WesMaps - Wesleyan University Catalog 2013-2014       Summer Session       Winter Session       Home       Archive       Search
CS92PROD
Heidegger and the Temporal Sense of Being

CHUM 327
Fall 2013 not offered
Crosslisting: PHIL 389
Certificates: Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory

Martin Heidegger claims in BEING AND TIME that the most fundamental philosophical question is the question of the sense of being, but that this question has been obscured and trivialized in the Western philosophical tradition. His book aimed to recover an understanding of this question and to show how temporality and time are central to an adequate grasp of the sense of being. This advanced seminar is not a course on Heidegger but is instead an attempt to clarify and address this question concerning the temporal sense of being. We are reading BEING AND TIME and various secondary literature as guides to what it would mean to "reawaken" that question. Since this question is also thought to replace or reformulate many familiar problems in philosophy--about meaning and intentionality, knowledge, agency/normativity, and metaphysics (as about entities rather than the being of those entities)--and to relocate others (truth, objectivity, historicity, and what it is to be human), we shall consider the significance of and rationale for these replacements and relocations. We shall give special attention to the role accorded to time and temporality in understanding being, and especially to the claim that any understanding of being is and must be finite.
Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: HA CHUM
Course Format: SeminarGrading Mode: Graded
Level: UGRD Prerequisites: None
Fulfills a Major Requirement for: (PHIL)(PHIL-Philosophy)(PHIL-Social Jus)

Last Updated on APR-19-2024
Contact wesmaps@wesleyan.edu to submit comments or suggestions. Please include a url, course title, faculty name or other page reference in your email ? Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, 06459