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Heidegger and the Human Difference

  • CHAD ENGELLAND (a1)
Abstract
ABSTRACT:

This paper provides a qualified defense of Martin Heidegger's controversial assertion that humans and animals differ in kind, not just degree. He has good reasons to defend the human difference, and his thesis is compatible with the evolution of humans from other animals. He argues that the human environment is the world of meaning and truth, an environment that peculiarly makes possible truthful activities, such as biology. But the ability to be open to truth cannot be a feature of human biology without making such pursuits as biology, mathematics, and philosophy a biological function of a certain species, Homo sapiens. To deny the human difference amounts to species relativism, which leaves the normativity of truth unexplained. To reconcile the human evolutionary heritage and the uniquely human openness to meaning and truth, this paper amplifies a distinction occasionally made by Heidegger between condition and cause.

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Copyright
COPYRIGHT: © American Philosophical Association 2015 
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This list contains references from the content that can be linked to their source. For a full set of references and notes please see the PDF or HTML where available.

Taylor Carman . (2003) Heidegger's Analytic: Interpretation, Discourse, and Authenticity in ‘Being and Time’. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Steven Galt Crowell . (2002) ‘Does the Husserl/Heidegger Feud Rest on a Mistake? An Essay on Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology’. Husserl Studies, 18, 123–40.
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Jeremy R. Kendal , Jamshid J. Tehrani , and John Odling-Smee , eds. (2011) ‘Human Niche Construction’. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 366, 784–934.
Ulf Liszkowski , Marie Schäfer , Malinda Carpenter , and Michael Tomasello . (2009) ‘Prelinguistic Infants, but Not Chimpanzees, Communicate About Absent Entities’. Psychological Science, 20, 654–60.
Derek C. Penn , Keith J. Holyoak , and Daniel J. Povinelli . (2008) ‘Darwin's Mistake: Explaining the Discontinuity between Human and Nonhuman Minds’. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 31, 109–78.
Hannes Rakoczy , and Michael Tomasello . (2007) ‘The Ontogeny of Social Ontology: Steps to Shared Intentionality and Status Functions’. In Savas L. Tsohatzidis (ed.), Intentional Acts and Institutional Facts: Essays on John Searle's Social Ontology (Dordrecht: Springer), 113–38.
R. Matthew Shockey . (2010) ‘What's Formal about Formal Indication? Heidegger's Method in Sein und Zeit’. Inquiry, 53, 525–39.
Robert Sokolowski . (2008) Phenomenology of the Human Person. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Jakob von Uexküll . (1921) Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere. 2d ed.Berlin: Springer.
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Journal of the American Philosophical Association
  • ISSN: 2053-4477
  • EISSN: 2053-4485
  • URL: /core/journals/journal-of-the-american-philosophical-association
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