Existentialism Books

From the dry, calculating ideas of JP.Sartre to the angular thinking of Husserl this book delivers. As a philosophy student that is rather used to long dull books this book was a nice surprise compared to most - I actualy enjoyed reading it. Although I find Heidegger a bit tedious and Marleau-Ponty was a newer name for me, this book is laid out clearly, easy to follow, and gets right to the meat and potatoes of each philosophers ontology. Many seemingly complex Phenomenological concepts were easy to grasp after reading MacAnn's wisely choosen exerpts; he wasted none of my time with anything but the very essence of each of the four authors. I only wish more philosophical compilations were put together this well. Hey MacAnn - Keep writing!

This is a great collection of the work of Nietzsche. However, you can get this book in any store in the U.S for less than $20. I do not know who is trying to sell it for the outrageous price of $199

Steiner argues that the overman is Nietzsche's central contribution. (compare deluze and Kaufmann both of whom make convincing cases for the Dionsion and eternal reoccurance as the important themes) Unlike other authors, Steiner is clear and fun to read. Nietzsche readers will appreciate what he has done with Nietzsche corpus.

Prof. Kleinberg takes you through the significance of Heidegger's philosophy to the modern Frech existential philosophers (Satre, Blanchot, Levinas, etc..) This is a particularly tricky subject because many of France's modern thinkers were Jewish (or Lefty's) and Heidegger was a Nazi. Kleinberg is able to address how Heidegger's philosophy continued to push itself into the modern thought discourse in France despite the social conflict his politics presented. It's a good historical narrative with plenty of tizight philosophical exogesis. Need to twist your noodle and learn about a really interesting period in western history? Give this one a shot.

As a philosophical figure, Heidegger is one who is sometimes, perhaps even often, largely avoided even by those whose interests reside in continental philosophy. This relative unfamiliarity is a great loss not only because of H's massive erudition and creativity but because the span of his project brings into one evolving vocabulary the span of western metaphysics from the Pre-Socratics to the peculiarities of science and technology in the late 20th century.

Few are able to bring clarity and contribution to Heidegger's project both because of H's complexity and because H depends so heavily on a mastery of languages, ancient and modern. McNeill, one of H's best and most prolific translators, is well suited to this task.

While the book's title may lead one to see it as highly specialized. M traces his thread of the "Augenblick" through the whole of H corpus as an organizing thread. The primary axis of this reading is through the relatedness of H to Aristotle. As such an exploration, the volume helps clarify a huge current that has come to the present with determinations that echo into daily affairs.

While any summary of such a dense text that is already synoptic must be foolish, the following is an attempt.

The volume suggests convincingly that our collective vision of being in the world has undergone an extensive alteration although one begun perhaps with the Platonic concept of the forms. Too briefly, this shift has brought about a gradual separation of the comportment appropriate to praxis and phronesis and the modern methodologies of theorization and experimentalism in which our encounter with being is given in advance, out of a centeredness of the subject most clearly initiated by Descartes, rather than as a unprejudiced appreciation of the particularity and difference immanent in our immediate locality and temporality. In contrast, the Augenblick names a caring, if anxious, attending to the here and now which is less the projection of a habitual expectation upon being than an attentiveness to the fate of the moment.

The effect of this text is grand. It lays open how much more has yet to be articulated of H's project; it understands from one perspective the grand sweep or trajectory of philosophy; it coordinates the relations of the technological and traditional philosophy; and it supplies a framework from which to reconceive the work of more recent figures -- such as Derrida and Deleuze --which makes their obscurities less vexing.

In short, this book should be in every philosophical library.

Former director of the Israel office of the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies Zev Golan presents God, Man and Nietzsche, an evenhanded look as to what a believer of God can learn from the atheistic teachings of Nietzsche, while retaining his faith. Chapters discuss how Nietzsche viewed the Jews - ultimately revealing how he both praised and chided them - how to find meaning in history, even such atrocious and horrific history as the Holocaust, the intersection between quantum physics and Jewish law, and much more. An insightful philosophical examination sure to provoke thoughtful discussion among students of Nietzschean and Judaic philosophy alike.

