Abstract
The reception of Heidegger’s reflections on modern science is shadowed by the question of Heidegger’s competence to utter the judgments he makes concerning science. The question is important because Heidegger offers notoriously tendentious judgments on the sciences, making statements as damning as the provocative claim in Was heißt Denken?, “Science does not think,”1 or emphasizing the “impotence of the sciences”2 to underscore the inability of the sciences to represent their own essence to themselves on scientific terms.
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Notes
Martin Heidegger, Was heißt Denken? (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1961). Also “Was heißt Denken?” in Vorträge and Aufsätze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954). [“Die Wissenschaft denkt nicht,” p. 127.]
Heidegger, “Science and Reflection,” p. 176. In The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). Cited hereafter in the text as SR.
Patrick A. Heelan, “Heidegger’s Longest Day: Twenty-Five Years Later,” p. 579 above.
William J. Richardson, “Heidegger’s Critique of Science” New Scholasticism, Vol. xlii (4), 1968, pp. 511 – 536.
In contrast to Heelan’s broad and considered review, one of the first responses to Richardson’s essay was produced by a scholar who was manifestly so provoked by the first sentence that he offered an entire essay devoted to an exact refutation: Hans Seigfried, “Heidegger’s Longest Day: Being and Time and the Sciences” Philosophy Today 22: 319–331. Rather than following Richardson’s careful lead, concentrating on Heidegger’s express reflections on science (particularly physics and mathematics in) in “Die Zeit des Weltbildes,” “Wissenschaft and Besinnung,” “Die Frage nach dem Ding,” Seigfried refers to the praxical analyses of Being and Time.
The Age of World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology. Cited hereafter in the text as WP.
See my “A Musical Retrieve of Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Technology: Cadence, Concinnity, and Playing Brass, Man and World 26: 239–269. 1993. See also my Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Science: Reflecting Science on the Grounds of Art and Life (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), pp. 142 ff.
8. Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concerning Technology,p. 34. Cited hereafter in the text as QCT.
9. What is a Thing?,trans. W.B. Barton and Vera Deutsch (South Bend, Indiana: Regnery, 1967), p. 70. Cited hereafter in the text as WT.
Heidegger, Die Frage nach dem Ding (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1962). Based on lectures first given in 1935/36.
See the translators’s reference to Kant’s discussion of the mathematical character of a scientific law as Ent-wurf in the Critique of Pure Reason (BXIII), What is a Thing?, pp. 88–89.
12. Heidegger, The Principle of Reason,trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 126. Der Satz vom Grund (Pfullingen: Neske, 1978), p. 206. Cited hereafter in the text as PR with page numbers to the German text following a slash.
Cf. the text in What is a Thing?: “nótvtwv xrawdiwv pttpov fatly tIvOptimK, t4v pEv ôvtwv ()Ç,ratty, t4v St ol’JK övtwv obi(=attv,” p. 46.
Through its tarrying (das Verweilen) in company with what presences, the belongingness of the I into the midst of what presences is. This belonging to what presences in the open fixes the boundaries between that which presences and that which absents itself. From out of these boundaries man receives and keeps safe the measure of that which presences and that which absents” (WP 145).
In his preface to The Birth of Tragedy,Nietzsche had argued that “the problem of science cannot be recognized on the ground of science.” Cf. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy ii, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 18.
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Babich, B.E. (1995). Heidegger’s Philosophy of Science: Calculation, Thought, and Gelassenheit . In: Babich, B.E. (eds) From Phenomenology to Thought, Errancy, and Desire. Phaenomenologica, vol 133. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1624-6_36
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