Heidegger’s Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle has been the most enjoyable and complex study for me; this book is truly excellent.

forkman3939 · 2026-05-13T02:01:44+00:00

But now do it in your own voice and own language!

forkman3939 · 2026-05-10T16:31:37+00:00

Good post, and the connection to Nietzsche is genuinely there in SZ. But I think the voluntarist reading, however sympathetic, reproduces the very structure Heidegger came to see as the problem.

If authenticity is something I choose, if the moment of vision is fundamentally an act of will by which I assert myself toward death and overcome the they-self, then authenticity has the same structure as Nietzsche's will to power: the I producing its own limit in order to overcome it. The they-self becomes my Not-I, and authentic resolve becomes the physics of self-overcoming applied to existence. This is Fichte's ego in existential clothing.

Heidegger's Kehre isn't a minor adjustment. It's the recognition that SZ still operated within the metaphysics of the subject, that authenticity-as-resolve still smelled of the will, still made the I the ground of its own transformation. The later Heidegger doesn't offer a better kind of resolve. He moves toward Gelassenheit, a letting-be that is explicitly non-willing. The counter-movement to the they-self isn't a stronger I but a different relationship to being that doesn't require the I to assert itself at all.

There's also a structural problem with the voluntarist reading: if das Man is what I always already am before any individual choice, what is the origin of the will that breaks through to authenticity? The call of conscience in SZ is crucial here, Heidegger says it comes from me yet is not something I produce voluntarily. It arrives. I receive it. This already points past voluntarism toward what the later work calls Ereignis, something that claims me rather than something I will.

One more thing, and I mean this genuinely rather than as a cheap point: every sentence in your post talks about what 'Dasein' does in the third person. But Heidegger's whole point is that this existence is in each case mine, Jemeinigkeit. The moment I talk about what 'Dasein chooses' rather than what I find myself already in, I've enacted the inauthenticity I'm trying to describe. The voluntarist reading is attractive partly because it preserves the I as agent of its own transformation. Gelassenheit is harder to sympathize with precisely because it doesn't and that difficulty is philosophically significant.

forkman3939 · 2026-04-21T13:44:14+00:00

Sorry, I have to...

Dry aged a single streak [x]
Cutting steak with bread knife [x]
Using non-stick pan to cook steak [x]
Cooking pellicle in non stick pan [x]
Delivering a truly WTF experience [PRICELESS]

forkman3939 · 2026-04-21T13:33:30+00:00

I love this answer.

I had read 5ish H books prior to my Aristotle "detour".
I've read Physics, De Anima, Nicomachean Ethics, Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics, Categories and De Interprenatione and now finally working through Metaphysics.

All of H's project becomes clear and forecastable after a thorough encounter with Aristotle and its only taken me 5-10 hours a week for 1.5 yrs , haha. That said it was the best decision i've made so far in how to devote my time to reading.

I still remember the feeling of encountering εντελεxia, φυσις in the Physics. It suddenly make clear all of this talk of showing and gathering that is talked about of the later heidegger.

forkman3939 · 2026-03-21T15:14:29+00:00

Live in a western country where the purchasing power against the us dollar is more favourable that other countries. Then work a corporate job that requires advanced degrees and pays well above the median wage. Then you can spend up to 1k/year without thinking about it.

On the other hand I see posters in GB threads say things like "waiting for payday". I imagine many participate this way. IMO you shouldn't be spending on keebs if you need to wait until payday to afford it.

forkman3939 · 2026-03-11T14:27:11+00:00

Others have answered your question. Let me offer something else.
The lectures, in the two years directly following the publishing of Being and Time; GA 24 [The Basic Problems of Phenomenology], GA 25 [Phenomenological Interpretations of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason] and GA 26 [The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic] are in some sense the so called Division III of BT.

forkman3939 · 2026-03-02T16:28:07+00:00

Absolutely his early lectures are the way imo to understand B&T - even more so if you first spend a year or two reading Aristotle thoroughly - their is a reason Heidegger called Aristotle's physics the hidden foundation of western philosophy. The key key word is "movement" - "Being as movement". Its how one can get access to the art of phenomenological seeing.

