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This paper offers a close analysis of Heidegger’s interpretation of the demigod in his 1934/35 lecture course, Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien}” und} “Der Rhein}” (Gesamtausgabe 39). Focusing on Hölderlin’s two different versions of Strophe VIII of “The Rhine” hymn, it traces through Heidegger’s inaugural insights into the structure of need (Brauch}) articulated in the “The Rhine” hymn as the gods’ need and use of the demigods to “feel something of themselves.” Contrasting this with Plato’s analysis of the demigod in the Symposium, the paper argues that for Heidegger the between is original in first founding the limit between gods and human beings through the creation of a new kind of otherness. It then goes on to follow out this insight through Heidegger’s interpretation of the counterturning course of the Rhine river in relationship to its origin, asserting that what is at stake in that analysis is Heidegger’s working out of a new conception of creativity realized through the river’s dwelling poetically.

Introduction -- The univocity of being -- The modern predicament -- The problem of univocity in ancient and medieval philosophy -- From Heidegger to Aristotle -- Medieval philosophy -- Scholasticism -- Heidegger, Scotus, and univocity -- The question of being -- Analogy, the medieval experience of life -- Univocity and phenomenology -- Destruction and tradition -- Metaphysics -- Phenomenological philosophy and aletheia -- Descartes, scholasticism, and time -- The presupposition of the tradition -- Scholasticism, analogy, and the interpretation of Heidegger -- The phenomena of beingness and time -- Beyond being -- The analogical interpretation of Heidegger's text -- Univocity and phenomenological philosophy -- Being and some other key terms -- The phenomenology of being and the question of Dasein -- Transcendental philosophy -- Univocity from 1916 to 1927 -- Cartesian connections and the medieval ontology -- Dasein, univocity, and the question of analogy -- Univocity and fundamental ontology -- Husserl and Heidegger -- Phenomenology, being, and univocity -- Univocity and analogy -- Univocity and Heidegger's later thought -- Mysticism -- The present age -- The later Heidegger -- A-letheia, ereignis, and epochal immanence -- A history of being -- The tradition -- The history of metaphysics -- The medieval and the modern -- A history of the modern : subjectivity -- Univocity and the problem of history -- History and civilization -- Art and history -- Fractured history -- Language and poetry -- The fate of univocity -- The re-enchanted forest -- Being mortal.

This article takes a critical look into Heidegger’s reading of Nietzschean metaphysics in the context of art and finds certain discrepancies in Heidegger’s texts. Heidegger’s claim is that Nietzsche has had some difficulty in discussing the problem of truth, being, and becoming in terms of how the Western tradition of philosophy has understood it. In the context of art, Magrini traces the path that Heidegger took in understanding Nietzsche’s notion of nihilism and finds that Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche is actually an attempt to elevate the latter as a timely philosophical force whose thought moves away from the rote and dogmatic tradition of Western philosophy. Magrini is also able to point out that Heidegger’s reading moves through the usual rational and structured philosophy via a sensuous use of metaphors that is much closer to life, which is a noticeable change in the writing style of Heidegger from his Nachlass lectures and his posthumous work the Beiträge zur Philosophie. Despite some misgivings, Magrini lauds Heidegger’s work as a strict close reading of Nietzsche that brings out the best of the thinker’s radical thoughts.

One prominent interpretation of Heidegger's thought on issues that are traditionally called “ethical” is that it gives us a formal description of how to reach authenticity (the early Heidegger) or how to gain a free relationship to technology (the late Heidegger) without stating any positive prescriptions. However, as Hubert L. Dreyfus (1995), (2000) has argued, there is more than pure formalism to Heidegger's thought: he points again and again to how important rootedness, Boden and Heimat, are in trying to overcome the technological understanding of being. Notoriously, Heidegger sees a special role to the Greek-German linguistic axis in internally challenging the tradition of Western metaphysics. This putative special status is in an unsettling way connected to Heidegger's antidemocratic ideas and to the “closedness” of the tradition that according to him is able to challenge the technological world. We will claim here that there is a way of opening up and thus, in a sense, democratizing the role of tradition and rootedness. However, this democatization has to be done without losing sight of the importance of positive content (as opposed to formal description) in overcoming technology. This opening up is connected to the idea of local gods in later Heidegger as interpreted by Dreyfus; however, the democratization comes at the price of making ethics local as opposed to universal.

