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Abstract
This article examines the development of Heidegger's thought directly following Being and Time, a period that is significant both in its own right and in its capacity to shed light on the problems driving Heidegger's later works. I assess Crowell's thesis that Heidegger's aim was to develop a metontology along the lines of a pre-critical metaphysica specialis based on a reassessment of Kant's transcendental dialectic. I show that such a reading misrepresents the nature of Heidegger's project in this period and argue that Heidegger was instead attempting to develop a distinctively critical metaphysics in a post-Kantian vein.
Keywords
metontology - transcendental illusion - special metaphysics - unity of being - temporality
1
Re-opening discussion about Heidegger's abruptly introduced and equally abruptly abandoned concept of metontology appears at first glance to be an unpromising exercise, as any approach to understanding what Heidegger means by metontology as a form of inquiry immediately throws up two substantial problems. Firstly, apart from a brief mention in one of his last Marburg courses in 1928 (GA 26, íggff)1 together with an even briefer use of the concept in its adjectival form in the context of a discussion of Plato two years earlier (GA 22, 106), no further reference is made to metontology in Heidegger's corpus, which often leads commentators to question the significance of the role that the concept plays in Heidegger's oeuvre.2 Secondly, what little information Heidegger does divulge about the nature and import of a metontology remains obscure, and is often taken, in the best case, as difficult to square with Heidegger's thought or, in the worst case, as simply incoherent.3
There are, however, two salient points that can be extracted from Heidegger's brief remarks on metontology that speak to its potential significance. The first is simply that the scarcity of references to metontology is belied by the significance that Heidegger places on the concept in 1928. Heidegger states that "right within the horizon of the problem of being, when posed radically" there lies the problem of entities as a whole, and so we "need a special problematic" that has the latter as its "proper theme"; the corresponding "set of questions" is to be designated as metontology (GA 26, 199). Metontology is, further, said to "reside...