Carnap’s famous demonstration of the “nonsensical” character of certain sentences from Heidegger’s Was ist Metaphysik? has generally not been read as a serious engagement with or criticism of Heidegger’s thought. I argue to the contrary. I show, first, that Heidegger and Carnap are both reacting against the same features of Husserl’s system, for the same reasons, and, second, that Carnap unders...

Section 1 establishes some key similarities between Heidegger and Georg Simmel in order to motivate the hypothesis that Simmel’s account of how society is possible can be used to give an account of das Man which reconciles the transcendentally philosophical role emphasised by Dreyfus with the ethically negative features emphasised by Olafson. Section 2 elaborates the issue addressed in Ch. 4 of...

Existentialism is not a doctrine but a label widely used to lump together several philosophers and writers who are more or less opposed to doctrines while considering a few extreme experiences the best starting point for philosophic thinking. Spearheading the movement, Kierkegaard derided Hegel's system and wrote books on Fear and Trembling (1843), The Concept of Anxiety (1844), and The Sicknes...

From 1959 until 1969, Heidegger lectured to psychiatrists and psychiatry students at the University of Zurich Psychiatric Clinic and in Zollikon. The transcriptions of these lectures were published as the Zollikon Seminars. In these seminars Heidegger is highly critical of psychoanalysis, because of its causal and objectifying approach to the human being. In general, Heidegger considers it an o...

The art and philosophy of a culture capture more than just the most developed consciousness of a people. Particularly in their structural forms as well as in their emphases, selection, and transformation of material cultural artifacts reproduce essential elements of the social context, bringing out the prevailing suppositions and conditioning forces and displaying them prominently. According to...

This is a tale of two readings, and of a non-encounter, the missed encounter between two philosophers whose legacy, as has been noted, might jointly define the scope of problems and questions left open, in the wake of the twentieth century, for philosophy today. In particular, I will discuss today two remarks, one by Wittgenstein on Heidegger, and the other by Heidegger on Wittgenstein; as far ...

The world today stands under the spell of Leibniz’s thought. Or, perhaps more carefully, we might say that the world today stands under the spell of what Leibniz thought only too well. With uncanny perceptiveness, he managed to articulate a basic principle of thinking and being in the early modern world that is arguably as vital today as it was at the outset of the eighteenth century. Looking f...