Being and Time (German: Sein und Zeit, 1927) is German philosopher Martin Heidegger's most important work. Although written quickly, and despite the fact that Heidegger never completed the project outlined in the introduction, the book has profoundly...
For the Time Being by Annie Dillard (Viking/Penguin, 1999, $29.99). Reviewed by Bert Vancook. It is unfair a person can write so well. And not only write well but lift people's spirits by her insight into everyday encounters and startling images. ...
As our regular readers know, the standard pattern of the Why column, the "formula" if you will, is an uninteresting question followed by a tortured joke followed by a dubious answer followed by a retraction the next week. For the sake of variety, however,...
Sometimes in the crush of busy workdays, it's hard to see the forest for the trees. You may have a vague feeling that things aren't right in your job, but you just can't put your finger on the problem. Well, here's some help. Look for...
Barack Obama, caught up in the fervor of a campaign speech Tuesday, drastically overstated the Kansas tornadoes death toll, saying 10,000 had died. The death toll was 12."In case you missed it, this week, there was a tragedy in Kansas. Ten thousand people died _...
If literature can accurately be said to capture and embody knowledge, it follows that it embodies "truth" or objective reality. The capacity of poetry to capture reality, in the highest sense, has in our day been most forcefully asserted by Martin Heidegger. His aesthetics, which amounts to a theory of poetry, is of the greatest importance as an effort to argue the fulness of poetry. The argument is a dominant concern of his recent thought, and shows how much its author had profited from the e...
Martin Heidegger's philosophical thought has been a guiding presence on the European continent for half a century, having influenced virtually every area of the human sciences from psychology to art in what must be called a revolutionary way. And, yet, a meaningful understanding of the enormous importance of his thinking, especially of his unmethodical methodological impulse, which informs the more immediately appealing "existential analytic" in Being and Time (Sein und Zeit, 1927) and ...
The influence, direct and indirect, of ["Being and Time" ("Sein und Zeit")], not only in philosophy but literature and psychology, has reached a point where its admirers characterize it as a work that has changed the intellectual map of the modern world. To this some of Heidegger's detractors agree, but add that he has changed the map of the world by overturning a bottle of ink on it. Numerous interpreters have tried to make sense of the blots produced, projecting naturall...
