Niklas Welch: 'Thinking about things and thinking about oneself: Heidegger's critique of Descartes'
Chair: Riley Harris
Abstract: Heidegger claims in Being and Time that traditional philosophy unduly prioritizes thinking over other modes of understanding entities. My first aim in this talk is to make sense of this claim. What kind of thinking does Heidegger have in mind, and why is it supposed to be problematic? Being and Time seems to contain multiple, incompatible candidate answers to these questions. These include considerations on perception, theoretical inquiry, and detachment. I will go through these candidate answers and deconstruct them one by one, before defending my own preferred candidate answer. This draws on Heidegger's discussion of Descartes' example of the piece of wax.
One of Heidegger's plans for the unpublished second part of Being and Time was to deconstruct Descartes' notion of res cogitans. I will show, referring to Heidegger's lectures from the early 1920s, that this deconstruction also revolves around the problematic role of thinking. Heidegger argues that Descartes' account of the subject involves a thinking that "returns to itself" or "thinks about itself". How does such a thinking work, and why is it problematic? My second aim in this talk will be to answer these questions. I end by making a general suggestion about the overall theoretical payouts of Heidegger's critique of Descartes with view to his conception of temporality.