Harris initially distinguished himself in the Hegel world through his publication, in the 1970s, of two massive volumes that studied Hegel's pre-Phenomenology works, and demonstrated through them the systematic development of Hegel's philosophical position. Since that time, he has been the pre-eminent English-language scholar of Hegel, and especially the Hegel of the Phenomenology of Spirit. In "Hegel's Ladder", Harris brings the same level of deeply detailed study to the reading of Hegel's Phenomenology. It takes two massive volumes for Harris to get through it all, and every page is worthwhile. Harris follows Hegel's text paragraph by paragraph, sorting through the technical language, deciphering the oblique literary allusions, supplying the relevant contexts from the history of philosophy, and most of all keeping a close watch on how the specific developments of the paragraph in question carry forward the larger systematic argument of the book as a whole. No one will agree with every detail of Harris's analysis, but no serious scholar can fail to see that Harris has brought the study of the Phenomenology to a qualitatively new level of insight and especially accuracy. This is without question the single best and most important commentary on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, and is a mandatory text for anyone intending to do serious research on Hegel.

Here is another book of philosophy lectures with no index. The Contents has a lot of section number and titles, but the possibility of some confusion is already obvious in the title for section 3, "The significance of the first part of the system with regard to the designation of both its titles." (p. v, pp. 17-26). This still relates to the early part of the Introduction before "Preliminary Consideration" (p. v, pp. 32-42), which consists of section 5, "The presupposition of the Phenomenology: Its absolute beginning with the absolute." If this seems excessive in the substitution of words for whatever this series of lectures is supposed to be about, there is a little chart of the basic Phenomenology-system at the bottom of page 7 which shows how Part I of Hegel's philosophy, his book, PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT, is merely an introduction to the Encyclopedia-system, which Hegel originally called Part II, before it was written, but which was divided in three parts, Logic, Philosophy of Nature, and Philosophy of Spirit, in the Encyclopedia which included Phenomenology of Spirit as merely "The second section of the first part (subjective spirit)" (p. 7) of the three main divisions included "in the transformed system of philosophy." (p. 7). Heidegger admits that this is a very philosophical move:

"But should one not say then that Hegel already at the beginning of his work presupposes and anticipates what he wants to achieve only at the end? Certainly this must be said. Indeed, whoever wishes to understand anything of his work must say that again and again. The attempt to diminish this `fact'--as we would like to call it--show, furthermore, how little this work has been understood. . . . For it pertains to the essential character of philosophy that wherever philosophy sets to work in terms of its basic question and becomes a work, it already anticipates precisely that which it says later." (p. 30).

These lectures on Hegel's first major work "constitutes the lecture course given by Heidegger at the University of Freiburg during the winter semester of 1930/31. The German edition, edited by Ingtraud Goerland, was published in 1980 by Vittorio Klostermann Verlag." (p. viii). Normally publication dates matter little in philosophy, and the English translation did not appear until 1988, but the publication in German in 1980 might be considered an answer to specific questions raised by hotshot American philosopher and Princeton professor Walter Kaufmann, near the end of his life, who published a three-volume set in 1980 called Discovering the Mind, after some of the ideas were presented in 1974 and the first draft was completed in 1976, in which Hegel was considered too rushed to be considered philosophical: "especially in his first book he came to write at such a pace that he put fleeting thoughts and doubtful notions down on paper and then had to send them to the printer without any opportunity to rethink what he had written." (DM, V. I, pp. 255-256). Volume II made the same points regarding the publication of Heidegger's first original work, only half a system in which "Heidegger secularized Christian preaching about guilt, dread, and death, but claimed to break with two thousand years of Western thought." (DM, VII, p. xvi). Privately, in "an unpublished letter that Heidegger had written to Karl Loewith on August 19, 1921" (DM, VII, p. 170), Heidegger had written "but it must be added that I am no philosopher, and I do not imagine that I am doing anything remotely comparable; that is not my intention. . . . I am a `Christian theologian.' " (DM, VII, p. 171).

