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)

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)

"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.

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.

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)

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)

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.

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)

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?

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)

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.

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)

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").

In this essay, a translation into English of Martin Heidegger's paper Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry, Paul de Man demonstrates his significant engagement with the work of Heidegger. He considers Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin's five key-passages on the subject of poetry, suggesting that the order in which these passages appear as well as the inner coherence that links them together will reveal the essence of poetry. He first comments on Hölderlin's claim that poetry is ‘the most innocent (...) of all crafts’ and goes on to discuss the four other key-passages: ‘Therefore, man was given language, the perilous of all blessings... that he bear witness to what he is... ’; ‘There is much that men have experienced. They have called the many of the heavenly by name, since we are an exchange of words, and one can hear from another’; ‘The poets found what will endure’; ‘With merit, and yet poetically, man dwells on this earth’. (shrink)

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)

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)

The volume contains an interpretation of Schelling's treatise on freedom from the summer semester of 1936. In the first part of the lecture, Heidegger, following Schelling's introduction, discusses the possibility of a system of freedom in view of the apparent incompatibility of system and freedom. The clarification of the term pantheism serves as a guide to the question of the principle of system formation, in particular of German idealism.It shows that the formal concept of freedom achieved by idealism is (...) not sufficient to grasp the fact of human freedom, a freedom to do good and evil. The question of the inner possibility and the nature of the reality of evil requires a new approach. Schelling finds it in the distinction between ground and existence, which Heidegger calls Seynsfuge, and from this develops his metaphysics of evil. The second part of the interpretation applies to you. Later marginal notes by Heidegger on a copy of the copy have been included as marginalia. They underline the intention of the interpretation: the emphasis of the ontological topic and the collection of all questions towards the question of being.[Publisher's synopsis]. (shrink)

Heidegger reflects on technology, language, and tradition, and he guides us into rethinking the common conceptions of technology and language. He argues that the anthropological-instrumental conception of modem technology is correct but not true, as it does not capture what is most peculiar to technology: the demand to challenge nature. The common conception of language as a mere means for exchange and understanding, on the other hand, is taken to its extremes in the technological interpretation of language as information. (...) Heidegger also argues that the technological transformation of language represents an attack on what is peculiar to language as saying, i.e., as letting-appear. Such attack constitutes a threat to our very essence. The traditional or non-technologized everyday language, however, preserves what is original and contains new possibilities. The opposition between traditional language and technological language thus concerns our essence, our world-relation and world-living. (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)

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)

Nature, History, State: 1933-1934 presents the first complete English-language translation of Heidegger's seminar 'On the Essence and Concepts of Nature, History and State', together with full introductory material and interpretive essays by five leading thinkers and scholars: Robert Bernasconi, Peter Eli Gordon, Marion Heinz, Theodore Kisiel and Slavoj Žižek. The seminar, which was held while Heidegger was serving as National Socialist rector of the University of Freiburg, represents important evidence of the development of Heidegger's political thought. The (...) text consists of ten 'protocols' on the seminar sessions, composed by students and reviewed by Heidegger. The first session's protocol is a rather personal commentary on the atmosphere in the classroom, but the remainder have every appearance of being faithful transcripts of Heidegger's words, in which he raises a variety of fundamental questions about nature, history and the state. The seminar culminates in an attempt to sketch a political philosophy that supports the 'Führer state'. The text is important evidence for anyone considering the tortured question of Heidegger's Nazism and its connection to his philosophy in general. (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)

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.

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.

Basic Concepts of Ancient Philosophy presents a lecture course given by Martin Heidegger in 1926 at the University of Marburg. First published in German as volume 22 of the collected works, the book provides Heidegger's most systematic history of Ancient philosophy beginning with Thales and ending with Aristotle. In this lecture, which coincides with the completion of his most important work, Being and Time, Heidegger is working out a way to sharply differentiate between beings and Being. Richard (...) Rojcewicz's clear and accurate translation offers English-speaking readers valuable insight into Heidegger's views on Ancient thought and concepts such as principle, cause, nature, unity, multiplicity, Logos, truth, science, soul, category, and motion. (shrink)

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

On May 18, 1958, Martin Heidegger led a one-day colloquium in Freiburg on the topic of “Art and Thinking” together with Shin’ichi Hisamatsu, the Japanese philosopher and Buddhist scholar. The protocol of the colloquium, published in volume 16 of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe, presents a conversation among the colloquium participants about art in the East Asian world. In this conversation, Heidegger is particularly interested in hearing from Hisamatsu about the conception of art present in the East Asian world prior (...) to the introduction of Western aesthetic concepts and about the relationship between form and formlessness in East Asian aesthetics. The conversation allows Hisamatsu to clarify for the participants what he takes to be the most essential features of Zen art and how these features compare with those found in modern Western abstract art. (shrink)

