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(2018) Human Studies 41 (2).
Animal experience
a formal-indicative approach to Martin Heidegger's account of animality
Alexandru Bejinariu
pp. 233-254
In the present paper I attempt an interpretation of Martin Heidegger’s analysis of animality, developed in winter semester 1929/1930. My general purpose is to examine Heidegger’s analysis in the wider context of formal-indicative phenomenology as such. Thus I show that in order to develop a phenomenology of animality, Heidegger must tacitly renounce the re-enactment of animal experience in which the formal-indicative concepts of his analysis could gain concreteness, and he resorts instead to scientific concepts and concrete experiments in biology or zoology. This is due to the fact that what I call the a-logical bursts into the field of the phenomenological regard when it is oriented toward animality. I therefore argue that the phenomenology of animality presents us with a paradigmatic case of a tension that is at work in any phenomenon, one between logos and a-logos, between hiddenness and unhiddenness—constituting a basic problem of future research in phenomenology and its approach to intersubjectivity and alterity.
Publication details
DOI: 10.1007/s10746-018-9468-6
Full citation:
Bejinariu, A. (2018). Animal experience: a formal-indicative approach to Martin Heidegger's account of animality. Human Studies 41 (2), pp. 233-254.
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