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Anthropological Theory
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Towards a Heideggerian Social Science

Heidegger, Kisiel and Weiner on the Limits of Anthropological Discourse

David Howarth

University of Essex, UK davidh{at}essex.ac.uk

This article elaborates a hermeneutical approach to social science by evaluating and drawing upon Martin Heidegger’s early and late philosophy, as well as James Weiner’s articulation of an overtly Heideggerian anthropology. It argues that Heidegger’s privileging of an irreducible and ultimately contingent ‘symbolic order’ that renders beings apparent, while withdrawing and remaining concealed, provides important resources for rethinking questions of freedom, ethics and subjectivity. Nevertheless, it argues that such an approach falls short of a fully-fledged research programme. Both Heidegger’s and Weiner’s projects fail to develop a sufficient set of ontological categories for analysing concrete social relations at the ontical level, and do not address crucial epistemological and methodological issues, such as those pertaining to the precise relationship between explanation and understanding, or the role of causal explanations, that necessarily arise in the social sciences. The article concludes by addressing these deficiencies from a post-structuralist perspective inspired by thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Ernesto Laclau.

Key Words: freedom • Heidegger • post-structuralism • social sciences • subjectivity

Anthropological Theory, Vol. 4, No. 2, 229-247 (2004)
DOI: 10.1177/1463499604042817
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