/lit/ - Literature

Is the key to understanding Heidegger's commentary on presence, "the nothing nothings", and his overall project on Being located in Plato's The Sophist? Specifically, Plato's attempt to understand Non-Being as "other than" and thus still a reference to Being?

>CTRL + F "Heidegger"
>nothing
Terrible thread.
Read Sein und Zeit.

Well, what did he think about them?
>This is why Heidegger was so keen on the method for his phenomenology [ref. ¶ 7, page 56]. Heidegger argues that the comparative methods of judging actually obscures the truth, because it is a placing of something in front of something else. Therefore in order to discover the truth, one must apprehending the being of an entity in and for itself.
>The term "apophantic" first appeared in the works of Aristotle. The concept appears in the Arabic Aristotelian tradition as jâzim.[1] In phenomenology,[2] Edmund Husserl considered apophantic judgment central to his 'transcendental logic'[3] but his student Martin Heidegger argued later that apophantic judgements are the least reliable means of obtaining truth because they are cut from the original interpretive framework of relations to the subject.
The first quote makes it sounds like he prefers apophantic statements over others (and comparative statements sound like the mechanism by which aletheia, the concealment and unconcealment of Being, functions). The second quote makes it sounds like it's part of the problem of presencing he is constantly talking about.

What other kinds of judgments are there, anyway? Apophantic and comparative? That's it?

>”Without such resolve, we will lose the capacity for action and become mere cogs in the equipment that constitutes the world uncovered by techne”
Is apparently NOT the way to read Heidegger, because:
>”Resolve” (as in phronesis/action) is exactly NOT the position to take according to Heidegger - this is more like Cassirer’s writings on the issue, where he proposes that we need more “control” over technology. WILLING is the exact problem that Heidegger wants to show - we are caught in willing willing in relationship to technology.
What exactly is this "willing willing" dilemma, and how do we escape this without relinquishing what it means to be human? Are we supposed to sit back and let things happen, to no longer have dealings and projects? I'm confused, Heidegger and Heideggerians.

When Heidegger is exploring what the Ancient Greeks, especially the Presocratics and Aristotle, had to say about number, mathematics (especially geometry), and language, what is he up to?

Here are two decent essays on the topic that were enormously helpful to me:
>https://progressivegeographies.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/the-place-of-geometry.pdf
>https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/64545/1/10.pdf
I'm reading so much about: Pythagoras, Parmenides, Zeno, succession, simultaneity, continuity, motion, parts, whole, unit, place, magnitude, stretch, nothing, etc., but I'm struggling to make heads or tails out of any of it. What I would love to do is reduce it to its essence and then organize it all.

What I think is happening is that Heidegger, acting as a ventriloquist through the Ancient Greeks, is trying to show that Being = Language, Language = Thought, but Thought =/= Being, for some reason or another. This is weird to me, because I would have imagined that Language is a subsidiary of Thought (not all thoughts can be spoken of), which in itself is a subsidiary of Being (not all things are intelligible).

I also think that there's an interesting parallel here between the investigation of Being and mathematics here and the construction of the transcendental aesthetic through schematization in Kant's CPR. Namely, that Kant tried to loosely "link" the phenomenal and noumenal world (read, protect causality and thus intelligibility) through a naive understanding of mathematics that was later unraveled by developments in science and mathematics. Neokantians could only save the structure but not the spirit of Kant's project.

why do continental philosophers have a reputation for being “obscure” in what they mean? is it just because they’re ideas are more complex than “a+b=x; therefore open relations are ethical.”

What’s the best reading path with this guy? I tried the art essay end of last year but got last and am working through Introduction to Metaphysics right now, which thus far is much more approachable. Also, what if Husserl should I be reading for him?