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The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger's Being and Time
The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger's “Being and Time” contains seventeen chapters by leading scholars of Heidegger. It is a useful reference work for beginning students, but also explores the central themes of Being and Time with a depth that will be of interest to scholars. The Companion begins with a section-by-section overview of Being and Time and a chapter reviewing the genesis of this seminal work. The final chapter situates Being and Time in the context of Heidegger's later work. The remaining chapters examine the core issues of Being and Time, including the question of being, the phenomenology of space, the nature of human being (our relation to others, the importance of moods, the nature of human understanding, language), Heidegger's views on idealism and realism and his position on skepticism and truth, Heidegger's account of authenticity (with a focus on his views on freedom, being toward death, and resoluteness), and the nature of temporality and human historicality.
448 pages, Paperback
First published May 10, 2013
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
February 3, 2021
Being and Time is notoriously abstruse. Few people are able to wade into its opaque waters and understand much about what Heidegger had to say. Part of the reason for this is that his thought is very abstract, even though it purports to be simply descriptive. Another reason is that it’s rife with neologisms. The subjects Heidegger tackles in Being and Time are something for which we have few words available and when you consider the fact that it is, for English speakers, a translation it’s more daunting still.
The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger's Being and Time is a very effective compendium on the subject. Essentially, it’s a series of exegetics that attempt to interpret the finer points of Being and Time for the layman, someone who either hasn’t read Being and Time, or who has read it but suspects he has missed crucial meanings that escape all but the most committed scholars. Various sections of Being and Time are parsed in the book. At times there is an overlap between the essays where you have the same thing being said in different ways. But in general, this is an excellent overview and a very penetrating examination of existentialism at its roots.
The book does as good a job as can be expected at plainly laying out the real and deeper meanings of the various terms Heidegger used in his philosophy. When Heidegger writes about death, he doesn’t mean what we commonly think. When he writes about resoluteness, or authenticity, or time, he doesn’t mean what we would normally think either. His approach to these concepts is considerably more nuanced than conventional thinking, in ways that could almost be described as holistic and, at times, even mystical, though he makes every outward effort to avoid this.
Still, you can’t help but get the feeling sometimes when you read this book that the essayist is not interpreting a secular, mundane philosophy, but some kind of obscure, religious text that is open to a variety of potential meanings, making Being and Time look, occasionally, not so much like a spiritually empty, godless refutation of traditional philosophical and religious belief but a substitute for it. In ways it is almost Eastern in nature.
This book is a fantastic primer for the curious, even if you find Heidegger’s ideas hopelessly inscrutable or even absurd. Like it or not, Being and Time is one of the great seminal works in the Western philosophical canon and remains thought provoking and pertinent to this day.
The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger's Being and Time is a very effective compendium on the subject. Essentially, it’s a series of exegetics that attempt to interpret the finer points of Being and Time for the layman, someone who either hasn’t read Being and Time, or who has read it but suspects he has missed crucial meanings that escape all but the most committed scholars. Various sections of Being and Time are parsed in the book. At times there is an overlap between the essays where you have the same thing being said in different ways. But in general, this is an excellent overview and a very penetrating examination of existentialism at its roots.
The book does as good a job as can be expected at plainly laying out the real and deeper meanings of the various terms Heidegger used in his philosophy. When Heidegger writes about death, he doesn’t mean what we commonly think. When he writes about resoluteness, or authenticity, or time, he doesn’t mean what we would normally think either. His approach to these concepts is considerably more nuanced than conventional thinking, in ways that could almost be described as holistic and, at times, even mystical, though he makes every outward effort to avoid this.
Still, you can’t help but get the feeling sometimes when you read this book that the essayist is not interpreting a secular, mundane philosophy, but some kind of obscure, religious text that is open to a variety of potential meanings, making Being and Time look, occasionally, not so much like a spiritually empty, godless refutation of traditional philosophical and religious belief but a substitute for it. In ways it is almost Eastern in nature.
This book is a fantastic primer for the curious, even if you find Heidegger’s ideas hopelessly inscrutable or even absurd. Like it or not, Being and Time is one of the great seminal works in the Western philosophical canon and remains thought provoking and pertinent to this day.
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January 30, 2023This text tended to be unyielding at times but nevertheless a great meltdown of Heideggers "being and time." Many connections between eastern philosophy in my mind, and thus I hallucinated the whole dead tree as a tremendous meditative journey in interpreting anxiety, death, and, of course, all forms of being and time. A book I will come back from time to time for some rational and rabbit-hole-deep take on these topics.
October 23, 2016
Excellent essays by some of the leading contemporary interpreters of Heidegger, on his magnum opus Being and Time. If it is your first time studying Heidegger (it was for me), the essays are really helpful in explaining the underlying themes, and in clarifying key concepts and the sometimes difficult Language used by Heidegger. Recommended!
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August 27, 2024Most Cambridge Companion to Philosophy books are complete with hit-or-miss essays. However, that problem can only be found in texts focused on a single thinker (For instance, the Heidegger Companion covers bits from Being and Time and his work post the “Turn”). You’ll usually get one or two essays that concern your studies. But in this case, when the book and the essays are about one singular text, they are all worth reading. I cannot recommend this book enough if you would like a handy overview of the text and essays that supplement your reading and thinking of the ideas. It has also introduced me to various Heidegger scholars, which I plan to check out. Fantastic book.
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June 19, 2019blattner "authenticity and resoluteness" --division II of being and time
thomson "death and demise"--division II of being and time
thomson "death and demise"--division II of being and time
September 16, 2024
Review to follow.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews