Thank you for posting this article. I enjoyed Dresser's essay, especially since he did a good job of recognizing the virtues of both Heidegger's & Carnap's thinking. I've always leaned more toward the Continental philosophers but have studied and appreciated the Analytic approaches (esp. Wittgenstein). This article rekindled my interest in both for the first time in years. Cheers.

Heidecker v Wareheim was also a classic

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Heidegger was rejecting a certain view of language. Heidegger's point about "being" (more accurately, meaningful presence) is that our everyday practices always-already assume certain conceptions of that by virtue of which entities are what they are, thereby "ontologicaly" defining them. So, the idea that philosophy can even begun by preforming a logical analysis of language is at the very least already dependent on our everyday/theoretical ontological assumptions: by treating language as a "thing", we have uncritically assumed a certain conception of "thinghood" (that is, meaningful presence). Carnap assume a whole set of empiricist/formalist principles (to be fair, carnap is very much explict about those). Yet those principles only make sense within one specific way of encountering beings. Any person who speaks everyday language knows, by virtue of this simple hermeneutic experience, the alien nature of logical analysis. We do not encounter language as a present-at-hand entity to be broken into parts, reduced to core principles and become an object for disembodied theoretical knowledge. Not that this is wrong taken for itself. Linguistics have a place in our "world". So does logic. But they have no superior claim for knowledge and truth then our much more intuitive and direct sense (sinn) of everyday pragmatics, when dasein encounter beings through their usefulness in a mode of ready-to-hand. The technological attitude which reduce beings to the stuff of Cartesian philosophy (or the sense data of carnap, the phenomenalist radical) can only explain the world so far. This is way only (ontological) phenomenology can be first philosophy (as recognized by Heidegger's Aristotle character): any other question, including "reflective" questions about language and thinking, assume an answer to the question about that by virtue of which things can be meaningful for us in the first place. An analysis of meaningful presence in the most general, and what allows for its coming forth and remaining in presence (human temporal existence), must come before an analysis of things. Finally, it's the world-disculsive rather then the descriptive or even problem-solving aspect of language which must be experienced in order for the meaningful presence of things to come to light. A general conception of meanfulness as divorced from what is meaningful must be attaind before even trying the fundamentaly impossible (and therefore basically "mystical") task of creating a "language about language". Heidegger start thinking in language (rather than about language), only after creating a phenomenological framework that will allow for the meaning-creating aspect of language to be understood and situated properly. Logic has no privileged access to language and is parasitic upon the hermeneutic experience through which things become present and disclosed. Understanding the convergence between anxiety, humen finitude, language as experience, and meaningful presence/disclosure is far from being metaphysical. Rather, it is an open-ended approach towards issues of meaning, signification, and interpretation. Heidegger's conception of the nothing can only be understood through this phenomenological context: meaning belongs to the things themselves and not just our statements about them. This is an important husserlian principle. Therefore, for heidegger, Language as disclusive of things is more fundamental than both the ideal and ordinary conception of analytical philosophy. The words "being" and "nothing" are very much constitutive of our more fundamental attunement to the world of meaningful presence (indeed, language is creative!), which comes before any logical statement about sense data forcibly divorced form it.

"Logic" didn't take an issue with metaphysics.

Hell, you could argue the thing itself is, together with the sacred epistemology.

But when anything can mean everything (and why not, also its opposite while we are at it) then you aren't on a quest for knowledge. Poetry seems indeed quite a fitting label for the remainder.

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.139543/page/n9/mode/2up

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinary_language_philosophy

Philosophy can also be awe then (try to explain the raven's paradox with the indoor ornithology metaphor, and people will be blown away) but jesus christ.. it shouldn't be the alpha and omega, and an excuse to write bullshit (in the sense that whatever somebody understands, you don't give a damn as long as they are "impressed"). To the point that I have read the worst scoundrels wiggling away from any responsibility towards their work, by claiming that the very damn language that they were using to convey such information is just too limited to actually know the world.

I don't think it's a coincidence that the guy too far up his ass ended up being a self-absorbed closed society guy, while the one standing up for "facts" eventually ended up being one of the dearest grandpas of philosophy of science.

And btw it's quite disingenuous to affirm that Carnap and other logical positivists failed. They set the basis for Popper's theory of truth, in what could be considered the biggest example of "progress" that there probably ever was in philosophy.