In his early lecture courses, Martin Heidegger exhibited an abiding
interest in human life. He believed that human life has philosophical
import while it is actually being lived; language has philosophical
import while it is being spoken. In this book, Scott Campbell traces the
development of Heidegger's ideas about factical life through his
interest in Greek thought and its concern with Being. He contends that
Heidegger's existential concerns about human life and his ontological
concerns about the meaning of Being crystallize in the notion of Dasein
as the Being of factical human life.
Emphasizing the positive aspects of everydayness, Campbell explores the
contexts of meaning embedded within life; the intensity of average,
everyday life; the temporal immediacy of life in early Christianity; the
hermeneutic pursuit of life's self-alienation; factical spatiality; the
temporalizing of history within life; the richness of the world; and the
facticity of speaking in Plato and Aristotle. He shows how Heidegger
presents a way of grasping human life as riddled with deception but also
charged with meaning and open to revelation and insight.