Heidegger

Catalog description

Martin Heidegger's masterpiece, Being and Time, is among the fundamental philosophical texts of the 20th century, taking up questions of metaphysics, religion, temporality, ontology, the history of philosophy, language, technology, and aesthetics. His thinking there influenced the development of hermeneutics, existentialism, and postmodernism, and continues to inform contemporary approaches to these topics. This course thus gives pride of place to Being and Time, potentially including also the related The Concept of Time (1924) and The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (1927). Major topics studied will be the primacy of the question of the meaning of being, the ontological difference, the phenomenological method, the critique against Cartesian subjectivity, and the existential characteristics of humans such as "being-in-the-world," temporality, spatiality, historicity, sociality, thrownness, authenticity, inauthenticity, everydayness, and death. Further themes of the course may include the relationship between Heidegger's "early" and "later" works; the political question in Heidegger, especially after the publication of the Black Notebooks; Heidegger's refusal to apologize for his allegiance to National Socialism; the problematic of ethics within the Heideggerian existential phenomenological account; Heidegger's critique of the metaphysics of presence; Heidegger's critique of technology; the Heideggerian conception of art; Heidegger's understanding of the poetic; and historical and contemporary critiques of Heidegger's thought.