In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A HEIDEGGERIAN CRITIQUE OF AQUINAS AND A GILSONIAN REPLY JOHN F. X. KNASAS Center for Thomistic Studies Houston, Texas I IN HIS BOOK, Heidegger and Aquinas: An Essay on Overcoming Metaphysics, John Caputo investigates among other points a claim of Etienne Gilson's followers. Their claim is that Heidegger's charge of an oblivion or forgetfulness of being cannot be pinned on Aquinas.1 Aquinas escapes the charge (...) because he alone in the history of Western philosophy deepens the understanding of being to the level of esse. How could someone who has seized upon the fundamental principle of being be guilty of a forgetfulness of being? Caputo begs to differ. A Heideggerian would find the Gilsonian thesis unimpressive. What Aquinas has done remains too ontical, for it still deals with things and the principles of things. Something else escapes Aquinas's eye, and Caputo variously expresses the Heideggerian dissatisfaction :... esse for Aquinas means that act by which a thing comes to be " real " rather than " present " in the original Greek sense of shining and appearing, revealing and concealing.... In St. Thomas the original Greek notion of presencing as the shining in which all appearances shine, as a rising up into appearance, into manifestness, has declined into an understanding of Being as "objective presence," the presence of what is mutely there, as a sound in an empty room is thought to be" there" in naive realism and common sense.2 1 John Caputo, Heidegger and Aquinas: An Essay on Overcoming Metaphysics (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982), pp. 100-1, 117-21. 2 Ibid., p. 199. 415 416 JOHN F. X. KNASAS Also: Hence, St. Thomas takes the being, not in its very Being-that is, in its quiet emergence into manifestness-but in its character as something created.3 Then: The metaphysics of actualitas is basically at odds with the meditative savoring of the original sense of Being as presencing.4 Finally: The early Greek experience of Anwesen, of the simple emergence of things into the light, differs fundamentally from St. Thomas's metaphysics of actuality and science of first causes.5 Caputo's conclusion is that one cannot accept Heidegger's criteria of S eindenken and think that Aquinas meets them.6 But a Gilsonian might humbly take Caputo's correction and still feel constrained to note that if the issue is being in the sense of presencing, then another portion of Aquinas's philosophical doctrine becomes relevant, viz., Aquinas's elaboration of the mechanics of cognition. In sum, things are present to us insofar as our form has been informed by their forms. Formal reception of form allows us to become the really other without loss to ourselves. We are then sufficiently actuated to cause the presence of the real as the term of our cognitional activity.7 a Ibid., p. 200. ' Ibid., p. 201. s Ibid., p. 209. 6 Ibid. 7 " ••• knowing beings are distinguished from non-knowing beings in that the latter possess only their own form ; whereas the knowing being is naturally adapted to have also the form of some other thing, for the species of the thing known is in the knower. Hence, it is manifest that the nature of a non-knowing being is more contracted and limited; whereas the nature of a knowing being has a greater amplitude and extension. That is why the Philosopher says that the soul is in a sense all things." Thomas Aquinas, ST I, 14, 2c, ed. Anton Pegis, The Basic Writings of St. Thomas Aquinas (New York: Random House, 1945), Vol. I, p. 136. On the Aristotelian background, see Joseph Owens, " Aristotelian Soul as Cognitive of Sensibles, Intelligibles and Self," Aristotle: The Collected Papers of Joseph Owens, ed. John R. Catan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981), pp. 81-98. A GILSONIAN REPLY TO HEIDEGGER 417 Once more, however, I believe that we have philosophers speaking past each other. For Heidegger believes that presencing requires an understanding of being as an a priori condition. Many texts to this effect exist. One of the most striking is from Heidegger's The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (1927). I would like to quote it at length. In... (shrink)

