Illustrations of Being: Drawing upon Heidegger and upon Metaphysics (Contemporary Studies in Philosophy and the Human Sciences) - Hardcover

Nicholson, Graeme

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0391037382 ISBN 13: 9780391037380

Publisher: Prometheus Books, 1992

Synopsis

Graeme Nicholson addresses the fundamental topic of ontology, perhaps the fundamental topic posed to philosophy and the human mind: what is being?, i.e., what is it to exist or to be? He initially shows that we humans must be understood to be "existers" and "disclosers"--terms that render Heidegger's concept Dasein. Heidegger's philosophy provides the basic viewpoint, but Professor Nicholson offers an interpretation of Heidegger that seeks to set deconstructionist and pragmatist readings to one side. Since, according to Heidegger, being is fundamentally a union of presence and absence, this study shows that metaphysical theories have always offered positive illustrations or interpretations of being.
Illustrations of Being then goes on to scrutinize the four most fundamental determinations of being that Western thought has adumbrated: being as substance, especially in Greek ontology; being as reality, especially in the period from Descartes to Kant, and therefore in nineteenth- and twentieth-century science; the logic of being, in which Nicholson undertakes an ontological critique of mathematical logic; and being as the transformation of form--the key idea that runs from Christian patristics, through Hegel and Marx, to modern dialectics.
Graeme Nicholson's new study is marked by its receptiveness to metaphysics in the traditional sense, and contains a critique of the deconstructionist effort to pass beyond metaphysics. It will be of interest to professional philosophers and to theologians, as well as to graduate students and to members of the general public interested in philosophical arguments about the nature of being.

About this title

About the Author

Graeme Nicholson, who taught for many years at the University of Toronto, is now Visiting Professor at the University of Ottawa. He is editor of the Contemporary Studies in Philosophy and the Human Sciences series and author of an earlier volume in the series, SEEING AND READING.

Review

". . . an extraordinary achievement in comparative hermeneutics. . ."
—Canadian Philosophical Review

Edition details

• Publisher: Prometheus Books
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0391037382
• ISBN 13: 9780391037380
• Binding: Hardcover