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Full Idea
The certainty that 'I myself am in that I will die' is the basic certainty of Dasein itself. It is a genuine statement of Dasein, while 'cogito sum' is only a semblance of such a statement.
Clarification
'Dasein' roughly means 'existence' or 'being there'
Gist of Idea
Certainty that I will die is more basic to my existence than the Cogito
Source
Martin Heidegger (History of the Concept of Time [1925], p.316-7), quoted by Richard Polt - Heidegger: an introduction 4.§46-53
Book Ref
Polt,Richard: 'Heidegger: an introduction' [Routledge 2003], p.87
A Reaction
This just seems to be false. Children face their existence in thought long before they face their mortality. Absorption in activity can marginalise death, but not marginalise thought.
| 4836 | The mind only knows itself by means of ideas of the modification of the body [Spinoza] |
| 5583 | We need an account of the self based on rational principles, to avoid materialism [Kant] |
| 20757 | The powerful self behind your thoughts and feelings is your body [Nietzsche] |
| 15583 | Certainty that I will die is more basic to my existence than the Cogito [Heidegger] |
| 23747 | What is sacred is not a person, but the whole physical human being [Weil] |
| 5324 | Bodily identity and memory work together to establish personal identity [Ayer] |
| 5668 | People own conscious states because they are causally related to the identifying body [Ayer] |
| 5173 | Two experiences belong to one self if their contents belong with one body [Ayer] |
| 5176 | Empiricists can define personal identity as bodily identity, which consists of sense-contents [Ayer] |
| 9263 | A person is an entity to which we can ascribe predicates of consciousness and corporeality [Strawson,P] |
| 5673 | If we have a pain, we are strongly aware of the bodily self [Cassam] |
| 16236 | Maybe our persistence conditions concern bodies, rather than persons [Olson, by Hawley] |
| 6669 | For 'animalism', I exist before I became a person, and can continue after it, so I am not a person [Olson, by Lowe] |
| 4936 | The self is founded on bodily awareness centred in the brain stem [Edelman/Tononi] |
| 6144 | You hold a child in your arms, so it is not mental substance, or mental state, or software [Merricks] |