Heidegger Being Towards Death: Part 1

As you all know the lockdown has meant that face to face teaching has been suspended for the meanwhile. This also has meant that our teaching has moved online. One of the resources we use are video essays. You might have seen video essays on Youtube or Vimeo. It is a great way to explain ideas visually. Over the next couple of weeks we’ll be adding some of the video essays to this blog, so you can see some examples of online teaching that we do in RPE.

This is from the module HM5510, Philosophy as a Way of Life. On this module, we don’t just learn about philosophy, but think about how we might apply it to our own lives. In Being and Time, Heidegger argues that death isn’t just an event that happens at the end of our lives, but a permanent possibility that surrounds every moment in our lives. He argues that if we were to truly face the possibility of our deaths, then we would have the courage to become who we really are. We investigate his analysis and see whether it makes any sense to our lives.

This is the first video essay, and there will be two more. In this video Dr William Large explains how Heidegger’s analysis of being towards death fits the project of Being and Time as a whole, and why the difference between death as an actuality and death as a possibility is so important to understanding Heidegger’s argument.