Heidegger's *individuals: An essay in moral ontology

This work tackles the thorny question concerning the relation between ethics and ontology in early Heidegger. Heidegger persistently contests a certain picture of human life and the world we inhabit: it is rooted in a family of notions about cognition, the knower, and what there is to be known; and it is shaped by the ideal of the detached spectator. In the first series of lectures delivered in Freiburg, Heidegger offers compelling reasons to renounce this paradigm (Chapter One).;But Heidegger also offers a compelling vision of what lies on this side of the disengaged subject. In the second chapter, I argue that Heidegger's work on what it means to inhabit a world constitutes a powerful weapon against moral skepticism, offers a rich account of what it is to cope with the world, and argues for the primacy of our particular attachments and concerns.;Heidegger takes occasional aim at the enlightened idea of universal humanity and the related notions of universal norms and generally binding standards of conduct. The earliest lecture courses pit an elusive and messy 'facticity' against a public ideal of timeless and transparent validity. In the third chapter, however, I argue that Heidegger has to be committed to some version of what we might call 'essentialism'; that death is one of the best examples of a shared characteristic of human life; and that we cannot make sense of our sense-making practices and ethical commitments without bringing mortality into focus.;In the final chapter I argue that Heidegger's eccentric and controversial linguistic practice is a complex response to the oft-competing claims of the particular and the universal. The figure who surfaces here is neither the personalist and mystic who frequents the pages of some recent work on early Heidegger, the Antiphilosoph who privileges religious experience and flirts with the ineffable, nor the neutral transcendental philosopher who speaks only in the name of abstract and universal conditions of possible experience, but (once again) a moral ontologist, in a sense that the work as a whole is devoted to clarifying.