[.ca] Heidegger For Beginners (ISBN 1934389137)

a painless introduction to Heidegger, but only an intro:
I wish I had found this book before starting on Heidegger in a class. It is a simple (simplified) overview of the complex and integrated thought of Heidegger. But I believe it will give beginners an overview of what to expect as they dig deeper. Then the digging will be less painful and more profitable. In our class, it became known as the "Heidegger Coloring Book", but others were eager to borrow my copy. A good starting point, no matter how serious you are or are not.

Great, Quick Survey for Difficult Ideas:
Don't kid yourself and pretend you're too good to read these '... For Beginner' books. They're an ideal way to gather together and encapsulate the key ideas of the primary texts to which they refer. They read quickly, have a sense of humor, and are great little summaries of key concepts. It goes without saying that they're no substitute for the real thing. That's a given. But Heidegger is difficult. (Are as most of the philosophers that these books deal with. Anybody who says otherwise is lying -- or has read so much Heidegger that he/she has started to get brain-blur.) The great thing about this Heidegger book (and all the books in the series) is that they present the key ideas in simple terms. And bear in mind that there's nothing wrong with simplicity. Good 'simplicity' is a lot more difficult than one might think. Writing simply and thinking critically is what these books are all about -- and for these reasons, I can't recommend them enough. I'm a few years out of graduate school, so I feel myself 'out of the loop.' These books are a great way to refresh key concepts, get a good solid fix on Heidegger's so-called project, and give you space enough to dive in (or at least poke about) in 'Being and Time'. Plus, they make Heidegger's difficult ideas ('Being' 'Dasein') accessible -- and, quite frankly, that's what learning (and reading) is all about. Yeah, they're no substitute for the real thing -- and anyone who thinks otherwise is sorely mistaken -- but they're great contextualizers -- and for that reason, they're quite valuable. Besides, everybody has hang-ups about the 'difficulty' of modern philosophy. What these books do is to say: Look, the ideas *are* difficult -- don't kid yourself -- but just because they're difficult doesn't mean they should be *inaccessible*. And that's what you want a good teacher to say, right? You want someone to clomp you on the back, tell you not to worry, and assure that if you just keep at it -- keep reading, keep grappling -- you'll do fine. That's what these books do. They're the teacher clomping you on the back, telling you not to worry.

Disappointment:
I picked this up after reading Sartre For Beginners -- an entertaining, smart, and humorous intro to Sartre. This book, however, was a big disappointment. It runs about half the length of Sartre for Beginners with hardly any text, the humor is stale, and Heidegger's work is glossed over so poorly and with such brevity that its more apt to confuse a reader of Heidegger than help them. This book does not explain Heidegger's use of phenomenology and how it differs from Husserl's, how Heidegger relates Being with temporality (!), or even, in any depth, how Heidegger escapes the subject/object problem. Aside from these key points, the author doesn't seem to touch on almost ANY of Heidegger's work -- which might be understandable, considering Heidegger's enormous output, but this book is woefully short in pages and on text. Lastly, there is a page in this book that has Heidegger set on a backdrop of a concentration camp. It condemns Heidegger for being a dedicated Party member who unapologetically followed the ideology of the Nazis. It ends by calling Heidegger a "Gernman Redneck." While Heidegger's participation in the Nazi party was contemptible, to say the least, it does not warrant such treatment. He was never an Anti-Semite, and openly condemned racism as "biological liberalism" as early as 1935. He also came to understand the Nazi movement, in these same lectures, as a mobilization enterprise, the likes of which he condemned as a technological worldview. What he did do as a Nazi, his rectorship at Freidburg, is worthy of full condemnation, but the author doesn't even mention it. In all, a disappointment.

Basics of Heidegger Explained:
This book is excellent for the beginner who does not understand the basics of Heidegger. Everything from Dasein to the concept of rebirth of Being and what went wrong with the Modern Philosophical tradition is listed here in cartoon form. It is a book similar to that of Donald Palmer's Looking at Philosophy: The Unbearable Heaviness of Philosophy made lighter. It skims the surface of Heideggerian thought and introduces the novice to most of the terms used by Heidegger in his philosophy. Sometimes it is profound, but it is basically meant for the beginner as a springboard for Heideggerian thought.

An entertaining and informative introduction for beginners.:
HEIDEGGER FOR BEGINNERS. By Eric LeMay & Jennifer A. Pitts. Illustrated by Paul Gordon. 120 pp. New York : Writers and Readers Publishing, Inc., 1994. ISBN 0-86316-172-3 (Pbk). It's difficult not to be impressed by the audacity of the Heideggerian enterprise. Here is a philosopher who, at the outset of his career, decided that Western thought had been fundamentally in error about everything for the last two thousand years, and who set out single-handedly to rectify matters by showing us, not only how we ought to be thinking, but also what things were really all about. If he was right about the West being all wrong, and there are excellent reasons for supposing that he was, he clearly becomes someone we ought to know something about. But where to begin? The Heidegger opus is MASSIVE, and consists of upwards of a hundred or so volumes, none of them easy. His German is notoriously obscure, even for native speakers of that language, and translation does little to improve it. And the works of his commentators, which in 1989 ran to over four thousand books and articles and today numbers considerably more, can often be even more obscure than Heidegger himself. Happily authors LeMay and Pitts, with the collaboration of Paul Gordon, have come to the rescue of all of those dazed and bewildered beginners out there with their extremely well-done illustrated treatment of Heidegger's basic thought. The illustrations are both effective and amusing. The thought is authentic Heidegger and, so far as it goes, accurate. The treatment, while witty, is respectful. The book concludes with some good advice about Further Reading, a basic Bibliography, and a brief anthology of key extracts : 'Martin Heidegger : In His Own Words' - On the Essence of Truth; On the Subject; On Being; On Authentic Existence; On Technology, etc. The aim, in short, seems to have been, while not overburdening the beginner with too much of Heidegger's radically different style of thinking, to give him or her enough to stimulate a desire to know more. In this I think the authors have been successful. 'Heidegger for Beginners' will be enjoyed by many who are new to Heidegger, and perhaps by at least some who are not so new. Purists, of course, will shriek that beginners would be far better off reading Steiner, or Poggeler, or Safranski, or even Heidegger himself. Of course they would! But purists have a curious tendency to forget that they too were once BEGINNERS (i.e., persons who know nothing but who would like to know something), and that prior to having become self-appointed 'experts,' they might have taken a less snooty attitude to the book under review, a book which - I repeat - is for beginners who may not yet be ready for something more substantial. My advice to beginners would be to forget about the purists (who rarely know as much as they like to pretend), and to curl up for a few good hours of fun and edification with LeMay and Pitts. You'll be amused. You'll certainly learn 'something' about Heidegger. And some of you will be left with a desire to know more. For those who would like to know more, details of one of the finest available conventional Introductions to Heidegger for the general reader are as follows: MARTIN HEIDEGGER. By George Steiner. 173 pp. University of Chicago Press edition, 1987 (1978). ISBN 0-226-77232-2 (pbk.)