When1: 1927
When2: 1935
Who: Martin Heidegger [Heidegger, Martin]
What: philosopher
Where: Germany
works\ Being and Time [1927]; What Is Metaphysics? [1929]; Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics [1929]; Introduction to Metaphysics [1935]
Detail: He lived 1889 to 1976, was atheist, founded existentialism, and was Sartre's and Hans-Georg Gadamer's teacher. Later, Heidegger became more pessimistic.
Being and thinking are becoming lost {nihilism, Heidegger}, as science, logic, and technology progress. People need thinking and language, as in art and poetry {the turn}.
Epistemology
Philosophy must be careful to use correct terms and to explain why other terms are incorrect.
Being itself causes errors in understanding, because many things are possible but only several actual.
Communication concerns living being transmitting information about problem at moment.
If something is true, people can understand it. False things do not have meaning.
Ethics
Present situations or problems require decision. Situation has social or problem context, people have goals or purposes, and tools and moods affect situation. One can act mechanically or freely. People must learn to act in these situations.
People must come to accept the inevitability of death. This knowledge is motivation to action, and so death is cause from the future that can affect people in the present.
Mind
People's lives are not like things people use {Zuhandenheit} and are not like things entirely separate from people {Vorhandenheit}. People's lives are fundamental forms of being, in which they have social relations to live in communities and personal goals to meet needs. Living people, as being itself {dasein}, are non-physical existences {existenz} or life loci.
People have identity gained from family and culture {authenticity}. People can understand this identity.
Before life begins, people are nothing and after death will again be nothing, so nothingness focuses human ideas and concepts.
Angst causes reflection. Then restless soul questions and so understands existence and thus accepts the pain and hopelessness of short life in limited universe. The soul takes resolute decision to assert its existence and essence and so determines its destiny itself. This is the meaning of being {sein, Heidegger}. Being depends on existence of people who understand its being.
To gain understanding of being and self, which are hidden, deliberately obscure, or too familiar, requires a method {hermeneutics, Heidegger}.
Politics
Beings develop in societies. Social conventions and ideas from the past determine one's being. To find all possibilities of being and to understand development, people must study history.
Social Sciences>Philosophy>History>Mind
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Date Modified: 2022.0224