Lee Braver is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Florida whose work delves into the profound questions of continental philosophy. Her scholarship often emerges from analyzing key thinkers to illuminate complex relationships between language, reality, and human cognition. Through her philosophical approach, she uncovers the subtle ways in which our understanding of the world is shaped by its foundations. Her writing challenges readers to contemplate the very nature of existence.
The book explores the pivotal debate of realism versus anti-realism, highlighting its significance in both analytic and continental philosophy. It delves into the influence of Kant's philosophy, particularly his notion that the mind plays an active role in organizing experience, and traces how this concept has shaped anti-realist thought. By employing a framework from notable analytic philosophers, the text provides a comprehensive analysis of these philosophical tensions and their historical roots.
In "Groundless Grounds," Lee Braver explores the philosophies of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, highlighting their shared goal of creating a human-centered philosophy devoid of the transcendent. Braver's analysis reveals how their ideas illuminate each other, fostering dialogue between continental and analytic philosophy.
"Heidegger's Being and Time" is one of the most influential and important books in the history of philosophy, but it was left unfinished. The parts we have of it, Divisions I and II of Part One, were meant to be merely preparatory for the unwritten Division III, which was to have formed the point of the entire book when it turned to the topic of being itself. In this book, leading Heidegger scholars and philosophers influenced by Heidegger take up the unanswered questions in Heidegger's masterpiece, speculating on what Division III would have said, and why Heidegger never published it. The contributors' task--to produce a secondary literature on a nonexistent primary work--seems one out of fiction by Borges or Umberto Eco. Why did Heidegger never complete Being and Time? Did he become dissatisfied with it? Did he judge it too subjectivistic, not historical enough, too individualistic, too existential? Was abandoning it part of Heidegger's "Kehre", his supposed turning from his early work to his later work? Might Division III have offered a bridge between the two phases, if a division exists between them? And what does being mean, after all? The contributors, in search of lost Being and Time, consider these and other topics, shedding new light on Heidegger's thought.
