Stanford scholar upends interpretation of philosopher Martin Heidegger - 0 views
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According to Sheehan, standard academic readings have long claimed that Heidegger believed Being gave weight and value to our world. There’s only one problem, Sheehan says: “Nobody seems to know what Being means.”
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After an exhaustive survey of Heidegger’s works, Sheehan concluded that Heidegger’s philosophy centers not on Being but rather on his early insight that our mortality is the source of all meaning. Sheehan explains, “Humans are characterized by the need to interpret everything they meet, and this need arises from our radical finitude, from what Heidegger called ‘temporality.'”
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According to Sheehan, Heidegger never intended to cultivate the cultic, quasi-mystical philosophy that sprang up around him. Rather, his aim was to uncover the sources of our need to make sense of the world. In that way, Heidegger is much more subversive than we give him credit for,
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