An Ontological Study of Death
From Hegel to Heidegger
Publication Year: 2007
Published by: Duquesne University Press
Cover
Title Page, Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
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pp. vii-viii
I would like to thank the University of Missouri Research Board and the University of Missouri - Columbia Research Council for supporting me in the completion of this book. I am also deeply grateful to Hellmut Ammerlahn and Jane K. Brown, both of whom gave me valuable feedback on earlier phases of this project. Here in Missouri, ...
Abbreviations of Frequently Used Works and Editions
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pp. ix-xi
Introduction: Philosophical, Historical, and Pathological Models of Death
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pp. 1-27
In his major philosophical work from 1943, Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre outlines two paradigms of death based on the image of a borderline. As Sartre points out, every boundary is a
1. Hegel: The Dialectic of Death
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pp. 28-78
Hegel and H�lderlin were born in the same year, 1770, and in the same region of Germany, namely Swabia. Moreover, they became classmates at the Protestant seminary in T�bingen known as the Stift, where they even roomed together for a time (along with Schelling, the younger philosophical prodigy). Students of the seminary were given ...
2. H�lderlin: Dialectical Death and Ontological Guilt
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pp. 79-127
By the time the Phenomenology of Spirit appeared in the spring of 1807, Hegel’s erstwhile companion and collaborator had suffered a mental breakdown from which he would never recover. Hölderlin, who had lost contact with Hegel since the latter’s move to Jena in 1801, and had experienced his share of bouts with nervous disorders through-...
3. Nietzsche: The Deaths of Empedocles and Zarathustra
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pp. 128-177
The figure of Empedocles is as present in the work of Nietzsche as in that of Hölderlin. However, this presence is not readily apparent to the casual reader and must often be sought in Nietzsche’s lesser-known writings. Like Hölderlin, he, too, struggled to compose an Empedocles tragedy but never progressed beyond preliminary notes ...
4. Rilke: The Holistic Recovery of Death
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pp. 178-228
In August of 1902 Rilke left the northern German idylls of Worpswede and Haseldorf—the former an artists’ colony, the latter an isolated estate belonging to aristocratic acquaintances—to settle in Paris, the modern city par excellence. The clash between these two environments exerted a profound impact on the young poet, bringing about a reori-...
5. Heidegger: The Ontology and Onticity of Death
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pp. 229-280
Heidegger’s analytic of death in Being and Time forms the culmination of the literary and philosophical thanatology that I have discussed in the foregoing chapters of this study. His understanding of human finitude as a supreme possibility of existence that both intimates freedom and reveals selfhood has obvious precedents in the works of Hegel, ...
Epilogue: The Dignity of Death and the Right to Die
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pp. 281-288
Death, as conceived in a line of thought stretching from the late eighteenth to early twentieth century, is far more than a narrow philosophical concern or isolated literary theme. As I have tried to illustrate in the foregoing chapters, it is intimately connected with a host of other underlying issues that feed into a comprehensive worldview. ...
Notes
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pp. 289-308
Bibliography
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pp. 309-320
Index
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pp. 321-326
E-ISBN-13: 9780820705552
Print-ISBN-13: 9780820703961
Page Count: 337
Publication Year: 2007
