Cosmology and Realism

Posted on June 16, 2010
Filed Under Heidegger, Peirce, Philosophy | Leave a Comment

I was rereading an old post from Deontologistics on Heidegger and realism. Part of his discussion is what he perceives to be the change in Heidegger’s thought from the middle to late period. One of the big changes he sees is that concealments becomes not just a feature of Dasein but the outside world itself. (i.e. earth as opposed to world in Heidegger’s jargon) While I think there may be elements of this prior to the Kehr, it definitely becomes a focus after the turn.

One quote I liked from the post was this one:


I think that you can definitely say that Heidegger is still an empirical realist, but I’m not sure that the whole later set up can be called transcendental in the Kantian sense. Heidegger is no longer making anything resembling claims about the structure of our cognition, but rather claims about how the very structure of Reality necessarily involves something like the possibility of cognition, and what this possibility consists in.

Now I disagree that this later position is wrong but I do think this is a reasonably good outline of what Heidegger is up to.

The reason I like this aspect of Heidegger is because of how closely it lines up with Peirce. There a lot of the hermeneutics that are developed as a kind of constitutive replacement for the categories of Kant become tied not just to the individual knower but to the universe as a whole. Peirce inverts the traditional way of viewing signs and interpretation. His categories become constitutive not just of human cognition but of the universe as a whole. (For Peirce this is reduced to three irreducible kinds of categories) I think Heidegger makes gestures in this direction as well, although it’s not as overt as in Peirce. The place to see this is in the places where Heidegger discusses Schelling.

Related posts:

  1. Peirce & Being
  2. Cognition: In the Head?
  3. OOP on the Fourfold
  4. Ereignis and Peirce
  5. Peirce on Intuition
  6. Tripartite Model of Being

Comments

Leave a Reply