Abstract

Unlike most recent studies of Martin Heidegger--for instance, by the Chilean Marxist Victor Farias and by the American philosopher Thomas Sheehan--Stanley Rosen's The Question of Being avoids making political statements. In fact Rosen is remarkably silent about Heidegger's engagement as a Nazi in the 1930s, and has no interest in discrediting his subject for sympathetic speeches about Hitler while rector of Freiburg in 1933 and 1934. Recognizing a worn-out field for what it is, Rosen deals instead with Heidegger's ontology, respectfully but also critically. He exhibits none of the obvious distaste for Heidegger that marked his earlier book Nihilism, nor do I find much evidence of the Straussian scaffolding apparent in Rosen's first work, on Plato's Symposium.