Abstract

These lectures, under the title “Logic,” were given at the University of Marburg in the Spring and Summer of 1928. They were the last lectures of Heidegger at this university. Four years earlier, Paul Natorp died, leaving behind his posthumously published Lectures on Practical Philosophy. In 1912, his colleague and friend, Hermann Cohen, left Marburg, after more than thirty years of residence, to retire in obscurity in Berlin. In 1918 Cohen died. Neo-Kantianism remained vigorous and productive in Ernst Cassirer, but it left German soil with Cassirer’s exile in 1933. What remained of German philosophy was embodied in the thought of Martin Heidegger, the implacable foe of both Cohen and Cassirer. The enemy was not simply particular philosophers, but the struggle against “sterile humanism” which Heidegger believed divorced us from that primordial encounter with transcendence as Dasein. Dasein, Heidegger tells us, is “the being for which its own proper mode of being in a definite sense is not indifferent…. In its neutrality Dasein is not the indifferent nobody and everybody, but the primordial positivity and potency of the essence. Neutrality is precisely the potency of the origin, which bears in itself the intrinsic possibility of every concrete factual humanity”. If we were asked about the subject matter of these lectures, we would say that they seek to uncover the foundations of logic. They are in search of that encounter with the ancients, in and through which we can again confront the primordial meaning of truth, the rediscovery of what we comprehend as the being of beings. These lectures were given in two parts: the first referred to Leibniz and was focused on the idea of knowledge; the second was devoted to the structure of a fundamental ontology: “how the universality of the concept of being is conceived”.