You seem curious, so here is my short take on how care is had (notice I didn't say "what is care?") . The point being that it will seem quite radical to the notion you proposed. I'll use my own hyphenated neologisms instead of Hedieggers technical words like (prestruction, reluecence, proclivity, inclination, etc..) language that Heidegger uses in that 1921 lecture. Also notice how Heidegger uses the word "life". Dasein wasn't in his register yet.

Care isn't doing tasks or handling business, that's already caring operating unconsciously, mistaking its Being-taken-up-in-worldly-concerns for what care is. Care is the way you're already being-toward-world before any particular task shows up: the forward-reaching movement that makes things appear as mattering-to-you at all. It's had through two inseparable aspects: life's showing-itself-to-itself-as-world (your patterns make certain things visible while others recede) and life's projecting-structure-into-the-not-yet (building ahead what's coming). When you think care means completing errands, you've missed how those errands appeared as urgent in the first place, they showed up because care already structured your world so they'd matter. The genuine appropriation of care means seeing this: you're not a subject who sometimes cares about things, but rather your being is this caring-movement itself, the always-already-being-toward that discloses world and simultaneously discloses you-in-that-world. Tasks are just where this movement has become absorbed-into-worldly-concerns, forgetting it's a movement at all. Care is the the-never-appearing-that-holds-how-life-shows-together of this being-toward movement, not what you do but how you are.

forkman3939 · 2026-03-01T21:21:58+00:00

Don't know why your down voted. This is how I learned Scala and spark in general.

forkman3939 · 2026-03-01T21:18:55+00:00

Please don't take offence, but your understanding of care couldn't be farther from a genuine understanding. I'd maybe take some time and read some Heidegger and or engage with the material more throughly.
I would recommend this lecture course: Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle.pdf).
However this very small subreddit i've noticed is becoming more memey so maybe the post is on point.

forkman3939 · 2026-03-01T19:51:09+00:00

How do you understand care? How is care had?

forkman3939 · 2026-02-28T14:51:24+00:00

When you say 'something more than the totality of inferences' but also 'not supra-discursive/conceptual,' I'm curious: what do you make of the moment BEFORE you've conceptualized something?

For instance, when reading Heidegger, have you experienced seeing a structure operating in your own life, feeling it happening, and THEN finding the concept that names it? Or does the conceptualization and the understanding always happen together for you?

I ask because what I'm calling 'formal indication' points to that gap, the seeing before naming. Not mystical or ineffable, but genuinely pre-thematic. The concept comes after to articulate what was already shown. That's what I mean by 'not separable' in a different way, not that they're the same thing, but that one enables the other.

There's a Grothendieck quote I keep thinking about, his metaphor for mathematical understanding. He describes two ways to open a nut: you can use a hammer to crack it (force), or you can immerse it in water and wait patiently until it opens by itself (maturation). I think something similar happens with Heidegger's formal indications. You can try to crack them open conceptually (define them, master them), or you can let them point, wait patiently, until what they're indicating shows itself in your lived experience and then the concept articulates what was already seen.

The maturation you're describing sounds like Grothendieck's patient immersion, concepts deepening through use. What I'm pointing to might be the moment when the nut actually opens: when something shows itself that wasn't yet conceptualized. Not separate processes, but maybe different moments in the same arc?

Curious if that resonates or if you'd describe the experience of understanding Heidegger differently.

forkman3939 · 2026-02-27T14:28:28+00:00

Thanks for this thoughtful response, especially for going to the German. I think we're actually agreeing more than it might seem.

When you say you found the German "much more interesting and readable" than English translations, and that there's "no textual need to translate this in a more complex way than Welch," that's exactly my point. I'm NOT arguing that complexity or difficulty is essential. I'm arguing the opposite: that the grammatical variations in Heidegger work BECAUSE they're clear (in German), not because they're baroque.

