Heidegger: A Guide for the Perplexed (Guides For The Perplexed)
David R. Cerbone
Language: English
Pages: 193
ISBN: B01K8ZY8N6
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Continuum's Guides for the Perplexed are clear, concise and accessible introductions to thinkers, writers and subjects that students and readers can find especially challenging. Concentrating specifically on what it is that makes the subject difficult to fathom, these books explain and explore key themes and ideas, guiding the reader towards a thorough understanding of demanding material. Martin Heidegger is one of the twentieth century's most influential, controversial and challenging philosophers. His Being and Time is a landmark text in modern philosophy, required reading for anyone studying Continental thought. However, the concepts encountered in Heidegger are intricate and frequently confusing, while the language through which they are articulated is deliberately dense and obscure. Heidegger: A Guide for the Perplexed is a thorough, cogent and reliable account of Heidegger's philosophy, ideal for the student who needs to reach a sound understanding of this complex and important thinker. The book covers Heidegger's oeuvre in its entirety, offering not only exposition of Being and Time, but also his later work. His perspectives on, and contributions to, both ontology and phenomenology are explored in full, as is the concept of Dasein, Heidegger's term for the human way of existence. Geared toward the specific requirements of students who need to reach a sound understanding of Heidegger's philosophy, this is the ideal companion to the study of this most influential and challenging of twentieth century philosophers.
knowledge. Everything that shows itself in the ordinary sense is accompanied and made possible by space and time as their form; however, this ‘accompaniment’ is not usually ‘thematic’. When I perceive the cup on my desk, I perceive it as spatially located and as spatially extended, indeed I must perceive it that way in order to perceive it at all; at the same time, I do not ordinarily attend to the space the cup is seen as inhabiting, nor do I give much thought to the features and characteristics
primarily interested in detailing the structure of this notion of world in general. This structure is what he refers to as the ‘worldliness of the world’. All ‘special worlds’ partake of this general structure, and owing to this general structure, every special world is ‘accessible’ from any other, at least to some degree. Though the college professor and the business mogul may not feel an especially great affinity for each other, they can both make themselves understood to one another with respect
‘being-in-the-world’, signifies this familiarity, this sense of feeling at home in a way of life. ‘In’ thus does not signify spatial containment, as though being-in-the-world primarily meant that Da-sein was always spatially located with respect to some larger, physically defined space. This may be true, but this notion of containment cannot capture or convey the sense of familiarity Heidegger is describing here. The physical world is one sense of ‘world’ (Heidegger lists four different senses of
might find a lost object by rummaging through the closet. Such a thing-like way of thinking is wholly inappropriate to Da-sein’s way of being; rather, to say that Da-sein is lost means that it fails to be what it is, which in turn means that it fails to project itself. Everyday Da-sein, as Dasein, is indeed projected, but in a manner that is largely passive: With the lostness in das Man, the nearest, factical potentiality-ofbeing of Da-sein has always already been decided upon – tasks, rules,
invites things in their particularity through the particularity of poetic language. What I’m calling here the particularity of poetic language is revealed in the ways in which poetic language has its own kinds of regimentation, its own demands for order and exactitude, but of a kind other than that found in the sciences. That a poem employs this word, rather than a near synonym, with this stress and in this relation to the words around it: understanding these demands is essential to a proper