%0 Journal Article
%T Sociology towards death: Heidegger, time and social theory
%A Kelly Nielsen
%A Tad Skotnicki
%J Journal of Classical Sociology
%@ 1741-2897
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/1468795X18772745
%X In this article, we draw on the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger to propose an approach to sociology that takes human experiences of finitude and possibility as crucial topics of investigation. A concern with death is not absent in sociological thought. To the contrary, Durkheim¡¯s Suicide grounds a sociological research tradition into death and dying. Yet Heidegger¡¯s existentialism renders our finitude ¨C not just death ¨C a matter of everyday life, a constitutive feature of human existence and a source of sociological investigation. By explicating Heidegger¡¯s interconnected concepts of finitude, futurity, authenticity and resoluteness, we propose to investigate people¡¯s ordinary temporal experiences as well as the institutional contexts that make them possible. On this basis, we develop two concepts ¨C existential marginalisation and existential exhaustion ¨C that foreground questions of time, meaning and institutions in the study of poverty, inequality and everyday life
%K Culture
%K institutions
%K phenomenology
%K philosophical sociology
%K social theory
%K temporality
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1468795X18772745