On May 19th, 1958, the day after Martin Heidegger and Shin’ichi Hisamatsu led a one-day colloquium in Freiburg on the topic of “Art and Thinking,” the two men came together to discuss the success of the colloquium. The conversation soon turned to the work of Paul Klee, the Swiss artist, and from there to the newest developments in Heidegger’s thinking about language. Heidegger had just presented some of this new thinking during his lecture on Stefan George’s poem (...) “Das Wort” in Vienna a week earlier. Having attended the lecture in Vienna, Hisamatsu used the opportunity of the conversation to ask Heidegger for elaboration on this new thinking and to clarify connections between it and language in the Zen tradition. The conversation was transcribed and later published in volume 16 of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe. (shrink)

On the seminar in 1958, Heidegger and Hisamatsu first of all discussed Japanese art. The beauty of Zen work of art, its essence, is revealed in free movement of the original selfhood. If this movement is expressed in terms of fine arts, we get a work of art. However, this presence is not limited to the field of fine arts in terms of art. The highest beauty is sooner to be found where you no longer find the form and (...) structure. (shrink)

Duns Scotus's Doctrine of Categories and Meaning is a key text for the origins of Martin Heidegger's concept of "facticity." Originally submitted as a doctoral thesis in 1915, it focuses on the 13th-century philosopher-theologian John Duns Scotus. Heidegger first analyzes Scotus's doctrine of categories, then offers a meticulous explanation of the Grammatica Speculativa, a work of medieval grammar now known to be authored by the Modist grammarian Thomas of Erfurt. Taken together, these investigations represent an early foray into (...) Heidegger's lifelong philosophical concerns, "the question of being in the guise of the problem of categories and the question of language in the guise of the doctrine of meaning." This new and unique translation of one of Heidegger's earliest works offers an important look at his early thinking before the question of being became his central concern and will appeal to readers exploring Heidegger's philosophical development, medieval philosophy, phenomenological interpretations of the history of philosophy, and the philosophy of language. (shrink)

The texts and notes collected in this volume offer unique insight into the development of Heidegger’s thinking on language and art from the late 1930s to the early 1950s – a tumultuous period both for Heidegger personally and for Germany as a whole. Following Germany’s defeat in WW II, Heidegger was banned from teaching at Freiberg University, where he had been a professor since 1929, and his thinking underwent significant changes as he began to cultivate different modes (...) of silence and non-saying in his philosophy of language. This volume illuminates these shifts and charts the evolution of key terms in Heidegger’s philosophy of language during this key period in the development of his thought. The central theme of Heidegger’s reflections on language in this volume is his repeated engagement with the character of the word, silence and the unsaid, and his rejection of the instrumental conception of language, where he prioritized instead conversation as the ‘homeland of language’. Alongside references to Hölderlin and von Hofmannsthal and shrewd scrutiny of aural phenomena such as silent thought and speechlessness, speech is demonstrated to be intimately connected to human essence. In a later section, Heidegger examines the place of art, in particular the plastic arts, and the role of the artist in conjunction with the new industrial landscape and architecture of his time, and in juxtaposition with ancient Greek attitudes to space and the polis. This key work by Heidegger, now available in English for the first time, will be of great interest to students and scholars of philosophy and to anyone interested in Heidegger’s thought. (shrink)

When Nietzsche asks in his Second Untimely Consideration about the benefits and disadvantages of history for life, he assumes - as Heidegger shows in his interpretation of this work in the seminar in the winter semester of 1938/39 - an ambiguous concept of life. "Life" here means, on the one hand, beings as a whole as all-life and, on the other hand, in an emphatic sense, human life. Against this background, Nietzsche compares man's historical relationship to the past with (...) the animal's relationship to the present. The benchmark here is life in the broader sense, by which the significance of history for human life is to be assessed.But - that is the basic question that Heidegger then asks: Can history be reckoned with life as such in this way? Who or what is man? Is he - as Nietzsche later says - the "as yet unidentified animal" who can both enhance and elevate as well as weaken his life through the various types of history (monumental, antiquarian, critical)? Or isn't he rather the being that "relates" to life through remembering and forgetting, precisely because he is not (only) as an animal rationale a "predator" looking for limitless increase in power and life, but a being that is deeply in the truth of being, and in which "life" in its ambiguity as world, human being, nature, ie as "beings as a whole" is first historically disclosed? As Heidegger suggests, this question is of central importance, not least for the historical examination of the "will to power" of the late Nietzsche. [Publisher's synopsis]. (shrink)

