The Promise of Being: Heidegger for Beginners

“The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is,” Martin Heidegger writes, “that we are still not thinking.” Our undergraduate seminar will study, slowly and carefully, some of Heidegger’s most fascinating and challenging paths of thinking, especially as they relate to questions of Being and our being-in-the-world. We will encounter his unique engagements with art and literature, his critique of modern technology, his reflections on what it means to “dwell” somewhere, his views on finitude and death, and his notion of being “on the way” toward language. No previous familiarity with Heidegger is assumed; curious students from diverse fields welcome.