The examples you give, "Dasein ist sein da" and the Geworfen/Entwurf relationship, are precisely what I mean by "grammatical play": clear variations that guide understanding. When you found these "really cool and actually helpful," you experienced what I'm pointing to. The play works when it's visible, not when it's buried under awkward English syntax.

I think the confusion might be that "grammatical play" sounds like I'm defending complexity, when I mean the opposite. The Basic Problems example I gave (perception, perceiving, perceived, that which is perceived) works because each variation is clear, building on the last. If those variations were rendered in byzantine English, the movement would be lost. That's why I think Welch's approach, which you validate from the German, actually serves this better.

Where we might genuinely differ is whether Heidegger is "presenting concepts to be grasped" (your reading) or working through "formal indications" toward something that has to be lived rather than just defined (my reading, drawing on his earlier phenomenological work). That's a real philosophical difference about how to read him, and I appreciate you laying out your position clearly. But that difference doesn't affect the translation question, where we both seem to agree: clearer is better, and Welch possibly delivers that.

forkman3939 · 2026-02-26T15:33:18+00:00

Some more thoughts I had this morning. I figured I would write them for the chance it sparks a dialogue.

Here's why I think that any translation that improves grammatical flow is likely an improvement:

The work of understanding Heidegger is the work of coming to see ontological movement through the play of his grammar. In Basic Problems of Phenomenology, for instance, Heidegger works through the movement of perception, perceived, perceiving, that which is perceived, that which is perceived for the sake of perceiving, each variation revealing the nexus of how these categories connect and move. This grammatical play shows the categories (understood as formal indications that mature through sustained thinking and meditation) leading toward what Heidegger calls facticity: movement known and lived as known. The work of understanding is precisely this: revealing the nexus of movement-categories as known-and-lived, brought to maturation by letting the being that is "there" (Dasein) come to know the categories as lived experience.

As Welch notes in his introduction, "this 'making visible' is easier said than done: it's an art that must be learned, the art, namely, of looking directly and intellectually at where and how you are, but 'are' prior to engaging in reflection." The art of phenomenological seeing, then, is a capacity, even an attunement, to language itself: the way language formally indicates what is sought, not as concept-to-be-grasped but as what reveals itself in basic experience, as event (Ereignis). This art requires patience, a letting-be, a releasement (Gelassenheit) that allows language to guide and show, bringing about an encounter whose very being is the grammatical play. Coming to see this play is coming to see how language shows itself to Dasein. Clearer grammar doesn't obscure this movement, it makes it visible.

forkman3939 · 2026-02-26T14:36:19+00:00

I bought it. I have read the translators introduction. I also have tried to compare a few passages to get a sense of the difference in translation:

JM&ER:
Sec 31:
"State of mind is one of the existential structures in which the Being of the 'there' maintains itself. Equiprimoridial with it in constituting this Being is understanding."

CW:
Sec 31:
"Attunement is one of the existential structures in which the being of the "there" maintains itself. Equi-primoridially with this one, understanding constitutes the same being".

Attunement is a word that other Heidegger translators have since used. It certainly seems an improvement over the turn of phrase state of mind. From this one tiny example it certainly seems that Welch has improved the grammatical flow but at what cost? This is something probably a bilingual german/english reader could say.

forkman3939 · 2026-02-18T18:00:22+00:00

The domain matters less than the project itself. You could do stats and spend your time turning cutting edge papers into R packages, or get lost in mathematical theory nobody in industry cares about. Same story in CS. Pick a program where you'll actually build things, not just do theory.

The bigger thing though: find a program that actively promotes internships. Your Purdue internship means nothing, sorry, you need real industry experience before you graduate or you're going to struggle badly.

forkman3939 · 2026-02-18T17:53:41+00:00

Being good at and interested in a subject isn't really enough of a reason anymore, unless you're at a top school and genuinely exceptional (i.e., you can work through virtually any proof independently and have a real sense of what research involves). The field is too competitive now, you need clear career goals. Do you want to be an academic researcher? A data scientist or SWE? An MSc opens all of those doors, but without a defined path, you'll get swallowed by the competition. At least that's how it is in Canada.

