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Why are we sometimes afraid of decisions? What does it have to do with fearing death? The dread of making a decision is something that many of us have experienced at least once in their life. A decision can be seen as the resolution to behave in a certain way and as such it involves both a choice and a commitment to that choice. Along with this dread, the fear of death seems to be shared by many of us. To live, indeed, is characterized by mortality, namely the state of being subjected to death. What is the connection between existential decision-making and mortality?
In this seminar, we will examine both of these concepts in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and Søren Kierkegaard. The main goal of the seminar will be to understand how the process of decision making may be affected by the status of "being-in-the-world", namely being subjected to the pressure of living together immersed in a socio-cultural and linguistic environment, and how this condition may divert from the search of personal authenticity. In this investigation, we will eventually come to discover the role that mortality plays in modulating the tension between authenticity and inauthenticity in that it points at the "possibility" as the highest modality of being.
Dear participants, the Corona pandemic has hit us all hard at the Saarland University. In light of the current situation, the seminar will be entirely web-based.
We will meet every Tuesday (12:15-13:45) using the Microsoft Teams platform, starting May 5th. During the seminar, we will go through the relevant texts* to tackle the issues that are the object of the seminar. In addition, we will watch Being in the World, a documentary film based on Martin Heidegger's philosophy that features a number of prominent philosophers such as Hubert Dreyfus, John Haugeland, Mark Wrathall and many others. Last but not least, we will read Leo Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich in order to reflect on the Heideggerian and Kierkegaardian concepts of decision and mortality in a piece of literature. Further details will be provided on Moodle. Please find the team code below.
Teams code: qh1wz6m
*Participants are required to read the texts before each session. |
