In reference to THIS POST enowning writes (HERE (go to the one at wed. Feb. 22)):
I have a few comments. I find the use of collective nouns, like "orthodox Heideggerians", to be useless unless their membership can be ascertained, like "all Fords" or the IEEE. Otherwise, the collective's membership usually dwindles towards zero upon inspection. I've come across Harman's focus on B&T's phenomenology of tools, and I have not read all of Harman's books, but the two I've read recently, Quadruple Object and Heidegger Explained, have a broader perspective on Heidegger's work. And what could be offensive about neo-Aristotelian views to orthodox Heideggerians? In the broad scheme of philosophy, Heidegger can be most easily understood as a series of footnotes to Aristotle.
Fair enough about the collective noun, so I should probably explain.
I've been reading Harman's Towards Speculative Realism. At the beginning of the first and fourth essay he notes that the papers were not accepted at SPEP or at the Heidegger Circle.
If you've read enough of the Heidegger papers presented at SPEP or the Heidegger Circle, and have an open mind, then it is pretty mind-blowing that these two papers were rejected. In the post in question (again, HERE) I just meant to be adducing a hypothesis concerning why they were rejected. That's all I meant to put forward, and I think the substantive claim is still true. Harman's assertion that Division 1 of Being and Time already contains an account of being, one that Heidegger simply reiterated over and over again before, after, and during his supposed turn, undercuts vast presuppositional swaths of work on Heidegger, probably over half of the papers presented at SPEP or the Heidegger Circle. For example, in Tool Being and one of the rejected essays Harman argues at great length that Heidegger actually has no real theory of time, that the relevant discussion is just a redundant reiteration of the tool/broken tool analysis.
As for enowinging's second point, I am aware of Harman's wonderful take on the fourfold. I think it's not only right as a clarification of Heidegger exegesis, but also a fundamental advance in ontology. Nothing I wrote in the original post was intended to undermine that.
Finally, the point about "a series of footnotes to Aristotle". . . well, that's the Bernasconi take. But there's a confusion here. What is neo-Aristotelian about Harman's work (a new version of Aristotlean substance) is not what Bernasconi takes to be neo-Aristotelain about Heidegger's work (stemming from the Nichomachean Ethics). I assume that enowning means the Bernasconi point, but this is something about which we both should have been clearer.
