Your complimentary articles You’ve read one of your four complimentary articles for this month. You can read four articles free per month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please Tallis in Wonderland Raymond Tallis wonders where Heidegger’s body went when he was philosophising. The ghost that haunts Martin Heidegger’s collected works – particularly the early ones leading up to his 1927 magnum opus Being and Time – is Dasein. That is his word for human being. So, gentle reader, the ghost is you . Why do I say ‘ghost’? Because Heidegger finds it difficult to deal with Dasein as having a body. The word ‘Dasein’ has two elements: sein means ‘being’, and da means ‘here’ or, confusingly, ‘there’. Importantly, though, ‘ da ’ does not, in this context, signify a spatial location. Our existence as Dasein is ‘being-in-the-world’ – but it is not in the world in the way that, for example, a match is in a match box, or my body is in my study, as I write this.…