This chapter examines the relationship between “logic,” language, and methodology in Heidegger. It begins by contrasting two ways in which one might understand that relationship: Dummett’s position as articulated in The Logical Basis of Metaphysics and Dreyfus’s influential reconstruction of Sein und Zeit. Focusing on Sein und Zeit §33, the chapter distinguishes Heidegger’s own view from each of these. First, drawing on his discussions of “grammar,” it shows where and why he diverges not just from someone like Dummett, but also from Kant. Second, it argues for the difference between the approach in this chapter and the Dreyfusian one: For Dreyfus, Heidegger’s attack on logic is ultimately a question of content, for Golob it is ultimately a question of method. The chapter closes by indicating how this analysis might be extended to texts from the 1924 Platon: Sophistes lectures to Die Sprache in the 1950s, paying particular attention to the concept of a “meta-language.”

Freedom for heidegger operates at four distinct levels: (i) as the basic capacity to open, sustain, or structure access to entities, (ii) as an ability to take on commitments or obligations, (iii) as an ability to transcend or surpass factual conditions, and (iv) as a way of conceptualizing certain states which Heidegger valorizes

For heidegger assertion refers both to: (i) a speech act in which one endorses some particular claim for some communicative purpose (SZ 153–55); and (ii) the meaning or content which is so endorsed (GA29/30:437).

A principle is a grounding assumption in terms of which a thinker or age makes sense of, and so gains access to, entities.

“Intentionality” is a property, typically attributed to mental states, whereby those states are directed toward or about something.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, the German rationalist philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten originated the ‘science’ of aesthetics as a means of analysing sensuous responses to art and nature. By the end of the century, in his Critique of Judgment (1790), Immanuel Kant demonstrated that aesthetic preferences or judgments of taste operated outside the realm of reason but could nonetheless be subjected to categorical treatment. The relationship between this aesthetic tradition and decadence is an intimate and complex one. Both the stock figure of the aesthete and the aestheticism of ‘art for art’s sake’ are classic decadent tropes with obvious sources in figures such as Théophile Gautier, Walter Pater, and Joris-Karl Huysmans. Yet the connections between aesthetics and decadence are more conflicted than might first appear: historically, aesthetics has served both as a site for the theorization of decadence and as the basis of an attempt to limit it, as in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. The purpose of this chapter is to examine these intricate ties.