R. MatthewShockey, The bounds of self: An essay on Heidegger's Being and Time. New York, NY: Routledge. 2021. p. 224. £130 (hbk.)

Does phenomenology bear on the question of how to live?Does it require us to step back from life, or is it compatible with active engagement in it?Is Being and Time properly understood as "existentialist"?Shockey's answers to these questions in The Bounds of Self will likely be surprising to many readers, but they are developed on the basis of a thoroughly worked-out reading of Heidegger as following in Augustine and Descartes's meditative footsteps. Shockey's aim inThe Bounds of Self is to develop a systematic interpretation of Heidegger's views in (and around) Being and Time.Shockey supplements his reading of Being and Time with interpretations of a handful of other works by Heidegger from the 1920s, especially Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics with its treatment of time and the imagination, some published lecture courses, and a few choice quotes from later works.Shockey makes a persuasive case for important, and underappreciated, continuities between Heidegger's approach to ontology in Being and Time, and Descartes's in the Meditations.Heidegger's book shares the latter book's two-step movement: "inward" to develop an understanding of one's own being, and "outward" again toward the ways of being that characterize the rest of the world.This movement is meditational in that it requires its practitioners to perform it for themselves in the first-person, with the aim of achieving clarity about self and world via careful attention and self-conscious discipline to the essential forms that self and world take.Shockey's title plays on the title of P. F. Strawson's book on Kant's First Critique, The Bounds of Sense, and pursues a similar mission and method.What Strawson's book did for Kant, Shockey's book aims to do for Heidegger, underscoring the relevance of the issues and questions that animate Heidegger's way of doing philosophy for a contemporary audience not enmeshed in the specific historical debates from which Heidegger's work emerged.Like Strawson, Shockey is concerned with producing a systematic reading of his target: the focus is more on the issues that animate the work, rather than its historical context, and the aim is to highlight what is (and, at times, what is not) persuasive in it.The overarching result is an account of how what is most persuasive might best fit together.Shockey does a good job of translating Heidegger's jargon into other terms, and of relating Heidegger to other thinkers who are likely more familiar to a contemporary reader.All of this work of translation, explanation, and relation is carried out in a way that keeps us fairly close to Heidegger's way of talking about things, but not so close that we are lost in the jargon.In this respect, Shockey's book resembles Hubert Dreyfus's Being-in-the-world, in providing a synoptic introduction to Being and Time.Shockey's introduction to Heidegger improves on Dreyfus's by highlighting Heidegger's treatment of temporality and its ontological significance in Division Two of Being and Time.Shockey's book belongs to what one might think of as a "second generation" of English-language Heidegger scholarship, after

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