Abstract

In Being and Time, Heidegger attempts to show how the understanding of being that figures in all self-relations to individual existence can become an explicit philosophical theme; but since no conventions exist in everyday talk and theoretical discourse for invoking everyday self-relations as understanding of being, and since there are no everyday problems or possibilities that require strictly ontological interpretations of everyday experience, it is hard for readers to accept the terms of his project. Indeed, Being and Time seems a patchwork of practical and cultural themes that may serve his ontological aims, and of ethical and religious ones that do not. Yet use of terms like practical, cultural, ethical, and religious to describe the analytic's themes wrongly presupposes that Heidegger uses heterogeneous interpretive frameworks to identify his field. Contending, to the contrary, that his sole interpretive framework and his themes have a homogeneous character, I argue that Heideggers disciplines represent developments of what he calls Rucksicht and Nacbsicht, our ways of looking after or looking out for one another in our individual reflexive relations to existence, since it is to such looking that individual, inadvertent confrontations with the difference between being and beings appear as a phenomenon. In the dissertation I explicate and defend Heidegger's arguments for fundamental ontology; examining his methodological commentary and his analyses as methodological exemplars, I articulate the conditions for exercising his disciplines and for recognizing oneself as disposing over non-Heideggerian motives for seeing the analytic's themes as exemplifying only understanding of being . In discussing formal indication, existential concepts, existential projections, and phenomenological reduction, I show why Heidegger turns to authors such as Kierkegaard, Augustine, and Aristotle to revise Husserl's phenomenology. Using only the interpretive language of looking and speaking correlative to individual self-relations to existence, studying only Heidegger's routines for showing how to see reflective and reflexive individuality casting being itself as a phenomenon, and asking only whether he identifies a unitary thematic field, I argue that fundamental ontology does respond to an unrecognized concern over and interest in ontological difference