This text is a reply to Dana S. Belu's Heidegger, Reproductive Technology, and the Motherless Age, as part of an Author Meets Critics panel at the 2021 Heidegger Circle, hosted by Roisin Lally at Gonzaga University.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: I would like to begin by thanking the Journal of Japanese Philosophy for making space in these pages for a review of my monograph Watsuji on Nature: Japanese Philosophy in the Wake of Heidegger. Although book reviews do not usually receive a reply from the author—much less one as lengthy as the article that follows—one seemed necessary in this instance because my ideas, unfortunately, have been (...) seriously mis-represented here. Moreover, the number and kinds of misreadings, mistakes, misunderstandings, and omissions are so extensive that even a brief attempt to address the main points at issue is no small task. But the primary problem is that the reviewer contends that I say the opposite of what I actually maintain with regard to some of the central claims of the book. These mistaken assertions are primarily the consequence of a failure to understand crucial philosophical concepts (especially metaphysical nondualism, being-in-the-world, intentionality, and disclosure). But they also stem from a series of errors ranging from the exclusion of some of the fundamental ideas and arguments of the book to the misreading of pivotal claims and the mistranslation of the Japanese-language primary sources.I begin with a single but telling example that is characteristic of the way the reviewer repeatedly portrays me as saying the opposite of what I actually say. Droz states that “For Johnson, while human beings taken collectively as a whole have the capacity to transcend the fūdo, individual human beings apparently do not” (Droz, 133). But what I actually say is that Watsuji “has not shown that this same capacity belongs to the individual human being” (Johnson, 191). I then give a series of examples of individual transcendence: “the forms of transcendence that are evident in, for example, the complex identities of immigrants, of those who have lived in multiple countries, of those who live in multiple milieus at the same time [...] of those who develop a very different character from their compatriots even as they live together in the same place” (Johnson, 191). [End Page 167] I go on to point out that “we also need a subtler account, on a much smaller scale, of the ways the self is both constituted by and is also able to transcend its fūdo. In what follows we will give an indication of some of the issues involved” (Johnson, 191). I then proceed to give such an overview, concluding with the point that “the strong identification with one aspect of one’s milieu rather than another shows that the self is much more than the simple expression of its fūdo. This form of transcendence, I suggest, can be studied with profit as an instance of what Watsuji calls the individual dimension of human beings” (Johnson, 192).Misrepresentations of this sort abound. The most serious instance of this kind concerns one of the central theses of this study. At the beginning of her review, the author purports to recount two criteria that I propose “to clarify what the philosophical concept of fūdo entails” (Droz, 129). But in fact, I list four criteria under two distinct categories. First, in order to determine the scope and boundaries of a fūdo, I propose the following two criteria:1. certain regions as articulated wholes found in nature itself, which is what Watsuji attempts to articulate with his taxonomy of basic types of fūdo (Johnson, 34).2. a relational whole of disclosure, self-interpretation, and natural locale (Johnson, 34).But the reviewer takes note of (1) and passes over (2) in silence—this omission is significant and, as we will see shortly, it leads her into later difficulties. Droz instead moves directly to a second topic, namely, what I intend by the term nature, which is a concept found in both of these criteria. Here I follow Mill in thinking that we need some way to distinguish between nature and nonnature if nature is not simply to be equated with everything. I therefore propose two criteria that we might use to distinguish nature from artifice within a fūdo: A. nature as all-encompassing space and place B. the sheerly given self-unfolding of things . (shrink)

Vallicella argued that Heidegger's idealism is incoherent but that absolute idealism is coherent. I argue the reverse. There is no contradiction in the supposition that Being is dependent upon Dasein, that entities are dependent upon Being, and therefore that all entities are dependent upon Dasein. This may be false, but it is consistent. The absolute idealism of Fichte and the like is incoherent, however, because it supposes that all human minds are but representations in the Absolute Mind, and it (...) is impossible for a mind to be nothing but a representation in another Mind. (shrink)

This essay responds to Jeff Malpas's foregoing article, itself written in response to my various publications over the past two decades concerning Donald Davidson's ideas about truth, meaning, and interpretation. It has to do mainly with our disagreement as regards the substantive content of Davidson's truth-based semantic approach in relation to the problematic legacy of logical empiricism, including Quine's incisive but no less problematical critique of that legacy. I also raise questions with respect to Malpas's coupling of Davidson with (...) class='Hi'>Heidegger, intended to provide a more adequate depth-ontological grounding for the formalized (logico-semantic) conception of truth that Davidson adopts from Tarski. My essay then argues the case for an outlook of objectivist causal realism joined with a theory of inference to the best, most rational explanation that would satisfy this need in more philosophically (as well as scientifically) accountable terms. (shrink)

A piece of wax—typically of a spherical shape—has been evoked occasionally as an apt example of how our engagement with the commonest everyday object may constitute a “raw” yet unexpectedly rich (and taxing) experience, from the Aristotelian discourse of Περὶ Ψυχῆς (_On the Soul_) to the ancient Chinese historical treatises, where the technique of making _lajuan _(wax-embraced silk) became a practical metaphor for the low-key transmission of classified information. Using the semi-enclosed, “walled” space—specifically, made of the material of wax from (...) Descartes’ often misread _Meditationes_—as a metaphor of an unlikely shape or structure for inducing the presence of the absent (e.g., memories of personal lives or ancient technology), the paper responds to Hoły-Łuczaj (Philosophy & Technology 36:19, 2023 )’s favorable and subtle touches in the Commentary on the recent study of ancient Eastern measurement and measuring thinking (Philosophy & Technology 36:22, 2023 ; Philosophy & Technology 34(4):785–809, 2021 ) by relating to the childhood experience of living with measuring tools and measuring/measured person(s) (_homō _-_mētiēns_/-_mēnsus_; to be distinguished from the Pythagorean formula of _homo_-_mensura _or man _as _the measure [of everything]). (shrink)

