Kámen, zvíře, člověk - Heideggerův pokus o metafyziku života – Novák Aleš (2024)

The book introduces a little-known yet remarkable phase of Martin Heidegger's thinking immediately after the publication of his book Being and Time, which he was unable to complete mainly for substantive reasons. Therefore, he attempted to step in a new direction towards thematizing human existence based on an examination of the so-called anthropological difference between humans and animals, as contemporary fashionable philosophical anthropology conducted, against which Heidegger sought to delineate himself, having been unjustly categorized by his teacher Edmund Husserl. He devoted a significant part of his semester lecture titled Basic Concepts of Metaphysics: World – Finitude – Loneliness from the winter semester of 1929/30 to this, in which he aimed for a purely philosophical contemplation of the essence of life: he considered life to be a mode of being of animals and plants – in contrast to existence, which specifically denotes the mode of being of humans. These different modes of being are distinguished primarily by how the given world, indicating the entirety of the obviousness of being as being, is perceived. While humans exist world-formingly, animals live in a way that is deprived of the world. The third type is the stone, which is completely prepared for the world. Although Heidegger himself considered this phase of his thinking to be a kind of dead end, it is indeed...