The Existentialists: Critical Essays on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre
Charles B. Guignon
Rowman & Littlefield, 2004 - 182 pages
This
volume brings together for the first time some of the most helpful and
insightful essays on the four most influential and discussed
philosophers in the history of existentialism: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche,
Heidegger, and Sartre. The contributors write on such topics as
Kierkegaard's knight of faith and his diagnosis of the 'present age;'
Nietzsche's view of morality and self-creation; Heidegger's accounts of
worldhood and authenticity; and Sartre's ontology, ethics, and
conception of the cogito. The essays have been selected for their higher
level of scholarship and for their ability to illuminate various
aspects of their subject's work. The volume is enhanced by the editor's
introduction and extensive bibliography to aid further study.
The
Metaphysical Presuppositions of Being-in-the-World brings St. Thomas
Aquinas and Martin Heidegger into dialogue and argues for the necessity
of Christian philosophy. Through the confrontation of Heideggerian and
Thomist thought, it offers an original and comprehensive rethinking of
the nature of temporality and the origins of metaphysical inquiry. The
book is a careful treatment of the inception and deterioration of the
four-fold presuppositions of Thomistic metaphysics: intentionality,
causality, finitude, ananke stenai. The analysis of the four-fold has
never before been done and it is a central and original contribution of
Gilson's book. The four-fold penetrates the issues between the
phenomenological approach and the metaphysical vision to arrive at their
core and irreconcilable difference. Heidegger's attempt to utilize the
fourfold to extrude theology from ontology provides the necessary
interpretive impetus to revisit the radical and often misunderstood
metaphysics of St. Thomas, through such problems as aeviternity,
non-being and tragedy.