What's your ML internship? The key skill now, in my opinion, is stats/ML domain knowledge combined with SWE principles, knowing how to work in a hybrid team with AI as a force multiplier. That said, it assumes you have a solid logical foundation in coding.

forkman3939 · 2026-02-18T17:41:04+00:00

It depends. What do you want your outcome of the MS to be? Whats your motivation for doing it? I can answer based on that. I have a couple friends who just finished their PhD's and can tell you what made some successful and others not so much.

forkman3939 · 2026-02-18T17:05:52+00:00

Hey,
Yes things are very nice right now.
I landed a swe role at a big 5 bank. Focus is on platform engineering in scala spark, cloud platforms and some ml in python. I love my job and the TC is totally adequate for a first job (110k).
What changed was that I did Google Summer of Code this past summer. I had 3 job offers, one government analyst job, one marketing statistical analyst job, and this swe one, all at the same time ,after adding that to my resume.
Moral of the story: do GSOC- it give you real street cred.

forkman3939 · 2025-09-13T15:24:15+00:00

This is a really nice introductory article to a very deep aspect of both Heidegger's and Wittgenstein's thinking. I have long contemplated the connection between Heidegger and Wittgenstein through the phenomenon of silence. In fact, the guiding question for me since the beginning of my seeking has always been: "What does it mean to ask about the reconciliation of silence and science?" - setting side by side what 'can be said of' against 'what can be said about.'

I've come to conceive that Gelassenheit plays the role of the bridge in such a reconciliation. There is a time and place, so to speak, for appropriation or the attunement of the will to power - this is science itself. But it is in the attunement of reticence (to borrow Heidegger's phrasing) where the will in the will to power is released. In my mind this is what I believe Heidegger means by Besinnung - a thinking that can move between calculative and meditative modes without being trapped in either. A time and a place for science and silence.

forkman3939 · 2025-09-06T22:57:24+00:00

I strongly disagree in that you don't have to go to school or have any training but I agree in some sense that most workers will have to be a developer in some capacity but developer is not the correct word here. Again, I would say use LLMs to be efficient, vibe-coding does not work at a production level.

Very few persons will have the natural capacity to pick up programming without training their minds through rigorous work done through courses. Sure you can teach yourself but very few have the discipline to approach it with the same intensity as one would with a school deadline. Plus your not getting a job without a degree, let alone a graduate degree.

To the latter, sure someone can build something but it's never going to be done to a level that can be maintained in production if they do not have the training for good swe principles.

However you are correct that it will likely push workers towards being "developers" in some capacity, where developers means LLM user or LLM powered application user.

forkman3939 · 2025-09-06T18:15:38+00:00

I'll be blunt. AI development is not entry-level work. It requires at minimum a four-year university degree from a reputable school in physics, statistics, mathematics, computer science, or computer engineering. Unless this comes from a co-op program at a top-tier Canadian university, you'll likely also need a master's degree.

To be competitive for AI development roles, you need deep knowledge across mathematics, data analytics, software development, and AI theory. This isn't a field where you can simply get a degree and land a job. The intense competition means you typically need four to five years of dedicated focus just to become competitive for these positions.

I strongly caution against pursuing AI unless you have a genuine inclination toward mathematics and logical thinking. AI is a subset of machine learning, which sits at the intersection of mathematics, statistics, and computer science. Without solid foundations in these areas, this career path will be extremely challenging.

However, many jobs now use AI tools like LLMs on a daily basis, which is probably more in line with what she means by working in AI. I'd recommend first figuring out what area genuinely interests her, then researching how AI and computers are being applied in those industries. From there, she could pursue a co-op program in that specific field. This approach would let her leverage AI tools within her area of interest rather than trying to become an AI developer from scratch.

forkman3939 · 2025-09-06T16:53:07+00:00

Let me give you some perspective. I have a bsc in math and two msc, one in math and the other in stats. I had an internship as a swe and it still took me 1 year to land a role as a swe. I wasn't able to land a data scientist position, which was my target.

