In the 1960s, Hans and Rosaleen Moldenhauer discovered a wealth of hitherto unknown manuscripts and sketches by Webern, including source materials for more than 130 works and arrangements dating from his earliest compositional beginnings to the year he completed his formative studies with Arnold Schoenberg (c. 1899–1908). This introduction outlines how this monograph seeks to contribute to ongoing scholarly efforts to understand Webern’s early work more than a half-century after the Moldenhauers’ sensational finds. Moreover, it makes a case that Webern’s early compositions provide a pertinent opportunity to rethink the category of earliness. An uncritical shibboleth in Webern scholarship, and neglected in musicological discourse at large, earliness, it is suggested, poses an attractive counter-paradigm to the well-established category of lateness, especially when conceived of as explicating the essence of a body of so-called juvenilia and its constitutive tensions.

The chapter shows how Vico’s ghost, and the maker’s knowledge tradition, crossed diverse phenomenological and hermeneutical projects and a few generations of scholars, from Wilhelm Dilthey to the mature Edmund Husserl, from Husserl to Martin Heidegger, and from Heidegger to Hans-Georg Gadamer and neo-humanist scholars such as Ernesto Grassi. As in the cases discussed in Chapters 1–6, what links all these figures is not always a direct acquaintance with Vico’s scholarship (although many were) a philosophical challenge to the Cartesian cogito and, more specifically, Kant’s problematic prioritisation of the intellect over human praxis.

The person’s values determine the meaning structure of the world they live in and drive their actions. The depressed patient’s values tend to change dramatically over the weeks and usually return to normal. At the height of their illness, patients can constantly feel that they are transgressing important personal and group values.

Examining the values at play is similar to creating a map with three dimensions: (1) the level of organization/proximity to primary stakeholders; (2) the hierarchy; and (3) the temporality of values. The patient’s values can be misaligned with those of others temporarily owing to the illness, and value-mapping can facilitate realignment. Changes in value hierarchy are often necessary for recovery. These changes can be dramatic and can happen at a faster pace whilst the person is becoming ill and during recovery.

The patient can be temporarily cut off from the values they would normally hold. Besides records of their former wishes and collateral information, sources of knowledge about value changes include peer support workers, first-hand narratives, philosophical and social scientific studies, media reports, and art portrayal of depression. Changes in one’s life narrative are also essential for recovery and resilience. The patient’s social environment, including the professionals, can facilitate (or hinder) this.

Developing a satisfactory explanation of the pathomechanism of mental illness, developing biomarkers to aid diagnosis, developing an aetiological classification system, and developing effective treatments to achieve both symptom elimination and functional recovery has so far remained the holy grail of psychiatry for most conditions. To make progress, psychiatric research needs to integrate the biological, psychological, sociocultural, and existential dimensions of mental illness and incorporate and work with values more efficiently. This chapter offers a methodology for this through first describing value-mapping and then elucidating the potential contribution of qualitative and mixed-method studies, phenomenological, hermeneutic, and other idiographic approaches, interpretative phenomenological analysis, analytic induction, quasi-judicial approaches, and the history of psychiatry.

An essential prerequisite of any breakthrough here would be going back to the person level. Research centres would need to become truly multidisciplinary to bring together researchers with expertise in the relevant natural and social sciences and the medical humanities as well as experts by experience for effective co-production.

The Healing on the Sabbath parable’s focus on higher and lower standing at a feast affirms humility over ostentation. Evoked is the grand meal given by Joseph in honor of his brothers who, on account of his high and their low standing, could not sit with him at his table.

This chapter defines the field of history by examining both the topics it investigates and some of its long-standing and unique epistemological and methodological assumptions. It points out the unique breadth of the discipline, which has always taken the whole of human experience as its object of study. It emphasizes the holism of the discipline – that is, History’s consistent interest not in particular parts or aspects of that experience, but in the interactions between different aspects of human societies. It examines the historicist tradition within the discipline – the fundamental assumption that every aspect of human life is conditioned by its broad historical context. And it explores the way in which that fundamental assumption has contributed to a primarily idiographic epistemological position – an interest in the analysis of the particular and specific, rather than the general or universal.

Gadamer’s attitude to Collingwood was marked by ambivalence: while promoting the Englishman on the one hand, Gadamer claimed on the other that the fundamental dimension of “hermeneutical mediation” had simply escaped him. In this paper, I aim both to assess Gadamer’s debt to Collingwood and the prima facie strength of his objections. First, I reconstruct steps by which ideas of Collingwood found their place in Gadamer’s hermeneutics in the 1950s, including the central “axiom of all hermeneutics”: the thesis that “we can understand a text only when we have understood the question to which it is an answer.” Second, I examine Gadamer’s main objections to Collingwood, the first one being based on a misunderstanding of Collingwood’s stance, while the second one hits home, and I argue in the final section that at issue here is Collingwood’s claim that it is possible to rethink exactly the same thought as that of, say, an historical agent, while Gadamer holds precisely the opposite view, that this is never possible.

This chapter endeavors to explain Heidegger’s intertwined thinking about death and “the nothing” and explore the ontological significance of this connection. As we have seen, “death” (Tod) is Heidegger’s name for a stark and desolate phenomenon in which Dasein (that is, our world-disclosive “being-here”) encounters its own end, the end “most proper” to the distinctive kind of entity that Dasein is. Being and Time’s phenomenology of death is primarily concerned to understand Dasein’s death ontologically. Heidegger is asking what the phenomenon of our own individual deaths reveals to us all about the nature of our common human being, that is, our Dasein (and what that discloses, in turn, about the nature of being in general). Understood ontologically, “death” designates Dasein’s encounter with the end of its own world-disclosure, the end of that particular way of becoming intelligible in time that uniquely “distinguishes” Dasein from all other kinds of entities (BT 32/SZ 12).

This introductory chapter seeks to answer the question of what Heidegger means by “death” (Tod) in Being and Time – and begin to justify that answer. I take up this weighty topic with some trepidation (if not quite fear and trembling) in part because to say that the meaning of “death” in Being and Time is controversial is to strain the limits of understatement. In addition to the emotionally freighted nature of the topic itself (to which we will return), I think four main factors contribute to and perpetuate this controversy: (1) Heidegger’s confusing terminology; (2) the centrality of the issue to the text as a whole; (3) the demanding nature of what is required to adjudicate the matter; and (4) the radically polarized scholarly literature on the subject. One of my main goals here is to suggest a way to move beyond the controversy that currently divides the field, so let me begin by saying a bit about its four main contributing factors.

In Time and Death: Heidegger’s Analysis of Finitude, Carol White pursues a strange yet once common hermeneutic strategy, namely, reading Heidegger backward by reading the central ideas of his later work back into his early magnum opus, Being and Time. White follows some of Heidegger’s own later directives in pursuing this hermeneutic strategy, and this chapter critically explores these directives along with the original reading that emerges from following them. The conclusion I reach is that White’s creative book is not persuasive as a strict interpretation of Heidegger’s early work, yet it remains extremely helpful for deepening our appreciation of Heidegger’s thought as a whole. Most importantly, I shall suggest, White helps us sharpen and extend our understanding of the pivotal role that thinking about death played in the lifelong development of Heidegger’s philosophy.