Abstract

This chapter demonstrates how Heidegger's philosophy works to disrupt in a radical sense, the assumptions of traditional philosophy. It seeks to attend to the way Heidegger's later thought (that is, his writings from 1930 onwards) works to develop the reconceptualization of thinking and human existence that was instigated by his early philosophy. The more direct attention Heidegger gives to the nature of language allows a concrete and robust account of the conditions of thought to come to the fore and one that moves us more radically beyond the model of the active, towards a conception of human existence. The duality of concealing, revealing, and the historical nature of language, is a condition of language doing the work it does in the first place. Through Heidegger's account of language, then, one can able to understand something important about the conditionality of human experience that Heidegger gestures towards in his earlier work.