Drawing from religion and the human sciences, particularly psychology after Freud, the author attempts to demonstrate that the fear of death is man's central ...

»Selten hat in den neueren Jahrhunderten ein philosophischer Erstling so durchgeschlagen und einen so unverrückbaren Platz unter den >großenHans Georg Gadamer in DIE ZEIT Nr. 47 vom 19.11.1982.

Reproduit quatre conférences faites en 1946 et 1947 sous ce titre au Collège de philosophie, et interroge la notion de temps comme limitation même de l'être fini ou comme relation de l'être fini à Dieu (Electre).

WHEN MAN FIRST BEGAN to interpret the nature of things—and this he did when he began to be man—life was to him everywhere, and being the same as being alive. Animism was the widespread expression of this stage, "hylozoism" one of its later conceptual forms. Soul flooded the whole of existence and encountered itself in all things. Bare matter, that is, truly inanimate, "dead" matter, was yet to be discovered—as indeed its concept, so familiar to us, is anything but obvious. (...) That the world is alive is really the most natural view, and largely supported by prima facie evi dence. On the terrestrial scene, in which experience is reared and contained, life abounds and occupies the whole foreground exposed to man's immediate view. The proportion of manifestly lifeless matter encountered in this primordial field is small, since most of what we now know to be inanimate is so intimately intertwined with the dynamics of life that it seems to share its nature. Earth, wind, and water—begetting, teeming, nurturing, destroying—are anything but models of "mere matter." Thus primitive panpsychism, in addition to answering powerful needs of the soul, was justified by rules of inference and verification within the available range of experience, continually confirmed as it was by the actual preponderance of life in the horizon of its earthly home. Indeed not before the Copernican revolution widened this horizon into the vastness of cosmic space was the proportional place of life in the scheme of things sufficiently dwarfed so that it became possible to disregard it for most of what henceforth was to be the content of the term "nature." But to early man, standing on his earth arched by the dome of its sky, it could never occur that life might be a side-issue in the universe, and not its pervading rule. His panvitalism was a perspective truth which only a change of perspective could eventually displace. Unquestioned and convincing at the beginning stands the experience of the omnipresence of life. (shrink)

Der Band 64 der Gesamtausgabe enthält die bislang unveröffentlicht gebliebene hoch bedeutsame Abhandlung 'Der Begriff der Zeit' aus dem Jahre 1924 sowie den im selben Jahr vor der Marburger Theologenschaft gehaltenen Vortrag gleichen Titels. Zum Text der Abhandlung gehören 194 Randbemerkungen aus der Zeit der Ausarbeitung von 'Sein und Zeit' (1924 bis 1926), die als Fußnoten wiedergegeben werden. Da in dieser Abhandlung auch die Thematik des dritten Abschnitts 'Zeit und Sein' aus dem ersten Teil und die Fragestellung des zweiten Teiles (...) von 'Sein und Zeit', die phänomenologische Destruktion der Geschichte der Ontologie, ausgesprochen werden, kann dieser Text mit Fug und Recht als die Urfassung von Heideggers Hauptwerk 'Sein und Zeit' (1927) bezeichnet werden. (shrink)

"This monograph is written with admirable lucidity and delightful wit. In using humor as a weapon in philosophical argument it is beautifully in the Russellian tradition. The arguments appear to be devastating. Defenders of Heidegger will have a hard time trying to answer it." --J.C.C. Smart, Professor of Philosophy, The Australian National University.

First published in 1948 under title: Dreadful freedom, a critique of existentialism. Includes bibliographical references.