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The Concept of Science in the Works of Martin Heidegger

Publication |
2011

Abstract

This study presents the concept of science in the works of Martin Heidegger. It pursues what Heidegger considers to be science, what are its main characteristics, its limits and its essence, its fundaments.

This study captures the concept of science both in Heidegger's early writings and in his later work. Whereas in his early work Heidegger understands science chiefly as a type of human behaviour, as a way that man exists in the world, as a way man relates to the world.

After the "reversal" (Kehre) in his thought, Heidegger connects science and technology with the history of being. Heidegger connects the individual characteristics of modern science (exactness, experiments, specializations, its operative character, etc.) with the new concepts of truth, existence and man in the Early Modern period.

In modern thinking, since Descartes, truth is understood as certitude, entity is considered as an object and man is thought of as a subject. Heidegger derives the individual characteristics of science from the mathematical character of science.

The study also covers what Heidegger considers to be the limits of science. Science is occupied only with entities and objects.

It isn't able to capture the being of individual entities (as according to early Heidegger), nor the meaning of the studied object - nature, history, man or language (as according to late Heidegger). On that account, it is necessary to explore reality not only from the scientific perspective, but also from the philosophical perspective (which is for early Heidegger the science of being), or from the perspective of art or thought (Besinnung).