Reddit reviews Being and Time (Harper Perennial Modern Thought)
We found 13 Reddit comments about Being and Time (Harper Perennial Modern Thought). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Harper Perennial
I would say yes, but with a few caveats. I myself am a bit of an autodidact, and I study philosophy as a hobby in my free time. I am currently a university student who works part time, so I sympathize with your concerns about limited time and energy. Some things I think you should be aware of:
• Studying on your own will be slower and generally less efficient than getting a degree. You won’t have the same obligations or motivators that university students have.
• You will lack access to resources that university students have. This includes both academic material (journals, essays, books) but also an environment with instructors and fellow students to consult when you’re confused.
• You will not have the benefit of writing essays and having them graded by an instructor.
Despite this, I still think there is a lot to be gained from self study. You have the freedom to pursue whatever you want, and you can go at a pace that’s comfortable to you. Plus there’s something to be said about challenging yourself and doing constructive things in your free time.
It may be best to start with introductory texts like Copleston’s history to get a general idea for each philosopher and to find what interests you. If you are still interested in the thinkers you mentioned, you should move on to primary sources. I’d recommend the following reading plan which should cover some of the “essentials” and has a sort of progression from one thinker to the next:
These four books will give you a solid foundation in western philosophy. You have the fundamental ideas and questions from the Pre-Socratics, Plato, and Aristotle, rationalism from Descartes, empiricism from Hume, and the synthesis of the two in Kant. Moving on:
These three cover your interests in phenomenology, from its foundations in Husserl, to Heidegger’s magnum opus, to Sartre’s interpretation and his development of existentialism. Finally we have:
These two cover Horkheimer & Adorno’s critical take on enlightenment rationality and Derrida’s deconstruction of Husserlian phenomenology.
None of these books are particularly easy (especially Husserl and Heidegger), but I encourage you to try! Take it one book at a time, read slow and take notes, and consult the IEP and SEP if you’re confused, watch YouTube lectures, or ask on this subreddit.
Good luck!
Much like you, I've also recently developed a strong interest in Levinas. I've yet to read him, though, so please take that into account when considering my recommendations.
I recently asked some of my professors and a friend of mine who wrote his master's thesis on Levinas to help me out with getting started. This is what they recommended:
I'm not too knowledgeable of Husserl, so all I can really recommend from him is the Cartesian Meditations, which sort of serves as an introduction to Husserl's own method of phenomenology.
For Heidegger, the most important work in this regard is certainly Being and Time. If you have the time, I recommend picking up the Basic Writings and reading through most of it.
On a final note, Levinas was steeped within the Jewish intellectual tradition. Jewish philosophers often emphasize the role of community and social contextuality in general. It might serve you well to read works such as Martin Buber's I and Thou and Gabriel Marcel's Being and Having.
EDIT: Another good compliment to Levinas is Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception.
FYI, I was specifically told not to use the Stambaugh English translation of Being and Time, the one you linked to.
Anyways, in my edition the chapter is "How the worldly character of the environment announces itself in entities within-the-world."
The sentence you pick out is in bold, here's the surrounding paragraph for context, as I think it will help you see what Heidegger is saying: "To the everydayness of Being-in-the-world there belong certain modes of concern. These permit the entities with which we concern ourselves to be encountered in such a way that the worldly character of what is within-the-world comes to the the fore. When we concern ourselves with something, the entities which are most closely ready-to-hand may be met as something unusuable, not properly adapted for the use we have decided upon."
This comes from the the Macquarrie and Robinson edition which was recently reprinted.
Here you go.
This too.
And this one is probably most important.
I wish I had more info for you. Hopefully someone else reading this can chime in. I can only recommend the [translation I read.] (https://www.amazon.com/Being-Harper-Perennial-Modern-Thought/dp/0061575593/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8), Macquarrie & Robinson. This is a more recent translation and I don't speak German. The classic version was the [Stambaugh] (https://www.amazon.com/Being-Time-Translation-Contemporary-Continental/dp/1438432763).
Those are the two main ones as far as I know. Once again, I'm sure there are people far better qualified to speak to this than me reading.
>I didn't know continental vs analytical terms are outdated.
Dated perhaps isn't the right term, but just know that they do have certain limits.
