Essay on Aristotle and Heidegger Allowing Personal...

Aristotle and Heidegger Allowing Personal Accountability A disquieting article recently appeared in The New York Times. The article chronicles the story of Larry W. Peterman, resident of Provo, Utah, owner of a successful adult video store, and defendant in a case in which he was charged with selling obscene material. During Peterman’s trial, the following information came to the fore, As it turned out, people in Utah County, a place that often boasts of being the most conservative area in the nation, were disproportionately large consumers of the very videos that prosecutors had labeled obscene and illegal. And far more Utah County residents were getting their adult movies from the sky or cable than they were from the stores†¦show more content†¦Heidegger’s penetrating analysis of human action yields - as we will discover - much insight into why we as humans are prone to weakness, which he defines in loosely social-constructionist terms that still allow for a large measure of personal accountability. However, i n the end we shall see that Aristotle goes further than Heidegger in explaining human weakness because his model of action (1) encompasses key aspects of Heidegger’s carefully executed existential analytic and (2) allows for more personal accountability by giving a wider account of action that allows for voluntary action that is chosen by deliberation in addition to merely voluntary action. Dasein, Modes of Being, and Being-in-the-world John Caputo of Villanova University relates that in Being and Time, Heidegger wishes to find a new conceptuality in which to ‘indicate,’ however ‘formally,’ the character of the pretheoretical, prephilosophical, indeed even a preconceptual life. This provocative and paradoxical task, to find a concept for the preconceptual, was undertaken in close dialog †¦ with Aristotle’s ethics.55 Simon Critchley tells us that the aim of Being and Time is to retrieve the question of Being as it was originally explicated by Aristotle and Plato.66 However, to understand fully Heidegger’s relation to Aristotle, we must first understand Heidegger’s project from