Overview

This book offers a clear, analytic, and innovative interpretation of Heidegger’s late work. This period of Heidegger’s philosophy remains largely unexplored by analytic philosophers, who consider it filled with inconsistencies and paradoxical ideas, particularly concerning the notions of Being and nothingness. This book takes seriously the claim that the late Heidegger endorses dialetheism – namely the position according to which some contradictions are true – and shows that the idea that Being is both an entity and not an entity is neither incoherent nor logically trivial. The author achieves this by presenting and defending the idea that reality has an inconsistent structure. In doing so, he takes one of the most discussed topics in current analytic metaphysics, grounding theory, into a completely unexplored area. Additionally, in order to make sense of Heidegger’s concept of nothingness, the author introduces an original axiomatic mereological system that, having a paraconsistent logic as a base logic, can tolerate inconsistencies without falling into logical triviality. This is the first book to set forth a complete and detailed discussion of the late Heidegger in the framework of analytic metaphysics. It will be of interest to Heidegger scholars and analytic philosophers working on theories of grounding, mereology, dialetheism, and paraconsistent logic.

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9780367230104

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Reviews

This provocative and challenging work by one of the foremost dialetheic readers of Heidegger exposes failed attempts by contemporary scholars to salvage Heidegger's paradoxical claims about being (e.g., 'being is not a being') and it makes a powerful case for the need and possibility of countenancing the contradictions entailed by those claims. The clarity and forthrightness of its arguments make Heidegger and the Contradiction of Being an important and timely work that no scholar grappling with Heideggerian paradox today can afford to ignore. - Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Boston University, USA. In this wonderfully wide-ranging book, Filippo Casati explores certain paradoxes in Heidegger's thinking about Being and argues that Heidegger can tolerate these paradoxes by acceding to the possibility of true contradictions. This argument has both an exegetical dimension, in that Casati argues that Heidegger does in fact reject the Principle of Non-Contradiction, and a philosophical dimension, in that Casati argues that we can make due logical sense of his doing so. The book is lively, provocative, and beautifully written. It will be of great value to students of Heidegger and to anyone interested in the most fundamental questions about the logical character of reality. - Adrian W. Moore, University of Oxford, UK. Filippo Casati's intriguing book argues that a paradox concerning the nature of being drove Martin Heidegger to reject commitments that have been seen as fundamental-indeed even unquestionable-throughout most of the history of Western philosophy. While other commentators have argued that such paradoxes may lurk in Heidegger's work, Casati's striking reading distinctively claims that Heidegger not only encountered these paradoxes but eventually came to embrace them. In doing so, argues Casati, Heidegger recognized the radical move that this would require, namely, questioning what is for most philosophers the most fundamental 'law of thought'-the law of non-contradiction. - Denis McManus, University of Southampton, UK. The appearance of Casati's Heidegger and the Contradiction of Being is a major event in Heidegger studies. With impeccable scholarship, uncommon clarity, and deploying state of the art tools of contemporary logic, Casati presents and defends a radically new interpretation of this major thinker. His book is set to become a classic in the area. - Graham Priest, CUNY Graduate Center, USA. Casati's book interprets Heidegger's question of Being, in connection with his idea of ontological difference, as demonstrating the actuality and potential truth of a fundamentally contradictory structure of reality. Clearly written and accessible, the book will be sought out by all those with an interest in the logical, ontological, and metaphysical implications of Heidegger's thought, as well as those interested, more broadly, in contemporary discussions of being, fundamentality, negation, and the logical or ontological structure of the world. - Paul Livingston, University of New Mexico, USA

Author Information

Filippo Casati is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Lehigh University (USA). His areas of specialization are Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein, with a passionate interest in Meinong. He has published in such venues as The British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Synthese, Logic et Analyse, Philosophical Topics and Philosophy Compass. With Daniel Dahlstrom, he has edited a forthcoming volume on Heidegger on Logic.

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