One of the most eminent Heidegger scholars of our time, Theodore Kisiel has found worldwide critical acclaim, his particular strength being to set Heidegger's ...

"This book, one of the most frequently cited works on Martin Heidegger in any language, belongs on any short list of classic studies of Continental philosophy. William J. Richardson explores the famous turn in Heidegger's thought after Being in Time and demonstrates how this transformation was radical without amounting to a simple contradiction of his earlier views." "In a full account of the evolution of Heidegger's work as a whole, Richardson provides a detailed, systematic, and illuminating account (...) of both divergences and fundamental continuities in Heidegger's philosophy, especially in light of recently published works. He demonstrates that the "thinking" of Being for the later Heidegger has exactly the same configuration as the radical phenomenology of the early Heidegger, once he has passed through the "turning" of his way." Including as a preface the letter that Heidegger wrote to Richardson and a new writer's preface and epilogue, the new edition of this valuable guide will be an essential resource for students and scholars for many years to come. (shrink)

In the late Middle Ages the philosopher and mystic Meister Eckhart preached that to know the truth you must be the truth. But how to be the truth? Eckhart's answer comes in the form of an imperative: release yourself, let be. Only then will you be able to understand that the deepest meaning of being is releasement. Only then will you become who you truly are. This book interprets Eckhart's Latin and Middle High German writings under the banner of an (...) imperative of releasement, and then shows how the twentieth-century thinker Martin Heidegger creatively appropriates this idea at several stages of his career. Heidegger had a lifelong fascination with Eckhart, referring to him as "the old master of letters and life." Drawing on archival material and Heidegger's marginalia in his personal copies of Eckhart's writings, Moore argues that Eckhart was one of the most important figures in Heidegger's philosophy. This book also contains previously unpublished documents by Heidegger on Eckhart, as well as the first English translation of Nishitani Keiji's essay "Nietzsche's Zarathustra and Meister Eckhart," which he initially gave as a presentation in one of Heidegger's classes in 1938. (shrink)

This paper examines Aristotle’s analysis of unenacted capacities to show the role they play in his discovery of the concept of actuality. I first argue that Aristotle begins Metaphysics IX by focusing on active and passive capacities, after which I discuss Aristotle’s confrontation with the Megarians, the philosophers who maintain that a capacity is present only insofar as it is being enacted. Using Heidegger’s interpretation as a guide, I show that Aristotle’s rejection of the Megarian position leads him to (...) propose that presence cannot be confined to activity. I also argue that this provides the context for Aristotle to realize that the relation between capacity and activity can be generalized as the relation between two ways of being. (shrink)

This book concerns itself with an issue that is not sufficiently addressed in the literature: Heidegger’s philosophy of science. Although a great deal of attention is paid to Heidegger’s later critique of technology, no one has systematically studied how he understood “science.” Many readers will be surprised to learn, through this book, that Heidegger developed the essentials of a fairly sophisticated philosophy of science, one that in many ways invites comparison with that of Thomas Kuhn. Glazebrook demonstrates (...) that Heidegger’s philosophy of science is not neatly divided into “early” and “late” (or “Heidegger I” and “Heidegger II”) but is, rather, an ongoing development over at least three periods, bound together as an analysis of modern science and an uncovering of other possibilities for understanding nature. Glazebrook states in her introduction, “This reading of Heidegger is radical. It cuts to the root of his thinking, for I argue that what are taken to be Heidegger’s many and significant contributions to philosophy—that is, his overcoming of metaphysics, his rereading of the ancients, his critique of technology and representational thinking, his vision and revision of language, truth, and thinking—have at their core an inquiry into science that drove his thinking for sixty years. I am not arguing for a new reading of a few texts, or for adjustments and refinements of existing readings of Heideggger. Rather, I am bringing to light a new basis on which to interpret his work as a whole.”. (shrink)

_Heidegger_ is a classic introduction to Heidegger's notoriously difficult work. Truly accessible, it combines clarity of exposition with an authoritative handling of the subject-matter. Richard Polt has written a work that will become the standard text for students looking to understand one of the century's greatest minds.

