Martin Heidegger (1889 - 1976)
Related: Existentialism - Germany - philosophy - Hannah Arendt
After WWII, Heidegger was held in a widespread contempt for his Nazi sympathies, and he was forbidden from teaching for a number of years. [Jan 2006]
Phenomenological thought influenced the development of existential phenomenology and existentialism in France, as is clear from the work of Jean-Paul Sartre
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger (September 26, 1889 – May 26, 1976) was a German philosopher. He studied at the University of Freiburg under Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, and became a professor there in 1928. He influenced many other major philosophers, and his own students at various times included Hans-Georg Gadamer, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt and Karl Lowith. Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre also studied his work closely. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Heidegger [Nov 2004]Phenomenology
Phenomenology is a current in philosophy that takes intuitive experience of phenomena (what presents itself to us in conscious experience) as its starting point and tries to extract the essential features of experiences and the essence of what we experience. It stems from the School of Brentano and was mostly based on the work of the 20th century philosopher Edmund Husserl, and was developed further by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger. Phenomenological thought influenced the development of existential phenomenology and existentialism in France, as is clear from the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, and Munich phenomenology (Johannes Daubert, Adolf Reinach) in Germany. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology [May 2005]The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude - Martin Heidegger
In these lectures, which noted German philosopher Heidegger gave in 1929-30 at a turning point in his thought, the aim is to show how Western philosophy went wrong. Heidegger says "Being" was confused with "beings," and philosophers, especially medieval philosophers, made even God into something cozy. But passive acceptance of irrationality is precisely what needs to be understood if we are to grasp the horrors of our time: it is at the heart of the problem that made Heidegger, a sensitive, intelligent man who took up Nazism, an embarrassment to philosophy. And so these lectures are very important. Some of the text is straightforward, but much of it concerns what the translators (not unreasonably) render as "boredom," though it is really about how time intrudes in human affairs. The "boredom" discussion is hard to follow, but it may well be at the back of what Hannah Arendt called the "banality of evil." The translators, Chicago and Oxford academics, write clearly, though the Germanic heaviness of the prose will not endear it to English readers. Primarily for academic collections.? --From Library Journal, amazon.com
Title of paper Beckett's Boredom and the Place of Theory
Abstract What is the role of boredom in Beckett's art? Is it still a question of art? How does, for example, a particularly repetitious and mechanical passage in Watt relate to Benjamin's reflections on the aura of art? And how does it relate to Adorno's reflections on the spiritualisation effected by anti-art? Is the frustration of sensual pleasure in a boring passage eased by a meta-interpretation of the passage and is its boredom thereby ignored and its challenge to the pleasurability of art suppressed? Boredom is difficult to face. Heidegger's lengthy analysis of boredom in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics ends up making boredom interesting. For Heidegger, the interest of boredom is regrettable as it prevents boredom's revelation of the truth of time (boredom, Langeweile, is time in its extension, as a "long while", and thus in its difference from the atomistic "nows" of the derivative concept of time). But Heidegger is too critical of voluntarism, for one thing, to advocate giving oneself up to boredom. If there are problems with the theoretical recuperationi of boredom, it still has to be asked - but asked in what sense? - what the boredom in Beckett's text "does". --James Phillips, http://sites.uws.edu.au/uws/conferences/beckett/speakers/phillips.html
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