Negativity in Hegel and breakdown in Heidegger: An investigation into the structures of finitude in 'The Science of Logic' and 'Being and Time'

It is commonly held that Hegel and Heidegger are antithetical. At the same time, Hegel is often criticized for an all encompassing monism, and Heidegger read as relativizing all entities to human practical activity, or to a hermeneutic structure of language. This dissertation provides a new model of the logic of finitude at work in Hegel and Heidegger. I establish that they are both responding to (and radically reworking) Kantian idealism, arguing that finitude lets beings present themselves. I demonstrate that Hegel's logic is not based around a cunning unity that is always working in the background, but, rather, is formed around the incommensurability of thinking and what is thought. I show that Being and Time is based neither on the phenomenon of pure anxiety, nor on the experience of tools and our uses of them, but, instead, on the phenomenon of struggling in our dealings with things. The way tools occur as broken, tasks as difficult, and something can be amiss, the way difficulties appear as occasional local problems is analogous to the way all entities occur in temporal, spatial, and significant relations through an ontological breakdown between identifiable entities and their singular being. In showing how Hegel and Heidegger transform Kant's regulative idea, I show the way forward to an idealism that, although remaining within the bounds of possible experience, is nevertheless a robust realism.