The Event of Death: A Phenomenological Enquiry

ISBN-13: 9789024734146 / Angielski / Twarda / 1986 / 348 str.

Ingrid Leman-Stefanovic; I. Leman-Stefanovic

Opis

Building upon the "preliminary conception of Phenomenology" introduced by Heidegger in section II of the Introduction to Sein und zeit, l one may say that a phenomenology of death would mean: "to let death, as that which shows itself, be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself. " Does this mean then, that a properly phenomenological d- cription of death may reveal to us what death as a factical event is like "in the very way in which it shows itself from itself"? Although I cannot experience my death in order to describe it, may some kind of phenomenologica'l inference or "extrapolation"2 be the condition for a unique and privileged revelation of what it is like to be dead? There is an important element of phenomenological descr- tion which renders such an extrapolation implausible, and it involves what Husserl originally called the reduction to signi- cance or meaning. It can never be true for the phenomenologist, 1 Heidegger, Martin, Sein und zeit, p. 34. e. t. page 58. 2 Henry W. Johnstone Jr. thinks that while one cannot extrapo late from the experience of sleep to the experience of death, it may be possible to extrapolate from the phenomeno lQgy of sleep to the phenomenology of death. Cf. H. W. John stone Jr., "Toward a Phenomenology of Death," in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. XXXV, No. 3, 1975, pages 396-7. Cf.

Spis treści

One: Ontological Roots of the Phenomenon of Death: A Heideggerean Interpretation.- One: Individuation and Temporality.- A. Transcendence as the Key.- (i) The Necessity of Individuation as Revealed in the Meaning of Transcendence: Lessons from Kant.- (ii) The Meaning of Transcendence as Temporality.- B. Temporality as the Meaning of Individuation.- (i) Heidegger’s Understanding of Individuation as Grounded in Care.- (ii) Temporality as the Meaning of Care.- Two: Temporality as the Meaning of Being-Towards-Death.- A. Inauthentic Understanding of Death.- B. Temporality and Authentic Being-towards-Death.- (i) Existentiell Attestation of Potentiality-for-Being-onef’s-Self.- (ii) Ontological roots: the temporal structure of Advancing Resoluteness.- C. Historicity and Being-towards-death.- Three: Death, Time and Appropration.- A. The Development of Heidegger’s Thought.- B. The Later Heidegger on Time and Appropriation.- C. Death in History, Poetry and Language.- D. Death and the Emergence of Being in the Essence of the Thing.- Four: A Project Beyond Heidegger.- Two: Death as an Ontic E-Vent: Coming to terms with the phenomenon of death as a determinate possibility.- One: Reflecting on One’s own Death.- A. The Intelligibility of the Phenomenon of My Own Death as a Determinate Event.- B. A pre-reflective awareness of a determinate possibility: a phenomenology of imagination.- C. My Own Death as a Determinate Possibility: Reflections on Terminal Illness.- (i) My Own Death, against the backdrop of Being-there.- (ii) Some Patterns of a Terminal Illness.- (iii) Implications regarding the analysis.- Two: The Death of the Other.- A. Solicitude: condition of the possibility of an ontological awareness of the ontic e-vent of the death of the Other.- (i) A Heideggerean perspective.- (ii) Heidegger on Solicitude.- (iii) The Relationship of Authentic Solicitude: Beyond Sein und Zeit.- (iv) The In-finitude of Authentic Solicitude.- B. The E-vent of the Death of the Other.- (i) Understanding of the Potentiality-for-Being of Others.- (ii) Solicitude as a Projection of our Being-towards-Death: the temporal roots of the Belonging-together of Death and Love.- (iii) A Death.- (iv) Recovery.- Three: The Phenomenon of Immortality.- A. The Possibility of my own Immortality.- B. The Immortality of the Other.- Three: Ontic/Ontological Implications.- One: Ontology as Concrete.- Two: Is Phenomenology still too Metaphysical?.- Key to abbreviations.