Summary In his paper, Professor Marx explores the connection between morality and the emotions. Though the connection is essential it is not clear that it provides an independent basis for morality. Nor is it clear that dread inspired by the thought of one's own death plays the important role ascribed to it by Professor Marx. Hume's account of sympathy, Aristotle's views on reason and feeling and Heidegger's approach to the topic are discussed briefly.RésuméDans son article, le professeur Marx étudie (...) la connexion entre la moralité et les émotions. Bien que cette connexion soit essentielle, il n'est pas évident qu'elle constitue un fondement indépendant de la moralité. Ni que l'horreur inspirée par la perspective de sa propre mort joue le rǒle important que le professeur Marx lui attribue. Sont aussi brièvement discutés: le recours de Hume à la sympathie, les vues d'Aristote sur la raison et le sentiment, et la manière dont Heidegger aborde le problème.ZusammenfassungProfessor Marx erforscht die Verbindung zwischen Moralität und den Gefühlen. Obschon die Verbindung wesentlich ist, ist es nicht klar, dass sie eine unabhängige Grundlage für Moralität liefert. Ebensowenig ist es klar, dass Furcht vor dem eigenen Tode die wichtige Rolle spielt, die er ihr zuschreibt. Humes Ausführungen über Sympathie, Aristoteles' Auffassung von Vernunft und Gefühle und Heideggers Ansicht zu diesem Thema werden kurz diskutiert. (shrink)

My book seeks to carve out a new way to examine affectivity, by using interdisciplinary methods for scholarship of affectivity, and by focusing on specific, concrete, material interfaces: in plants, birds, placentas, human skin, and, finally, soil. In my response to Florian Grosser, Jea Sophia Oh, and Miguel José Paley, I emphasize this focus on local material e-co-affectivity because it explains in large part why I, strategically, (1) have or have not used certain sources or ideas in Aristotle and (...) class='Hi'>Heidegger, and (2) how I see my new research developing and addressing some of the concerns of the respondents regarding the need to tend to the inequities of vulnerability. Moreover, I will try to address (3) questions regarding post-human agency, as well as (4) cross-cultural comparisons with the Chinese concept of wuwei and the Korean concept of jeong (emotions or feeling). I conclude (5) by addressing concerns regarding the meaning of temporality as it is lived on the skin. (shrink)

In what follows, I present my replies to Nicholas Walker, Taylor Carman, and Peter Gordon's reflections on my What Would Be Different? Figures of Possibility in Adorno. I begin by summarizing what is at stake in the book. My reply to Nicholas Walker and Taylor Carman focusses on Adorno's criticisms of Heidegger, who claims that the history of metaphysics has blocked our access to an “other beginning” for thinking. This prepares the ground for a comparison of Adorno's and (...) Heidegger's notions of what I call “blocked possibility.” My reply to Peter Gordon clarifies the relation of “blocked possibility” to actuality and, more specifically, to the actuality of happiness in Adorno's writings. (shrink)

I am impressed by how angry Jonathan Crewe is, but I found his remarks confused and unclear and so I’m uncertain how to reply. Whatever the matter it, he wants “to forestall a sense of academic obligation on anyone’s part to work back to Cavell through Bruns” . God knows this might be a good idea, judging from what James Conant says.Conant’s criticisms are directed at the section of my paper called “The Moral of Skepticism,” which he cannot help (...) wanting to rewrite, since he has a much more intimate grasp of Cavell’s thinking than I have. I imagined myself on the outside of Cavell’s texts, trying to characterize them in a certain way, not on the inside, giving an account of their genesis. Obviously my paper is neither philosophy nor literary criticism but a crossdressing of the two that is bound to make someone like Crewe bite his teeth. I appreciate Conant’s forbearance. Gerald L. Bruns is William and Hazel White Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Notre Dame. His most recent book is Heidegger’s Estrangements: Language, Truth, and Poetry in the Later Writings. (shrink)

"The letters touch on many points of philosophical interest to both men, yet only hint at the political turmoil that swirled around them. They discuss how they came to see themselves as personally connected but publicly misidentified as "existentialists." There are also many illuminating exchanges concerning Hannah Arendt, Karl Lowith, Max Weber, Edmund Husserl, and others. Editors Walter Biemel and Hans Saner provide a wealth of references and annotations that make these personal letters accessible to contemporary readers."--BOOK JACKET.

This chapter provides an interpretation of the early Heidegger’s underdeveloped conception of the undistinguishedness of everyday human existence in Being and Time. After explaining why certain translation choices of some key terms in this text are interpretively and philosophically important, I first provide a concise argument for why the social constitution interpretation of the relation between ownedness and unownedness makes better overall sense of Heidegger’s ambivalent attitude toward the social constitution of the human being than the standard existentialist (...) interpretation of this relation. I then proceed to the heart of this chapter, which develops his inchoate conception of the undistinguishedness of everydayness by arguing that it specifies the third distinctive mode of concrete human existence in addition to ownedness and unownedness. Accordingly, I show how unownedness is actually a generic phenomenon with two distinct species, namely, undistinguishedness and disownedness, which are at once closely related to, but also differ in significant respects from, each other. Consequently, instead of taking for granted a one-dimensional and mutually exclusive opposition between ‘authenticity’ and ‘inauthenticity’, I argue that we should adopt a two-dimensional and more nuanced understanding of the relations among undistinguishedness, disownedness, and ownedness that intersects with Heidegger’s underappreciated distinction between genuineness and ungenuineness. After raising and replying to some objections to this interpretation of undistinguishedness, I conclude this chapter by briefly sketching three of its philosophical consequences and pointing out its potential as an important resource for contemporary social theories. (shrink)

