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The chapter explores the idea of presence and its role in religious experience with particular reference to poetry, art, and mysticism. After an initial discussion of the notion of presence referring to William James, Wordsworth, and Schleiermacher (noting its ‘Romantic’ provenance), the chapter proceeds to look at how this theme is manifested in modern culture, taking Gerard Manley Hopkins, Paul Cezanne, and D. T. Suzuki as examples. The philosophical implications of these are examined in relation to Heidegger's early lectures on categorial intuition, Kierkegaard's account of the self-relational self, and Heidegger's notion of Dasein. Sartre is seen to conclude that the existential idea of the self leads to the complete annihilation of Being, but it is concluded that the ‘distance’ between self and Being cannot be immediately conflated with simple absence.

Augustine sees time is inherently corrosive of true Being, and the aim of Christian life is identification with the self-sameness of divine Being. Hegel and Kierkegaard reverse this valuation and inaugurate a new modern idea of Christian selfhood in which being in time is integral to living religiously. But does this mean abandoning a relation to the eternal? The problem is sharpened by Heidegger's focus on death as the ultimate term and challenge of temporal existence. However, Heidegger's ‘nihilism’ is challenged by others and is qualified in his own later thought, where the poet is seen as offering a revelation of the divine that grounds historical fulfilment. This possibility is explored through T. S. Eliot and Edwin Muir. In a final section the question of the relationship between time and space is introduced, a topic often ignored in modern theology with its characteristic ‘historical’ orientation.

Among Western thinkers deeply embroiled in the transition between paradigms, two stand out from the rest: Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, the former serving in a way as precursor or pacemaker of the second. This chapter illustrates Nietzsche and Heidegger’s anticipatory outlook by focusing on a limited number of their writings, detailing how the endeavors launched by Nietzsche were pursued and intensified by Heidegger in the changed twentieth-century context—a context marked by the rise of phenomenology, existentialism, and hermeneutics. Moreover, the chapter discusses how the closest parallel between Nietzsche and Heidegger resides in their critique of the antinomies of the modern philosophical paradigm and their commitment to an “overcoming” of traditional metaphysics through an “other thinking” and new beginning.

Heidegger’s anti-Semitism is “historial” because it attributes to the Jewish people a task that is both world-historical and philosophically significant, having to do with the uprooting of beings. Why, according to Heidegger’s logic, must this be attributed to the Jews, since the process described involves multiple agents? Because the Jews are the racialized people that brings about a “deracialization” of humanity, a levelling and equivalence in indifference. This process can be compared by analogy with Marx’s analysis of money as the general equivalent, and of the proletariat as the agent and figure of revolution. For Heidegger, the new beginning of humanity requires a figure, a type, embodied in a people capable of hastening the end. For every singular beginning requires a people, as does every end.

This chapter explores how Heidegger's reflections on ‘constitution’ bear on some more familiar philosophical issues, including a long-standing tradition of concern with ‘the categories’. The chapter discusses, in particular, the question of how ‘the categories of thought’ and the ‘categories’ under which objects fall correspond to, or fit, one another. This discussion, informed by Heidegger's engagement with some reflections of Kant's, provides a framework upon which the book's later account of Heidegger's rejection of both idealism and realism draws. But the basis of that rejection also raises the suspicion that talk of ‘constitutive correlations’ and ‘subjective-’ and ‘objective-correlates’ may itself be misleading — a realization that may have played a role in the emergence of Heidegger's concepts of Dasein and ‘Being-in-the-world’. The chapter ends by considering how Heidegger's ‘constitutional’ reflections raise the question of the ‘subject-correlate’ of scientific knowledge and — in a further radical twist — of philosophy itself.

This chapter makes explicit how Chapter 6's reflections shed light on Heidegger's notion of ‘Being-in-the-world’ and his remarks on truth. Among the worries that the chapter addresses are ones raised by Heidegger's critique of scepticism, by his claim that the notion of truth as correspondence is ‘founded’ in a different, and more primordial, form of truth, and by his remarks about the relationship between the real and the ideal. In the course of its discussion, the chapter considers the kinds of capacity that a creature might need to acquire in order to count as a form of Dasein and re-examines some themes from Chapter 4's discussion of McDowell. But the chapter also raises doubts about whether sense can be made of Heidegger's proposal that ‘“There is” truth only in so far as Dasein is’.

