In Heidegger's Way of Being, the follow-up to his 2010 book, Engaging Heidegger, Richard Capobianco makes the case clearly and compellingly that the core matter of Heidegger's lifetime of thought was Being as the temporal emergence of all beings and things. Drawing upon a wide variety of texts, many of which have been previously untranslated, Capobianco illuminates the overarching importance of Being as radiant manifestation - "the truth of Being" - and how Heidegger also named and elucidated (...) this fundamental phenomenon as physis, Aletheia, the primordial Logos, and as Ereignis, Lichtung, and Es gibt. Heidegger's Way of Being brings back into full view the originality and distinctiveness of Heidegger's thought and offers an emphatic rejoinder to certain more recent readings, and particularly those that propose a reduction of Being to "sense" or "meaning" and maintain that the core matter is human meaning-making. Capobianco's vivid and often poetic reflections serve to evoke for readers the very experience of Being - or as he prefers to name it, the Being-way - and to invite us to pause and meditate on the manner of our human way in relation to the Being-way. (shrink)

"This collection of diverse essays represents a unified, perceptive look into seminal ideas of Heidegger's lifelong attention to the question of Being, and suggests some thought-provoking attempts, philosophical ventures, to go beyond them, to think them through in a new way, to deepen and expand their understanding. It offers an initial, balanced, measured, well-targeted Socratic response to the hermeneutic closure imposed on them, at least by some ideological and pre-fixed hermeneutical assumptions and prejudices, by short-circuiting the hard, scholarly labor with (...) the texts themselves, with the writings of the philosophers in question. The clear, short, interconnected discussions of Heidegger's insights, focused on Being and based on his lectures, coalesce into a unified exposition and grasp of his multi-dimensional thinking; they prepare the ground for their questioning, for expanding the range of their understanding. The lucidity of writing, its dexterity and fluency, combined with scholarly diction and terminology, enhanced by Capobianco's attunement to Heidegger's language, indispensable for grasping his thought, render the manuscript at hand suitable for beginners and daring, curious readers, for scholars in many fields and for "generalists" as well."--. (shrink)

One of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger was primarily concerned with the 'question of Being.' However, recent scholarship has tended to marginalize the importance of the name of Being in his thought. Through a focused reading of Heidegger's texts, and especially his late and often overlooked Four Seminars, Richard Capobianco counters this trend by redirecting attention to the centrality of the name of Being in Heidegger's lifetime of thought. Capobianco gives special attention (...) to Heidegger's resonant terms Ereignis and Lichtung and reads them as saying and showing the very same fundamental phenomenon named 'Being itself '. Written in a clear and approachable manner, the essays in Engaging Heidegger examine Heidegger's thought in view of ancient Greek, medieval, and Eastern thinking, and they draw out the deeply humane character of his 'meditative thinking.'. (shrink)

This essay draws on texts previously untranslated into English, and in particular Heidegger’s brilliant 1943 lecture course on Heraclitus, to show how Heidegger understood kosmos as an early Greek name for Being itself. The contemporary scholarship has altogether missed the significant role that this Greek Ur-word plays in his later thinking. The “gleaming,” “adorning” kosmos—which the later Heidegger understood to be “world” in the fullest and richest sense—is not in the first place any kind of transcendental-phenomenological “projection” of the human (...) being; rather, it is the resplendence of the “ever-living” Being-unfolding-way itself from out of which both the gods and human beings come to pass and pass away. The independence of kosmos/Being itself in relation to the human being is highlighted. An Ode by Pindar and a painting by Andrew Wyeth are also considered. (shrink)

Despite the efforts of such notable thinkers as Sartre, Camus, and Ricoeur to affirm philosophically the being of evil, a systematic critique of the traditional metaphysical understanding of evil as privation of being has not yet been fully worked out. The task of this paper is to sketch out just such a critique and to suggest a more adequate philosophical reflection on the being of evil by turning to the thought of Heidegger. Part 1 examines Heidegger’s commentary on Aristotle’s remarks (...) on steresis. Aristotle is our teacher, Heidegger argues, in learning “to hold on to the wonder” of the steresis-dimension of Being (physis), and, thus, to hold on to the wonder that “lack,” “loss,” “absence” - is. Part II considers Heidegger’s recognition that the k-not at the very heart of our existence is yet much more complex. He turns to the fragments of Parmenides and Heraclitus to bring to light a dissembling-dimension of Being. (shrink)

This essay, drawn from the book Heidegger's Way of Being, brings back into view the core matter of Heidegger's lifetime of thought: Being as the temporal emerging, showing, shining-forth, manifestation of all beings and things. Highlighted is the overarching importance of Being as radiant manifestation—"the truth of Being"—and how Heidegger also named and elucidated this Ur-phenomenon as aletheia, Ereignis, Lichtung, and Es gibt. The essay is part of a larger project that aims to recall and restate the originality and distinctiveness (...) of Heidegger's thought and to offer a rejoinder to certain more recent readings, and especially those that propose a reduction of Being to "sense" or "meaning" and maintain that the core matter is human "meaning-making.". (shrink)

