The Question of the Meaning of Being: Heidegger and Wittgenstein Converse
The Question of the Meaning of Being: Heidegger and Wittgenstein Converse

Summary/Abstract: The paper encourages the dialogue between the Wittgensteinian and Heideggerian traditions, by pointing to joint motives and similar deep understanding of the task of philosophy. It argues that what is regarded as a distinctively Heideggerian form of philosophical inquiry is in fact a development to which philosophy naturally subjects itself as a result of reflexively reiterating exactly the same human tendency to question whatever is at the moment given to the thinker. For instance, at the level of Heideggerian regional ontologies, the dialogical openness of any one regional ontology to its others naturally engenders the question of fundamental ontology as a result of the natural tendency of human comprehension to thematise and question itself. This points to the dual-aspect nature of philosophy * from the unavoidable fact that it forms one part of the phenomenon it aspires to take in as a whole. For insofar as philosophy is defined as an inquiry into the human capacity for comprehending inquiry as such, beyond any particular way of acquiring understanding of any particular domain of reality, it amounts to a kind of absolutely purified or intensified exemplar of this aspect of the human way of being.

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