ABSTRACT
Steven Crowell is a leading contributor to revisionist readings of Sein und Zeit, which argue that the liminal phenomena of existential death, Angst, and the call of conscience play a central and ineliminable role in Heidegger’s understanding of intentionality and its normativity. In Crowell’s Kantian terms, Heidegger’s account of Dasein’s everyday ways of being in Division I taken by itself only shows how we can act in accord with social norms, but not in light of norms. The “existentialist” themes in Division II then show how reasoning plays a constructive role within a more adequate conception of Dasein’s normative accountability as always at issue. Crowell also argues that Heidegger’s account vindicates a sharp separation between Dasein as the entity that discloses the being of entities and any biological understanding of our humanity: “the Dasein in us” has never been animal. I argue instead that recent developments in evolutionary-developmental biology allow recognition of a broadly Heideggerian-existential conception of intentionality and normativity as a biologically explicable outcome of our massively niche-constructive way of life. This account in turn challenges Crowell’s insistence upon the priority of transcendental conditions for intentionality over the ongoing articulation of normative accountability from within our ways of life.
