Saturday, September 6, 2008

Heidegger on Truth and Being

I am working currently on my MA thesis involving the transcendental properties of being in the thought of Aquinas and Heidegger. As a consequence, a lot of my work is critical interpretation of Heidegger. I found this article by Maverick Philosophy W. Vallicella, Heidegger's Reduction of Being to Truth. As I have been reading Heidegger and attempting to understand the changes in his thought, I came to some of the same conclusions Dr. Vallicella did in this article. The problem I see with Heidegger is that his reduction of Being to aletheia makes Being in no real sense intrinsic to beings. Heidegger calls that sort of thinking metaphysics, but I think it truly is a case of the irrelevance of the question if we make the central question of Being unrelated to beings per se. There is a response to this criticism in the same place, which I have yet to read. I can anticipate certain responses from a Heideggarian, which it would be interesting to look at and consider. My own view is that Heidegger requires a theory of transcendentals and the co-related analogia entis in order to form a consistent "metaphysics" in the non-onto-theological sense. But we shall see...