Though focusing chiefly on Weimar Germany, this chapter broadens its argument to Europe overall. Weimar culture’s vitality contained multidimensional antagonisms between secularizing reforms and their Christian-nationalist opposition. Complicating that enmity were the consequences of commercial entertainment cultures, which troubled socialists as much as conservative, Christian, and other rightwing critics. Such commentaries clustered around the political symbolics of the New Woman. If the latter’s proponents saw an ideal of happy personhood and emancipated living, the rightist enemies railed against change in the name of an imagined past of orderly families and settled gender inscriptions, often in idioms of angry, masculinist misogyny. Across interwar Europe during the 1920s, from Spengler, Huizinga, and Eliot through Ortega y Gasset to the Conservative Revolution, Schmitt, and Heidegger, conservative intellectuals fashioned a declensionist, deeply reactionary critique of the evolving present.

I argue that much of twentieth-century Continental philosophy is vulnerable to what I call “the Myth of the Acategorial Given.” Whereas the Myth of the Categorial Given holds that direct encounter with an object is necessary and sufficient to determine the ultimate ontological status of that object, the Myth of the Acategorial Given holds that apprehension of ultimate reality lies in noncategorial experiences, such as ‘attunement’. The Myth of the Acategorial Given is readily identifiable in what Meillassoux calls “strong correlationism.” I argue that Sellars’s account of categorial revision avoids both the Myth of the Categorial Given and the Myth of the Acategorial Given. To this extent Sellars shares with Husserl and Heidegger the project of radicalizing Kantian critique but, unlike Husserl and Heidegger, avoids both myths by embedding a radicalized critique within a historicized naturalism.

This chapter discusses the Renaissance sensibility for order, symmetry and the elevation of the individual as an originating cause. Through Ruskin, then Heidegger, comes a discussion of how humans relate to things as equipment, as tools, how these relational and regional settings are those to which all craft work adheres, and how, nevertheless, we can be unhomed from such. There is a focus on the work of the potter Gillian Lowndes as an exemplar of this unhoming.

The chapter shows how Vico’s ghost, and the maker’s knowledge tradition, crossed diverse phenomenological and hermeneutical projects and a few generations of scholars, from Wilhelm Dilthey to the mature Edmund Husserl, from Husserl to Martin Heidegger, and from Heidegger to Hans-Georg Gadamer and neo-humanist scholars such as Ernesto Grassi. As in the cases discussed in Chapters 1–6, what links all these figures is not always a direct acquaintance with Vico’s scholarship (although many were) a philosophical challenge to the Cartesian cogito and, more specifically, Kant’s problematic prioritisation of the intellect over human praxis.

Authenticity plays key methodological and normative roles for early Heidegger: as he puts it, to ‘work out the question of Being adequately … we must make an entity – the inquirer – transparent in his own Being’. But the precise nature of those roles, and how Heidegger differs from other thinkers of authenticity, is much less clear. This chapter considers three possible interpretations of authenticity found in the contemporary literature. On a transcendental reading, authenticity is what allows us to first recognize reasons as such and act in light of norms at all. On a unity reading, authenticity unifies Dasein’s commitments, and thereby grants a special narrative or judgmental coherence to my life. Finally, on the structural reading, ultimately defended here, authenticity is an inchoate awareness of the structural features of normative space and of Dasein’s own way of being. It is only this interpretation, it is argued, that can make sense of Heidegger’s text and the centrality of authenticity within his early work.

Heidegger’s subordination of reason to “care” in Being and Time has exposed him to the charge of irrationalism. Against this view, I argue that Being and Time offers a “normativity-first” account in which reason, as reason-giving (logon didonai), is an ineluctable demand constitutive of authentic selfhood. Examining Heidegger’s rejection of the neo-Kantian equation of reason with logic in his 1929 Kantbuch, I explain the threads that connect what Heidegger calls “pure sensible reason” to his extensive phenomenological account, in Being and Time, of the “everyday” and “authentic” modes of Dasein’s care-structure. As authenticity’s discursive mode, the “call of conscience” is Dasein’s portal into normative space. As the essay “On the Essence of Ground” makes plain, Dasein’s response to the call involves answerability for what it holds to be best in its practical life, hence reason-giving. Such an origin of reason contrasts with rationalism only in eschewing any principle of sufficient reason.

This chapter explores the connection between Heidegger’s existentialism and fundamental ontology. Specifically, and contra John Haugeland who argues that existentialism is a key feature of fundamental ontology insofar as taking responsibility for our existence entails getting the being of entities right, this chapter argues that taking responsibility for our existence explicitly exhibits the temporal horizon that is fundamental for all our purpose activities and our understanding of entities, generally.

In this chapter, I examine arguments that have been or might be used to establish or defend the distinction that Heidegger draws between entities (things that are) and the being of entities (that by virtue of which those things are). I find these arguments for the ontological difference to fail – due largely to the self-concealing nature of being, which makes it difficult to distinguish being from entities. At the same time, I see something positive in these troubles for the ontological difference, that is, they serve as prompts to question the meaning of being.

Despite widespread and well-reasoned objections to its methods, originalism has gained widespread prominence as the au courant doctrine of legal interpretation. This chapter offers a rhetorical analysis of originalism’s ethos – namely its communal indwelling rooted in rule of law and American democratic values – to explain its strange persistence as well as provide a critical starting point for developing effective critical interventions in future jurisprudential debates about the merits of originalism as a theory of legal meaning. Drawing from Martin Heidegger’s theorizing of ethos, the chapter reconceptualizes ethos and recovers its full meaning beyond good character and wisdom. The chapter situates this full meaning within the emergence of modern originalism as represented in the work of Professor Raoul Berger and then traces the meaning’s evolution through the work of Justice Antonin Scalia and Professor Larry Solum, who both rely on the ethos of indwelling to overcome originalism’s deficiencies rather than their perceived ethos of personal character and effective reasoning. The chapter demonstrates that it was Berger, Scalia, and Solum’s ability to connect their work to a deep-seated shared sense of communal identity that enabled them to secure a place of pride for originalism in jurisprudential debates.