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections (...) in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. (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)

Martin Heidegger's Nietzsche's Second Untimely Meditation presents crucial elements for understanding Heidegger's thinking from 1936 to 1940. Heidegger offers a radically different reading of a text that he had read decades earlier, showing how his relationship with Nietzche's has changed, as well as how his understandings of the differences between animals and humans, temporality and history, and the Western philosophical tradition developed. With his new reading, Heidegger delineates three Nietzschean modes of history, which should be understood (...) as grounded in the structure of temporality or historicity and also offers a metaphysical determination of life and the essence of humankind. Ullrich Hasse and Mark Sinclair offer a clear and accessible translation despite the fragmentary and disjointed quality of the original lecture notes that comprise this text. (shrink)

On the day of German Labor, on the day of the Community of the People, the Rector of Freiburg University, Dr. Marin Heidegger, made his official entry into the National Socialist Party. And so begins one of the most controversial philosophical texts available today. Heidegger, a German Nationalist and proud Nazi, thoroughly examines the history, the philosophy, and the rise to power of the Nazi movement in Germany. Martin Heidegger s distinguished Italian colleague, Professor Benedetto Croce, said (...) of his German contemporary, This man dishonors philosophy and that is an evil for politics too. Croce s severe rebuke was not singular at the time when Hitlerism was rampant over Europe. It is true that among the almost one thousand professional philosophers of Germany and Austria only very few actively opposed National Socialism. On the other hand, no one degraded his historic profession in the manner Heidegger did, by becoming a spokesman for National Socialism and attempting to mold his theories into one pattern with Hitlerism. Heidegger s contribution to the growth and development of National Socialism was immense. In this small anthology Dr. Runes endeavors to point to the utter confusion Heidegger created by drawing, for political and social application of his own existentialism metaphysics, upon the decadent and repulsive brutalization of Hitlerism. Martin Heidegger was a philosopher most known for his contributions to German phenomenological and existential thought. Heidegger was born in rural Messkirch in 1889 to Catholic parents. While studying philosophy and mathematics at Albert-Ludwig University in Freiburg, Heidegger became the assistant for philosopher Edmund Husserl. Influenced by Husserl, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, Heidegger wrote extensively on the quality of Being, including his opus Being and Time. He served as professor of philosophy at Albert-Ludwig University and taught there during the war. In 1933, Heidegger joined the National Socialist German Worker s (or Nazi) Party and expressed his support for Hitler in several articles and speeches. After the war, his support for the Nazi party came under attack, and he was tried as a sympathizer. He was able to return to Albert-Ludwig University, however, and taught there until he retired. Heidegger continued to lecture and write until his death 1973. (shrink)

The question of knowledge - that is the question of truth - has moved Western philosophy from the very beginning, and this question must also show where Nietzsche stands in Western metaphysics: whether he is the perfector of it or whether he overthrows it This end opens up a new beginning. Heidegger's lecture thinks about this decision from the first sentence to the last. Seeing knowledge as a form of the will to power also means demarcating Nietzsche's philosophy from (...) misunderstandings and misinterpretations: Nietzsche's biologism and the relationship between science and philosophy are topics that are fundamentally discussed.The volume is based on the manuscript for the lecture from the summer semester of 1939. It also contains the "repetitions" that are missing from the individual volumes published by Neske in 1961. The version of the last lecture hour, revised in autumn 1940, was included in the appendix, as was a bundle of texts entitled "Notes on Nietzsche". [Publisher's synopsis]. (shrink)

The two treatises The Overcoming of Metaphysics (1938/39) and The Essence of Nihilism (1946-1948) do not belong together temporally or formally, but they are brought together in this volume because they both treat a common thesis from the standpoint of different questions - namely, that nihilism is the essence of metaphysics in relation to the history of being. The overcoming of metaphysics is, for Heidegger, the decisive historical moment in which metaphysics is experienced as the history of the abandonment (...) by being and overcome at the same time. The abandonment of beings by being reveals itself in the final and most extreme intensification of metaphysics as the "unconditioned predominance of manipulation." Manipulation means here the all-dominating producibility of beings. The Essence of Nihilism is linked to the idea of overcoming. This text deals with the attempt to elucidate the essence of nihilism through Nietzsche's words "God is dead." The killing of God springs from the will to power as the most extreme form of manipulation. The being of beings is grasped here as the positing of values emanating from the will to power. In this positing of being as value, it becomes clear that being itself remained unthought in metaphysics. Therefore, metaphysics as such is nihilism proper. These key works by Heidegger, now available in English for the first time, will be of great interest to students and scholars of philosophy and to anyone interested in Heidegger's thought. (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)

