Author: Hubert L. Dreyfus File Type: pdf 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 Dreyfuss 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 Heideggers 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.Dreyfuss approach to this daunting book is straightforward and pragmatic. He explains the text by frequent examples drawn from everyday life, and he skillfully relates Heideggers 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.From Library JournalDreyfus has for many years lectured on Heideggers Being and Time in courses at the University of California at Berkeley, and his explanations of that gnomic work have won wide acclaim, which this book shows was justified. He presents a detailed account of Division I of Being and Time , never lapsing into the incomprehensible. Heidegger repudiated the view that meaning is a mental phenomenon. Instead, he argues, human life is governed by practices that can never be fully articulated but only studied through interpretation. The theory of knowledge, as it has been pursued by Descartes and his successors, therefore rests on a false assumption. Human beings never live in the world as minds isolated from objects the problem of skepticism arises through ignoring the inextricable immersion of human beings in practical activities. Dreyfus does not offer much argument that Heideggers views are correct. Readers will, however, learn with crystal clarity the nature of Heideggers position.- David Gordon, Bowling Green State Univ., Ohio 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. ReviewMainstream philosophers... have never come up with a satisfactory account that translates Heidegger into their own language.... That should change very soon, with the publication this year of Hubert Dreyfuss Being-in-the-world. The fruit of 25 years of teaching the subject at Berkeley, it is undoubt, edly one of the clearest accounts of Heideggers thought to date. Anthony Gottlieb, New York Times Book Review

Author: Tomoyuki Sasaki File Type: pdf Japans so-called peace constitution renounces war as a sovereign right of the nation, and bans the nation from possessing any war potential. Yet Japan also maintains a large, world-class military organization, namely the Self-Defence Forces (SDF). In this book, Tomoyuki Sasaki explores how the SDF enlisted popular support from civil society and how civil society responded to the growth of the SDF. Japans Postwar Military and Civil Society details the interactions between the SDF and civil society over four decades, from the launch of rearmament in 1950. These interactions include recruitment, civil engineering, disaster relief, anti-SDF litigation, state financial support for communities with bases, and a fear-mongering campaign against the Soviet Union. By examining these wide-range issues, the book demonstrates how the militarization of society advanced as the SDF consolidated its ideological and socio-economic ties with civil society and its role as a defender of popular welfare. While postwar Japan is often depicted as a peaceful society, this book challenges such a view, and illuminates the prominent presence of the military in peoples everyday lives.