Being-in-the-World by Hubert L Dreyfus

Being-in-the-World by Hubert L Dreyfus

Being-in-the-World is a guide to one of the most influential philosophical works of this century: Division I of Part One of Being and Time, where Martin Heidegger works out an original and powerful account of being-in-the-world which he then uses to ground a profound critique of traditional ontology and epistemology. Hubert Dreyfus's commentary opens the way for a new appreciation of this difficult philosopher, revealing a rigorous and illuminating vocabulary that is indispensable for talking about the phenomenon of world.

The publication of Being and Time in 1927 turned the academic world on its head. Since then it has become a touchstone for philosophers as diverse as Marcuse, Sartre, Foucault, and Derrida who seek an alternative to the rationalist Cartesian tradition of western philosophy. But Heidegger's text is notoriously dense, and his language seems to consist of unnecessarily barbaric neologisms; to the neophyte and even to those schooled in Heidegger thought, the result is often incomprehensible.

Dreyfus's approach to this daunting book is straightforward and pragmatic. He explains the text by frequent examples drawn from everyday life, and he skillfully relates Heidegger's ideas to the questions about being and mind that have preoccupied a generation of cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind.

Hubert L. Dreyfus is Professor of Philosophy in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley. His research bridges the Analytic and Continental traditions in philosophy. His major interests are phenomenology, existentialism, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of literature, and
philosophical implications of artificial intelligence. He is the author of Skillful Coping: Essays on the Phenomenology of Everyday Perception and Action (OUP, 2014), Retrieving Realism (with Charles Taylor, Harvard University Press), and All Things Shining (with Sean Kelly, Simon & Schuster).

Mark Wrathall is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of California, Riverside. He works in the phenomenological tradition of philosophy, and is interested in issues surrounding selfhood, responsibility, authenticity, temporality, and the phenomenology of
religious life. He is the author of Heidegger and Unconcealment: Truth, Language, and History (CUP) and How to Read Heidegger (W.W. Norton). He has edited a number of volumes, including Skillful Coping: Essays on the Phenomenology of Everyday Perception and Action (OUP, 2014) and The Cambridge
Companion to Heidegger's Being and Time (CUP).