Ignore any reviews pointing to the lectures as the means of getting to Heidggers thought, they are mere pointers and the Concept of Time lectures do little more than enable you to understand the first page of this work and its introduction of three types of time. If you want to know the meaning of life, that is be given the tools to understand the meaning of YOUR life read this book. If you want to dress in black and mistakingly demarcate yourself as a Philosopher then buy "Being and Nothingness" AKA the collected works of Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger.

If you enjoy philosophy, as I do, then you should be excited reading a great thinker at work particularly when they are trying to bring philosophy back from the arid, elitist and academic pursuit it once was and sadly has again become. This book tried to arrest a crisis in philosophy but was its final dying whimpers...


An outstanding achievement of British scholarship   January 6, 2005
 12 out of 15 found this review helpful

This is a marvelous translation, superior on many fronts over its only English language rival, of the most important philosophical text of the twentieth century. Highly recommended.


The greatest project I ever undertook in philosophy.   February 18, 2003
 38 out of 42 found this review helpful

I am not a trained philosopher. I had however, read a considerable amount of work by other philosophers before I came upon this book. In order to effectively grasp Heideggers mercurial thought, I had to read an introduction first, then read this text, then read and re-read this text again. I found that this book expains an outlook, or way of thinking which has to be 'felt' or experienced as well as understood (still that doesn't describe it so well!). As soon as you try to give a synopsis of the ideas, the ideas tend to disintegrate.
There are no conclusions to be drawn from this and
Heidegger will answer none of your questions. Reading this book should be thought of as a project rather than a quick read.
A superficial skim through this won't get the point across.
You may understand each and every sentence, but you won't get the core of the idea because it requires you to think in a very unusual way.
As a last point, if you don't have a lecture course or introductory book, or someone to talk to about this before you read it, you will be stuck. The reason for this is that Heidegger often introduces terms and ideas before explaining what they mean fully.


an ontological construction of a phenomenological doubt   September 25, 2000
 10 out of 24 found this review helpful

Heidegger one of the highly original philosophers of 20th century provides a masterpiece of ontological problematic.By projecting the being of time onto being-in -time ,extends the "notion of time" and reconfigures it towards being. The notion of zero,freedom bad belief , responsibillity, the history of man and man in history and all the traditional hard dualisms of philosophy are met in new forms in this book providing an assault to traditional Cartesianism


Masterpiece   March 23, 2000
 6 out of 9 found this review helpful

This book really ought to be in a dual language edition. The translators admit so much in their introduction. As it is, Heidegger's thought manages to survive, although the English neologisms do little to enhance the reader's understanding and perhaps indeed also their sympathy for the delicate exercise Heidegger had set himself. Heidegger is less pretentious in German than English, although that is not to say he didn't have a lot of nerve to complicate people's lives by creating his new terms for the "Existenel" analysis of our own authentic being.

But what can you say about what is the most influential piece of philosophy written this century? Read it and make up your own mind.