Hermeneutic Phenomenology on the Meaning and Function of Philosophy

Abstract

Since its origin in Greece in the seventh century B.C. philosophy has considered the question concerning the meaning of the “Whole” to be the central and most fundamental philosophical question. In dealing with this basic question philosophers for over 2500 years have attempted to specify the precise meaning of the problem, to solve it, and to justify its solution in many different ways, using different methods and referring to it with various terminologies. But however much philosophy has changed over the centuries in almost all aspects, so that we properly speak about philosophies, all of them seem to have one thing in common: their concern for the “Whole,” the totality of all that is, the totality of all possible meaning, to which they have referred with terms such as “cosmos,” “universe,” “world,” “nature,” “being,” “substance,” “matter,” “spirit,” and so on.¹

FromThe World in Science and Philosophy, by Joseph J. Kockelmans, published by the Bruce Publishing Company. Copyright © 1969 by the Bruce Publishing Company. The text is taken from pp. 3–53 and reprinted by permission of the Glencoe Division of the Macmillan/McGraw-Hill School Publishing Company.

Martin Heidegger, What is Philosophy?, trans. Jean T. Wilde and William Kluback (New Haven: Yale University Press, n.d.), pp. 45-67.