Heidegger's Being and Time Explained: A Teaching Paper (original) (raw)
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Heidegger’s “Being and Time”: Critical Essays
Heidegger’s “Being and Time”: Critical Essays. Edited with an introduction by Richard Polt. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. https://books.google.com/books/about/Heidegger\_s\_Being\_and\_Time.html?id=2dK0LmyRG-IC
2015
This is an attempt to provide a short summary of this monumental and difficult work as an aid to students. I have tried both to summarise the main ideas - following the text and using Heidegger's terminology and language, while inserting in square brackets briefer and more colloquial summaries of some of the more opaque passages. Sometimes I have also added my own remarks to place some of the ideas in context. What remains is still a dense reading experience, partly because of the way Heidegger expresses himself, but also because of the number and variety of the concepts he introduces. Hopefully it will act as both an introduction as well as a resumé for readers.
Heidegger: Being and Time and the Care for the Self
The secret of Being and Time and of its constant cultural and philosophical presence lies in its unusual hermeneutical richness. Being and Time becomes, so to speak, a precise seismometer capable of detecting the slips and falls of the contemporary era with surprising accuracy. It offers us an exact scan of the ethi- cal and moral conscience of our time. Being and Time does not develop a philosophical theory among others, rather it faces the challenge of thoroughly reflecting upon the dilemma that is constantly present in philosophy, namely the question of human being and its relation to being in general. From this point of view, I would like to consider the possibility of reading this fundamental work of Heidegger as an ethics of the care, that is, as book that promotes a cultivation of the self and the other.
What is Missing? The Incompleteness and Failure of Heidegger’s Being and Time
Lee Braver, ed., Being and Time, Division III, Heidegger's Unanswered Question of Being (MIT Press), 2015
In this essay, I first consider several prevalent interpretations of the fragmentariness and “failure” of Being and Time, including three of Heidegger’s divergent and at times conflicting self-interpretations. I then turn to questions of hermeneutics that are provoked by this incompleteness and its reception in relation to Heidegger’s approach to hermeneutics as the art of interpretation. Heidegger’s practice and elucidation of destructuring, creative, and violent interpretations that intend to liberate the “unthought” in the text appear to clarify his own subsequent depictions of Being and Time. But there remains a discrepancy and distance between the contingent incompleteness of Being and Time owing to the circumstances of its publication and the role this incompleteness is later given as part of the history of being. I accordingly examine the “gap” between the thought (or unthought) and the contingent empirically or ontically existing “author.” I conclude that Heidegger’s best interpretations of the significance of Being and Time in his philosophical journey entail a different understanding of the relationship between “life and work” than the one Heidegger himself maintained—one that is closer to the hermeneutical perspective and interpretive strategies, which embrace critical autobiographical and biographical reflection, encouraged by Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Misch.