In part I I reply to Seymour Feldman's criticism of volume 1 of The Marrano of Reason. I try to show that Professor Feldman misreads me, first, by overlooking the transformation of Spinoza's Marrano traits from the world of religion to the world of reason; second, by failing to recognize the diversity of Marrano responses as part of my own thesis; and thirdly, by paying no heed to the mental (or, phenomenological) structures and analysis upon which a good deal (...) of my argument relies. Since many of Feldman's particular points hinge upon the first two points, I need not address each item separately. This leaves a few smaller points. I also restate the methodological boundaries of my ?Marrano? thesis, what the book does and does not do. In parts II and III I respond to criticisms on volume 2 of The Adventures of Immanence from Henry Allison and Richard Schacht. I admit the book calls for a chapter on Lessing and the Pantheismusstreit, and also on existentialists like Sartre (and Heidegger too), though not Kierkegaard. I defend, against Allison, my not self?evident decision to include Kant, whose position I characterize as ?immanent humanism?. Although Kant opposed reason to nature, his revolution made the human mind, rather than a transcendent God, the source of objectivity in knowledge, morality in action, legitimacy in politics, and even sanctity in religion. I also defend my reconstruction of Marx's immanentist ontology. I further clarify two crucial distinctions: a philosophy of immanence is not necessarily the same as ?Spinozism?, and is not necessarily critical. Hence my protagonists need not be strict Spinozists, or critical philosophers, to figure in the ?adventures of immanence?. My debate with Schacht concerns the question whether Nietzsche and Marx saw the immanent world as divine (which I deny); the place of pantheism in these thinkers (in Nietzsche I see it as a temptation which amor fati has to overcome); and whether Hegel's discovery of the role of the social world in mediating knowledge depended on his metaphysical anthropomorphism (viewing the immanent domain as subject and Spirit, and assigning the human race a privileged ontological ? and theological ? role in it: I deny that dependence). Finally, in the reply to both Allison and Schacht I rephrase my criticism of Nietzsche's ?cult of transitoriness and explain my preference for ?tentative rationality"? (shrink)

A feminist reading of how Heidegger may have responded to an unanswered questioned he posed in 1923, "Problem: What is woman?" while using his thought to better understand how contemporary society replies to questions in the realms of law, bioethics, pedagogy, and politics.

In my reply to the commentaries by Babette Babich and Robert C. Scharff I make a distinction between critical remarks and additions that are relevant for my view on philosophy for substantive reasons and others that relate to a style or way of philosophizing. My reply to Scharff concerns the latter. I continue to defend an updated version of Heidegger’s thinking about technology, which I bring together with elements from the work of Don Ihde and Andrew Feenberg. (...) I read all this from the perspective of a neo-pragmatist way of philosophizing, explicitly inspired by Richard Rorty. (shrink)

This collection of texts is Heidegger's first post-war book and contains some of the major expositions of his later philosophy. Of particular note are 'The Origin of the Work of Art', perhaps the most discussed of all of Heidegger's essays, and 'Nietzsche's Word 'God is Dead',' which sums up a decade of Nietzsche research. Although translations of the essays have appeared individually in a variety of places, this is the first English translation to bring them all together as (...) Heidegger intended. The text is taken from the last edition of the work, which contains the author's final corrections together with important marginal annotations that provide considerable insight into the development of his thought. This fresh and accurate new translation will be an invaluable resource for all students of Heidegger, whether they work in philosophy, literary theory, religious studies, or intellectual history. (shrink)

In this article, I address (1) the anti-academic procedures by which Professor Thomas Sheehan affirms that I “continue” a “scam,” before (2) presenting in a greater detail my work on the notion of being as a code name (Deckname) in Heidegger. In sections 3, 4, and 5, I analyze the way in which Sheehan authoritatively hollows out the state of the debate around the interpretation of Heidegger and the weakness of his philological interpretation. Finally, in the last section, (...) I return to the necessity of the research that Sheehan’s “Emmanuel Faye: The Introduction of Fraud Into Philosophy?” attempts to discredit. (shrink)

