Post-Kantian European Philosophy Seminar

Abstract: Despite its prominent appearance in the book’s title, the role of time in Heidegger’s Being and Time has long puzzled readers. Heidegger claims that our ordinary understanding of time “springs from” the peculiar phenomenon he calls “originary temporality”. According to William Blattner’s influential interpretation, this claim commits Heidegger to the unsuccessful attempt to generate the successiveness of ordinary time from a non-successive temporality, making him a failed temporal idealist.

In this talk, I propose an alternative interpretation. Taking my cue from Heidegger’s suggestion that “in the field of ontology, any ‘springing from’ is degeneration”, I argue that Heidegger’s ambition behind letting time “spring from” temporality is not best understood as the attempt to generate time’s successiveness, but as an account of how time could acquire a seemingly self-evident standing, in which its role in making the world intelligible is covered over. I explain the processes of standardization, homogenization, and reification that are involved in this degeneration. Finally, I show that this way of understanding time allows us to make progress toward fulfilling an important systematic ambition: explaining how the traditional ontological division between temporal, extra-temporal, and supra-temporal entities could acquire the standing of a dogma. This ontological error theory of time constitutes an important step toward the destruction of the history of ontology that Heidegger had planned for the never-published second part of Being and Time.

Registration: If you do not hold a university card, please contact the seminar convenor or admin@philosophy.ox.ac.uk at least two working days before a seminar to register your attendance.

Post-Kantian European Philosophy Seminar Convenors: Jack Wearing, Manuel Dries, Joseph Schear, Kate Kirkpatrick and Mark Wrathall.