George Pattison’s Heidegger on Death (HD) aims at critically assessing Heidegger’s analysis of death included in his magnum opus Being and Time (BT) (1927). Given the peculiar status of Heidegger’s analysis, tightly interwoven into a complex argumentative narrative touching on an array of foundational issues in philosophy, Pattison must first of all spell out for his reader Heidegger’s overall project in BT and show how Heidegger’s analysis of death fits in it. As the author makes clear, HD isn’t meant to be a piece of Heidegger scholarship but rather ‘… an essay about death that uses Heidegger … as a way of thinking about the question of death in a Christian and theological perspective’ (HD, p. 12). This self-imposed task places a second burden on Pattison, i.e., to draw on theological premises to examine Heidegger’s analysis of death and find it ultimately wanting. An implicit third burden, which the author only occasionally seems to intend to meet, is to state in exactly what sense the said premises are Christian and theological; although Pattison draws on a wealth of religious writers including Augustine, Luther, Franz Rosenzweig, Gabriel Marcel, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and (above all) Kierkegaard, it is not always clear it is the religious dimension of this material that does the critical job intended by Pattison. The book is divided into six chapters and an introduction. In the Introduction, Pattison motivates his focus on death by the centrality of the topic in human experience, and his focus on Heidegger with his claim that the German philosopher is one ‘who has offered the most intellectually consistent and rigorous account of death in modern philosophy’ (HD, p. 13). Pattison should have warned his reader that Heidegger’s account of death is not so much the most consistent and rigorous in modern philosophy as being virtually the only one: there are systematic reasons why death has not been a serious topic of discussion in philosophy (modern or otherwise), and omitting these reasons can mislead the reader into thinking that Heidegger is a choice among many.
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