| This dissertation is about Martin Heidegger's contribution to the phenomenological understanding of judgment. Drawing primarily on Being and Time and the accompanying lecture courses (from 1925-1930, roughly), I present and defend the following three Heideggerian theses. First, judgment is a ubiquitous and essential dimension of our ordinary commerce with the world. Second, judgment is fundamentally an expression of our capacity for ontological commitment, what Heidegger calls our "understanding of being." Third, the content of judgment---generically, the very idea of propositional meaning---is best made sense of neither by psychologism nor by platonism, but by a broadly existentialist form of explanation. This form of explanation makes sense of the possibility of the content of judgment by tracing it back to its source in the entity that is capable of making judgments. Heidegger calls this explanation an "existential analytic of Dasein." By forging the link between Heidegger's mature response to the psychologism problematic in logic and the existential analytic of Dasein, I claim that the judgment theme provides a fruitful point of access for understanding the basic contours of the philosophical project undertaken in Being and Time. |
