The Measure of Truth

Forms not Norms! On Haugeland on Heidegger on Being

“…These remarks fit with McManus' view (: 62ff.) that, for Heidegger, scientists can have an operative understanding of being but also an understanding of that understanding, which can itself be a misunderstanding, as when they think that what they do is behold the world in a purely disinterested way.…”

“…Apart from Crowell, op. cit., I have found the most helpful treatments of the topic of normativity in Heidegger to be Golob () and McManus (). Golob, unlike Haugeland (whom Golob does not discuss directly), (emphasizes the status of being) in the guise of what he calls ‘prototypes’, as normative for entities, rather than as something that itself is beholden to them.…”

“…McManus partially bolsters such a reading by bringing out the Platonic resonance of what Heidegger calls a ‘Hinblick’, an a priori advance ‘view’ we have of entities, which he (Heidegger) identities as a ‘measure’. Nevertheless, McManus' own considered view is that these ‘measures’ are in fact constitutive without being normative, and he gives what I take to be a decisive argument for this: ‘we cannot come to see how an “original having” [of the sort a Hinblick gives us] is applicable to a particular domain of objects, because seeing such a “fit” would require that we grasp that domain independently of its disclosure through that “original having”, when, ex hypothesi , there is no other way of grasping that domain of entities…A key feature of the modes of understanding and entities in question is that there is no such thing as encountering the entities in question other than through these modes’ (McManus []: 121). It follows that there is no sense of holding entities up to being to assess or measure them, for that requires precisely the grasp on them apart from their being that Heidegger's Hinblicke render impossible.…”

“…KPM: 160, where it is the imagination as ‘unknown root’ before which Heidegger says Kant shrinks back. As McManus notes (: 113–14), in the Logik lectures of 1925 Heidegger appears to reject the ‘Cartesian’ subjectivizing of the a priori by Kant, specifically his grounding of space and time in the subject (L: 278, 318). There is thus a shift in Heidegger's view of what he sees as wrong with Kant.…”

Heidegger and the Supposition of a Single, Objective World

“…(For an indication of how this case might be made, cf. McManus : Section 4 forthcoming‐a Section 9.2, and forthcoming‐c. )…”