Video and Podcast Resources On Martin Heidegger's What Is Metaphysics?

ten lectures in video and podcast formats on this great short work

Martin Heidegger is a rather challenging thinker to read, for a variety of reasons. He develops his own philosophical vocabulary and works with some complex and deep ideas, for just two reasons. You can add to that the fact that he is entirely uninterested and even opposed to making philosophy more easy and accessible for people to study.

I do teach his works in my classes from time to time, and the one that I most often have my students read and grapple with is his 1929 lecture “What Is Metaphysics?” It is indeed, like pretty much all of his works, a difficult text. But in my view, it is fairly accessible to students when they are given resources to help them work their way through it, and to give them some clarification when they fall into conclusion.

There’s another reason why I often assign this piece to my students. It doesn’t contain every single concept that Heidegger develops in his decade of work, but it does at least touch on a number of really central Heideggerian ideas and doctrines. These include the nothing, the importance of mood, the fundamental mood of anxiety, the priority of metaphysics over logic, the ways we lose sight of the human condition, freedom and possibility, and the history of metaphysics.

A good ways back, I developed a set of lectures to help out my students with this work, first creating a sequence of core concept videos, and then taking those and converting them into podcast episodes. If you’re interested in reading “What is Metaphysics?” you might find them useful as well. Here they are:

• The Nature Of Metaphysical Inquiry | watch video | listen to podcast

• The Nothing, Not, And Negation | watch video | listen to podcast

• The Mood Of Anxiety | watch video | listen to podcast

• The Nothing And Nihilation | watch video | listen to podcast

• Modalities Of Nihilative Behavior | watch video | listen to podcast

• Sciences, Logic, And The Nothing | watch video | listen to podcast

• Mood and The Totality Of Beings | watch video | listen to podcast

• Original Anxiety And Everydayness | watch video | listen to podcast

• Previous Metaphysical Views On Nothing | watch video | listen to podcast

• The Nothing, Selfhood, And Freedom | watch video | listen to podcast

There you have it. Ten lectures you can watch or listen to. I hope you find them interesting and useful