Heidegger's Analytic : Interpretation, Discourse and Authenticity in Being and Time (Modern European Philosophy)

Rating:
Summary: A Brilliant Book!
Review: Carman's book is not only brilliant but entertaining. Amidst an amazing range of references, he fearlessly takes issue with virtually every other major interpreter of Heidegger, and the sparks do fly! For analytic and continental philosophers alike, this is an adventure in philosophical reading not to be missed!

Rating:
Summary: First-rate Heidegger scholarship
Review: First-rate scholarship. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: A good study
Review: This book is a fine piece of scholarship, and it certainly stands out amongst other commentaries on Heidegger's thought, most of which are plagued by ideological tendentiousness and unclarity. Carman's book avoids both of these failings, and for that reason alone is well worth a read.

The guiding thesis of the book is that Heidegger's "analytic" in "Being and Time" should be understood as the provision of "hermeneutic conditions," i.e. the conditions under which human beings are able to interpretively make sense of the world. Focusing particularly on Heidegger's views on language and intentionality, Carman makes a fairly good case for this reading.

The main problem that I found in this book is that, by tying Heidegger's researches with contemporary Anglo-American thought so closely, Carman winds up distorting the real originality of Heidegger's thought. Heidegger's thought is so deeply unlike virtually everything else that has come along in the last 200 years that it is a mistake to assimilate his work to that of other philosophers. Commentators and readers alike need to keep Heidegger's own admonitions about his work in mind while reading him; this is a man, after all, once told his students that it was his "personal conviction" that his "hermeneutics" is not philosophy at all (Summer 1923), and who later said that "It is my belief that it is all over for philosophy" (Winter 1923-1924).

That said, Carman's work is an eminently readable, well-argued study that ought to be a paradigm for other scholars. While I have my doubts about attempts to make Heidegger into an analytic philosopher, I can only praise Carman's effort at making Heidegger speak to a contemporary audience about issues of universal philosophical concern.