Dreyfus' Being and Time Course Online

Thanks to a comment from Demographer, I've learned that Hubert Dreyfus is making recordings of his 2007 Heidegger class at Berkeley available online. You can subscribe to the podcast as well as download mp3s of the individual class meetings.

Check it out here.

Autumn, Week 4 Meeting

At Thursday's meeting, we covered a lot of ground, but also went very quickly. Unfortunately, that will probably be the norm for a two-hour, bi-weekly meeting about a lot of difficult text. But the blog is a place to continue the discussion and ask new questions that you didn't get to ask at the meeting, or that have occurred to you since the meeting.

We talked about:

1. The difference between entities (das Seiendes, the things that are) and being (das Sein, that in virtue of which they are as they are, that on the basis of which we understand entities as entities), and why being is not an entity (§2, §3).


2. The difference between ontic inquiry (which asks questions about entities, usually particular ones, e.g., the sciences) and ontological inquiry (which asks questions about the being of those entities) (§3). We further distinguished between regional ontology (which works out the basic concepts of being for entities of a particular sort, for instance, what it means to be a natural entity, or a physical one, or a historical one), on the one hand, and on the other hand, fundamental ontology (which works out the basic concepts of being for any entity whatsoever, asks what it means to be, in general).

We considered several answers to the question, 'What is the relationship between ontological claims and ontic ones?'. We suggested that ontological claims and concepts might have some sort of foundational relationship to ontic claims, grounding them in some way or other (which we didn't work out much further). We also suggested that the ontological claims answer a 'how possible?' question with regard to the ontic claims, explaining how it's possible to be, say, a physical entity, by giving the conceptual framework in terms of which our claims about physical entities are intelligible, make sense to us. We also wondered whether our discoveries at the ontological level, including, but not limited to, conceptual change brought about in a scientific revolution, might influence and change the claims we make on the ontic level, or whether, by contrast, the work we do to clarify and make explicit our ontological concepts is for the sole purpose of bringing us to understand our ontic claims better, even though we already do understand them to some degree (since, for instance, we can do physics, even if we might not have a completely worked out account of the being of physical entities).

This question was left hanging somewhat open, along with a corresponding question about the relationship between claims of fundamental ontology and claims of regional ontology. Is there a similar relationship of founding, making possible or intelligible, influencing or clarifying, between our claims about being in general and our claims about being an entity in a particular region of being?


3. The being question as a question not about semantics, but about what makes the difference between something that is and something that is not – that is, about what is going on when we relate to an entity as something that is. We also discussed (and, to a certain extent, experienced) the being question as a question that needs to be reawakened (Preface, §1).


4. The three dogmas about being – universality, indefinability, self-evidence (§1). These are theses that Heidegger points out to motivate his project of reawakening the question of being. We pointed out that the first two theses are connected, since the universality and indefinability of the notion of being both have to do with the fact that being (according to Heidegger) doesn't admit of analysis or determination by way of a genus and specific difference. Several people asked and tried to answer the difficult question why being is not a genus, a question also posed as, 'Why is being not a property?'. It was difficult to find a knock-down explanation, so this issue was also left somewhat open. We considered that for Aristotle, there are senses of being that have nothing to do with a genus/specific difference analysis, such as being possible vs. actual, being true vs. false, and being essential vs. accidental. If we agree that all these distinctions have something to do with being, then we might feel a philosophical urge to work out an account of what they all have in common with regard to the notion of being in general, as a whole. The issue of genus and specific difference, by contrast, only applies to the sense of being expressed by our use of categories such as number, color, human, quantity, quality, etc. Again, this discussion was interesting and provocative, but left inconclusive in the interest of time.


5. The formal structure of the being question – what is asked about, what is to be found out, that which is to be interrogated, as well as the fact that our seeking is guided beforehand by what is sought (the pre-ontological understanding of being) (§2). We mentioned Heidegger's claim that we ask the question about the meaning of being from within some everyday, pre-ontological way that we already understand what it means to be; in this sense, the question of being is "guided beforehand by what is sought." We made an analogy between a police investigation and the investigation into the meaning of being, in that both can be understood as asking about something, interrogating something and asking after something it seeks to find out. We found places in the text where Heidegger fills out each of those formal aspects for his own investigation into being: What it asks about is being (the being of entities, that in terms of which they are already understood and determined as they entities they are); what it interrogates are entities (especially, some people presaged, the entity called 'dasein,' which we did not discuss much in our meeting); what it asks after and seeks to find out is the meaning of being (we are looking for something that seems to count as a meaning, and for something that shows up in a special way, distinct from the way that entities show up, since – one of the points Heidegger is most adamant about – being is not an entity).


6. We did not discuss the reason that dasein has an ontical, ontological and 'ontico-ontological' priority with respect to the question of being, why dasein is the specific entity we interrogate first when we seek to clarify the meaning of being. That is, we did not discuss why fundamental ontology proceeds through the existential analytic (analysis of existence) (§4). We also did not talk about what dasein is, although this can be vexing and will probably be a live issue throughout the reading group. We also did not distinguish 'existentiell' and 'existential,' nor explain what it means to say that dasein's way of being is 'existence'.

* * *

Anyone is free to ask about or try to give a take on any of the issues left unresolved at the meeting. You can do this through the comments link below. We encourage you to continue discussion with each other outside our meetings on campus, especially through this blog. The best way to make sense of a text, beyond oral discussion, is to write something about it, whether that's by attempting to give an explanation of a term, claim or problem from the text, or simply writing about what confuses you or what doesn't make sense in the text or discussion. We have posted the blog in hopes of encouraging writing about, and thereby developing and refining, our ideas.

(Finally, note that we are changing rooms next meeting. We'll meet from 5:00-7:00 on November 1st in Cobb 102.)

Greek and Latin in the Introduction

I found two helpful pdfs that provide translations for the Greek and Latin terms in Heidegger's introduction. These are done by Dennis Beach of the College of Saint Benedict/Saint John's University, for his philosophy course on Heidegger. You can find the terms in §1 and §4 here and, for your later reading, the terms in §7 here.

If you want to ask questions or discuss these terms with the group, you can use the comments link at the end of this post.

Organizational Meeting

10/4 Organisational Meeting

1. Introductions


2. Description of the group: the group is not a class; we will not be teaching Being and Time (SZ). Rather, it will be a guided discussion in which we figure it out together and compare different interpretations. You will be expected to have read the assigned text and to be prepared to discuss it. You need not have understood it, but should be able to ask intelligible questions about what you don't understand.


3. Why read SZ? Group discussion. Mentioned: those who Heidegger influenced; the differences between 'early' Heidegger and 'later' Heidegger; the phenomenological method; the incompleteness of SZ (we have 1/3 of the planned text); the topics covered in SZ: tool use, the world, society and conformity, understanding, moods, death, angst, conscience, time; the question of SZ as the question of what it means to be and its relation to time, given that 'to be' is most generally understood as 'to be present'. We also read the preface to SZ aloud.


4. Reading schedule handed out:







5. Translations: Macquarrie and Robinson translation preferred over Stambaugh.