Abstract

Philipse's interpretation of Heidegger's concept of being is fundamentally mistaken. It treats that concept as an amalgam of themes drawn from Aristotle, Husserl, Kant and Hegel with no hint of the utterly different ontology of the human subject that is Heidegger's most original contribution. Heidegger emerges incongruously as a transcendental philosopher a la Kant and the world is supposed to be constituted by the meaning-giving activity of a transcendental subject. As a result, the whole conception of human being as Dasein and being-in-the-world goes by the board. In its place we get religious and politico-military construals of the big movements in Heidegger's thought and no attention at all to the centrally important conception of being as presence. The only sense in which the author's evident intention of demolishing every thesis Heidegger defends succeeds that nothing recognizably Heideggerian emerges from the account he gives