This chapter further explores the interconnectedness and relationships between Dasein, polemos, Being, and time by first laying out Heidegger's interpretation of time in his early period. The sense of Being is dependent not only on one's orientation and experience of the universe in terms of the senses, but is also dependent upon an orientation within time. There are two aspects of Dasein's orientation in time. The first is that for the individual Dasein, its Being is situated within a system of past-present-future, a horizon of time that encloses that Dasein. For individual Dasein that function as a member of a historical people, that horizon is now defined by a history of communal practices, not by the linearity of the past-present-future. The chapter goes on to explore Heidegger's thoughts on Dasein's Being as historical.

The social construction of crime reflects a phenomenological process that is fundamentally inseparable from the social world. The emerging construction(s) of social knowledge are lived from context specific encounters between individual “subject” and social world, which reveals the character of lived-experience and social world. Any understanding, therefore, of the meaning of the production of crime or criminal behavior is contingent upon the reality of this unified phenomenon. The configuration of social knowledge, as it relates to the production of crime, can never be viewed as an isolated event of human experience; rather, it reflects the various ways in which human experience finds itself as a being-in-the-world.

Heidegger’s description of anxiety over death and what we read in the gospels have in common that human beings are those who must “remain always awake.” That may be a question of authentic Dasein (Heidegger), or the dilemma of the wise and foolish bridesmaids (Matthew 25:1–13). But while the philosopher attempts to overcome death through an authentic Dasein, the believer remains on the alert, waiting for another who will come along with believers, undertaking pure suffering but also a “passage.”

This chapter studies Heidegger's thoughts on politics, particularly his political philosophy. Although his defenders would conclude that nothing resembling “political philosophy” could be found in his work, it does not necessarily mean that Heidegger had nothing whatsoever to say about politics. To gleam Heidegger's political philosophy, one must recognize that political philosophy, when taken conventionally as the study of human nature, the factical conditions of society, and the best means for organizing institutions, sees to exhibit a connection with Heidegger's study of a realm of beings. In a sense, then, it is in Heidegger's discussion of the conditions for human community (Dasein's Being-together with other) where we will be able to find Heidegger's contributions to political thought.

This chapter suggests that the traditional conception of life informs Heidegger's understanding of being in Being and Time's existential analytics. Being and time excludes life from ontology because Heidegger sought to free Dasein from the phenomenology of living corporality. But the spatiality and affectivity of Dasein does not escape the same traditional structure that determines spatiality and affectivity in living corporality, a structure that can be identified with Aristotle's conception of “sensitive life.”

This chapter discusses Martin Heidegger's concept of death in his Being and Time. It argues that death plays a transcendental role in Being and Time and that the conditions for the possibility of human experience are predicated on a lack. The chapter contends that conditions for the possibility of experience lie in Dasein's transcendental melancholia, and that the melancholia is not a psychological reaction to empirical loss, but the metaphysical ground of any possible experience.

This chapter analyses the projections of death in Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, and examines the nature of Dasein in order to argue that death is one of the conditions for the possibility of experience. It explains that the connection between Dasein's end and its ability to be task-oriented bears directly on the relation between death and melancholia, and contends that Dasein's unique form of existence is a result of its constitution as possibility.

This chapter examines Dasein's unique mode of temporality. It discusses Martin Heidegger's understanding of temporality in a way that is very different from both common conceptions of temporality and theoretical conceptions of temporality. The chapter provides a detailed analysis of Dasein as melancholic and the transcendental role that melancholia plays in Being and Time. It discusses Heidegger's argument that thinking of time as a series of nows is dependent on thinking of time as dependent on Dasein's existence as possibility.

This chapter discusses Karl Jaspers' philosophy of existence, explaining Jaspers' concept of philosophy and his concept of death. There are four elements in Jaspers' metaphysical construction of the human being and these include Dasein or existence, consciousness-as-such, spirit and Existenz. Jaspers' existential concept of death is centred on the notion of boundary situations in which one has to face up to one's own, or a loved one's, death.

This chapter examines the puzzling relationship between Existenz and death; analyses what Karl Jaspers means by his claim that Existenz, as distinct from Dasein, is not subject to death; and reflects on the basic features of Existenz and some questions related to these features. It suggests that the eternal aspect of man can be explained in terms of the existential experience of the Augenblick and argues that the main objection to the eternal aspect of Existenz stems from the definition of eternity as endless duration.