This study attempts a systematic philosophical examination of C. G. Jung's understanding of the unconscious and, more particularly, of his understanding of das Selbst . Chapter 1 brings into focus the historical context of Jung's discussion by briefly examining the understanding of the unconscious in the work of four leading figures in late 19th century psychology: Wilhelm Wundt, Pierre Janet, Theodore Flournoy, and Sigmund Freud. Chapters 2 through 5 trace the development of Jung's thinking on the nature of the unconscious (...) and on the self; a close textual analysis is made of his writings from the earliest lectures, the Zofingia lectures , to his last major work, Mysterium Conjunctionis . ;Under philosophical scrutiny, Jung's theoretical positions are revealed to be somewhat inconsistent or simply inadequate. Jung does not offer to philosophy a rigorous, carefully worked out theoretical reflection on the nature and structure of the human being. Yet, this said, it is also true that Jung does have something to say on this issue, and it is the effort of this study to give theoretical coherence to Jung's reflections. ;Thus, as re-constructed, Jung's position may be stated as follows: The unconscious is an intelligent, transpersonal structure irreducible to consciousness. As an intelligent structure, the unconscious maintains identity-in-difference, and for this reason, Jung suggests, unconscious intellectual processes are irreducible to conscious intellectual processes which "discriminate." The supra-intelligent, transpersonal unconscious structure is a subject; the self is the supra-intelligent, transpersonal unconscious subject. While the self, the unconscious subject, is irreducible to the conscious subject , the conscious subject remains, nevertheless, a manifestation of the self. The ego and the self are mutually dependent or cor-related. ;In the conclusion of this study, I turn to the thought of Martin Heidegger to help elucidate the concerns of Jung in a more rigorously philosophical manner. (shrink)

The first book on the notion of the Holy in Heidegger, this collection evokes a poetic sense of awe before the divine present in his philosophical approach.

Is Dasein primordially—that is, at the very core of its being—“at home” or “not at home” in Being? One of the more overlooked or understated issues in Heideggerstudies is how Heidegger, over the course of a lifetime of thinking, transformed his answer to such a question about Dasein’s fundamental relation to Being. In several important texts of the 1920s and 1930s, The History of the Concept of Time, Being andTime, and Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger maintained the position that Dasein is (...) primordially unheimlich, “unsettled,” and thus also unheimisch, “unhomely,” at the core of its being. Yet, we discover a significant turning in his thinking toward home, especially in the early 1940s. The 1942 commentary on Hölderlin’s poem “The Ister” stands out as a bridge text between the early and later Heidegger on this issue; in particular, we find a striking and significant difference in his reading of Sophocles’ Antigone compared with the more well-known reading in the 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics. In the “Ister” commentary, Heidegger engaged both Sophocles and Hölderlin to work out the motif—so prominent in his later work—that human beings are primordially “at home” in Being, the sheltering source and origin of all beings. We also find a further development in his thinking in the 1950s and 1960s. In all, I propose that the “middle” Heidegger of the early 1940s offers the most satisfying phenomenological account of being human. (shrink)

Is Dasein primordially—that is, at the very core of its being—“at home” or “not at home” in Being? One of the more overlooked or understated issues in Heideggerstudies is how Heidegger, over the course of a lifetime of thinking, transformed his answer to such a question about Dasein’s fundamental relation to Being. In several important texts of the 1920s and 1930s, The History of the Concept of Time, Being andTime, and Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger maintained the position that Dasein is (...) primordially unheimlich, “unsettled,” and thus also unheimisch, “unhomely,” at the core of its being. Yet, we discover a significant turning in his thinking toward home, especially in the early 1940s. The 1942 commentary on Hölderlin’s poem “The Ister” stands out as a bridge text between the early and later Heidegger on this issue; in particular, we find a striking and significant difference in his reading of Sophocles’ Antigone compared with the more well-known reading in the 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics. In the “Ister” commentary, Heidegger engaged both Sophocles and Hölderlin to work out the motif—so prominent in his later work—that human beings are primordially “at home” in Being, the sheltering source and origin of all beings. We also find a further development in his thinking in the 1950s and 1960s. In all, I propose that the “middle” Heidegger of the early 1940s offers the most satisfying phenomenological account of being human. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger wrote one and only one preface for a scholarly work on his thinking, and it was for William J. Richardson’s study Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, first published in 1963. Ever since, both Heidegger’s Preface and Richardson’s groundbreaking book have played an important role in Heidegger scholarship. Much has been discussed about these texts over the decades, but what has not been available to students and scholars up to this point is Richardson’s original comments and questions to Heidegger (...) that led to the famous Preface. These are published here for the first time both in the German original and in our English translation. In our commentary we 1) discuss how Heidegger’s Preface came about, 2) explain the source and status of the materials published here, and 3) pair selected passages from Richardson’s text with Heidegger’s reply in his Preface to highlight the consonance of their thinking. (shrink)

Frederick Olafson makes the case sensibly and eloquently that, despite Heidegger’s failed personal and political judgments, “the profoundly original constellation of ideas he introduced in Being and Time can make an important contribution to our understanding of the whole ethical side of our lives”. In particular, Olafson argues that Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis of Mitsein provides the framework for thinking about the “ground” of ontic ethical theory, rules, and prescriptions.

William Blattner is surely right that not enough scholarly attention has been paid to one of Heidegger's most central and most important philosophical notions: “originary temporality”. Blattner's exhaustive effort to lay bare and scrutinize Heidegger's arguments regarding temporality and time in Being and Time and in other early texts is impressive, and he offers several valuable new readings and insights. Yet, regrettably, Blattner tries too hard to trump Heidegger. He is bent on showing that Heidegger “failed” in his thinking about (...) temporality and time, and his overly polemical account mars an otherwise illuminating discussion of Heidegger's texts. (shrink)