GUIDE TO HEIDGGR BNG AND TME

by Robert C. Scharff

The collection I propose is designed as a volume for Blackwell’s new “Guides to Great Works” series. Although (or perhaps because) there is an enormous secondary literature on Heidegger’s Being and Time [BT], there is a clear need for a collection of fresh and original essays about this work that reflects the basic ideas of this series. Most currently available collections on BT, as well as the recently published single-author guidebooks, tend to display one of two features that the proposed Blackwell volume will avoid. In quick and dirty On the one hand, some writers approach Heidegger already so strongly influenced by their own philosophical outlook and interests that Heidegger’s project in BT (and thus also the purpose of its treatment of such famous topics as practical vs. theoretical understanding, care, death, time, and historicity) disappears from view. On the other hand, some commentators are so intent on staying faithful to Heidegger’s own concerns that their analyses never stray very far from summary, paraphrase, and conservative extension of the master’s pronouncements. The first approach, at best, succeeds in showing how Heidegger can be made to contribute to other philosophical projects (e.g., analytic epistemology/metaphysics, deconstruction, critical social theory, or existential therapy). The second approach, at best, succeeds in showing that the first approach, by appropriating Heidegger for other uses, retains features of precisely the traditional philosophical outlook that BT identifies at the very beginning as the primary obstacle to its project of “raising again the question of the meaning of being.” Of course, this classification of Heidegger collections and commentaries is selective and lacking in nuance

Paperback