Heidegger For Beginners [Paperback]

USEric LeMay taught writing at Columbia, the University of Chicago, and Harvard. He currently lives in Athens, Ohio, and is on staff in Ohio University. His writing has appeared inThe Paris Review, Gastronomica, Poetry Daily,and he currently serves as the web editor forAlimentum: The Literature of Food. The ideas of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger have been described as an intellectual time bomb, as some of the most revolutionary thought in western history. Despite the enormous amount of secondary scholarship available on Heidegger, it is–due to the complexity of his thought and the density of his writing–difficult for the curious beginner to gain an insight into Heidegger’s philosophy.Heidegger For Beginnersserves as an entry into the ideas of one of the 20th century’s most important thinkers, situating Heidegger’s thought within its philosophical and historical context–alongside such thinkers as Plato, Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche, Husserl and Sartre.Heidegger For Beginnersexplicates many of Heidegger’s central ideas, including theNothing, average everydayness, care, existence, be-in-the-world, theOne, the critique of technology, anxiety, and most importantly,Being–a notion which may offer us the key to understanding the very mystery of our own existence.