Abstract

This dissertation is a contribution to the clarification of the meaning of Heidegger's work for contemporary philosophy. First, I survey major criticisms of Heidegger's work by recent and contemporary philosophers, including Theodor Adorno, Emmanuel Levinas, Cornelius Castoriadis, Ernst Tugendhat, and Jurgen Habermas. I isolate six major criticisms of Heidegger's philosophy: fundamental ontology amounts to an illegitimate philosophy of origins; Heidegger's appeal to the phenomenon amounts to an illegitimate appeal to givenness; Heidegger's central analysis of truth as aletheia distorts the conception of truth central to critical reasoning; Heidegger's account of Western philosophy is incoherent; Heidegger's metacritique of reason is self-refuting; and Heidegger's appeal to thinking otherwise is unintelligible. ;Guided by these criticisms, I next reconstruct Heidegger's interlocking analyses of truth, the phenomenon, and the proposal for a formally indicative method of exposition. I argue these analyses are damaged by Heidegger's impoverished conception of communication and lack of a conception of intersubjectivity. ;Then I show how Heidegger's analysis of artworks helps him revise his earlier philosophy and introduce a new understanding of Western philosophy in its foundations in the work of Parmenides and Plato. Neidegger accordingly alters his earlier critique of reason through a new understanding of the preeminence of the principle of sufficient reason in modernity. ;Next I explicate Adorno's alternative conception of the interrelationship of art, reason, and philosophy, and compare and criticize the two accounts. Both appeal to art to preserve a sense of finite transcendence amidst a world of social practices structured by and justified in terms of instrumental reason. ;Finally, I present alternative accounts of foci of Heidegger's philosophy. First I re-analyze Parnenides' and Plato's conceptions of philosophy as reason-giving. Then I consider contemporary work in philosophy on ethical and social aspects of reason and concept-formation. Lastly I present an account of a recent artwork, John Cage's Ryoanji, as an indication of the continuing validity of Heidegger's and Adorno's analyses