Alweiss, Lilian: The World Unclaimed. A Challenge to Heidegger’s Critique of Husserl

Abstract

As it is apparent from its title, in her book Lillian Alweiss presents us with a critique of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time in its failure to deliver what he claimed Edmund Husserl could not. Even though she gives us a sympathetic reading of Husserl’s works to defend him against Heidegger, her final analysis attempts to identify the limits of phenomenology in pointing towards the ultimate condition of our natal bond with the world. The work, which is composed of five chapters, could initially seem deceptively accessible due to the author’s flowing style, although in its stimulating analyses and critical input it addresses a reader who is already somewhat acquainted with the main works of Husserl and Heidegger prior to 1927. The book secures Alweiss’ status as an original philosophical mind who can anchor herself to a coherent position. However, she tries to accomplish this in 226 pages, in such a way that some of her analyses are spread too thin at places where a more in depth approach might be in order. The impetus behind Alweiss’ project is to distance herself away from Cartesian dualism through her reflections on the works of these two thinkers. In doing this, Alweiss sides with Husserl, for she sees his internal critique of the Cartesian project as a more truthfully non-dualistic depiction of our relation to the world than the external critiques such as Heidegger’s. But she also sympathizes with the Heideggerian attempt to prioritize transcendence over immanence while avoiding the dualism. In the first chapter Alweiss tells us not to understand Heidegger’s critique of his teacher in B&T within paradigm of the internalism vs. externalism debate, as Pierre Keller would have