Heidegger: An Essential Guide For Complete Beginners

✍ Scribed by Michael Watts

• Publisher: eBookPartnership.com
• Year: 2014
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 300
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Short extracts from reviews of Heidegger: A Beginner’s Guide

“The merit of Michael Watts work – what I find particularly appealing about it – is his ability to grasp the abstruse and abstract nature of someone’s thought, and render it in clear, concise, and concrete terms. He is a master at this!” (Roy Martinez, Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Spelman College, Atlanta, USA).

“To write clearly and accessibly, and yet present a philosopher’s ideas without trivialising or distorting them requires considerable intellectual discipline. This challenge is, arguably, all the more severe in the case of philosophers such as Heidegger and Wittgenstein…Michael Watts has understood his responsibilities to the ‘newcomer’ very well.” (Extract from The Philosophers’ Magazine [Summer 2002] review by Jonathan Derbyshire, Culture Editor of New Statesman and Managing Editor of Prospect).

“Michael Watts gives an exceptionally clear and readable account of Being and Time, while also performing the difficult feat of weaving this into an account of Heidegger’s later writings. He provides valuable guidance for the beginner through the complexities of Heidegger’s thought and much of interest for those who are already ‘on the way’.” (Michael Inwood, Trinity College, Oxford).

Ideal for complete beginners, this is an exceptionally readable and reliable overview of Heidegger's thought, refreshingly free from the complex jargon typical of most academic philosophy. Full of concrete examples, Watts provides easy access to key Heideggerian notions of authenticity, falling, throwness, angst, guilt, conscience, technology and death, while also navigating the difficult relationship between earlier and later texts, to provide readers with a strong sense of the overall continuity of the Heidegger's thought.

✦ Table of Contents

CONTENTS
FOREWORD

PREFACE

1. THE LIFE OF HEIDEGGER

The roots

The influences of his environment

Education

Heidegger’s academic career

Heidegger and Nazism

The post-war years

1. THE MEANING OF LIFE: THE QUESTION OF BEING

The ontological ‘error’ of Western philosophy

Heidegger’s fundamental ontology

An argument against Heidegger’s approach

Heidegger’s response to nihilism

Heidegger’s vocabulary

‘Being’ and ‘being’

Ourselves as the initial subject-matter of the inquiry

Time as the horizon of Being

Being and Time

The Nothing

Why is there something rather than Nothing?

The significance of unanswerable questions

1. THE CENTRAL CONCEPTS OF BEING AND TIME

Dasein: ourselves as the starting point

The a priori structure of Dasein

The world

Dasein’s Being-in-the-world

Dasein’s ordinary, everyday existence

Ready-to-hand and present-at-hand

Heidegger’s ‘equipment totality’

Space and time

Being-with-others

Dasein’s thrownness

Inauthenticity: the ‘they-self’

Inauthenticity: falling

Moods

Understanding

Interpretation

Meaning

Anxiety

Care

1. BEING-TOWARDS-DEATH

The ‘afterlife’ issue

Heidegger’s ‘facts of life’ and death

Death as a possibility

1. CONSCIENCE, GUILT AND AUTHENTICITY

Conscience

Guilt

Authenticity

1. THE ‘TRUTH OF ALETHEIA’ AND LANGUAGE

Traditional concepts of truth

Heidegger’s truth of aletheia

Heidegger’s concept of language

The emptiness of everyday language

The language of Being

Ancient Greek and German

Talk: the basis of language

Language: our primary access to Being

The silent ‘saying’ of the world

The language of poetry

1. TAO, ZEN AND HEIDEGGER

Taoism and Heidegger

Zen and Heidegger

1. HEIDEGGER ON TECHNOLOGY

Enframing: the ‘mind-set’ of technology

Techne, poiesis and the essence of technology

Enframing: danger or source of awareness?

Heidegger’s response to technology

FURTHER READING

GLOSSARY