For your students, celebrating this day is a source of rare and pure joy. The only way we can be adequate to this occasion is to let the gratitude that we owe you become the fundamental mood suffusing everything from beginning to end. In keeping with a beautiful tradition, today on this celebratory occasion we offer you as our gift this slender volume of a few short essays. In no way could this ever be an adequate return for all that (...) you, our teacher, have lavished upon us, and awakened and nourished in us. In the coming days many will try to survey your work in philosophy and to evaluate its impact and effect on various scales. In so doing, they will bring to mind many things that we should not forget. However, that way of parceling out a person's intellectual impact and of calculating the influence of his writings fails to grasp the essential matter for which we owe you our thanks. That essential element will not be found by considering how fruitful your teaching career has been. Surely such effectiveness will continue to be the prerogative and good fortune of every professor as long as German university escapes the doom of getting turned into a mind-numbing trade school. No, the essence of your leadership consists in something else, namely that the content and style of your questioning immediately forces each of us into an intense, critical dialogue, and it demands that we always be ready to reverse or even abandon our position. There is no guarantee, of course, that any of us will find our way to the one thing that, so unpretentously, your work sought to lead us to: that releasement in which one is seasoned and ready for the problems.2 So too the works we present to you are mere witnesses to the fact that we wanted to follow your guidance, not proof that we succeeded in becoming your disciples.3 But there is one thing we will retain as a lasting possession: Each of us who had the privilege of following in your footsteps was confronted by you, our esteemed teacher, with the option either of becoming the steward of essential matters or of working against them. On this celebratory occasion, as we view your philosophical existence in this light, we also acquire secure points of reference for giving a true assessment of the value of your work in philosophy. Does it consist in the fact that some decades ago a new movement emerged in philosophy and gained influence among the then-dominant trends? Or that a new method was added to the list of previous ones? Or that long-forgotten problem-areas got reworked.. (shrink)

Long awaited and eagerly anticipated, this remarkable volume allows English-speaking readers to experience a profound dialogue between the German philosopher Martin Heidegger and the Swiss psychiatrist Medard Boss.

In his critique of my book Heidegger and Marcuse, Jeff Kochan (2006) asserts that I am committed to the possibility of private knowledge, transcendent truths, and individualism. In this reply I argue that he has misinterpreted my analysis of the Challenger disaster and Marcuse’s work. Because I do not dismiss Roger Boisjoly’s doubts about the Challenger launch, Kochan believes that I have abandoned a social concept of knowledge for a reliance on the private knowledge of a single individual. (...) In fact, I consider Boisjoly’s observations just as social, if not as scientific, as the results of rigorous scientific study. Kochan’s reliance on a principle of symmetry derived from science studies to explain such politically charged technological controversies tends to mask the role of power and ideology in social life. Kochan interprets Marcuse as a failed Heideggerian who regresses from Heidegger’s social conception of human being to traditional individualism. I am accused of sharing this view. This interpretation overlooks the importance of the Hegelian–Marxist category of ‘real possibility’ in Marcuse’s work and so mistakes his critique of conformist politics for individualist romanticism. Marcuse always attempted to ground radical opposition in a community of struggle without abandoning the heritage of a long critical tradition. This view I willingly share. Keywords: Philosophy of technology; Principle of symmetry; Challenger disaster; Herbert Marcuse; Martin Heidegger; Knowledge . (shrink)

This is the first English translation of the seminar Martin Heidegger gave during the Winter of 1934-35, which dealt with Hegel's Philosophy of Right. This remarkable text is the only one in which Heidegger interprets Hegel's masterpiece in the tradition of Continental political philosophy while offering a glimpse into Heidegger's own political thought following his engagement with Nazism. It also confronts the ideas of Carl Schmitt, allowing readers to reconstruct the relation between politics and ontology. The book (...) is enriched by a collection of interpretations of the seminar, written by select European and North American political thinkers and philosophers. Their essays aim to make the seminar accessible to students of political theory and philosophy, as well as to open new directions for debating the relation between the two disciplines. A unique contribution, this volume makes available key lectures by Heidegger that will interest a wide readership of students and scholars. (shrink)

PHILOSOPHERS WHO ENVY scientists think that philosophy should deal only with problems formulated in neutral terms—terms satisfactory to all those who argue for competing solutions. Without common problems and without argument, it would seem, we have no professional discipline, nor even a method for disciplining our own thoughts. Without discipline, we presumably have mysticism, or poetry, or inspiration—at any rate, something which permits an escape from our intellectual responsibilities. Heidegger is frequently criticized for having avoided these responsibilities. His defenders (...) reply that what he has avoided is not the responsibility of the thinker, but simply the tradition of "metaphysics" or "ontology." Consider the following typical passage. (shrink)

This essay originated as a reply to Richard Rorty's ”Habermas, Derrida, and the Functions of Philosophy“. In it, I contest Rorty's deployment of the categories of private selfcreation and the collective political enterprise of increasing freedom, first developed in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, to demonstrate that the philosophical projects of Habermas and Derrida are complementary rather than antagonistic. The focus of my critique is two-fold: firstly, I contend that so-called critiques of metaphysics are always simutaneously engaging with some form (...) of social domination or disintegration (e.g. nihilism or societal rationalization); secondly, I argue that the fault-line in Rorty's thought that structures his categories is his, Davidson inspired, naturalized philosophy of language. This philosophy of language falls afoul of Heidegger's analysis of the present-to-hand. (shrink)

Contributing to a greater understanding of German intellectual and cultural history, this essential volume presents for the first time a definitive collection of the extended academic and personal correspondence between Martin Heidegger and his student Karl Löwith.

