Authentic Grasp of Being Essay

Philosophical Question Why would an authentic life matter when, according to Heidegger, human beings, as Da-sein, are inevitably beings-towards-death?

Identity. What is identity? One will say that it is the distinct personality of an individual. Others will say that identity is the behavior of a person in response to their surrounding environment. At certain points of time, some people search for their identity in order to understand their existence in life. In regards, identity is shaped into an individual through the social trials of life that involve family and peers, the religious beliefs by the practice of certain faiths, and cultural awareness through family history and traditions. These are what shape the identity of an individual.

Martin Heidegger stated, criticizing the “wrong” path that western philosophy deviated to, that people understood “being” only in the superficial sense. The advancements in mathematics and natural sciences along the millennia always pre-assumed that being was a known phenomenon and never bothered to explore its true nature; bypassing the herculean task, we never delved into what “Ontos” really

This essay examines three brief works that introduce core concepts of philosophy. Comparisons are drawn between Plato’s The Allegory of the Cave, The Apology of Socrates and Voltaire’s The Story of the good Brahmin. Warnings about adopting a philosophically focused approach to life are extracted, as are the incentives. A central pursuit of truth above all is established to be my own prime goal, which ties closely to these two philosophers own.

Being and Time, by Martin Heidegger, represents an attempt at fundamental ontology. Moreover, Being and Time is an inquiry into the fundamental question of being via employing a method known as phenomenology, which involves reflecting upon and interpreting every day experiences to reveal its latent meaning and structure. For Heidegger, inquiring into the nature of being this way is vitally important because the question of being implicitly subtends all other lines of intellectual inquiry, such as those of the social and physical sciences. This is because those types of sciences are always concerned with beings of one kind or another, and so humans can conduct those kinds of inquiry only on the implicit basis of their understanding of what it is to be. However, in Heidegger’s view, the question of being has not been posed in any thorough and rigorous way, which for him means a phenomenological way, since the time of the Pre-Socratic philosophers. Consequently, from Heidegger’s perspective, since its inception in antiquity, the entire edifice of Western intellectuality, along with the technological world that has grown out of it, has been without any real foundation in the reality of human being’s existential condition. As a result, human being’s intellectual way of understanding things is proceeding without any deep comprehension of the true nature of being. As a result, underneath it all, the world is not guided by any thoughtful understanding of the nature of the human

Heidegger believed that being is unchanging, but change is becoming. In other words, being is something that cannot change, but at the same time, change is something that is heading towards a fulfillment, or a state of becoming in which no longers and not yets are changing due to their achievement. Likewise, Dasein is also becoming, but it is not actualizing. Dasein is trying to head towards its self-fulfillment in which Daseins spend their entire lives trying to do, but are never fully able to reach the goal of self- actualization. As a result, beings are something that are constantly being, while at the same time, constantly becoming, heading towards their self-actualization. Heidegger additionally pointed out that what is no longer has to become, because it is coming into appearance. To put it in a different perspective, what is becoming is something that is something that cannot exist anymore, because it is heading towards its true self, and its ultimate demise. It is overall the appearance and the manifestation of something, it is something that is

A prevalent idea that is not only discussed frequently in the field of philosophy but is also bound to make an appearance in everyone’s wandering thoughts is the concept of personal Identity. Who am I? What is it to be a person? How can one perceive a one’s existence in time? All these and more are common questions that can blindside someone’s casual daydream and force them down the rabbit hole of philosophy. Intellectuals from all around the world have pondered this conception of self, yet one man especially has delivered the soundest notion. Philosophically David Hume has proven to have the most credible theories on self-identity. It’s obviously important to recognize any of my personal theories brought up in this paper

In this paper I examine two essays, Gadamer and the Fusion of Horizons by David Vessey and The Concept of the Subject in the Philosophical Hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer by Flemming Lebech. Each essay explains a piece of Gadamer’s work and includes critiques of that work. I use these two texts in order to show the importance of the individual and to make clear that we are autonomous beings to Gadamer.

