When I'm on the operating table, I'm happy for the surgeon to treat me as a machine, but the moment I return to consciousness I have other needs and aspirations that should be recognized. We're not here only to survive or extend our individual or species life but to do something seemingly more difficult, for which I've used words and phrases like 'love' and the 'Kingdom of God'.

Ethics arises in the recognition of our obligation to care for others as beings, like us, exposed to mortality - that is, beings who need our help. Buddhism, not wrongly, extends this to 'all sentient beings'.

And one thing the void certainly can teach us is how to wait, how to become truly patient, and how to let go of superfluous intellectual baggage - all of which is a good lesson for hyper-agitated multi-tasking goal-focussed contemporary human beings.

I think he [Heidegger] sets the question up in a useful way and, despite appearances, he's not 'against' technology. He just wants us to have a questioning and thoughtful relation to it. This must be relevant to any approach.

Interpretation is a task that we repeatedly have to take up and start again from the beginning, Sisyphus-like. But, as Camus said, we must always imagine Sisyphus happy, and this is not so difficult when it's a matter of texts that reveal important truths about being human.

In brief, I regard love as a more decisive focus of meaning than death. In terms of Heidegger's argument, this is because I think he misdescribes the importance of the deaths of others and focuses exclusively on my relation to my own death. But, in reality, the deaths of others have a more urgent and immediate impact on our lives than the purely notional knowledge that I too will one day die.

But, inevitably, as he [Kierkegaard] approaches what we might call his Christocentric climax many readers drop off. Many scholars just leave that part of his authorship alone.