This work is central to Heidegger's overall project of reinterpreting Western thought in terms of time and truth.

This collection of texts (originally published in German under the title Holzwege) is Heidegger's first post-war book and contains some of the major expositions of his later philosophy. Of particular note are 'The Origin of the Work of Art', perhaps the most discussed of all of Heidegger's essays, and 'Nietzsche's Word 'God is Dead',' which sums up a decade of Nietzsche research. Although translations of the essays have appeared individually in a variety of places, this is the first (...) English translation to bring them all together as Heidegger intended. The text is taken from the last edition of the work, which contains the author's final corrections together with important marginal annotations that provide considerable insight into the development of his thought. This fresh and accurate new translation will be an invaluable resource for all students of Heidegger, whether they work in philosophy, literary theory, religious studies, or intellectual history. (shrink)

Discourse on Thinking questions that must occur to us the moment we manage to see a familiar situation in unfamiliar light.

Offering a full-scale study of the theory of reality hidden beneath modern logic, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, a lecture course given in 1928, illuminates the transitional phase in Heidegger's thought from the existential analysis of Being and Time to the overcoming of metaphysics in his later philosophy. In a searching exposition of the metaphysical problems underpinning Leibniz's theory of logical judgment, Heidegger establishes that a given theory of logic is rooted in a certain conception of Being. He (...) explores the significance of Western logic as a system-building technical tool and as a cultural phenomenon that is centuries old. (shrink)

First published in German in 1984 as volume 45 of Martin Heidegger’s collected works, this book is the first English translation of a lecture course he presented at the University of Freiburg in 1937–1938. Heidegger’s task here is to reassert the question of the essence of truth, not as a "problem" or as a matter of "logic," but precisely as a genuine philosophical question, in fact the one basic question of philosophy. Thus, this course is about the essence (...) of truth and the essence of philosophy. On both sides Heidegger draws extensively upon the ancient Greeks, on their understanding of truth as aletheia and their determination of the beginning of philosophy as the disposition of wonder. In addition, these lectures were presented at the time that Heidegger was composing his second magnum opus, Beiträge zur Philosophie, and provide the single best introduction to that complex and crucial text. (shrink)

1. Thomson's critique: Despite the efforts of his followers to show that Heidegger had a progressive theory of technology, his work is clouded by nostalgia. His positive contribution is a fragmentary opening toward a phenomenology of daily technical practice, which I use to develop de Certeau's distinction between the strategic control of technical systems and their tactical usage by subordinates. Heidegger himself made no such application of his own phenomenological approach. 2. Stump's critique: Can an ontological essentialism and (...) a historically oriented constructivism be combined as Questioning Technology attempts to do? Stump claims they cannot, but assumes that I accept far more ontological and epistemological baggage from each position than I do. In fact, what I retain from essentialism is primarily the analysis of the basic technical relation to reality, and from constructivism, historical and hermeneutic methods of analysis of the realization of that relation in actual systems and devices. These elements of the two theories are compatible. (shrink)

1. The opening sentences of Being and Time (§1) indicate that, according to Heidegger, Plato and Aristotle raised the question of being. A page later, Heidegger asserts that Aristotle discovered th...

I am trying...to go back through all those places where I was exiled-enclosed so he could constitute his there. To read his text to try to take back from it what he took from me irrecoverably...I am trying to re-discover the possibility of a relation to air. Don’t I need one, well before starting to speak?

Time and being.--Summary of a seminar on the lecture "Time and being."--The end of philosophy and the task of thinking.--My way to phenomenology.

The Concept of Time presents the reconstructed text of a lecture delivered by Martin Heidegger to the Marburg Theological Society in 1924. It offers a fascinating insight into the developmental years leading up to the publication, in 1927, of his magnum opus Being and Time, itself one of the most influential philosophical works this century. In The Concept of Time Heidegger introduces many of the central themes of his analyses of human existence which were subsequently incorporated into Being (...) and Time, themes such as Dasein, Being-in-the-world, everydayness, disposition, care, authenticity, death, uncanniness, temporality and historicity. Starting out by asking: What is time?, Heidegger proceeds to radicalise the concept of time and our relation to it, ending with the question: Are we ourselves time? Am I time? (shrink)

The text of Martin Heidegger’s 1927–28 university lecture course on Emmanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason presents a close interpretive reading of the first two parts of this masterpiece of modern philosophy. In this course, Heidegger continues the task he enunciated in Being and Time as the problem of dismatling the history of ontology, using temporality as a clue. Within this context the relation between philosophy, ontology, and fundamental ontology is shown to be rooted in the genesis of (...) the modern mathematical sciences. Heidegger demonstrates that objectification of beings as beings is inseparable from knowledge a priori, the central problem of Kant’s Critique. He concludes that objectification rests on the productive power of imagination, a process that involves temporality, which is the basic constitution of humans as beings. (shrink)

Joan Stambaugh's translations of the works of Heidegger, accomplished with his guidance, have made key aspects of his thought and philosophy accessible to readers of English for many years. This collection, writes Stambaugh, contains Heidegger's attempt "to show the history of Being as metaphysics," combining three chapters from the philosopher's Nietzsche ("Metaphysics as a History of Being," "Sketches for a History of Being as Metaphysics," and "Recollection in Metaphysics") with a selection from Vortrage und Aufsatze ("Overcoming Metaphysics").