John Caputo of Villanova University relates that in Being and Time, Heidegger wishes "to find a new conceptuality in which to ‘indicate,’ however ‘formally,’ the character of the pretheoretical, prephilosophical, indeed even a preconceptual life. This provocative and paradoxical task, to find a concept for the preconceptual, was undertaken in close dialog … with Aristotle’s ethics."55 Simon Critchley tells us that the aim of Being and Time is to retrieve the question of Being as it was originally explicated by Aristotle and Plato.66 However, to understand fully Heidegger’s relation to Aristotle, we must first understand Heidegger’s project from

Paul Tillich was a versatile and trailblazer author, theologian and philosopher throughout his whole life. Hence, there was a direct correlation between his concrete choices/decisions and his actual life. To wit, one should consider his actions to understand what his thoughts were. Tillich did not lose touch with the world and life. So, his thoughts and actions cannot be considered according to solitude of the philosophical or theological investigations. Furthermore, this is the case why his writings left us some important and wealthy conceptions to philosophical considerations. Although it is difficult to formulate the views of an anti-systematic philosopher such as Tillich, in his animated writings, one can find hints of his thoughts that would help one to get a better understanding about the difference of his stance regarding human existence that would allow a comparison of his views with his contemporaries.

Aristotle and Heidegger have conflicting views on what a human or beings are. Although, there are some similarities to each of their set of ideas. Aristotle has a clear hierarchical framework classifying the differences between humans, animals, and plants. Heidegger opposes this strict definitions by discussing this idea of “Dasein” which states of being there. Although, their approaches to this topic are different with the types of question one asks and how they theorize about what is a being. There is key similarities that they discuss almost two thousand years apart. Aristotle and Heidegger are two philosophers that have tackled the enormous question, what is it to be a being? This paper discusses the two different approaches to defining this long standing question.

ABSTRACT: The problem of traditional epistemology is the relation of subject to external world. The distinction between subject and object makes possible the distinction between the knower and what is known. Starting with Descartes, the subject is a thinking thing that is not extended, and the object is an extended thing which does not think. Heidegger rejects this distinction between subject and object by arguing that there is no subject distinct from the external world of things because Dasein is essentially Being-in-the-world. Heidegger challenges the Cartesian legacy in epistemology in two ways. First, there is the modern tendency toward subjectivism and individualism that started with

According to Heidegger, man can only reflect his real self to his self. Man cannot be what he is not. He can be what he is already: his existence. He further says that humans were temporal beings. It finds itself finite because he was bound in time and the space he was experiencing. And when man finds itself finite, his existence would be doomed. But by his free will, he can overcome these threats to his existence. For Heidegger, on the one hand man is creator of his own experience and on the other hand, he is subject of his experience. If man accepts the responsibility for developing his own being then he has true human aspects in his personality. In the concept of existence, existentialists differentiate the verb “to exist” from the verb “to live”. For them, existence means a full, self conscious, responsible and growing life. Existentialists divided the concept of existence between authentic existence, and inauthentic existence. A man can live in an unauthentic existence by being a member of a group that is absorbed only in things and details of everyday life. But a man can live in an authentic existence by living through his choices. As quoted from Marcel, ‘to exist’ means not just to be ‘present to my own aware-ness’

‘What is Being?’ is the essence of Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (Sein und Zeit) book (1927). Although Being is one of the universal concepts, it is hard to define because it exists above and beyond all categories that we have in our understanding. For example, we can’t apply the term “entity” to Being because Being is neither a thing nor a genus, and cannot be defined according to logic. This is surprising because Being

To understand Martin Heidigger's response to Modernity one would have to examine the relationship between their notions of Man. Martin Heidigger's concept of Man, a being-in-the world, is very different from the Modern view of man as a thinking being. One believes that understanding comes from a purely subject-object perspective wherein the understanding of the world around us is performed by our internal, completely separate, “I” because it is perfect and known innately while the other believes that to be a being is to actively “Be”, which is the same as Heidigger's notion of Being, and to Be is to exist or to be engaged in the world therefore connecting being, Being and the world forming the concept of Dasein or a being-in-the-world.