An Outline and Study Guide to Martin Heidegger's Being and Time
  • An Outline and Study Guide to Martin Heidegger's Being and Time

An Outline and Study Guide to Martin Heidegger's Being and Time

John Tietz
An Outline and Study Guide to Martin Heidegger's Being and Time
218 pages
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John Tietz An Outline and Study Guide to Martin Heidegger's Being and Time 218 pages

This book gives a detailed analysis of every chapter of Being and Time, detailing and explaining the arguments of the text. Intended to be a companion to Being and Time, it is also linked to commonly used commentaries on Being and Time and is intended to augment them by providing a complete presentation of Heidegger's argumentation.

This book gives a detailed analysis of every chapter of Being and Time, detailing and explaining the arguments of the text. Intended to be a companion to Being and Time, it is also linked to commonly used commentaries on Being and Time and is intended to augment them by providing a complete presentation of Heidegger's argumentation.

The author
John Tietz was an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. He received his Ph.D in 1966 from Claremont Graduate School and has been a Visiting Associate Professor at Clark University and a Visiting Fellow at Princeton University. In addition to several articles in scholarly journals, Dr. Tietz has published a book about Wagner and Nietzsche entitled Redemption or Annihilation? Love versus Power in Wagner's Ring (Peter Lang, 1999).



Contents

Preface   7

Untitled First Page   11
First Introduction   13
Second Introduction   23

Being and Time:
  Division I Chapter 1   41
  Division I Chapter 2   51
  Division I Chapter 3   61
  Division I Chapter 4   73
    Summary Outline of I-4   73
  Division I Chapter 5   81
    Summary Outline of I-5   81
  Division I Chapter 6   101
    Division I Chapter 6 Summary Outline   124
    Division II Chapter 4, #69 Summary Outline   126

  Division II Chapter 1   129
  Division II Chapter 2   145
  Division II Chapter 3   163
  Division II Chapter 4   177
  Division II Chapter 5   193
  Division II Chapter 6   207

The author   220



Preface

For the student, Martin Heidegger's Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) stands as one of the most difficult texts in Western philosophy in large part because of its unusual and idiosyncratic language. This classic work of twentieth-century philosophy contains important and original theses, but for the student the primary question has long been: what are they? On the one hand, the task of reading Heidegger seems so forbidding that students often avoid struggling with the text entirely, seeking answers in the many commentaries now available. On the other hand, if one concentrates too much on Heidegger's language, little headway can be made with very many of the arguments. But if secondary sources are used too extensively, how can justice be done to the text?
I began preparing this outline several years ago as a means of helping students out of this dilemma by pointing out the main structural features of Being and Time?where the main arguments are and how the various pieces and digressions fit into the larger scheme. I have co-ordinated my outline with four commentaries: Michael Gelven, A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, revised edition (DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1989), Richard Schmitt, Martin Heidegger on Being Human (New York: Random House, 1969), Charles Guignon, Heidegger and the Problem of Knowledge (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983) and, the most recent, Hubert Dreyfus's Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991). There are many other new commentaries and collections of essays. I tend to stay with the references to older secondary sources because they are more likely to be available in libraries. Heidegger's own The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, finally translated into English in 1982 (by Albert Hofstadter) and published by Indiana University Press, covers the same ground as Being and Time. It was a lecture course Heidegger gave while writing Being and Time. For the most part it is much clearer, although a bit diffusely organized?like a lecture series. The trouble is that it adds several hundred more pages of reading. But selective use of this text would be a good idea.
Like Gelven's, this book consists of a section by section account of Being and Time. Despite many valuable insights, however, Gelven tends to overgeneralize, sometimes leaving specific details behind, often relying too much on existentialist explanations in the Sartrean manner. Dreyfus and Guignon, in contrast, focus more intently on issues shared with the analytic rather than solely existential tradition: foundationalism, theories of truth, realism and idealism. They tend to emphasize the anti-individualism in Heidegger's account of Dasein and das Man, for example, where Gelven concentrates on Dasein's uniqueness in a moral and personal sense. My outline tends to sympathize with the approach of Dreyfus and Guignon, although both themes should be discussed. As a general guide to terminology, based on the dictionary form, Michael Inwood's A Heidegger Dictionary, published by Blackwell in 1999, provides a thorough discussion of the various alternative interpretations.
I hope that my outline format will allow the student to quickly understand the structure of the sections and chapters of Being and Time. I occasionally recommend commentary relevant to particular passages in the primary text but I try to avoid much general commentary of my own, focusing instead on the text itself. Plenty of overview can be found in the four books mentioned above and elsewhere. I also think the outline format allows the student to visualize the structure of given chapters and the interrelation of Heidegger's points. I try to outline the primary text in, I hope, fairly clear language (even at the price of occasional oversimplification). There are of course different views on what that structure might be and what follows should be seen as one possible reading. I would be grateful for responses from teachers and students?and for advice about how I can improve this work. It is after all primarily intended as a teaching tool. If I use your suggestions in future editions, I will happily acknowledge their source.
Page numbers in square brackets refer to the original German edition page numbers in the margins of the translation of Being and Time by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Harper and Row). I have not included an index because the edition already contains a good one and since this study-guide uses that edition, it also corresponds to the index. The newer translation by Joan Stambaugh (State University of N.Y., 1997) has many advantages over the older Marquarrie/Robinson, but the latter is still the more widely used and quoted. Stambaugh also includes the page numbers of the older and original edition so that Marquarrie and Robinson's fine index will work for it as well. Concerning translation, I have followed Dreyfus in translating "vorhanden? as "occurrent? rather than as "present-at-hand? and "zuhanden? as "availability? or as "involvement context? rather than as "ready-to-hand.? Except for quotations, I have also followed Dreyfus in eliminating capital letters from most of the terminology in Being and Time. Occasionally I retain "Being? to indicate a difference from Heidegger's view of being as activity when discussing other philosophers such as Aristotle or Hegel. I have avoided the hyphenated expressions Marquarrie and Robinson use as translations of German words when hyphens seem to add nothing. I do retain "being-in-the-world? and one or two others in order to indicate Heidegger's specialized senses of these terms but I have found the general practice unnecessary and sometimes obfuscatory. At the ends of chapters I-4 and I-5 I have included summary outlines since these are long and complex discussions. I have included as a separate chapter a summary outline of I-6 and II-4, since these two chapters are philosophically related.
Special thanks to Gary Overvold who first got me interested in Heidegger, despite my initial resistance, when we were fellow graduate students many years ago. Comments from my students have also been helpful.


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John Tietz An Outline and Study Guide to Martin Heidegger's Being and Time 218 pages

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