 101 as inference 95 and logic 92 Habilitationsschrift 11, 13, 20, 25, 121 Hartmann, N. 13 Hegelianism 14 Heidegger, M. 1, 2, 26, 40, 73, 111, 120 charge of irrationalism 3, 8, 142, 144, 147, 148 and contemporary logic 120 freedom 106 genuine logic 18 logical training at Freiburg 13, 14 scholarship 9 thing itself 50 Heidegger and symbolic logic 144 hermeneutics of assertion 51 of being 101 of categorical logic 7 of Dasein 31 of ground 101 of inference and validity 100 of judgement 45 of knowledge 55 of logical formalism 51 of meaning 2 and metatheory 128 of negation 72 of predication 126 of truth 62 history as a teleological philosophy of culture 31 of Western philosophy 32, 33, 113 holism 40, 83 Husserl, E. 13, 15, 18 critique of copy theory 79 Ideas 58 intentionality of consciousness 157 n53 Logical investigations 18 theory of meaning 28

incompleteness theorem, Godel’s 122, 126, 161 n49 inference 160 n9 in categorical logic 96 formal 79 forms of 98 ground as 95 and lógos 45, 91, 92 as syllogistic validity/invalidity 100 intentionality of assertion 61 as the defining category (Gebietskategorie) of the logical realm 28 of discursiveness 157 n47 Heidegger’s critique of 76 Huslerian conception of 28, 157 n53 as the radical transcendence of disclosedness 76 versus validity 28 judgement 126, 156 n11, 159 n4 categorical 26 as a concept 50 feature of 6 formal negation in 86 lógos as 107 meaning shifts of 18 nature of 15 negative 5, 20 structure of 14 as a thematic comportment 45 transcendental 58 true and false 78 unifying theory of 17 Kant, I. 14, 16, 22 see also neo-Kantianism ding an sich 50 Kantian schema 50 Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics 112, 155 Kategorienproblem 26, 27, 37, 152 unity-in-diversity of being 37 Kirkham, R. 162 n58 Kisiel, T. 13, 155 n3 knowing as deficiency 41 as a derivative comportment 12

Index and having 38 and not knowing as a modes of being for Dasein 41 and understanding 35 language assertoric 127, 147, 153 Cartesian 44 closed and open 136 deductive 134 metalanguage 9, 128 object 123, 151 predicate 128 of traditional metaphysics 32 Lask, E. 12, 15, 20, 21, 43, 117, 150, 152 conception of transcendental logic 25 and the Habilitationsschrift 20 theory of meaning 12, 28, 29 Leibniz, G. 94, 106 principle of sufficient reason 95, 98 rationalistic tendency 99 theory of the copula and correspondence 96 logic Aristotelian categorical 14 divisions of 96 formal 3 Fregean 121 genuine 18 logical form and grammatical form 20 logical positivists 150 logic-based philosophy 142 logicism 122 and logistics 18 lógos, logik, and logistik 9 material 93 mathematical 121, 122 and metaphysics 11 as the metaphysics of truth 113 philosophical 14 syllogistic 7 symbolic 7 systems of 122 transcendental 11, 14, 22 Logic and Ontology in Heidegger 2 Logical Investigations 18, 32

173

lógos 1, 6, 9, 106 of being 61 categorical 31 concept as the basic element of 95 existenzial 31 hegemony of 21 of inference 45 and logic 106 space of 33 and temporality 107 as temporality 92 of worldhood 6 Lotze, H. 12, 22, 23, 55, 59 logik 50 theory of negative judgement 57 meaning 15 see also lógos Lask’s account of 23 Laskian-Husserlian theory of 28 as living spirit (lebendiger Geist) 29 as pre-reflective truth 30 theory of meaning 13 theory of the modi 27 metaphysics 14 anti-metaphysical 14 monadological 98 ontology 36 see also ontology traditional 32, 95 Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz (Metaphysical Foundations of Logic) 91 metatheory 128–30, 132, 133 Mohanty, J. 119, 125, 126, 156 n15 Natorp, P. 14 negation 5, 57, 80 and being 81 double-negation 87 formal 81, 87 the nothing and science 81 and truth 19, 80, 85 neo-Kantianism 13–17 Baden neo-Kantianism 17 logical idealism 16 Lotze’s theory of validity 15 Marburger neo-Kantianism 16 Neuere Forschungen über Logik (New Research in Logic) 17

174 Olafson, F. 34, 77, 150 Ontology categorical 31 and epistemology 38 existenzial 31 fundamental 145 hermeneutical 19 radical 33 phenomenology of categorical judgement 28 existential 31 first philosophy as 59 Heidegger’s 32 hermeneutic 2 of intentionality 29 transcendental 13 Plato 3, 57, 157 n51 psychologism 15, 17, 64, 92, 116 anti-psychologism 15 realm of validity 14, 42 reflexivity 29 Rickert, H. 13, 156 n11 Russell, B. 144 satisfaction 161 n42 as a semantic concept 136, 137 Tarski’s definition of 137 truth as 8, 63, 120, 137 Schopenhauer, A. 102 Scotus (Erfurt) 26 Socrates 56 subject 150 legitimizing thinking 24 relation to object 30

Index theory of categories 26, 27, 30 totality-of-significations 44 transcendental consciousness 13, 15, 22, 157 n53 truth 23, 62 contingent 97 copy theory of 74 as correspondence 73 derivative 23 eternal 74 and falsity 76 identity theory of 98 necessary 97 and normativity 71 ontical and ontological 63 paradigmatic 23 primary 97 Tugendhat, E. 71, 74–6, 79, 87 unities 35 conceptual/verbal 51 as horizonal 35 What Is Metaphysics? 20 Windelband, W. 13 Witherspoon, E. 86, 146 worldhood 40 analytic of 39 bimodality of 59 Dasein and the world as structural moments of 43 Heidegger’s descripton of 40 as judgement 150 lógos of 6 normativity of 76 subject and object 43 Wright, C. 131