Abstract

In the late 1940s, a young French philosopher, Jean Beaufret, asked Martin Heidegger when he would write an ethics to complement his ontology of human existence. Now, in Ethics and Finitude, Lawrence Hatab, who teaches philosophy at Old Dominion University, sets out to show that even though Heidegger never published an ethics, “his manner of thinking is well suited to moral philosophy”. Professor Hatab believes it is possible “to speak from the atmosphere of Heidegger’s thinking with the hope of making significant contributions to ethical thought” : “My general aim,” he writes, “is to show how Heidegger’s way of thinking is able to articulate both the claims and the finite complexity of ethical existence”.