Heideggers Reading of Descartes Dualism Essay -- Dualism Essays

Heideggers Reading of Descartes DualismABSTRACT The problem of traditional epistemology is the relation of plain area to external world. The bankers bill betwixt thing and object makes possible the distinction between the knower and what is known. Starting with Descartes, the subject is a thinking affair that is not extended, and the object is an extended thing which does not think. Heidegger rejects this distinction between subject and object by arguing that there is no subject distinct from the external world of things because Dasein is essentially Being-in-the-world. Heidegger challenges the Cartesian legacy in epistemology in two ways. First, there is the ultramodern tendency toward subjectivism and individualism that started with Descartes uncovering of the cogito. Second, there is the technological orientation of the modern world that originated in the Cartesian understanding of the mathematical and external physical world. Descartes stands at the beginning of modern is m and Heidegger accepts Descartes role in the history of metaphysics. Descartes is the stolon thinker who discovers the cogito means as an indubitable and the most certain foundation and thereby liberates philosophy from theology. He is the first subjectivistic thinker in the modern philosophy and he grounds his subjectivity on his epistemology.The orientation of the philosophical problems with Descartes starts from the ego (the subject) because in the modern philosophy the subject is given to the knower first and as the only certain thing, i.e., the only subject is accessible directly and certainly. For Descartes, the subject (the ego, the I, res cogitans) is something that thinks, i.e., something that represents, perceive... ...icture, The Question of Technology and some other Essays. Trans. by William Levitt. (New York Harper and Row Pub., 1977.), 127.(27) Bernard Charles Flynn, Descartes and the Ontology of Subjectivity, Man and World, (Vol. 16, No 1, 1983), 10.(28) Ibid., 10.(29) Ibid., 14.(30) Ibid., 14.(31) C. D. Keyes, An valuation of Levinas Critique of Heidegger Research in Phenomenology. (Vol. II, PP 121-142, 1972), 131 and Martin Heidegger, Being and Time 46.(32) Ibid., 131.(33) Martin Heidegger, staple fiber Problems of Phenomenology, 119.(34) caper Richardson, Existential Epistemology A Heideggerian Critique of Descartes Project, (Oxford Clarendon Press, 1986), 91.(35) Aristotle, Physics Book IV The Basic Works of Aristotle. Ed. and Intr. by Richard McKeon. (New York Random House, 1941.), 219b.(36) Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , 376.