Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

You can register for a free account to have four complimentary articles per month. We will occasionally email you a newsletter, from which you can unsubscribe at any time. We do not sell personal data or otherwise disclose personal information to other organisations.

Tallis in Wonderland

Heidegger’s Ghost

Raymond Tallis wonders where Heidegger’s body went when he was philosophising.

The ghost that haunts Martin Heidegger’s collected works – particularly the early ones leading up to his 1927 magnum opus Being and Time – is Dasein. That is his word for human being. So, gentle reader, the ghost is you. Why do I say ‘ghost’? Because Heidegger finds it difficult to deal with Dasein as having a body.

The word ‘Dasein’ has two elements: sein means ‘being’, and da means ‘here’ or, confusingly, ‘there’.

…