Introduction to Philosophy

Contents

Translator’s Foreword

Introduction

The Task of an Introduction to Philosophy

§ 1. To be human already means to philosophize

§ 2. To introduce means: To get philosophizing underway

§ 3. The preunderstanding of philosophy

§ 4. How does philosophy relate to science, Weltanschauung, and history?

Division 1 Philosophy and Science

1. What Is Philosophy?

§ 5. Is philosophy a science?

§ 6. Ancient and modern conceptions of philosophy

§ 7. The expression “philosophy”

2. The Question Concerning the Essence of Science

§ 8. Provisional question concerning the essence of science in terms of the crisis of science

a) The crisis in the relationship of the individual to science

b) The crisis of science with regard to its position in the whole of our historical and social existence

c) The crisis within the inner structure of the essence of science itself

§ 9. A new reflection on the essence of science

a) Science as methodological, systematic, exact, and universally valid knowledge

b) Science and truth—Adaequatio intellectus ad rem

§ 10. Truth as propositional truth

a) The traditional concept of truth

b) Truth as feature of a proposition: The connecting of subject and predicate

c) The approach to the problem of truth in antiquity

§ 11. On the problem of the subject-object relation. Predicative and veritative relation

3. Truth and Being
On the Original Essence of Truth as Unconcealment

§ 12. The original essence of truth

a) Going back behind the subject-object relation: Being alongside . . .

b) Being alongside . . . as a determination of Dasein’s existence

c) Beings as they make themselves known in contexts of involvement

d) Truth as unconcealment. Various ways in which beings are manifest

§ 13. The original essence of truth

a) Being present at hand together—Being with one another

b) Being with one another: Several comporting themselves toward the same

c) Sameness

d) The same as common

e) Is partaking something common?

f) Of the letting be of things

§ 14. We share in the unconcealment of beings

a) Being with one another is a sharing in truth

b) The unconcealment of what is present at hand

c) The belonging of truth to Dasein does not declare truth to be something “subjectivistic”

d) Being alongside what is present at hand and being with one another belong equiprimordially to the essence of Dasein

e) The being uncovering of Dasein. The truth of what is present at hand and ready to hand as uncoveredness

4. Truth—Dasein—Being-With

§ 15. Being uncovering in early human and early childhood Dasein

§ 16. The uncoveredness of what is present at hand and the manifestness of Dasein

§ 17. The manifestness of Dasein qua Da-sein

§ 18. Dasein and being-with

§ 19. Leibniz’s Monadology and the interpretation of being with one another

§ 20. Community on the grounds of the with-one-another

5. The Realm of the Essence of Truth and the Essence of Science

§ 21. Summary of the interpretation of truth

§ 22. Determining the essence of science in terms of the originary concept of truth

a) Science as a kind of truth?

b) Prescientific and scientific Dasein

c) Scientific truth

§ 23. Science as a possible fundamental stance of human existence. Βίος θεωρητικός—Vita contemplativa

§ 24. The original belonging together of theory and praxis in θεωρεῖν as making beings manifest

§ 25. Construction of the essence of science

a) Being-in-the-truth for the sake of truth

b) The originary action. The letting be of beings

§ 26. The change in the understanding of being in the scientific projection. The new determination of beings as nature

a) How the understanding of being precedes every conceptual comprehending

b) The change in our understanding of being: An example from physics

c) The positivity of science. The antecedent, nonobjective projection of the constitution of being that demarcates a field

6. On the Difference between Science and Philosophy

§ 27. The projection of the constitution of being pertaining to beings as the inner enabling of positivity, that is, of the essence of science. Preontological and ontological understanding of being

§ 28. Ontic and ontological truth. Truth and transcendence of Dasein

§ 29. Philosophizing as transcending belongs to the essence of human Dasein

§ 30. The different realms of questioning in philosophy and science

§ 31. A summary of what has been presented. The understanding of being as the primordial fact of Dasein: The possibility of the ontological difference. The ontological difference and the distinction between philosophy and science

Division 2 Philosophy and Weltanschauung

1. Weltanschauung and the Concept of World

§ 32. What is Weltanschauung?

a) The word Weltanschauung

b) Interpretations of Weltanschauung: Dilthey—Jaspers—Scheler

§ 33. What is meant by world?

a) The concept of world in ancient philosophy and in early Christianity

b) The concept of world in Scholastic metaphysics

§ 34. Kant’s concept of world

a) Kant’s concept of world in the Critique of Pure Reason

b) Excursus: Kant’s laying the ground for metaphysics

α) The main theses

β) The execution

c) Excursus: Kant’s Dialectic

d) Kant’s concept of ‘idea’

e) World as the idea of the totality of appearances: Correlate of finite human knowledge

f) Idea and ideal. The full determination of the concept of world as a transcendental ideal

g) The existentiell signification of the concept of world

2. Weltanschauung and Being-in-the-World

§ 35. Dasein as being-in-the-world

§ 36. World as “play of life”

a) Being-in-the-world as the original play of transcendence

b) Transcendence qua understanding of being as play

c) The correlation of being and thinking. Its narrowing in the “logical” interpretation of the understanding of being

§ 37. Achieving a more concrete understanding of transcendence

a) Selfhood (for the sake of oneself) as determining the being of Dasein. Exposure as an intrinsic determination of being-in-the-world

b) Exposure as thrownness

c) Facticity and thrownness. The nihilative character and finitude of Dasein. Dissemination and individuation

d) The lack of hold pertaining to being-in-the-world

§ 38. The structural character of transcendence

a) Retrospect on the structural character of being-in-the-world attained

b) Weltanschauung as holding oneself in being-in-the-world

3. The Problem of Weltanschauung

§ 39. Fundamental questions regarding the principle problem of Weltanschauung

a) Weltanschauung as factically engaged being-in-the-world

b) The concept of Weltanschauung in Dilthey

§ 40. How does Weltanschauung relate to philosophizing?

a) The ordinary form of the problem: Can and should philosophy construct a scientific Weltanschauung?

b) On the historicality of Weltanschauungen

§ 41. Two fundamental possibilities of Weltanschauung

a) Weltanschauung in myth: Shelter as a hold amid overwhelming beings themselves

b) The degeneration of shelter: Weltanschauung that has become busyness

§ 42. The other fundamental possibility: Weltanschauung as held bearing

a) Weltanschauung as held bearing and the confrontation with beings arising from it

b) Weltanschauung as held bearing and the transformation of truth as such

c) Forms of degeneration of Weltanschauung as held bearing

§ 43. On the inner relationship between Weltanschauung as a held bearing and philosophy

a) On the problematic of this relationship

b) Philosophy is Weltanschauung as held bearing in an exceptional sense

§ 44. In Weltanschauung as held bearing the problem of being irrupts

a) The awakening of the problem of being from Weltanschauung within myth as sheltering

b) Historical forms of development of philosophy from Weltanschauung as sheltering and held bearing

4. The Connection between Philosophy and Weltanschauung

§ 45. The problem of being and the problem of world

a) The question of being as a question concerning ground and the problem of world

b) In the problem of being and the problem of world, transcendence brings itself to conceptual unfolding

§ 46. Philosophy as held bearing in relation to ground: Letting transcendence happen from out of its ground

Editors’ Epilogue

German–English Glossary

English–German Glossary

Introduction to Philosophy (GA 27) [GA App]

Ereignis