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“Breaking Down Experience”

Congratulations to Professor Katherine Ward who recently published “Breaking down experience—Heidegger’s methodological use of breakdown in Being and Time” in the European Journal of Philosophy.

Here’s the abstract:

Phenomenologists draw on descriptions of experience to uncover the conditions that enable experience. However, a second‐order or distanced view of experience can distort it. In his analysis of the ready‐to‐hand, Heidegger utilizes experiences of breakdown to avoid this problem, but he does not provide a detailed account of why this methodology is effective. I use Heidegger’s analysis of interpretation to reconstruct a detailed account of the breakdown methodology and show why it avoids the problem of “observation distortion.” Although Heidegger is only explicit about his use of this methodology in the analysis of the ready‐to‐hand, I show that analyses of breakdown experiences are implicit throughout Being and Time and have an important role in two key moments of the analysis of Dasein: Being‐with (publicness) and Dasein’s structural whole (care).

You can read the paper (subscription or on-campus connection required) here.

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