Trevor,
You say that I never responded to your Kant post other than to talk about Routley's environmental philosophy and hermeneutics. It should have become clear from the conservation and its silences that we do "philosophy" in very different ways.

We have very different ways of relating to the philosophical tradition. I presume that German philosophers work within a tradition and know it well. So Adorno would know Hegel, Nietzche and Heidegger. It is home. Much more so than Australian philosophers who are learning to understand this tradition from a great distance and from within an empiricist culture. So I know very little about the turn of century neo-Kantian idealism, their interpretation of Kant, the transcendental ego, Husserl's appropriation of neo-Kantianism, or Husserl's constant appeal to Kant. All that is the philosophical background to Heidegger and it is a blank:--- I just map it as presupposing that science was the model of knowledge, the mastery of reality, transcendental justifications, methodology, an objectifying consciousness and its culmination in science.

It is the recoil from philisophy as science and science as the model of knowledge that I am interested in because that was the hermeneutical structure of my own philsophical situation in the academy. What I would call overcoming the tradition to bring philosophy into everyday life.

My way of reading Heidegger presupposes that the boundedness of our present historical situation is constitutively involved in the process of understanding this philosophical tradition. It shapes our understanding. So the present situation is where I'm rooted (hence my gesture to environmental philosophy), and this constitutes my bias or prejudice and the temporal character of my interpretations. We are situated by the past as a heritage of background meanings not isolated from it and so philosophical knowledge involves understanding tradtion. So I respond to the German philosophical tradition in terms of its recoil from scientism.

This approach does not give much weight to the intention of individual philosophers such as Adorno as a way to understanding meaning.

Now I reckon I did respond to your Kant post over a series of posts. What I described in the initial post was how I read Heidegger--the prism through which I viewed his texts---and why thought he was important in terms of Australian philosophy. I said I read Heidegger's texts backwards, and in latter posts gave an account of metaphysics in terms of the technological mode of being and then the metaphysics of everydayness in Division one of Being and Time.

It is a different account of metaphysics (a pragmatic one) to the one you offered in terms of Kant--a non-transcendental one. I also said that I did not work in terms of interpretations being correct, accepted different readings of Heidegger, and that we were reading Heidegger from quite different perspectives. I then outlined how I read Heidegger's metaphysics, and said I was interpreting your reading of Heidegger as a reading through Adorno's texts. What I was trying to do by this way of approaching the texts is to make the hermeneutical circle more explicit.

Somewhere along the way I made my perspective explicit by saying that I came to Heidegger through reading Gadamer's interpretation of Heidegger's ontological hermeneutics. So I read Heidegger as engaging in a radical critique of the foundations of Western philosophical thinking or tradition. His philosophical project was, 'what is the meaning of being"? The purpose of Being and Time was recover the mode of experience of being that lies concealed behind the dominant modes of western metaphysics.

If modern metaphysics is a technological mode of being then what lies concealed is an ecological mode of being. That way of exploring Heidegger is about metaphysics. I was under the impression that you were also talking about metaphysics. Sure, the historicity dimension of Heidegger's metaphysics was not mentioned--but you could infer from what I have written that I would place an emphasis on the historicity of philosophical hermeneutics.

I do not have time, energy or the resources to read Heidegger's interpretation of Kant vis-as vis Adorno and Benjamin's interpretation of Kant. I left that up to you though, I suspect the turn in Heidegger has something to do with transcendental reflection. I am quite willing to acknowedge that Heidegger undertook a trancendental analytic of of everydayness and to this extent was carrying through Husserl's phenomenology, or executing transcendental phenomenology. However, my interest is in reading the ontology of Being and Time from a more pragmatic perspective.

What I was willing to do was to explore Division Two of Being and Time since this was where the 'existential Heidegger' arose. It would probably be the one closest to Bataille. So I was willing to invest time and energy in that since this is where the structure of temporality and historicity can be found.

What I would be doing by this was conveying the past into the present through translating past meaning into the present in terms of reading the philosophical tradition as a source of possibilities. So a text speaks differently as its meanings find conceretizaton in different hermeneutical situations.

I will leave Adorno be for another time. I have given some indication of how I understand the commonalityof Adorno and Heidegger: philosophy as interpretation, a thinking otherwise to instrumental reason, an emphasis on poetics and a reaction against the tradition of philosophy as epistemology and philosophy as science.