The Heidegger Reader

Presents key texts from the entire course of Heidegger's philosophical career. This book offers insight into Heidegger's thought. It also traces the many thematic paths that are useful for developing a comprehensive understanding of Heidegger's most important work.

Continuum's Reader's Guides are clear, concise and accessible introductions to classic works of philosophy. Each book explores the major themes, historical and philosophical context and key passages of a major philosophical text, guiding the reader toward a thorough understanding of often demanding material. Ideal for undergraduate students, the guides provide an essential resource for anyone who needs to get to grips with a philosophical text. Heidegger's Being and Time is one of the most influential and controversial philosophical treatises of the 20th century. It had a profound impact on Sartre and Merleau-Ponty in their further development of phenomenology and existentialism, hugely influenced Gadamer's hermeneutics, and paved the way, partly directly and partly indirectly through Heidegger's later thought, for the emergence of deconstructionism. In addition to being a very important text, it is also a very difficult one. Heidegger presents a number of challenges to the the reader, asking them to abandon many assumptions fundamental to traditional philosophy, such as the mind/body distinction and the concept of substance. The text also introduces a whole host of new concepts and terms and as such is a hugely challenging, yet fascinating, piece of philosophical writing. In Heidegger's 'Being and Time': A Reader's Guide William Blattner explains the philosophical background against which the book was written and provides a clear and concise overview of the key themes and motifs. The book then examines this challenging text in details, guiding the reader to a clear understanding of Heidegger's work as a whole. Finally Blattner explores the reception and influence of the work and offers the student guidance on further reading. This is the ideal companion to study of this most influential and challenging of texts.

Along with several selections from Heidegger's national socialist days, this work includes later interviews as well as contributions by Lowith, Junger, Jaspers, Marcuse, Habermas and others about his political ideas.

Martin Heidegger is one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. His later writings are profoundly original and innovative, giving rise to much of postmodernist thinking, yet they are infamously difficult to approach. Heidegger's Later Writings: A Reader's Guide offers a concise and accessible introduction to eight of Heidegger's most important essays. These essays cover many of the central topics of his later thought and are conveniently gathered together in the book Basic Writings, making this guide a perfect companion. Written specifically to help students coming to these texts for the first time, each chapter illuminates a particular essay's structure to enable readers to start finding their own way through the text.

Heidegger is perhaps the most influential, yet least readily understood, philosopher of the last century. Mark A. Wrathall unpacks Heidegger's dense prose and guides the reader through Heidegger's early concern with the nature of human existence and his later preoccupation with the threat that technology poses to our ability to live worthwhile lives. Wrathall pays particular attention to Heidegger's revolutionary analysis of human existence as inextricably shaped by a shared world. This leads to an exploration of his views on the banality of public life and the possibility of authentic anticipation of death as a response to that banality. Wrathall reviews Heidegger's scandalous involvement with National Socialism, situating it in the context of his views about the movement of world history. He also explains Heidegger's important accounts of truth, art and language. Extracts are taken from Heidegger's magnum opus, Being and Time, as well as a variety of his best-known essays and lectures.

Martin Heidegger is known for rethinking the western understanding of what it means to be (a thing, a person, an institution, etc). Although this may seem to be an abstract, specialized, philosophical project, it has turned out to have profound implications for many aspects of contemporary life. The list of those whom Heidegger's work has decisively influenced reads like a roster of the major thinkers of the 20th century: Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jurgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor and Pierre Bourdieu. This book includes pieces by the above authors who have written essays on Heidegger's philosophy, as well as the best examples of the work of a new generation who have been attempting to put Heidegger's thought into an idiomatic English which captures the phenomena to which Heidegger sought to call our attention, and to draw out the implications of Heidegger's work for the current philosophical scene. These essays show how Heidegger opened up new approaches to central questions in the philosophy of language, mind, action, and technology.

Heidegger is a classic introduction to Heidegger's notoriously difficult work. Truly accessible, it combines clarity of exposition with an authoritative handling of the subject-matter. Richard Polt has written a work that will become the standard text for students looking to understand one of the century's greatest minds.

Heidegger’s radical thinking on the meaning of truth in a “clear and comprehensive critical edition” (Philosophy in Review). Martin Heidegger’s 1925–26 lectures on truth and time provided much of the basis for his momentous work, Being and Time. Not published until 1976—three months before Heidegger’s death—as volume 21 of his Complete Works, it is nonetheless central to Heidegger’s overall project of reinterpreting Western thought in terms of time and truth. The text shows the degree to which Aristotle underlies Heidegger’s hermeneutical theory of meaning. It also contains Heidegger’s first published critique of Husserl and takes major steps toward establishing the temporal bases of logic and truth. Thomas Sheehan’s elegant and insightful translation offers English-speaking readers access to this fundamental text for the first time.