Being and Time

Martin Heidegger's major work, published in 1927 while incomplete, only the first two of three planned divisions ever appeared, and still among the most influential works of twentieth century continental philosophy. The book reopens what Heidegger calls the question of the meaning of Being, arguing that prior philosophy had lost sight of it by treating Being as though it were simply the most general kind of object, and approaches the question instead through a detailed analysis of Dasein, the particular kind of being, ours, for whom its own being is always an issue. Central concepts include thrownness, the way Dasein finds itself already immersed in a world and a set of possibilities it did not choose; falling, the everyday tendency to lose oneself in impersonal, average ways of being Heidegger calls das Man, the they; and being-toward-death, the confrontation with one's own finitude that Heidegger treats as the condition for a more authentic relation to one's own existence.