The influence of Heidegger's on current thought has been pervasive. In reaction to Enlightenment ideas, he presents a view of the modern world as destructive of nature, community, tradition, individuality, and more. His writings have influenced such central social and literary thinkers as Derrida and Foucault. This volume is the first thorough introduction to his work on language and literature. Heidegger's reputation for being difficult has scared off many who would have otherwise profited from a knowledge of his (...) work. This guide is written with these people in mind. It is "student-friendly" and presents Heidegger's ideas in a clear and comprehensible manner. Understanding Heidegger is essential for anyone who wants to understand current literary theory, and this guide is essential for anyone seeking to understand Heidegger. (shrink)

Introduction: situating Heidegger and the philosophy of technology -- Heidegger's philosophy of technology -- The historical-ontological priority of technology over science -- Deromanticizing Heidegger -- Interlude: the earth inherited -- Was Heidegger prescient concerning technoscience? -- Heidegger's technologies: one size fits all -- Concluding postphenomenological postscript: writing technologies.

While the enormous influence of Martin Heidegger's thought in Japan and China is well documented, the influence on him from East-Asian sources is much lesser known. This remarkable study shows that Heidegger drew some of the major themes of his philosophy--on occasion almost word for word--from German translations of Chinese Daoist and Zen Buddhist classics.

This introduction by leading scholar Peter Trawny is the first to tackle the Black Notebooks, whose recent publication revealed the extent of Heidegger's anti-Semitism. Trawny directly confronts the most problematic aspects of Heidegger's thought, also fully surveying his work, from early writings to his magnum opus, Being and Time.

This book offers a fundamentally new account of the arguments and concepts which define Heidegger's early philosophy, and locates them in relation to both contemporary analytic philosophy and the history of philosophy. Drawing on recent work in the philosophy of mind and on Heidegger's lectures on Plato and Kant, Sacha Golob argues against existing treatments of Heidegger on intentionality and suggests that Heidegger endorses a unique position with respect to conceptual and representational content; he also examines (...) the implications of this for Heidegger's views on truth, realism and 'being'. He goes on to explore Heidegger's work on the underlying issue of normativity, and focuses on his theory of freedom, arguing that it is freedom that links the existential concerns of Being and Time to concepts such as reason, perfection and obligation. His book offers a distinctive new perspective for students of Heidegger and the history of twentieth-century philosophy. (shrink)

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)

Winner of 2002 Edward Goodwin Ballard Prize In a penetrating and lucid discussion of the enigmatic relationship between the work of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, Steven Galt Crowell proposes that the distinguishing feature of twentieth-century philosophy is not so much its emphasis on language as its concern with meaning. Arguing that transcendental phenomenology is indispensable to the philosophical explanation of the space of meaning, Crowell shows how a proper understanding of both Husserl and Heidegger reveals the distinctive (...) contributions of each to that ongoing phenomenological project. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger--philosophy's hidden king or leading exponent of a dangerously misguided secular mysticism? Heidegger has been acclaimed as the most powerfully original philosopher of the twentieth century, who made a deep impact on thinkers such as Sartre, Habermas, Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida.

The collapse of historicism was not merely the demise of an academic tradition but signified a shift in the understanding of hermeneutics and metaphysics. Whereas earlier books have explored the rise and dominance of historicism within academic history, this is the first to trace its collapse and to show how it was shaped by larger philosophical and scientific concerns. Charles R. Bambach's lucid account of the demise of historicism within the context of German metaphysics provides a rich new perspective on (...) the development of the young Heidegger's concept of "historicity" and on the origins of postmodern thought. Bambach reconstructs the methodological debates arising from a pervasive sense of crisis among German philosophers in the late nineteenth century. He details the divergent attempts by the Neo-Kantians, Nietzsche, and Dilthey to overcome the limitations of historical relativism. Heidegger's view of "historicity," Bambach shows, radically transforms the problematic of historicism into a discourse concerning the crisis of philosophical modernity. (shrink)

This book, the first comprehensive study in English of Heidegger's philosophy of art, starts in the mid-1930s with Heidegger's discussion of the Greek temple and his Hegelian declaration that a great artwork gathers together an entire culture in affirmative celebration of its foundational 'truth', and that, by this criterion, art in modernity is 'dead'. His subsequent work on Hölderlin, whom he later identified as the decisive influence on his mature philosophy, led him into a passionate engagement with the (...) art of Rilke, Ce;zanne, Klee and Zen Buddhism, liberating him not only from the overly restrictive conception of art of the mid-1930s but also from the disastrous politics of the period. Drawing on material hitherto unknown in the anglophone world, Young establishes a new account of Heidegger's philosophy of art and shows that his famous essay 'The Origin of the Work of Art' is its beginning, not its end. (shrink)

