Maximilian Tegtmeyer

My thesis has two main aims – one exegetical and one comparative: Exegetically it aims to defend two theses regarding Being and Time, namely, (i) that Heidegger is a conceptualist, and (ii) that he is a transcendental philosopher; comparatively it contrasts Being and Time with John McDowell’s Mind and World.

The first chapter disputes the prevalent pragmatist reading of Being and Time in favour of an alternative conceptualist interpretation, on which all of Dasein’s intentionality necessarily includes conceptual content. This is corroborated, by showing that the traditional argument against conceptualism is unfounded, because it rests on a misinterpretation of Heidegger’s account of assertion in Being and Time §33. Accordingly, the chapter establishes that Heidegger shares McDowell’s conceptualism, wherefore Hubert Dreyfus is unjustified in invoking Heidegger in his attack on McDowell. However, the degree of agreement between Heidegger and McDowell remains unsettled, because it depends on, whether tuning (Stimmung) adds non-conceptual content to Heideggerian intentionality, which, if so, would mean a divergence of Heidegger and McDowell’s conceptualism.

The second chapter argues for a picture of Heidegger as a transcendental philosopher, who is primarily concerned with explicating the conditions for the possibility of intentionality via the analysis of Dasein, outlined in chapter one. Simultaneously, the chapter reconstructs Heidegger’s implicit argument against Cartesian style scepticism in Being and Time §43. It furthermore establishes that Heidegger and McDowell are acting on the same insights regarding the motivations of the problems of modern philosophy, thus sharing a negative transcendental strategy. Furthermore, it argues that Heidegger’s positive transcendental account, qua analysis of Dasein, represents an alternative to McDowell’s metaphorical quietism, thus providing the resources for criticising McDowell’s account as dogmatic, because it fails to explicate the conditions for the possibility of the notion of the self that it rests on, namely spontaneity.