It should be obvious that Heidegger was capable of recognizing systems and identifying them quite easily. In HEGEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT, he has titles in his Contents that call out: "the System of Science," "1. The system of the phenomenology and of the encyclopedia," "2. Hegel's conception of a system of science," "b) Absolute and relative knowledge. Philosophy as the system of science," "4. The inner mission of the phenomenology of spirit as the first part of the system." Such an understanding of systems is entirely philosophical, and Heidegger's defense of his BEING AND TIME in the final few pages of these lectures is entirely philosophical in nature. He was not supposed to be writing about himself, but about the philosophical "problematic of `being and time' " (pp. 146-147) which previously flared up "for the first and only time, namely, in Kant--people refuse to see the problem and speak rather of my arbitrarily reading my own views into Kant. There is something peculiar about the lack of understanding in our contemporaries by virtue of which one can become famous all of a sudden, and indeed in a dubious sense." (p. 147). That he could complain about being famous as a philosopher already in 1931, before any notoriety from political scandals could make the picture as messy as a German mentality would be a few years later, tends to show that Heidegger had a better grasp of philosophical matters than any of his competitors, of whom only Karl Jaspers, the famous doctor-philosopher whose books include one on GENERAL PSYCHOPATHOLOGY, springs to mind as truly great.

Heidegger pictures Hegel's first book as a process of creeping up on absolute knowledge. "Hence, the work ends with the short section DD, which is entitled `Absolute Knowledge.' " (pp. 32-33). This leads up to the main assignment:

"In this lecture course I presuppose such a first reading of the entire work. If such a reading has not taken place or does not take place in the next few weeks, there is no sense in sitting here: You cheat not only me but yourselves. However, the first reading is not a guarantee that with the second reading we really understand the work. Perhaps the first reading must be frequently repeated, which is only to say that the first reading is utterly indispensable." (p. 36).

This book is complementary introduction to Hegel¡¯s ¡®Phenomenology of the Mind¡¯. It follows through Hegel¡¯s thought chapter by chapter. Primarily, this book is the commentary and recapturing of the book chapter by chapter. But it is not simple exegesis. It recaptures the nub of each chapter not in simple briefing, but in the way to place Hegel against other philosophers like Descartes, Locke, Kant, Husserl, Ayer, Wittgenstein and so forth. In that way, we can capture Hegel¡¯s line with more ease. But don¡¯t afraid. You don¡¯t have to know other philosophers. They are mobilized to bring out Hegel in contrast to other philosophers. So the author does not present them in detail, but to the point in relation to Hegel¡¯s line, in the way not requiring some knowledge on the philosopher.
For other complementary material, I recommend Werner Marx¡¯s ¡®Hegel¡¯s Phenomenology of the Mind¡¯. though it¡¯s confined to the preface and introduction, the author tactically captures the essence of the book. W. Marx¡¯s book is about some vocabulary in preface and introduction. He explains them in relation to the tradition of German idealism. If you are familiar with Kant, it must be helpful. Some recommend Jean Hyppolite¡¯s ¡®Genesis and Structure of Hegel¡¯s ¡°Phenomenology of the Mind¡±¡¯. But in my view, it¡¯s more difficult to follow than Hegel¡¯s own book.

This is a first-rate and thorough analysis of Heidegger's thought of selfhood, from the early writings focusing on fundamental ontology to the last seminars in the late sixties and early seventies. Raffoul provides an in-depth treatment of Heidegger's critique of the tradition of the subject, particularly through close readings of Descartes and Kant. He then carefully unfolds Heidegger's ontological appropriation of the subject, focusing on Heidegger's thought of Dasein, of transcendence and being-in-the-world, ecstasis and reflection. The work culminates in a meditation on Heidegger's notion of 'mineness' (Jemeinigkeit), a notion that indicates that the event of being is 'each time mine,' that is, each time my own task to be. Raffoul thus argues that Heidegger's thought is not without a reflection on the proper being of human beings, and that his critique of the subject opens onto a renewed understanding of what it means to be human. This is an important work, for it engages Heidegger's texts rigorously while staying away from sterile polemics. It is both a contribution to Heidegger studies and to the task of a philosophical rethinking of selfhood.