Heidegger is now widely recognized as one of the most influential and controversial philosophers of the twentieth century, yet much of his later philosophy remains shrouded in confusion and controversy. Restoring Heidegger's understanding of metaphysics as 'ontotheology' to its rightful place at the center of his later thought, this book demonstrates the depth and significance of his controversial critique of technology, his appalling misadventure with Nazism, his prescient critique of the university, and his important philosophical suggestions for the (...) future of higher education. It will be required reading for those seeking to understand the relationship between Heidegger's philosophy and National Socialism, as well as the continuing relevance of his work. (shrink)

With characteristic lucidity and style, Steiner makes Heidegger's immensely difficult body of work accessible to the general reader. In a new introduction, Steiner addresses language and philosophy and the rise of Nazism. "It would be hard to imagine a better introduction to the work of philosopher Martin Heidegger."--George Kateb, The New Republic.

This contribution unfolds an existential-ontological response to the question of sexual difference in the context of Heidegger’s formally indicative concept of “Dasein.” The question of Dasein’s “neutrality” concerns how formal indication formalizes, empties, and neutralizes the givenness of factical human existence. Ostensibly “given” biological and anthropological facts, such as sexual difference, are interpreted from an emptied and neutralized perspective that appears abstract and fictional to Heidegger’s critics. How, then, is the “neutrality” of formalizing emptying related to the “facticity” (...) of in each case factically existing as a sexual and gendered being? The answer lies in Heidegger’s elucidation of the existential-ontological structure of Dasein: Dasein is always relationally instituted in its factical entangled life through “being-with.” The sexual difference of human existence is not merely biologically or anthropologically given, but disclosed and enacted according to one’s relations with others, the environment, and oneself. The formally indicating concept “Dasein” indicates, accordingly, the concrete diversity and plurality of individuated sexual and gendered ways of being. (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)

_Leading figures in Heidegger scholarship critically reflect on the dominant topics of Heidegger's thought during the 1930s._.

Wittgenstein’s and Heidegger’s objections against the possibility of a science of aesthetics were influential on different sides of the analytic/continental divide. Heidegger’s anti-scientism leads him to an alētheic view of artworks which precedes and exceeds any possible aesthetic reduction. Wittgenstein also rejects the relevance of causal explanations, psychological or physiological, to aesthetic questions. The main aim of this paper is to compare Heidegger with Wittgenstein, showing that: there are significant parallels to be drawn between Wittgenstein’s and (...) class='Hi'>Heidegger’s anti-scientism about aesthetics, and that their anti-scientism leads both towards partly divergent criticisms of what I will call ‘aestheticism’. The divergence is mainly due to a broader metaphilosophical disagreement concerning appeals to ordinary language. Thus situating the two philosophers’ positions facilitates a possible critical dialogue between analytic and continental approaches in aesthetics. (shrink)

_Challenges conventional understandings of Heidegger’s account of the body._.

Among the most influential and enigmatic thinkers of the modern age, Nietzsche and Heidegger have become pivotal in the struggle to define postmodernism. In this work, Gregory Smith offers the most comprehensive examination to date of the turn to postmodernity in the writings of these philosophers. Smith argues that, while much of postmodern thought is rooted in Nietzsche and Heidegger, it has ironically attempted, whether unwittingly or by design, to deflect their philosophy back onto a modern path. Other (...) alternative paths emanating from both Nietzschean and Heideggerian thought that might more powerfully speak to postmodern culture have been ignored. Nietzsche and Heidegger, Smith suggests, have made possible a far more revolutionary critique of modernity then even their most ardent postmodern admirers have realized. Smith contends that the influences on the postmodern in the thought of Nietzsche and Heidegger are founded in a new vision of praxis liberated from theory. Ultimately, these philosophers do transcend the nihilism often found in the guise of postmodernism. Their thought is, moreover, consistent with the possibility of limited constitutional government and the rule of law. Smith's book takes the first step toward recovering these possibilities and posing the fundamental questions of politics and ethics in ways that have heretofore been closed off by late-modern thought. (shrink)