Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy

Martin Heidegger's posthumous work, Contributions to Philosophy. @PhiloofAlexandria

[kakungulu]

Prof. Bonevac is either a virtuoso lecturer who can work random environmental sounds and wasp invasions into his line of explanation or a talented video editor. Either way, a joy to listen to. I also never heard any talk about Heidegger's philosophy before that wasn't clouded by his horrible choices and how they relate to his ideas.

[lapsecontinuum]

Great stab at it professor. I've never read the "Contributions" in its entirety, only in snippets. Though I have read "Being And Time" in its entirety many times, and poured over that book and studied it for years. B&T, for all its difficulty, is a clear-cut, systematic work of philosophy compared to "Contributions." I think you're right that, by that point, Heidegger felt that traditional use of language & thinking were, in some sense, just not up to the task -- that something would always be left out in the end. I know Heidegger tends to catch some flack, especially in "analytic" circles, for his obscure and almost mystical-sounding language in some of the later works. But when one considers that those were the writings of the same man who wrote "Being and Time" & "Basic Problems..", I feel that we owe it to Heidegger to at least attempt to follow his thinking and take it seriously. I'm an early Heidegger fan myself, though I still intend to take the dive one of these days into the later corpus, for better or worse! I think Being & Time is one of the richest, most brilliant works of philosophy ever produced. So I have to think there must be some value to be gleaned from the "Contributions." Just a matter of really wrestling with the text to gain the reward! Thanks for being brave enough and willing to not only take these writings seriously, but to openly discuss them and share your thoughts with the rest of us. Cheers to you Professor Bonevac!🍻

[adambruce]

Thank you, Professor! This video has inspired me to study Heidegger more carefully; I admit that I had somewhat written him off before.

[tommyharmon]

I’m currently getting my undergraduate in philosophy and I want to study with professor Bonevac for my graduate degree

[stripedgazelle]

Thank you. :-) I am thrilled by the similarities I hear to ideas of Carl Gustav Jung (who formed, indeed, much of my own local network of meaning).

[arvindkrishnan]

Kindly do a similar mini series on Bertrand Russell professor

[emmereffing]

Professor - what you are talking about is "participation, " a favorite topic of Owen Barfield, who has been called "British Heidegger"

[nicholasjagger]

I agree with Atman, either God provides final meaning, or we reach the end of human resources and find they are incapable of ultimate validation. Did Heidegger ever stop being a theologian? Brilliant as ever from DB, thanks for taking your break to make these videos about Heidegger. There's so much use of the German language in Heidegger that translation can't carry. Thanks again DB.

[CjqNslXUcM]

Ereignis means something like occurrence, appropriation would be Aneignung. These are the meanings as commonly used in German, but the connotations are quite different than they are in English.

I could see how Ereignen could be used to express Aneignen which is probably where the interpretation comes from. The root of both words is eigen, meaning self or own, like proprius in appropriation.

The pronunciation of Ereignis is actually different. Since 'er' is just the prefix, it is one syllable followed by a glottal stop followed by the stressed syllable 'eig': er-'EIGnis.

[WistfulOcean]

Prof. Bonevac, you have a very solid understanding of logic (I love your book "deduction"), so I was wondering how someone with this kind of analytic background comes to grips with philosophers that are (to my layman's mind) so lacking in clarity when it comes to providing definitions and argumentative steps. Do you try to reconstruct their arguments using your analytical toolkit, or do you put this toolkit aside and use a different approach to understand them?

[freddytackos]

@Daniel Bonevac, where to go from here? have any philosophers tried to pick up where heidegger left off?

[terpy]

Having read an english translation, and asking my german teacher to give a few possibilities for meaning in contested translations, I really appreciate the extra contextual info. It's an interesting thought exercise to view Contributions from the "event" and "appropriation" frames of reference. The self actualization required to "be" in the event reference makes sense, one's own interpretation of the psychical world requires self reference over time and action requires the ability to use those experiences in the present. However, the "appropriation" reference frame makes the implications of this self referential necessity very dark. The meaning breaks down, in my opinion, because there are networks of meaning that produce truth, but these are merely emergent properties of a larger system that cannot coraltated by locality. I could eventually write the dictionary by parsing full english words from random pages in the library of babel, if it truly contains every combination of letters, numbers, ect. The locality comes from the event and meaning emerges along with logical operators like true and false. Simply adding the ability to compare two logical operators creates the conditions necessary for modern computers.

[freddytackos]

thank you. this seems very applicable to the current american political situation

[soloy]

Dude I think someone's trying to steal your car.

[LuigiSimoncini]

Thank you Professor! It took an analytical philospher to make some sense out of Heidegger's unintelligible continental prose. Funny how the conclusion is that the german SOAB came to nothing in the end...

[tedpikul]

Here's a question: how is this sense of interpretation, or sense-making, different from (relatively) contemporary Kantians like Cassirer, who make a turn into linguistics in order to talk about pre-conditions for understanding? How is Heidegger's sense-making different from Kant's synthetic judgements?

The reason that I ask is that I'm very sure that Heidegger's sense-making is something more than simply Kant's synthetic judgement...but I'm not sure why.

[oldsachem]

How do we ascribe meaning to dreams? What is the grounded foundation by which one interprets dreams? Totally experiential?

[kallianpublico]

In quantum mechanics, whose apparati, their operation, and utilization I am unfamiliar with, there is this ambiguity in the "framework of meaning". There is this conflation of being and becoming.
Physicists measuring the position and momentum of particles like electrons tell us about indistinguishability.They cannot tell one electron from another: no physicist has ever measured the same electron twice. If they have they could not tell you. This begs the question how do they know its an electron. Usually measuring apparatus tells you a propert of the thing being measured, it doesn't tell you what the thing is. A scale tells you 5000 pounds, it doesnt tell you if its an elephant or a car. How do they know they aren't being fooled every time by something interacting with their equipment? Something acting like an electron but isn't. Is that a wasp flying by, or a bee 🐝, or a fly, or a gnat, or a dragonfly, or a beetle, or a ladybug or a...?
Paradoxes are seeming contradictions. Seeming because of literal translation. They can be "solved", however, by adding context. Not just meaning but meaning in a situation. "When you get to a fork in the road, take it."
The brain is an organ of time, it tells us the situation. The stomach is an organ of meaning, so is the tongue, ear, nose, skin, eye. Consciousness, however, is the final context: the source of being and becoming. Nature the source of every situation. The soul the connection between Nature and consciousness. The mind the connection between brain and consciousness. The heart the connection between the body and Nature.

[anthonystrefwick]

Cant help thinking that Heidegger in his concrete actuality, actualised the incapacity revealed in his philosophy . He sold himself to a bad cause in Nazi Germany, even when it was to have been subsequently seen fit to absolve him of any culpability .
Free choice of conceptual scheme, conceptual scheme chosen in the urgency of maintaining social relationships in a local community .Then this as precondition of referring to particulars in a changing life world. Without sign equipment to support reference then no meaning - or perhaps instability, or inscrutability? .
Heidegger in the concrete actuality of all this must necessarily become hopelesy lost as he tries to orient himself and yes...he indeed accounts for this in his work by importing his idea of thrownness or entgeworfenheit. But he is lost in the first place with, so to speak, the local tail of particularity by virtue of method, conceptually wagging the entire dog of absolute conceptual scheme needed for certainty?

[psychonaut]

Listening to this I start to think that philosophy will give way to cognitive neuroscience.