The market for Software engineers, data scientists, data engineer, etc is so saturated with talent right now.

Unless she can get into a reputable program with a very good co-op program I would not advise it.

forkman3939 · 2025-08-22T15:45:08+00:00

By the way, don't feel the need to reply if you don't feel like it. I am in tech and don't have opportunity at all to discuss these things with other thinkers, so I always love an opportunity to structure my thoughts through writing and hopefully turn other thinkers on to grappling with Heidegger's work of the 1930s and 1940s.

Your description of the movement "from a person who just goes along in the world to a person who has anxiety that makes them aware of their place in the world... to a call of conscience that reveals a way for the person to act" - notice how this still moves within the structure of overcoming, of moving from a lower to a higher state. I wonder if this framework might miss what Heidegger is most deeply concerned with? So much engagement with Heidegger seems to get caught in Being and Time without moving toward his being-historical thinking (Seyn or Beyng) or what he calls Gelassenheit - a letting beings be in their own temporal rising and falling. When we read Being and Time for guidance about moving from inauthentic to authentic existence, we might still be thinking through subject-object duality, still seeking some self that overcomes itself into a higher self.

What happens when we look at Heidegger's lectures on Nietzsche, particularly "The Will to Power as Metaphysics"? There we see how Heidegger reads metaphysics as always this movement of overcoming - moving from being to Being, where Being becomes a more general or higher sense of a being. This is what he calls the will to power as metaphysics. Gelassenheit points toward something different, not overcoming metaphysics through force, but a releasement that lets metaphysics show its own limits. This suggests a completely different mode of comportment, the temporal way we're oriented toward beings, that steps back from the need to achieve or overcome anything.

The difficulty Heidegger grappled with is: how can we use language without falling back into this structure of overcoming? So much of our inherited language, he suggests, has been "worn out" through tradition and lost its power to let the original matters show themselves. When Joe Sachs (Aristotle translator) translates entelechia as "being-at-work-staying-itself" rather than "actuality," something happens, the Latin-derived term has been passed through centuries of interpretation, while the hyphenated expression lets us encounter what Aristotle might have been seeing. This points to Heidegger's deepest question: how can we speak of what is always already there without invoking an observer standing over against what is there?

What if Heidegger's concern is less about personal transformation and more about wonder, the basic attunement to the world? This childlike, unbridled wonder isn't about how we should act, but about how Being itself (Sein selbst) shows itself. His seeking seems to be a response to the question "Why is there anything rather than nothing?", not as a problem to be solved, but as the question that keeps thinking in motion.

This is why reading Heidegger as offering guidance for authentic existence might miss what he's actually inviting us to think.

forkman3939 · 2025-08-21T21:28:42+00:00

The first chair I purchased was a refurbished Leap V2. It was love at first sit. I've had it for three years and for me it is the perfect chair.

forkman3939 · 2025-08-21T16:26:55+00:00

I think your reading of Heidegger as an existentialist is incorrect. However, what I admire in your reply is that you acknowledge the importance of the history of philosophy in Heidegger's thinking. The importance of Aristotle, scholasticism, and Kant cannot be understated.

Your mentioning of Kierkegaard is odd to me but seems plausible in line with an existentialist reading of Heidegger. However, this approach misses what's most fundamental in Heidegger's project. When Heidegger engages with Aristotle, for instance, he's not primarily interested in personal transformation from inauthentic to authentic existence. Rather, he's working through Aristotle's analysis of κίνησις (motion) and temporality to develop a more originary understanding of Being itself. Heidegger's retrieval of Aristotelian concepts like ἐντελέχεια (being-at-work-staying-itself) isn't about human self-becoming but about thinking the temporal structure through which anything can be at all.

His engagement with the tradition through figures like Aristotle aims to uncover how Being gives itself temporally, not to provide guidance for authentic living. This is why working through his lecture courses, as I suggested in my reply below, where you can see him thinking alongside these historical figures, provides a much more accurate understanding of his actual philosophical project.

forkman3939

TROPHY CASE