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A number of commentators, myself included (Critchley 2002; Olafson 1998; Stolorow 2011; Vogel 1994), have perceived a certain thinness in Martin Heidegger’s (1962/1927) conception of “Being-with” (Mitsein), the existential structure that underpins the capacity for relationality, and have suggested a number of ways in which it might be expanded. Irene McMullin’s (2013) approach to such a fleshing out is quite a unique one, and I found it to be both persuasive and valuable. Reading Heidegger as a transcendental phenomenologist concerned with the first-person experience of meaning, she finds the basis for an enriched depiction of Dasein-to-Dasein relationships in Heidegger’s account of Dasein’s originary or ecstatic temporality. Specifically, she wants to show that individualized interpersonal encounters entail the mutual recognition of the particularity of each participant’s temporalizing way of Being-in-the-world, and, controversially, that such mutual recognition occurs even within...

DOI: 10.1007/s10746-014-9309-1

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