One prominent interpretation of Heidegger’s thought on issues that are traditionally called “ethical” is that it gives us a formal description of how to reach authenticity (the early Heidegger) or how to gain a free relationship to technology (the late Heidegger) without stating any positive prescriptions. However, as Hubert L. Dreyfus (1995, 2000) has argued, there is more than pure formalism to Heidegger’s thought: he points again and again to how important rootedness, Boden and Heimat, are in trying to overcome the technological understanding of being. Notoriously, Heidegger sees a special role to the Greek–German linguistic axis in internally challenging the tradition of Western metaphysics. This putative special status is in an unsettling way connected to Heidegger’s antidemocratic ideas and to the “closedness” of the tradition that according to him is able to challenge the technological world. We will claim here that there is a way of opening up and thus, in a sense, democratizing the role of tradition and rootedness. However, this democatization has to be done without losing sight of the importance of positive content (as opposed to formal description) in overcoming technology. This opening up is connected to the idea of local gods in later Heidegger as interpreted by Dreyfus; however, the democratization comes at the price of making ethics local as opposed to universal.

Paper presented to the 22nd. Heidegger Symposium History, Historicity and Mystery in Heidegger 30 October-02 November, 2002 University of North Texas, Denton, TX, USA Twisting Heidegger's thinking into the 'horizontal' of social relations. Heidegger's thesis that "being for the Greeks is having-been-produced" can be interpreted as the poietic structure of all metaphysical thinking. The paradigm of poiesis, however, needs to be supplemented by that of exchange to genuinely capture the phenomenon of social relations.

The thirteen essays in this volume represent the most sustained investigation, in any language, of the connections between Heidegger's thought and the tradition of transcendental philosophy inaugurated by Kant. This collection examines Heidegger's stand on central themes of transcendental philosophy: subjectivity, judgment, intentionality, truth, practice, and idealism. Several essays in the volume also explore hitherto hidden connections between Heidegger's later "post-metaphysical" thinking—where he develops a "topological" approach that draws as much upon poetry as upon the philosophical tradition—and the transcendental project of grasping the conditions that make experience of a meaningful world possible. This volume will interest philosophers in the continental tradition, where Heidegger's thought has long had a central role, as well as those many philosophers in the analytic tradition whose own approach to knowledge, semantics, and philosophy of mind traces its roots to Kant.

This essay begins with an outline of the early Heidegger's distinction between beings and the Being1 of those beings, followed by a discussion of Heideggerian teleology. It then turns to contemporary analytic metaphysics to suggest that analytic metaphysics concerns itself wholly with beings and does not recognize distinct forms of questioning concerning what Heidegger calls Being . This difference having been clarified, studies of identity and individuation in the analytic tradition are examined and it is demonstrated that such inquiries have far more in common with Heidegger than one might initially suspect. Indeed, it turns out that much of what the early Heidegger says about Being is tacitly presupposed by the workings of certain being-centric metaphysical projects in the analytic tradition. The discussion concludes with the suggestion that the central difference between the two projects should be understood as one of emphasis and that Heidegger's discussion of Being and a realist metaphysics in the analytic tradition can complement each other as aspects of a broader, more unified philosophical inquiry.

This paper offers a reading of Heidegger''s 1931 lectures on Aristotle''s Metaphysics, Theta 1-3 that relates that discussion to Heidegger''s later work on The Question Concerning Technology and then, more briefly, to contemporary philosophical discussions of ecological issues. This reading is intended to open the possibility of using Heidegger''s re-interpretation of Aristotle as a source within the Western European tradition for understanding our relationship to the natural world in a way that could provide the philosophical tools for addressing ecological problems more adequately and effectively.