Written by one of the pre-eminent interpreters of Heidegger, this book is an important statement about the basis of human sociability that is a major contribution to the continuing debates about Heidegger in particular, and ethics in general. Existential philosophy is often thought to promote moral nihilism in which everything is permitted. This book demonstrates that, in the case of Martin Heidegger, any such accusation is unjust. On the contrary, Heidegger thought seriously about the implications of human co-existence, and this (...) book shows that conceptions of trust and responsibility that lie at the very heart of morality are to be found in the sketch of Mitsein - our being together with one another in the world - offered in Being and Time. That Heidegger never developed these conceptions may explain why they have been overlooked, but renders them no less important for that. (shrink)

' ...this volume extracts the moral and ethical conflicts presented by everyday police activity and makes explicit the assumption that shape the police response... '.

This paper examines the moral arguments for and against employees' blowing the whistle on illegal or immoral actions of their employers. It asks whether such professional dissidents are justified in disclosing wrongdoing by others while concealing their own identity. Part I examines the concept of anonymity, distinguishing it from two similar concepts — secrecy and privacy. Part II analyzes the concept of whistleblowing using recent definitions by Bok, Bowie and De George. Various arguments against anonymous whistleblowing are identified and evaluated. (...) The author concludes with a defense of the practice in terms of social benefits — primarily the redressing of wrongdoing. (shrink)

In this paper I investigate the notion of an unconscious intention as it is discussed and defended in Freud's A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. I am concerned with two issues: first, whether the evidence that Freud adduces supports his conclusion that there are unconscious intentions, and, second, whether the notion of an unconscious intention is coherent. I call into question some of Freud's arguments to support the notion, and I present a case for the incoherence of the notion. Finally, I (...) suggest how one might begin to reconcile my argument for its incoherence with an argument for the existence of unconscious intentions. (shrink)

This article rejects the idea that Heidegger's Nazism derives from his philosophical thought. No connection has convincingly been shown to hold between the ontological apparatus of Being and Time and any political orientation. The elaboration of the concept of being in the later work needs to be understood as Heidegger's own reaction to the activism of his earlier thought which in the absence of any principle of respect for other human beings could provide no moral basis for resistance to Nazi (...) ideology. The tensions between the circumstances of Heidegger's early life - rural, conservative, and Catholic - and the Nietzschean modernism of his philosophical thought are explored. It is suggested that there were analogous tensions between tradition and the modern world in Nazism and that it was Heidegger's hatred of that world that led him to respond favorably to some (but not all) of the themes of Nazi thought. (shrink)

Danto and White, alone among philosophers who emphasize the narrative structure of historical writing, attempt to reconcile historical narrative with the regularity theory of explanation. Their efforts fail because neither realizes that the concept of intentional action lies at the root of historical understanding. Danto's insistence that historical events can under some description be subsumed under universal causal laws forces him to disallow and thus to sacrifice the integrity of explanations that are intelligible to the historical agents themselves. White does (...) not see that "action" not "thought" or "underlying condition," may be "the decisive cause" of an event. Though the attempt to square historical narrative with the regularity theory is not doomed from the start, it has no chance of success until the concept of action, now being intensively analyzed by philosophers, is better understood. (shrink)

The author discusses the activity of deceiving" as deceiving another and as self-deception. he attempts a logical equivalence between the two. the discussion encompasses 'belief'. the author concludes that the statement 'jones is deceiving himself' translates into "'"how could" jones believe such nonsense'?" with the answer built-in: "'he really "can't"'." (staff).

He demonstrates that a broad parallelism exists between developments in ethical theory among Continental philosophers of the phenomenological persuasion and the more analytically inclined philosophers of the English-speaking world.

Although the status of the concept of being in Heidegger's thought is still the subject of controversy, textually it is quite clear that he held the fundamental character of being to be presence. Accordingly, this paper is not concerned to show that this was indeed Heidegger's conception of being. Instead, it undertakes to make a philosophical case for the prima facie paradoxical thesis that being is presence. It does so by first taking up Heidegger's account of truth in which it (...) is identified with the mode of being of Dasein and thus with the 'uncoveredness' (Entdecktheit) of entities that Dasein effects. This leads to a review of traditional conceptions of being. I argue that being is not just the character that makes an entity the kind of entity it is; it is that entity's be-ing whatever it is. As such, it has the structure of a state of affairs and it is a state of affairs that makes statements or thoughts about it true or false as the case may be. But a state of affairs is not a part or a property of the entity it is about. As what makes a true statement true, I argue, it belongs to the context of truth and thereby of presence. In a final section, the relevance of these matters to contemporary philosophical discussion is taken up. (shrink)

This broad, ambitious study is about human nature, but human nature treated in a way quite different from the scientific account that influences so much of contemporary philosophy. Drawing on certain basic ideas of Heidegger the author presents an alternative to the debate waged between dualists and materialists in the philosophy of mind that involves reconceiving the way we usually think about 'mental' life. Olafson argues that familiar contrasts between the 'physical' and the 'psychological' break down under closer scrutiny. They (...) need to be replaced by a conception of human being in which we are not entities compounded out of body and mind, but unitary entities that are distinguished by 'having a world', which is very different from simply being a part of the world. (shrink)