The early Heidegger’s Aristotle: the logic of possibility

© 2013 Dr. James Nicholas GarrettThe argument of this thesis is that Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle in the early 1920s is best understood after we have come to terms with the critique that Heidegger develops against theoretical attitude. By understanding how Heidegger determines the limitations of the theoretical attitude we can grasp the scope of Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology that takes up the task of overcoming of those limitations. In particular this thesis follows the development of an underlying opposition in Heidegger’s work from 1919 to 1924. This opposition is staged around competing interpretations of the structural elements at work in the actualisation of research. Specifically these structural-logical elements are the understanding of unity and simplicity within the contexts of vision, speech and action that underlie the way that research takes up an object and understands its own possibilities and ends. When read in this way Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle is a demonstration of possibilities of research that are invisible to theoretical attitude. As we have followed Heidegger’s reconstructions of Aristotle what emerges is a representation of Aristotle’s work where Heidegger attempts to alter our presuppositions about the possibility of research and thereby alter our understanding of Aristotle’s texts. The fundamental strategy of this alteration of presuppositions is to draw out the incompatibility of the structural-logical elements as employed by the modern philosophical positions criticised by Heidegger and the research carried out by Aristotle; this thesis makes this strategy explicit. To carry out the argument we move from establishing an understanding of Heidegger’s critique of the theoretical attitude in chapter one, to examining the ways that alternative research projects may be carried out in chapter two, and then finally to closely examining Heidegger’s readings of Aristotle in 1923 and 1924 in chapters three and four. The four chapters together show how Heidegger’s arguments about the role of formalisation in research lead directly into the fundamental element in Heidegger’s early reading of Aristotle, which is the conception the human being as being primarily in logos. With this new understanding of the nature of the human being insofar as it can do research and be the object of research comes an accompanying theory of both the nature of language and a rejection of the division of mind and world