Re: Heidegger Background Reading

1

Heidegger is in a race with the term-end expiry of my library card. The outcome should be exciting.

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2

I bought the German version a while ago and have been taking a first pass through it. The English edition you recommended plus a background text in english are due anytime after the 20th June. If I'm lucky end of next week.

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3

I've been a little wary of recommending background reading on Heidegger because so much of it is just wrong

Everyone likes an opinionated professor.

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4

There's another kind?

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5

Any sense of how you'll want to pace this?

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6

Can someone explain to me how a philosopher uses the term "radical"? For instance, "Thus one's being is radically finite." The word seems to serve no function except perhaps as an intensifier, though how one finite thing is more finite than another finite thing is not clear to me.

On the othr hand, one could append ", dude" to the above quote, and it would no longer sound so odd to me.

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7

Still waiting for my copy. You mailed it already, right?

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8

The pacing is a tough question. We need to balance two things: first, that the people participating, for the most part, have busy lives; second, that we can't drag this on for a year. I expect that we'll go very slowly at first, then pick up the pace considerably. This can all change based on how we do and feedback, of course.

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9

Re "radical:" A lot of the work philosophers are doing is giving particular meanings to words, so any answer to how a word is used has to be confined to a particular case. That said, your best bet is to start with the etymology. "Radical" comes from the Latin word for "root." To be "radically finite" then (without getting into details, since I only think I know the passage you're referring to) means to be finite at the root, rather than accidentally, or contingently, or in some ways but not others: fundamentally finite (we'll see later in B&T why "fundamentally" isn't as good as "radically.")

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10

I got the book last night.

I just tried using google to look up the ontic/ontological distinction (Apparently it has to do with other Hiedegerian terms rearranged in a slightly different order than in "Being and Time"), and I realized that the combination of the highly networked nature of blogs and the idiosyncratic Hiedegerian vocabulary may lead to the ontic/ontological distinction meaning whatever the hell ogged says it is.

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11

You know, that's probably true. Awesome!

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