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Dasein and Sciences: a Reply to Haugeland’S DASEIN AND SCIENCES: A REPLY TO HAUGELAND’S READING OF BEING AND TIME As A thesis submitted to the faculty of 3C, San Francisco State University JtolC In partial fulfillment of the requirements for TMIL the Degree Master of Arts In Philosophy by Michelle Ann Mogannam San Francisco, California 2015 Copyright by Michelle Ann Mogannam 2015 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL I certify that I have read Dasein and Sciences: a Reply to Haugeland’s Reading of Being and Time by Michelle Ann Mogannam, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of Arts in Philosophy at San Francisco State University. u j lA-^ ) Mohammad Azadpur, Ph.D. Professor of Philosophy David Landy, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Philosophy DASEIN AND SCIENCES: A REPLY TO HAUGELAND’S READING OF BEING AND TIME Michelle Ann Mogannam San Francisco, California 2015 In the following paper, I will be arguing against a position held by John Haugeland that puts forth the claim that the sciences are cases of dasein. I draw on Martin Heidegger’s philosophical work, Being and Time, to address this issue and in doing so I demonstrate that the modem sciences cannot be cases of dasein. By adjudicating the views of Hans- Georg Gadamer and John McDowell, I am able to make the relevant distinction between the two. The mode of being-in that Heidegger identifies as tarrying alongside is what does the necessary work for my argument to go through. The realization that only human beings gain phenomenological access to things as they are in themselves situates my findings into a larger picture that puts emphasis on the distinctiveness of dasein, and Heidegger’s overarching phenomenological goals. I certify that the Abstract is a correct representation of the content of this thesis. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Dr. Mohammad Azadpur and Dr. David Landy for putting their time and efforts into my thesis process. I would like to especially thank Dr. Mohammad Azadpur for helping me direct my thoughts accordingly. I also want to thank my fellow classmates in the program who have made these years nothing less than inspiring and special. Lastly, I dedicate this thesis to my father, Richard Mogannam, who has never failed in pointing me towards the eternal truth. Vll TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. John Haugeland’s Reading of Heidegger..........................................................1 2. Heidegger’s Method in Being and Time............................................................6 3. Dasein’s Disclosedness.....................................................................................8 4. Tarrying Alongside Entities............................................................................ 12 5. Gadamer on Theoretical Knowledge and the Thing in Itself......................... 16 6. McDowell: The Limits of Science Are Not the Limits of the World..............22 7. Conclusion.......................................................................................................29 8. Works Cited.....................................................................................................31 1 “Freedom is engagement in the disclosure o f beings as such. Disclosedness itself is conserved in ek-sistent engagement, through which the openness o f the open region, i.e., the ‘there ’ [ ‘Da ’], is what it is. ” —Martin Heidegger “Scientific existence is possible only if in advance it holds itself out into the nothing”— Martin Heidegger “By a primal oneness the four—earth and sky. divinities and mortals—belong together in one... Mortals are in the fourfold by dwelling. ’—Martin Heidegger John Haugeland’s Reading of Heidegger In a 2007 essay on Martin Heidegger titled “Death and Dasein,” Haugeland states that dasein is (a term Heidegger has coined): “(i) a distinctively human way of living that (ii) embodies an understanding of being and for which (iii) individual people (“cases of dasein”) can take responsibility” (182). He concocted a list of what any science necessarily includes: “scientists, a rich repertoire of skills, practices, and equipment.” He proceeds to assert, “Since existence is the way of being peculiar to dasein this implies that sciences are daseins—which implies that the aforementioned three points characterize them as well. And I myself take that implication at face value: I think it is what Heidegger means; moreover; I think he is right” (182). What led Haugeland to make such a bold claim stems from a passage in the introduction of Being and Time where Heidegger writes, “As ways in which man behaves, sciences have the manner of Being which this entity—man himself—possesses. This entity we denote by the term ‘Dasein Scientific research is not the only manner of Being which this entity can have, nor is it 2 the one that lies closest” (32/H12). In the latter passage, Heidegger is directing our