A response to Sheehan's attempted paradigm shift in Heidegger studies

This paper is a first response to Thomas Sheehan’s recently published book Making Sense of Heidegger: A Paradigm Shift.1 In the first part of this paper I address Sheehan’s attack on the hypostatization of being on the one hand and his radical shift towards meaning and intelligibility on the other hand. I claim that while Sheehan’s critique may serve as a certain corrective in Heidegger scholarship, his proposed solution to eliminate “being” from the lexicon of Heidegger’s philosophy is not warranted at all. In the second part of the paper I look at Sheehan’s proposed paradigm shift in relation to the paradigm it is meant to replace. Here I claim that Sheehan’s new paradigm is not as radically new as he makes it out to be, and I point out severe shortcomings in his argumentation for the new paradigm. In the last part of the paper I discuss Sheehan’s concept of meaning, which I believe can help to start a much needed discussion in Heidegger scholarship.