Hello Gary, my first comment here (enjoy your blog very much, especially the occasional artistic exhibits ;) Stanley Rosen's _The Question of Being: A Reversal of Heidegger_ is an extended commentary on Heidegger's Plato's Sophist lectures. I read it some time ago but it was too much for me (as an amateur Deleuzian ;)

Hi Mark,
I read Plato's Sophist many years ago and struggled with that dialogue.

I had been taught a very crude Plato---The Theory of the Forms+ Republic---and I was lost stepping outside the crude interpretation of Plato.I have no knowledge of ancient Greek so I struggle with the way Heidegger questions the text through interpreting the categories.

I have yet to Stanley Rosen's commentary--I didn't understand enough of Plato's text to read commentaries.

I too am an amateur Deleuzian ---and I struggle with Deleuze.

In fact, Heidegger explicitly stated that, when he embarked on the writing of "Being and Time", he had been ruminating on two specific passages from Aristotle, one from the "Nichomachean Ethics" and one from the "Physics".

It's interesting that they've now published an early academic lecture on Aristotle, because one of the signs of Heidegger's pervasive preoccupation with Aristotle is the relative paucity of any commentary on Aristotle in his published work, compared to endless expatiations on other philosophers, as if he could not get enough distance from Aristotle to fully come to grips with him "destructively".

(I myself years ago read "Being and Time" before I'd read "Nichomachtean Ethics", and, noticing the parallels, found the former useful in unraveling the latter. In particular, the role of theoria in the 10th book, which has always been the crux of differing interpreations of the relation between practical and theoretical reason in Aristotle, is structurally the "same" as being-toward-death, as providing an ultimate limit beyond which deliberative internestings can not go, thus resolving the order of purposes. That goes toward the "chorismos" between practical and theoretical reason, the "separate and equal dignity" of practical reason, rather than it being subsumed by theoretical reason.

Of course, in the "Politics", the theoretically contemplated harmony of the cosmos does provide an analogy to the harmoniously integrated and reconciled order of the polis, even as the polis is nested in and limited by that cosmos.)
It's also interesting that some of Heidegger's more prominent students responded to the theoretical aporias of Heideggerian Being by leaving them aside in favor of a revival of practical reason, Gadamer and Arendt through a retrieval of motifs of Aristotelian praxis and Levinas, in a Judaic vein, through arguing for the "primacy" of ethics against theoretical ontology.

But I would question to what extant Heidegger himself successfully breaks out of a subject-centered perspective, as well as, whether he ever attains an adequate conception of praxis. "Being and TIme" maintains the transcendental in the distinction between the ontic and ontological, while the claim that dasein is at once ontic and ontological merely stuffs the transcendental ego back into the empirical ego, over-inflating the latter to the point where only its imaginary, as opposed to real, death can set its limit, while the subsequent ontological history or destiny of Being, which is after all a retrieval of second-order ontological-transcendental conditions, the "traits" or "Zugen", "pulls", of Being, by which dasein is to be non-subjectivistically constituted through its mutual relation with Being seems to conceal a sort of weirdly inverted super-subjectivity.

And on the other hand, there is a functionalistic/instrumentalistic complexion to the opening of "Being and Time" and the way it figures into the notion of projects,- ironically enough, given Heidegger's later tergiversations about technology,- that feeds into the notorious, fatally seductive ambiguity as to whether dasein is an individual or collective category or determination, since others are merely postulated as "Mitsein" as a determination of dasein, such that relations with others are merely mediated through a mutual functional adequacy of standards, without the differentiation of persons playing any constitutive role.

In other words, as Levinas would have it, the otherness of Being subsumes and suppresses the real otherness of others.

John,
I'd read Aristotle's 'Nichomachean Ethics' before I read Heidegger, and I pretty much read 'Being and Time' through the lens of praxis (as mediated by Hegel and Marx). So I quickly accepted that praxis is primordial in Heidegger's analysis; not theory.

What caught my eye re 'Being and Time' in the light of this praxis tradition were an account of: being embedded in the world of things, entities and abstractions, as involved in the world---ie., being-in-the-world; "seeing" the world as the understanding and interpretation of the entities within which we are thrown; and concern or care as designates a way of comporting oneself towards beings.

That account returns us and philosophy to the everyday. Just what I was looking for.

I came across this article It makes some interesting points about the way that Heidegger comes to grips with Aristotle "destructively"---- Heidegger's Aristotle is a radically Heideggerianized Aristotle.

One of the points made is the way theory is a part of practical activity.

For Heidegger, Theorie is no longer concerned with the contemplation of necessary objects. Theory in Heidegger involves stepping back from the world, and conducting a cold analysis of things seen as merely present in the world. Unlike Aristotle's theoria, however, theory in Heidegger is in no way directed towards the end of contemplation, nor does it study "necessarily existent" objects. Theoretical behaviour is looking at things, without looking at them in terms of use. As I will show in the section below, theory in Heidegger is a derivative form of poesis, stemming from the original moment of involvement in the hermeneutical situation. Theorie is not an entirely separate realm of dianoetic activity, but is already permeated with the productive.

I found that very useful when confronted in the philosophy department by the high theory of scientific philosophy of the physicalists disconnected from everyday life.

Heidegger's account of being-in-the-world as attempting to understand the world in relation to its own possibilities is what I found groundbreaking. My concern was with the "ready at hand” as this presupposed an instrumental reason.

That probably links up with your questioning to what extant Heidegger himself successfully breaks out of a subject-centered perspective, as well as, whether he ever attains an adequate conception of praxis.

On that point, as I understand it, the category is
'Ereignis' which is translated as "enowning"--- a philosopheme. In using Ereignis Heidegger is seeking to reach beyond the subject-object dichotomy, to designate the event of meaning, that which takes place, that which manifests itself and shines forth, as something to which the subject of knowledge also belongs.