Comments on Sheehan’s "Making Sense of Heidegger"

Phenomenology as a subversive practice.

“…Our research strategy was based on an image of human action as contextually situated, concernfully engaged, temporal, relational, and agential. Theoretically speaking, our approach was informed by assumptions drawn from the work of Martin Heidegger (1962) and others who have developed his ideas in various ways (e.g., Dreyfus, 1992, 2014; Guignon, 1983, 2002; Wrathall, 2013, 2014). In conjunction with this philosophical background, we employed an explicit theoretical framework informed by the hermeneutic moral realist philosophy of Charles Taylor (1989) and, to a lesser degree, the neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics of Alasdair MacIntyre (1984) (for more details on these ideas in psychology, see Brinkmann, 2011; Stigliano, 1990).…”

Theory as truth and as ethics.

“…From our own postmodern age, in which we have definitively recognized the impossibility of adequately “mirroring nature” (Rorty, 1979) and the inadvisability of seeking knowledge as representation (Guignon, 1983), back through Hume’s (1985) radical skepticism of knowledge of the sources of experience and of causality, to the pronouncement by the Pre-Socratic Philosopher Protagoras that “of all things the measure is man” (Silvermintz, 2016), it is easy to detect a consistently recurring theme: Truth is elusive, if not illusory, relative, if not irrelevant, and truth claims are always suspect. We should beware of any sense that this insight is of recent origin or that its most recent avatar represents its fullest and truest reality.…”