Heidegger

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

In this advanced seminar, we will read a significant portion of Martin Heidegger’s magnum opus, Being and Time (1927). Time permitting, we will also read a handful of Heidegger’s most important essays, including “The Origin of the Work of Art” and “The Question Concerning Technology”. We will focus on mastering the framework of Heidegger’s project, its terminology, and its differences from traditional philosophical views and methods. Heidegger’s goal was to reawaken the question of the meaning of being, which he takes to have been neglected throughout much of the history of Western philosophy. In posing and pursuing the question of what it means to be rather than not, Heidegger develops a novel and powerful account of the human being as the understander of being – as both responsible for and responsive to the sense that things make. Drawing on Aristotle and Kant as well as Kierkegaard and Augustine, Heidegger analyses our embeddedness in the world and society, and our openness to meaning through action, tradition and language. His later essays extend his account to cover (for example) how art works to produce and shape the sense that things make, and how the modern technological attitude impoverishes the sense that things make. Assessment will consist primarily in short answer exegetical exercises, which will force students to confront Heidegger’s difficult prose and ideas directly. Students must be prepared to commit to grappling with a notoriously obscure thinker and his famously impenetrable texts.