Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I

Being-in-the-World is a guide to one of the most influential philosophical works of
this century: Division I of Part One of Being and Time, where Martin Heidegger works out an original
and powerful account of being-in-the-world which he then uses to ground a profound critique of
traditional ontology and epistemology. Hubert Dreyfus's commentary opens the way for a new
appreciation of this difficult philosopher, revealing a rigorous and illuminating vocabulary that is
indispensable for talking about the phenomenon of world.The publication of Being and Time in 1927
turned the academic world on its head. Since then it has become a touchstone for philosophers as
diverse as Marcuse, Sartre, Foucault, and Derrida who seek an alternative to the rationalist
Cartesian tradition of western philosophy. But Heidegger's text is notoriously dense, and his
language seems to consist of unnecessarily barbaric neologisms; to the neophyte and even to those
schooled in Heidegger thought, the result is often incomprehensible.Dreyfus's approach to this
daunting book is straightforward and pragmatic. He explains the text by frequent examples drawn from
everyday life, and he skillfully relates Heidegger's ideas to the questions about being and mind
that have preoccupied a generation of cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind.Hubert L.
Dreyfus is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.