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This is a 33-minute preview of a 1 hr, 52-minute episode.
Discussing Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (1927), mostly the intro and ch. 1 and 2 of Part 1.
When philosophers try to figure out what really exists (God? matter? numbers?), Heidegger thinks they've forgotten a question that really should come first: what is it to exist? He thinks that instead of asking "What is Being?" we ask, as in a scientific context, "what is this thing?" This approach then poisons our ability to understand ourselves or the world that we as human beings actually inhabit, as opposed to the abstraction that science makes out of this.
This is Seth's big episode: this was his primary concentration in his later grad school years. Plus: Nazis, trying to figure out things by free associating about their origins in ancient Greek, and whoopee cushion record breaking news!
Read the text online or buy it.
End song: "Find You Out," from the brand new New People album, Impossible Things.
I’ve just discovered the podcast, and I’m extremely excited for the potential for the internet to revolutionize the process of slogging through very difficult texts on one’s own. I’m late to the party, I know, but this is great.
Two claims made in this podcast seem to be in tension:
(1) The being of an entity is dependent on its context in a human world. In the podcast, is that a book can be used as a book doorstop.
(2) Heidegger’s (later?) stance is also asserted to be that we should let beings be what they are.
(1) seems to say that the being of an entity emerges through human activity. (2) seems to say that there’s a way to let an entity be on its own, independent of human activity.
What am I missing?