A Conversation With Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger is one of the most important as well as one of the most difficult thinkers of the last century. His masterpiece Being and Time has been described as the most profound turning point in German philosophy since Hegel. Raymond Tallis, who has been arguing with Heidegger for over thirty years, illuminates his fundamental ideas through an imaginary conversation, which is both relaxed and rigorous, witty and profound. The Conversation defines Heidegger's relevance to the philosophical agenda of the present century by illuminating his great contribution to our thinking about what it is to be a human being while identifying the weaknesses in his thought.

RAYMOND TALLIS trained as a doctor and since 1987 has been Professor and a Consultant in Health Care of the Elderly in Salford, Manchester. He was Project Director of Neurosciences between 1997 and 2001 overseeing the development of a new neurosciences centre and a neuroscience service for the three million population of Greater Manchester. Among his numerous medical publications are two major textbooks, The Clinical Neurology of Old Age, and (co-edited with Howard Fillet) Brocklehurst's Textbook of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology. He has written extensively outside medicine, an anthology of his writings over the previous decade - The Raymond Tallis Reader - was published in 2000.