To Stand Being

ABSTRACT Little has been said about Martin Heidegger’s influence on Latin American philosophy. This article addresses this oversight by investigating how twentieth-century Argentine philosopher Rodolfo Kusch uses ser and estar and the formula estar-siendo to dethrone Heidegger’s famed Dasein. Drawing on estar’s etymological roots in the semantic element <stand>, Kusch recovers a phenomenological tradition rooted in the Greek histemi instead of the on of “ontology.” To champion Kusch’s phenomenology, this article borrows from analytic philosophy. Beginning in the words’ semantics, this article illustrates ser and estar as normative pragmatic functions to understand Kusch’s deployment of the words as phenomenological concepts. Following Kusch, it is argued that estar has an ostensive function meant to signal facticity, rather than to register propositional content apophantically, while ser’s pragmatic function is declarative; it passes on warranted premises for novel inferences. The article concludes by cashing estar-siendo out as a philosophical speech act that revokes the self-verifying nature of accept truths by pointing such truths back to their factive origins. Accordingly, this article brings together continental philosophy, semantics, and analytic strands of pragmatism.