First published in German in 1995, volume 77 of Heidegger's Complete Works consists of three imaginary conversations written as World War II was coming to an end. Composed at a crucial moment in history and in Heidegger's own thinking, these conversations present meditations on science and technology; the devastation of nature, the war, and evil; and the possibility of release from representational thinking into a more authentic relation with being and the world. The first conversation involves a scientist, (...) a scholar, and a guide walking together on a country path; the second takes place between a teacher and a tower-warden, and the third features a younger man and an older man in a prisoner-of-war camp in Russia, where Heidegger's two sons were missing in action. Unique because of their conversational style, the lucid and precise translation of these texts offers insight into the issues that engaged Heidegger's wartime and postwar thinking. (shrink)

John Macquarrie's Hensley Henson Lectures for 1993-94 delivered at the University of Oxford may serve two different but not mutually exclusive audiences. First, as a brief, concise, reliable, and yet not uncritical survey of Heidegger's thought from Being and Time through his later meditative thinking of Being, this book stands at the top of my list. Following a discussion of Heidegger's career and early writings, Macquarrie devotes two chapters to his major work, Being and Time. He makes it (...) clear that Heidegger was primarily concerned with developing a general ontology, not philosophical anthropology as many persons initially thought. The fourth chapter, entitled "Theology and Metaphysics," focuses in particular on the essay "What Is Metaphysics?" including the later postscript and introduction, Introduction to Metaphysics, and A Letter on Humanism. These works take up some of the issues unfinished in Heidegger's major work and point the way towards a more direct focus on the question of Being itself. Chapter 5 is concerned with Heidegger's reflections on thinghood, technology, and art showing his development beyond the primarily instrumental world of work in his early writings to a much richer, perhaps even spiritual conception of world. In chapter 6 Macquarrie discusses three closely related topics in Heidegger's later work, thinking, language, and poetry. Here we see Heidegger's progression beyond traditional philosophical and metaphysical thinking of Being to what he calls meditative thinking, a kind of thinking and speaking of Being that has much in common with poetic thinking and speaking and an understanding of Being that finds parallels in some western and eastern mystical traditions. For the title of his seventh chapter, Macquarrie chooses the title of the well-known interview with Heidegger, "Only A God Can Save Us," published in Der Spiegel after his death. He is primarily concerned in this chapter with the understanding of Being, theology, and God. Macquarrie delays until his final chapter the discussion of Heidegger's relation to National Socialism which comprises half of the Der Spiegel article. With characteristic balance Macquarrie argues that although Heidegger's conduct at the time should not be excused or glossed over it needs to be seen in the particular historical and political context which he outlines. To this he adds two personal notes based on his experiences with German prisoners following the cessation of hostilities in 1945 and a conversation with Hannah Arendt. The conversation with Hannah Arendt took place at Heathrow Airport on May 19, 1973 where Dr. Arendt was on her way to Europe for her summer holiday. Heidegger had suggested that Edward Robinson and Macquarrie consult with Arendt if they had any special difficulties translating Being and Time, and Macquarrie and she continued to have contacts following the completion of the translation. Their conversation turned to the sales of the translation of Being and Time which had been quite large, and Macquarrie commented that Heidegger must be making a good bit of money from the translation. Arendt replied that Heidegger was not much of a business man and that most of the money went to the publisher. Macquarrie then asked, "Would you say then that it was because he is not a man of affairs that he became so involved with the Nazis in 1933?" "Yes," she said, "quite so.". (shrink)

Publisher's description: The Phenomenology of Religious Life presents the text of Heidegger's important 1920621 lectures on religion. First published in 1995 as volume 60 of the Gesamtausgabe, the work reveals a young Heidegger searching for the striking language that eventually formed the mature expression of his thought. The volume consists of the famous lecture course "Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion," a course on "Augustine and Neoplatonism," and notes for a course on "The Philosophical Foundations of Medieval Mysticism" (...) that was never delivered. Heidegger's engagements with Aristotle, St. Paul, Augustine, and Luther give readers a sense of what phenomenology would come to mean in his later works. Here, Heidegger reveals an impressive display of theological knowledge, protecting Christian life experience from Greek philosophy and defending Paul against Nietzsche. The appearance of this first English translation marks a significant event in Heidegger scholarship and affords a unique look into his phenomenology. (shrink)

