School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemThe Truth of Heidegger’s Existential Analytic of Dasein( 2021)Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time is an ambitious work that fuses transcendental-ontological and historical themes. Critics have argued that these two aspects of the work are inconsistent and, in light of Heidegger’s substantive claims regarding the historical structure of human existence, the methodological commitment to the transcendental-ontological notion of originary truth should be abandoned. ‘Detranscendentalised’ readings of Being and Time, to adopt Steven Crowell’s term, suggest this is because the historical themes cast doubt on the ability of the philosophising subject (Dasein) to identify and conceptualise timeless and ahistorical ontological structures. This thesis argues that the apparent tension between the transcendental-ontological and historical aspects of Being and Time can be resolved using the existential analytic of Dasein as the guiding theme. The existential analytic of Dasein is the explication of the universal existential structures of the philosophising subject. Heidegger’s achievement in Being and Time is to acknowledge the historical structure of human existence and incorporate it within the possibility of transcendental-ontological inquiry. This thesis is divided into three chapters. The first chapter introduces the existential analytic of Dasein as the guiding theme and examines the apparent tension by outlining Heidegger’s methodological commitments in Division I and substantive claims in Division II of Being and Time. The problems of access and articulation, which prove decisive for resolving the apparent tension, are also introduced. The second chapter begins by outlining Crowell’s challenge to the detranscendentalists and details the argumentative strategies employed in the detranscendentalised readings of Cristina Lafont, Richard Rorty, and Jacques Derrida. The final chapter resolves the apparent tension by arguing that the detranscendentalists’ argumentative strategies are insufficient for rejecting the transcendental-ontological themes in Being and Time. This chapter also argues that detranscendentalised readings typically contain latent transcendental-ontological commitments that are inconsistent with the predominant role assigned to the historical themes. The detranscendentalised readings are in this respect beset by the same inconsistency that they claim to find in Being and Time.
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ItemCan we read Nietzsche as a proto-phenomenologist?( 2016)This thesis asks the question whether we can interpret Nietzsche as anticipating the phenomenological movement of the twentieth century in his own philosophy. I begin by exploring some of the deep connections between his philosophy and Husserl’s founding phenomenology, before looking at some irreconcilable differences between them. I then argue that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, as it is laid out in the preface to Phenomenology of Perception, bears the strongest relations to Nietzsche’s thought, and is the most promising way to consider whether Nietzsche really practiced a form of proto-phenomenology. With these connections established, I then consider two themes of Nietzsche’s philosophy that seem to contradict important aspects of phenomenology: his “falsification thesis” and his perspectivism. Regarding his falsification thesis – the thesis that our descriptions necessarily falsify experience – I show that Nietzsche had no reason to hold onto this by the time of his mature works, and indeed abandoned it and in doing so made something of a “phenomenological turn”, particularly regarding his position on metaphysics. Furthermore, I also show how Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts on language in Phenomenology of Perception provide helpful insights that Nietzsche’s philosophy could accommodate and which would make his overall argument more phenomenological in nature. Regarding his perspectivism, I begin by showing how this is potentially problematic in considering Nietzsche as proto-phenomenological because of two reasons: firstly, it seems to say, like the falsification thesis, that our experiences are necessarily falsifications of realty. Secondly, it has often been interpreted in a way that leads Nietzsche towards relativism, whereby we have no notion of intersubjective truth. Again by showing how his metaphysical views changed throughout his career, I argue that his mature understanding of perspectivism rather than preventing access to an intersubjective truth, actually guarantees it, by arguing for our necessarily embodied perceptual access to the world, much in the same manner that Merleau-Ponty came to argue in his phenomenology of perception. With these potential conflicts resolved, this thesis shows that there are fundamental connections between Nietzsche and existential phenomenology – particularly via Merleau-Ponty – and that we should seriously consider the phenomenological credentials of Nietzsche’s philosophy.