The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger’s “Being and Time.” ed. by Mark A. Wrathall (review)

This substantial volume is a worthy addition to the Cambridge Companion series. It offers a broad sample of primarily Anglophone scholarship on Being and Time, particularly from so-called analytic Heideggerians, whose approaches to the text combine precise argumentation with colloquial, accessible expressions.

Mark Wrathall and Max Murphey open with a careful overview of Being and Time. Readers unfamiliar with the interpretive tradition stemming from Hubert Dreyfus may find novelty in some of their vocabulary, such as “affordances” and “norms.” Wrathall and Murphey correct the tendency in this tradition to focus on Division One with a fine-grained account of Division Two, arguing that for Heidegger our existence is essentially “unjustifiable” (31). Alfred Denker skillfully traces the personal and intellectual impulses that culminated in Being and Time, emphasizing young Heidegger’s quest for a philosophically honest way to be Christian in the modern world. Since it provides broad cultural context, Denker’s essay may be of particular interest to readers of this journal.

Taylor Carman defends Heidegger’s inquiry into “being” against misreadings. Heidegger does not just ask about a word (85) but about “conditions constitutive of the interpretability of entities” (86). Entities are to be interpreted as having degrees of being (88) and various related ways of being (89–90). Heidegger does not rigidly distinguish a priori meanings of being and empirical findings; they are “interwoven” (92). Wayne Martin applies analytic tools to the concept Dasein. Is it defined by its extension (human beings) or its intension (entities who understand being) or, as Martin proposes, by exemplars (Heidegger, his readers, and those ontologically like them) (117)? The answer one prefers affects how one reads Heidegger’s claims that Dasein necessarily has certain features. (In the 1930s such problems come to a head: Heidegger asks “Who are we?” and presents Dasein as a possibility for humans.)

The next several essays investigate supposedly necessary traits of Dasein, as presented in Division One: spatiality (David Cerbone), being-with (Hubert Dreyfus), mood (Matthew Ratcliffe), understanding (Mark Wrathall), and language (Barbara Fultner). The authors pose incisive questions: Is proximity a matter of convenience or attention (Cerbone, 139–141)? Why does Heidegger not distinguish conforming from conformism (Dreyfus, 153–154)? Does Heidegger himself espouse the “foundationalism of most pragmatist Heideggerians” who claim that “all intelligence and intelligibility is derived from practical intelligibility” (Wrathall, 198)? Is language a tool, is it constitutive of our very being, or both (Fultner, 218)? Peter E. Gordon’s contribution combines intellectual history with textual analysis. Gordon reveals the neo-Kantian targets of Heidegger’s diverse comments on signs, “primitive Dasein,” and “functional concepts” (this last passage, for instance, is an attack on Cassirer’s Substance and Function). Denis McManus considers Heidegger’s view of skepticism. On McManus’s rather Wittgensteinian reading, Heidegger’s insight is that both correct and incorrect judgments presuppose “observational tasks” (251) and thus a “mastery of skills” (252). Recognizing our need for such skills does not demolish skeptical thought-experiments, but may make skepticism less intuitively plausible (255–256).

Most of the subsequent essays investigate themes from Division Two: death (Iain Thomson), freedom (Béatrice Han-Pile), authenticity and resoluteness (William Blattner), temporality (Stephan Käufer), and historicity (Joseph K. Schear). Thomson submits that Heidegger’s “death” means “the experience of existential world collapse” (274); similar views are espoused by Blattner (324) and Schear (365), but in my view such a phenomenon is Angst, rather than the related but distinct Sein zum Tode, i.e., one’s relation to one’s own possible nonexistence. Han-Pile helpfully relates Heidegger’s “choice to choose” to Descartes and Kierkegaard, and describes such choosing as a “medio-passive” process (308). Blattner combines “existentialist, Aristotelian, and transcendental approaches” (322) in his portrayal of authenticity as “loyalty to who one factically and currently is” (334). Käufer explains the relation between Heidegger’s account of temporality as the basis of care and...