This “excellent translation” of Heidegger’s writings on Hegel shows an essential engagement between two of the foundational thinkers of phenomenology (Phenomenological Reviews). While Martin Heidegger’s writings on Hegel are notoriously difficult, this volume provides a clear and careful translation of two important texts—a treatise on negativity, and a penetrating reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. In these stimulating works, Heidegger relates his interpretation of Hegel to his own thought on the event, taking up themes developed in Contributions (...) to Philosophy. While many parts of the text are fragmentary in nature, these interpretations are considered some of the most significant as they bring Hegel into Heidegger’s philosophical trajectory. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger is one of the most important and influential philosophers of the 20th Century. A major figure in the development of phenomenology, his work also profoundly influenced many of the intellectual movements that followed in his wake, from Sartre's Existentialism to Derrida's deconstructionism. Towards the Definition of Philosophy brings together two seminal lectures that mark a breakthrough moment in Heidegger's thought and introduces the major themes that he would develop in his opus Being and Time.

The present study compares the philosophy of Leibniz with Heidegger’s thought, in particular his analysis of the principium reddendae rationis sufficientis, the so-called principle of reason: nihil est sine ratione. Early on, the author notes that this version of what Leibniz referred to, in 1686, in a letter to Antoine Arnauld as “my great principle” was for Leibniz merely a “vulgar axiom,” the fundamental form of which “[is that] whereby one can always account for why something has happened this (...) way rather than in some other way”. Heidegger, for his part, finds philosophical meat precisely in the modifying phrase “[in] this way rather than in some other way,” not in the traditional “axiom” that “nothing is without a reason”. Although Leibniz does not give the principium in its pure form in the text cited by Cristin, we are to understand that it is a metaphysical principle, not a logical principle. It is not, however, the principle of causality, which demands an answer to the question about why things are, but rather an ontological principle, which shows that and how things are as they are and not otherwise. The foundation of things, which is expressed in Leibniz’s “great principle,” is like the rose spoken of in a line from Johannes Scheffler’s Cherubinischer Wandersmann that Heidegger admired so much: “The rose is without a ‘why’; it blooms because [weil] it blooms”. Like the rose, the nature of the foundation is not gained by asking “Why?” Yet how can that be? What is more fundamental than asking about etiology, reasons, or grounds? In Der Satz vom Grund [The Principle of Ground], a lecture course from 1955/56, Heidegger replies: “The Why [Warum] looks for [sucht] the foundation. The While [Weil] brings about [bringt] the foundation”. Incidentally, when Heidegger makes a noun from the adverb “weil” in this text, he restores the original meaning of the adverb, which is an abbreviated form of “dieweil,” meaning a span of time. In so doing, he points to the temporal nature of the foundation. We can now better understand how, for Heidegger, the principle of the foundation should not be understood as a proposition or utterance, but rather as something like a tempo marking that leads thinking along its path. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger’s 1934–1935 lectures on Friedrich Hölderlin’s hymns "Germania" and "The Rhine" are considered the most significant among Heidegger’s lectures on Hölderlin. Coming at a crucial time in his career, the text illustrates Heidegger’s turn toward language, art, and poetry while reflecting his despair at his failure to revolutionize the German university and his hope for a more profound revolution through the German language, guided by Hölderlin’s poetry. These lectures are important for understanding Heidegger’s changing relation (...) to politics, his turn toward Nietzsche, his thinking about the German language, and his breakthrough to a new kind of poetic thinking. First published in 1980 as volume 39 of Heidegger’s Complete Works, this graceful and rigorous English-language translation will be widely discussed in continental philosophy and literary theory. (shrink)

Despite its draft character, the Marburg lecture from the summer semester of 1926 can rightly be regarded as Heidegger's version of a philosophizing passage through the history of Greek philosophy up to Aristotle, which was attempted in the thinking phase of Being and Time. Entirely in line with the historical understanding of being and time, these interpretations aim to repeat the crucial beginning of Western philosophy as an ever richer and more differentiated process of discovering being from beings, because (...) only in this way can contemporary philosophy adequately explore its possibilities for questioning can acquire.In contrast to the later understanding, which interprets the history of Greek philosophy as a movement of disintegration of an original affirmation of being, Heidegger sees in the present lecture an ascending movement of the self-development of the idea of ​​being towards the climax in Aristotelian philosophy. The lecture is proof that Heidegger's way of formulating and developing the concept of being originates to a significant extent from dealing with history, the forms of thought and the basic concepts of Greek philosophy.[Publisher's synopsis]. (shrink)

Volume 18 of Martin Heidegger's collected works presents his important 1924 Marburg lectures which anticipate much of the revolutionary thinking that he subsequently articulated in Being and Time. Here are the seeds of the ideas that would become Heidegger's unique phenomenology. Heidegger interprets Aristotle's Rhetoric and looks closely at the Greek notion of pathos. These lectures offer special insight into the development of his concepts of care and concern, being-at-hand, being-in-the-world, and attunement, which were later elaborated in (...) Being and Time. Available in English for the first time, they make a significant contribution to ancient philosophy, Aristotle studies, Continental philosophy, and phenomenology. (shrink)