Heidegger's 'Being and Time': A Reader's Guide

Blattner’s interpretation of Heidegger is very clearly informed by scholarship and is far more accessible for a reader who is getting tongue tied in Being and Time. Although, if you really want to understand Being and Time, just take Dreyfus’ advice: read it over and over!

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This product has been what I expected it to be and and it has been very useful for its purpose

Being and Time definitely requires introductory and supplementary materials for a fruitful study. The problem here is that the reader's guide designed to provide these resources does a very poor job at selecting widely, ordering logically and applying instructively the tools it gathers. If we learn anything from a perusal of even the first few pages of Heidegger's text, from the first, our terms are of utmost importance. Blattner, however, applies throughout a sloppy cobbling together of his own unreflective language, conceptual dumming-down through reductive explication, sophmoric generalizations, and facile comparisons. One would do well to read this guide in order to feature, by contrast, the ease, clarity and transparency of reading Heidegger's text. It's not a bad ancillary or otherwise miscelaneous resource, but as a primary interprative tool, it's just plain awful. There's got to be a better way.

Very prompt service. Great book for those interested in Martin

Blattner's introduction strikes the right balance between a readable introductory guide and a reliable take on Heidegger's necessarily obfuscating language in Being and Time. He starts off by grounding Heidegger in his use of phenomenology and Hermeneutics. This makes the method of Being and Time very clear. This is followed by essays on the major themes in B&T. Blattner limits the guide by not focusing on the more difficult and raw strains of Heidegger's thought on temporality in Division II and depending on what you're looking for, this may be a blessing or a curse. The essays are written in a very contemporary tone, and raises questions that a modern reader is likely to face himself. In answering these questions, Blattner engages in a fair amount of Hermeneutic himself, so there is quite a lot of Blattner is this book as there is Heidegger. For Heidegger purists, this may be annoying, but for someone who wants to understand Heidegger, these are honest quests to penetrate his thought. Blattner also uses a lot of contemporary examples and situations to highlight ideas in B&T. While this is a welcome approach, I found some of these examples to be distracting, e.g. Blattner's repeated assertion that the H's concept of anxiety is equivalent to depression, etc. Heidegger's phenomenology becomes very interesting when it starts dealing with existentialism, and here too I have issues with Blattner's take. He makes a good attempt to explain how Heidegger differs from the modern existentialists like Sartre, in the latter's insistence that the essence of dasein is nothingness, but I would have liked more material on H's concept of nullities and nothingness. There are some ambiguities here that are likely to be confusing. These shortcomings, however, are more than compensated by the very crisp style of Blattner. Also, every essay is followed by study questions that keeps the reader on the ground, and makes him do some original thinking; an excellent idea, IMHO. In summary, an excellent guide to Heidegger that will serve well as your first introduction to his thought.

'Heidegger's Being And Time' by William Blattner is an instalment in the Continuum series of readers guides - intended as a companion to reading Heidegger's Being and Time. This is a nice small text (under 200 pages), Blattner has a strong grasp of Being and Time and is particularly helpful in decoding much of the abstruse jargon used by Heidegger. Blattner also comments on some of language used in standard English translation of Being and Time by Macquarrie and Robinson. Being and Time has come to be recognised as one of the more important and influential philosophical texts of the twentieth century. Despite its importance, however, for the non-Heideggerian it can seem impenetrable - stylistically speaking, it represents some of the worst aspects of German philosophy writing; verbose, rambling and ambiguous. I read this text in conjunction with Hubert Dreyfus's UC Berkley course and found it very useful - enjoying Heidegger more than I previously have. Dreyfus's Being and Time couse is available free at itunes/UC Berkley/humanities. Dreyfus also has a Being and Time commentary that is worth a look.

Excellent book.

This guide to Heidegger's Being and Time is clear and engaging. It features questions for you to consider which certainly do help you to engage with the content of the book. I have only given it three stars because the author has decided for us not to go in to the Second Division of the book because he thinks it's wrong. This might be so, but if you publish a book claiming to be a guide to a text in its entirety, it seems haughty and disingenuous to write off swathes of the text without going in to why. A section on why Heidegger's project came apart in the Second Division would have both served to complete the promise of the title and shed light on what Heidegger did next.