As for post-WWII philosophy, there's a lot, but I'm going to let you know that much of it can't be well-understood without a basic understanding of Heidegger, much of whose thought was pre-WWII. His best known work is Being and Time, but it's one of the most challenging texts in the western canon. For an easier introduction to prep you for it, I'd recommend some of his early lecture material, such as The Hermeneutics of Facticity and The History of the Concept of Time. This could just be me, but I've found his lectures to be generally easier than his primary texts. If you want to trace the development of his thought, much of which was post-WWII, the Basic Writings anthology has a number of essays by him. While nothing really eclipsed Being and Time, much of his later thought is still studied. I'd say the most significant work of his later career was his Contributions to Philosophy, which took the form of briefer aphorisms and anecdotes, more similar to Nietzsche in style, but still grounded in much of his own thought and terminology.
If you want to move away from Heidegger, some of the big texts would be Gadamer's Truth and Method (Gadamer was a student of Heidegger's, so the former's thought is very deeply influenced by the latter), Sartre's two texts Being and Nothingness and Existentialism is a Humanism (note the similarity to Sartre's title with Heidegger's Being and Time, and also note that Heidegger would respond rather critically to Sartre's Existentialism with an essay in the Basic Writings), and Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (a key feminist work heavily influenced by Sartre and Heidegger).
Beyond this my knowledge is a bit scattered, as I've only just completed undergrad. I really would recommend David West's text as a decent overview that will guide you in what the key texts are, as well as good secondary sources. I've not brought up Derrida, who was also huge, as well as Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek, Michel Foucault and Charles Taylor just to name a few. On top of those, there's a ton of pre-WWII stuff that's hugely important for understanding these thinkers, such as the ideas of Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, and the whole field of psychoanalysis (Freud, Jung and Lacan). Then there's postmodernism, postcolonialism, the various strands of feminism, and tons more. The more I type, the more I'm just reminding myself how little I know about this area (even though it's the area I'm most interested in).
Let me know if there's anything more you need to know or if you want to know a decent secondary source.
http://www.amazon.com/Being-Time-Martin-Heidegger/dp/0061575593?pf_rd_mnb=ATVPDKIKX0D34&pf_rd_stb=center-2&pf_rd_rat=0817NMRY4ZRQZM6P18TH&pf_rd_t3r=101&pf_rd_ptd=470938631&pf_rd_ied=507846&tag=buaazs-20&pf_rd_ptd=470938631&pf_rd_ied=507846
There's probably a few ways you could go about expanding your knowledge base. The two that seem most fruitful are
If (1), then I'd probably suggest one of two courses. Either, (a) read the stuff that influenced the existential thinkers that you've listed, or (b) read some literature dealing with issues related to the thinkers you've listed.
For (a) I'd suggest the following:
For (b) it's really a mixed bag. I'd suggest going through the SEP articles on the thinkers you've listed and looking into some good secondary literature on them. If you're super interested in Nietzsche, I'd definitely suggest reading Leiter's Nietzsche on Morality. I really couldn't tell you more unless you told me something more specific about your interests.
If (2), then I suppose I'd suggest one of the following:
Again, it's hard to give you better directions without more information on what you're actually interested in. I've just thrown a bunch of stuff at you, and you couldn't possibly be expected to read, say, Schopenhauer's World as Will and Representation over break and be expected to really understand it.
Heidegger wrote an eighty-eight page first draft to Being and Time. Unless you have a crazy amount of time on your hands, I'd recommend going after the first draft. Whichever version of the book you read, it will most likely be one of the most difficult philosophy books you will come across. I don't mean that demeaningly. Heidegger's writing is almost indecipherable. There are a few threads made here in /r/askphilosophy that have better recommendations as to where to begin with Heidegger. Hopefully someone will respond to this post with more and better info!
Referring to Heidegger's view, there are a couple basic ideas. One is that we are faced by uncertainty throughout our lives, and one source of uncertainty is the unknown-ness of the future, which we're always moving towards. Our response is often to keep ourselves busy with everyday superficial existence, or take root in nostalgia for an idealized past, but Heidegger sees these responses as being inauthentic responses to the problem. Another partly related source of anxiety is in the future, and that's death; we can't be certain of anything in the future except for the fact that we will die.
Heidegger's 'solution' to this problem is to encourage us to face our death head-on, although it's less gloomy than it seems at first. What facing our sources of anxiety does is break us out of our more superficial ways of existence and gets us to really own who we are and what we'll do with our lives.
There's a lot more to this, and due to it being Heidegger, it's admittedly not easy, but most of this comes up in division II of Being and Time, although due to the difficulty of the text, the SEP or some more accessible secondary text might be a better place to start, unless you want a challenge, in which case go for it and good luck!
Being and Time by Martin Heidegger
If phenomenology of time peaks your interest, Edmund Husserl speaks about "Internal Time Consciousness." The sort of "how?" of experiencing time.
Easy peasy.
Enjoy.
Here ya go.