Heidegger's Transcendental Aesthetic

Book excerpt: Presenting an original and thought provoking interpretation of Heidegger's philosophical anthropology, this book offers a comprehensive interpretation of the conception of human sensibility in early and later Heidegger. Beginning by isolating Heidegger's understanding of the Kantian idea of pure intuition, Moyle suggests that the early and later work present radically different answers to the underlying problem that this idea generates. This book offers an original perspective on the relation between early and later Heidegger and a distinctively different approach to later Heidegger's ontology of language. Moyle acknowledges Heidegger's significant debt to the Romantic tradition and takes seriously his later philosophical claim that thinking is the highest affirmation of life. On the other hand, Moyle challenges the assumption that Heidegger's later work falls back from philosophy into a poetic form of mysticism and argues that the work on language can be used constructively in contemporary philosophy, especially in relation to the recent work of John McDowell.