attention to the ways in which dasein engages in scientific research, and this is precisely one way that dasein can behave in a scientific manner as a way of “being-in-the-world.” As he expresses shortly after that passage, “Sciences are ways of Being in which Dasein comports itself towards entities which it need not be itself’ (33/H13). That dasein is an entity with the ability to behave in various manners in comporting itself towards the world in different ways, is something distinctive to dasein. Now the basic state of dasein is “being-in-the-world” and this term ‘in’ does not express something like “being inside” another “thing” as a shoe is ‘in’ a closet. So dasein is not ‘in’ the world like things are ‘in’ space. As Hubert Dreyfus points out in his commentary on Heidegger, “The primordial sense of ‘in’ was, rather, ‘to reside’, ‘to dwell’” (42). Dasein is in the world in the active sense of residing or dwelling for it is involved in the world and has a primordial familiarity with it (80-1/H54-5). Furthermore, the word is hyphenated indicating that this is a ‘unitary’ phenomenon in the case that dasein cannot exist without a world (Welt), so they must be taken together as a ‘whole.’ Dasein is always ‘being-in’ a state which Heidegger identifies as an existentiale or an essential state of dasein’s being (79/H54). In my thesis, I will argue that the modem sciences cannot be cases of dasein because they essentially obfuscate the things in the way they look by subduing them into the realm of law. I will come to confirm that it is only human beings who can tarry alongside and let things show themselves as themselves. This is to be what differentiates the sciences from dasein. In engaging things scientifically, scientists look at things in the 3 world in a theoretical manner by taking a theoretical attitude/stance towards them. The sciences have theoretical knowledge and so, the sciences are not daseins but a mode of being-in. In order for the discussion to get underway, I must take a look at Haugeland’s earlier papers, “Heidegger on Being a Person” and “Dasein’s Disclosedness,” to get a clear picture of what he means when he says that we are “cases of dasein.” He concludes that “a person is a case of Dasein” and in order to make this intelligible, how Haugeland interprets Heidegger’s notion of “understanding” or, this “projecting in terms of possibilities” will be important to unpack. Seeing that for Haugeland, these possibilities are “the new options and alternatives opened up by norms: roles that things can play and ways that they can play them” (36). As a case of dasein, a person can cast themselves into a role and take on the relevant norms “ both in the sense of undertaking to abide by them and in the sense of accepting responsibility for failings.” In this way, a scientist can understand himself as a “responsible role player” within this common institutional framework and these roles that a case of dasein plays do not seek to establish what it is but who it is. Yet other things in the world such as equipment also exercise role-playing. For example, think of a chess piece as being part of a game in which its role depends on rules that are given and which determine its possibilities. One can say the same thing of a hammer. A hammer’s role is defined by its designated use as something that drives in nails. The difference is that various kinds of equipment are not to be held accountable for how they perform and a case of dasein is. In being the people we are, there is a certain 4 way of life that distinguishes people like us from other entities in the known universe. Given this, a term like ‘responsible’ is supposed to capture the distinctiveness of dasein in the sense that we ourselves are dasein, qua people. Another way of thinking about this is that, “we each live dasein” and this is akin to saying “we are what we do,” while each and every one of us has their own personal way of living (“Dasein’s Disclosedeness” 30- 9). When a person is thought of as a case of dasein he navigates the world, as one of its many possibilities, with a practical “know-how” or “skillful behavior.” Haugeland is sure to make a distinction between the functional roles of organic and mechanical subsystems with roles of equipment. The latter are essentially instituted in a way that is in “conjunction with norms of use,” and this just means that a case of dasein is held accountable for how it uses equipment—a case of dasein can behave appropriately or inappropriately—within this normative institutional framework. We can now point out his claim that tells us that a case of dasein is literally an institution when he says, “you and I are institutions like General Motors, marriage, and the common law, except that we are ‘primordial.’” With this in mind, he calls “accountable institutions” to be “primordial” and would configure “people” as “primordial institutions” because they can be held responsible for their behavior.
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