Cognitive Existentialism, Phenomenology, and Philosophy of Science: Stimulating the Dialogue

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Notes

This view results of course from the general way in which the Heideggerians mostly understand Husserl's notorious ‘phenomenological reduction’. As I understand this latter methodological move, however, Husserl does never in fact lose sight of his original discovery of intentionality as experience of transcendently appearing beings (but I will not argue this further here).

For a reading of this point in a way similar to that of Ginev, see Glazebrook (2001, 366).

See correspondingly Husserl (1970, 6) and Heidegger (1968, 135). Ginev probably has in mind (and rejects) the meaning of de-worlding examined (and rejected) by Dreyfus and Spinosa (1999, 53f.), as reaching the thing in-itself, which nonetheless is not an issue for Heidegger.

This is the basic understanding of even our universities nowadays. They are expected to teach that the clockwork should keep going on and that we should be ‘producing’ ‘individuals’ specialized in fully ‘exploiting’ the ‘potential’ of the natural as well as the ‘human resources’! Techno-science would have, then, to realize the ‘vision’ of calculative order; just at the cost, however, of depriving humans of their peculiar existence-meaning, i.e. at the cost of throwing humanity in the abyss of the already progressing nihilism. The dilemma, then, is ‘techno-scientifically inspired world-view of a global mechanical order for all beings’ or ‘generally speaking, humanistic world-view’. For the possibility, nonetheless, that the answer to this may not be either of the dilemma's horns, see Theodorou (forthcoming). See also Section 5 below.

On the meaning of this Ding and especially of the Naturding and its relation with the scientific object, see Theodorou (2005, 2010).

This is a point that passes essentially unnoticed even by Vallor's otherwise nice defence of a Husserlian/Merleau-Pontian instrumental or experimental realism (Vallor 2009, 6). Of course the same hinted-at critical point here applies to all instrumental or ‘manipulative’ entity realisms in the spirit of Ian Hacking.

This forces Heidegger to an over-idealistic or hyper-semantic thesis, i.e. to accept the view that the intentional object of even our pre-scientific experience after the breakdown of our practical engagement in an equipmental nexus, i.e. even the perceptual thing, is a made-up theoretical construct of the theoretical attitude. For the exactly opposite reading, though, see e.g. Glazebrook (2001, 385).