Heidegger, Measurement and the ‘Intelligibility’ of Science

This paper provides a sympathetic reading of Heidegger’s early remarks on science. The prospects for such a reading may seem dim since his overall philosophical outlook appears to be anti-naturalist with problematic idealist leanings; for example, despite the fact that Heidegger claims to reject realism and idealism (a claim I will refer to as (C1)), he attacks a conception of the constitution of the non-human world as made of up what he calls ‘present-at-hand’ [vorhanden] objects and insists instead on the primacy of what he calls ‘readyto-hand’ [zuhanden] objects, objects such as hammers and spanners, objects whose identity is seemingly determined by their place in human practices. (In what follows, I will refer to this attack and this ‘primacy’ claim collectively as (C2).) Moreover, his more specific remarks on science seem intended to reveal a priori commitments implicit within the thought and practice of scientists, commitments which sit uncomfortably with the claim to objectivity normally made for scientific knowledge. Much of this paper will be devoted to two of these commitments: