Overview

Iain D. Thomson is renowned for radically rethinking Heidegger's views on metaphysics, technology, education, art, and history, and in this book, he presents a compelling rereading of Heidegger's important and influential understanding of existential death. Thomson lucidly explains how Heidegger's phenomenology of existential death led directly to the insights which forced him to abandon Being and Time's guiding pursuit of a fundamental ontology, and thus how his early, pro-metaphysical work gave way to his later efforts to do justice to being in its real phenomenological richness and complexity. He also examines and clarifies the often abstruse responses to Heidegger's rethinking of death in Levinas, Derrida, Agamben, Beauvoir, and others, explaining the enduring significance of this work for ongoing efforts to think clearly about death, mortality, education, and politics. The result is a powerful and illuminating study of Heidegger's understanding of existential death and its enduring importance for philosophy and life.

Full Product Details

Author:   Iain D. Thomson (University of New Mexico)
Publisher:   Cambridge University Press
Imprint:   Cambridge University Press
Weight:   0.515kg
ISBN:  

9781009480031

ISBN 10:   1009480030
Pages:   356
Publication Date:   08 January 2026
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
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Table of Contents

Preface; Acknowledgments; Abbreviations used for works by Heidegger; A note on the notes (de capo); Part I. Rethinking Death in Heidegger: 1. Death and demise in being and time; 2. The death of metaphysics and the birth of thinking, or: why did being and time fail to answer the question of being? 3. Heidegger on death and the nothing it discloses; 4. Death and Rebirth in Being and Time's perfectionist philosophy of education; Part II. Rethinking Death after Heidegger: 5. White's Time and Death: on the advantages and disadvantages of reading Heidegger backward; 6. Rethinking Levinas on Heidegger on death; 7. Critical afterlives of Heidegger's phenomenology of existential death in Sartre, Beauvoir, Levinas, Agamben, and Derrida; 8. Heidegger's mortal phenomenology and the postmetaphysical politics of ontological pluralism; 9. Why it is better for a dasein not to live forever, or: being pro-choice on the immortality question; Concluding recapitulations: lessons from rethinking Heidegger's phenomenology of existential death and the irreducible nothings it discloses.

Reviews

'Heidegger's existential account of death in Being and Time is one of the most influential yet controversial aspects of his thought.  In this book, Thomson develops in impressive detail a coherent interpretation of Heideggerian death – not just as it figures in Being and Time, but as it also informs his later philosophy.  Rethinking Death is essential reading for anyone interested in human finitude, death, and life.' Mark Wrathall, University of Oxford

Author Information

Iain D. Thomson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education (Cambridge, 2005) and Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity (Cambridge, 2011), and the co-editor (with Kelly Becker) of The Cambridge History of Philosophy: 1945–2015 (Cambridge, 2019).

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