Dasein Disclosed: John Haugeland’s Heidegger

The author of discipline-defining studies of human cognition and artificial intelligence, John Haugeland was a charismatic, highly original voice in the contemporary forum of Anglo-American analytic philosophy. At his death in 2010, he left behind an unfinished manuscript, more than a decade in the making, intended as a summation of his life-long engagement with one of the twentieth century€s most influential philosophical tracts, Heidegger€s Being and Time (1927). Dasein Disclosed brings together in a single volume the writings of a man widely acknowledged as one of Heidegger€s preeminent and most provocative interpreters.

A labyrinth of notoriously difficult ideas and terminology, Being and Time has inspired copious commentary. Not content merely to explain, Haugeland aspired to a sweeping reevaluation of Heidegger€s magnum opus and its conception of human life as Dasein€•a reevaluation focused on Heidegger€s effort to reawaken philosophically dormant questions of what it means €œto be.€ Interpreting Dasein unconventionally as €œthe living of a living way of life,€ Haugeland put involvement in a shared world, rather than individual persons or their experience, at the heart of Heidegger€s phenomenology of understanding and truth. Individuality, Haugeland insists, emerges in the call to take responsibility for a collective way of being in the world. He traces this thought to Heidegger€s radical conclusion that one does not truly understand philosophical concepts unless that understanding changes how one lives.

As illuminating as it is iconoclastic, Dasein Disclosed is not just Haugeland€s Heidegger€•it is a major contribution to philosophy in its own right.