Volume 35 of Heidegger's Complete Works comprises a lecture course given at the University of Freiburg in 1932, five years after the publication of Being and Time. During this period, Heidegger was at the height of his creative powers, which are on full display in this clear and imaginative text. In it, Heidegger leads his students in a close reading of two of the earliest philosophical source documents, fragments by Greek thinkers Anaximander and Parmenides. Heidegger develops (...) their common theme of Being and non-being and shows that the question of Being is indeed the origin of Western philosophy. His engagement with these Greek texts is as much of a return to beginnings as it is a potential reawakening of philosophical wonder and inquiry in the present. (shrink)

In this essay, a translation into English of Martin Heidegger's paper Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry, Paul de Man demonstrates his significant engagement with the work of Heidegger. He considers Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin's five key-passages on the subject of poetry, suggesting that the order in which these passages appear as well as the inner coherence that links them together will reveal the essence of poetry. He first comments on Hölderlin's claim that poetry is ‘the most innocent (...) of all crafts’ and goes on to discuss the four other key-passages: ‘Therefore, man was given language, the perilous of all blessings... that he bear witness to what he is... ’; ‘There is much that men have experienced. They have called the many of the heavenly by name, since we are an exchange of words, and one can hear from another’; ‘The poets found what will endure’; ‘With merit, and yet poetically, man dwells on this earth’. (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)

On Inception is a translation of Martin Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe 70. This work belongs to the crucial period, before and during WWII, when Heidegger was at work on a series of treatises that begins with "Contributions to Philosophy" and includes "The Event" and "The History of Beyng." These works are difficult, even hermetic, but represent a crucial development in Heidegger's thinking. On Inception deepens the investigation underway in the other volumes of the series and provides a unique perspective (...) on Heidegger's thinking of Being and of Event. Here, Heidegger asks, with a greater insistence than anywhere else in his work, what it might mean to think of being as event, and not as presence. Event cannot be thought without the sense of a beginning - an inception - and so, Heidegger insists, we must try to think of being as inception, as fundamentally inceptive. On Inception pursues rigorously the difficult and puzzling implications of this speculation. It does not merely extend work already undertaken but also opens doors onto wholly other pathways. (shrink)

Excerpt from Die Kategorien-und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus Die Widmung ist der Ausdruck schuldigen Dankes; sie will aber zugleich bei vollig freier Wahrung des eigenen "standpunktes die Uberzeugung bekunden, da der pro blembewute, weltanschauliche Charakter der. Wert philosophie zu einer entscheidenden Vorwartsbewegung und Vertiefung der philosophischen Problembearbeitung berufen ist. Ihre geistesgeschichtliche Orientierung gibt einen fruchtbaren Boden fur das schopferische Gestalten der Pro bleme aus dem starken personlichen Erlebnis. Das philo s0phische Schaffen eines Emil Lask, dem an dieser Stelle ein Wort (...) dankbar treuen Gedenkens in sein fernes Soldaten grab nachgerufen sei, bleibt ein Beweis dafur. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

Aims to transform logic into a reflection on the nature of language.

"Fried and Polt's translation of Martin Heidegger's Being and Truth is a well-crafted and careful rendering of an important and demanding volume of the Complete Works."-Andrew Mitchell, Emory University In these lectures, delivered in 1933-1934 while he was Rector of the University of Freiburg and an active supporter of the National Socialist regime, Martin Heidegger addresses the history of metaphysics and the notion of truth from Heraclitus to Hegel. First published in German in 2001, these two lecture courses (...) offer a sustained encounter with Heidegger's thinking during a period when he attempted to give expression to his highest ambitions for a philosophy engaged with politics and the world. While the lectures are strongly nationalistic and celebrate the revolutionary spirit of the time, they also attack theories of racial supremacy in an attempt to stake out a distinctively Heideggerian understanding of what it means to be a people. This careful translation offers valuable insight into Heidegger's views on language, truth, animality, and life, as well as his political thought and activity. Gregory Fried is Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Suffolk University. He is author of Heidegger's Polemos: From Being to Politics and editor of A Companion to Hedegger's Introduction to Metaphysics. Richard Polt is Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Xavier University. He is author of The Emergency of Being: On Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy and Heidegger: An Introduction. (shrink)