ABSTRACT
According to Hegel in his Science of Logic, life is a logical concept. In his account, this means that we know non-empirically that there is an ontological distinction between living and nonliving beings, and what this difference consists in. We know it as a result of a general reflection on what is involved in self-consciously judging anything to be the case; somewhat more broadly: in the rendering of any object or event intelligible. Heidegger, on the contrary, denies that the way life is understood, or is available to us, is as a concept, a content of a priori thought, and in doing so he treats Hegel as paradigmatic for the approach of western philosophy, a ‘forgetful’ and unsustainable approach. So there is a great deal at stake between them in what I will call a contrast between a phenomenological approach to a living being and a ‘logical’ approach. In this paper, I defend Heidegger's claim that Hegel leaves unexplained the original availability of the living/nonliving distinction in human experience.
