Part 1 (Tues., 1/3): pages 1-6

Part 2, (Tues., 1/10): pages 7-10

Part 3, (Tues., 1/17): pages 11-14

Part 4, (Tues., 1/24): pages 15-18

Part 5, (Tues., 1/31): pages 19-20

Part 6, (Date TBD): Review

Location

Bread & Butter

419 Park Avenue South @ 29th St.

Transit: (4) or (6) train to 28th St.

Google Map

http://maps.google.com/maps/place?cid=29156...

This essay on Plato was written four years after "Being and Time" and reflects Heidegger's attempt to place the practical analysis of Da-sein from BT (on human being-there in the world) into a larger context. The earlier analysis shows human existence as fundamentally being-in-the-world, dealing practically -- and generally unreflectively -- with things as they are given to us ready-to-hand.

Heidegger demonstrates decisively that the critical reflection or theoretical cognition of the reasoning "I " in the modern philosophy of Descartes -- and in the modern scientific stance generally -- is a derivative phenomenon, occurring only when familiar life-world practices break down, when things are forced to show up as strange and unfamiliar in their "facticity" or Being at all.

Contemporary empirical cognitive science now widely confirms and recognizes this insight from Heidegger's early work: cognitive reflection -- and its theoretical "view" -- is a secondary phenomenon, relative to the primary phenomena of a practical being-in-the-world. Paradoxically, this result threatens to completely undermine the traditional tendency of Western philosophy and science toward Theory, which presupposes the possibility of an objective point-of-view and with it a universally true representation of the world.

In the Plato essay Heidegger moves beyond the analysis of being-in-the-world, putting the resulting picture into the larger historical context of Western philosophy and science. These latter descend from Plato's theory that beings cannot be true without the form of an "idea" which particular beings need to become intelligible -- where being-intelligible is a 'form' into which particular beings must be placed in order to make sense within a collective human discourse or language.

This is language. Consider that it might be essential to the nature of discourse or language to essentialize what a being is (e.g., what is a planet? what is a dog? what is a home? what is a democracy?) and this makes the relation of our language to empirically existing beings (e.g., actual planets, dogs, homes, and democracies) perennially problematic. Was the chicken or egg first?: do the beings precede the idea? Or is there some sense in which the idea preceded the beings?

Language leads us to skeptical problems.

In this particular essay we get Heidegger's articulation of what amounts to his main or essential contribution to today's philosophical discourse, which has become especially conscious of the problems of language (see the Linguistic Turn of Analytic Philosophy, for example). He begins developing the genealogical analysis and overall critique of more than 2000 years of Western philosophy and science, adopted by others such as Michel Foucault. Heidegger shows how our philosophies, theories and sciences genetically descend from a change in the meaning of truth effected within Plato's allegory, whereby "ideas" get understood as "representations" and representations are mis-taken for the essence of truth.

Heidegger's own professed aim is to recover the original, primordial phenomenon of truth as "alethea," from Greek for the event of unhiddenness or unconcealment of Being (that things are and how things are 'at all', in the first place). Heidegger argues that "alethea" occurs in Plato's thought prior to the tying of truth to the form of an "idea" (in the mind). The idea (in the mind) becomes the form of representing what is unhidden, the form of being correct about what is unhidden.

Through this critical recovery of the original meaning of truth Heidegger believes we gain insight into how Western philosophy, science, and technology -- all of which dominate modern life -- tend to systematically conceal Being and thereby deter us from thinking more originally.

You can download a PDF of the essay here:

Heidegger_on_Being_in_the_Cave_of_Plato

http://files.meetup.com/1329080/Heidegger_on_Being_in_the_Cave_of_Plato.pdf

SCHEDULE

Heidegger's essay on "Plato's Doctrine of Truth" is about 20 pages long (download link repeated below). Over the course of six meetups we can divide the discussion into about four pages to explore in detail during each meetup, with one final meetup to review the entire essay. This way, if you did not get in to one meetup you will be able to pick up in the next (if someone drops out) by having read the pages up to that point. Here is the tentative division of pages for the next few meetups:
 
Part 1 (Tues., 1/3): pages 1-6 (up to the end of the "allegory of the cave").

Part 2, (Tues., 1/10): pages 7-10 (Heidegger describes the origin of the "idea" in Plato's text).

Part 3, (Tues., 1/17): pages 11-14 (Heidegger describes how truth turns into representation).

Part 4, (Tues., 1/24): pages 15-18

Part 5, (Date TBD): pages 19-20

Part 6, (Date TBD): Review of entire essay
 
Download:
http://files.meetup.com/1329080/Heidegger_on_Being_in_the_Cave_of_Plato.pdf
 
Best,
Tom
Organizer, NYC Philosophical Reading
http://www.meetup.com/philosophical/

http://owlofminerva.org