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Iain D. Thomson is renowned for radically rethinking Heidegger's views on metaphysics, technology, education, art, and history, and in this book, he presents a compelling rereading of Heidegger's important and influential understanding of existential death. Thomson lucidly explains how Heidegger's phenomenology of existential death led directly to the insights which forced him to abandon Being and Time's guiding pursuit of a fundamental ontology, and thus how his early, pro-metaphysical work gave way to his later efforts to do justice to being in its real phenomenological richness and complexity. He also examines and clarifies the often abstruse responses to Heidegger's rethinking of death in Levinas, Derrida, Agamben, Beauvoir, and others, explaining the enduring significance of this work for ongoing efforts to think clearly about death, mortality, education, and politics. The result is a powerful and illuminating study of Heidegger's understanding of existential death and its enduring importance for philosophy and life.
List of contents
Preface; Acknowledgments; Abbreviations used for works by Heidegger; A note on the notes (de capo); Part I. Rethinking Death in Heidegger: 1. Death and demise in being and time; 2. The death of metaphysics and the birth of thinking, or: why did being and time fail to answer the question of being? 3. Heidegger on death and the nothing it discloses; 4. Death and Rebirth in Being and Time's perfectionist philosophy of education; Part II. Rethinking Death after Heidegger: 5. White's Time and Death: on the advantages and disadvantages of reading Heidegger backward; 6. Rethinking Levinas on Heidegger on death; 7. Critical afterlives of Heidegger's phenomenology of existential death in Sartre, Beauvoir, Levinas, Agamben, and Derrida; 8. Heidegger's mortal phenomenology and the postmetaphysical politics of ontological pluralism; 9. Why it is better for a dasein not to live forever, or: being pro-choice on the immortality question; Concluding recapitulations: lessons from rethinking Heidegger's phenomenology of existential death and the irreducible nothings it discloses.
About the author
Iain D. Thomson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education (Cambridge, 2005) and Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity (Cambridge, 2011), and the co-editor (with Kelly Becker) of The Cambridge History of Philosophy: 1945–2015 (Cambridge, 2019).
