For your students, celebrating this day is a source of rare and pure joy. The only way we can be adequate to this occasion is to let the gratitude that we owe you become the fundamental mood suffusing everything from beginning to end. In keeping with a beautiful tradition, today on this celebratory occasion we offer you as our gift this slender volume of a few short essays. In no way could this ever be an adequate return for all that (...) you, our teacher, have lavished upon us, and awakened and nourished in us. In the coming days many will try to survey your work in philosophy and to evaluate its impact and effect on various scales. In so doing, they will bring to mind many things that we should not forget. However, that way of parceling out a person's intellectual impact and of calculating the influence of his writings fails to grasp the essential matter for which we owe you our thanks. That essential element will not be found by considering how fruitful your teaching career has been. Surely such effectiveness will continue to be the prerogative and good fortune of every professor as long as German university escapes the doom of getting turned into a mind-numbing trade school. No, the essence of your leadership consists in something else, namely that the content and style of your questioning immediately forces each of us into an intense, critical dialogue, and it demands that we always be ready to reverse or even abandon our position. There is no guarantee, of course, that any of us will find our way to the one thing that, so unpretentously, your work sought to lead us to: that releasement in which one is seasoned and ready for the problems.2 So too the works we present to you are mere witnesses to the fact that we wanted to follow your guidance, not proof that we succeeded in becoming your disciples.3 But there is one thing we will retain as a lasting possession: Each of us who had the privilege of following in your footsteps was confronted by you, our esteemed teacher, with the option either of becoming the steward of essential matters or of working against them. On this celebratory occasion, as we view your philosophical existence in this light, we also acquire secure points of reference for giving a true assessment of the value of your work in philosophy. Does it consist in the fact that some decades ago a new movement emerged in philosophy and gained influence among the then-dominant trends? Or that a new method was added to the list of previous ones? Or that long-forgotten problem-areas got reworked.. (shrink)
In 1987 Victor Farías' Heidegger et le nazisme dropped like a bomb on the quiet chapel where Heidegger's disciples were gathered, and blew the place to bits. The myth Heidegger had concocted after the war -- that he supported the Nazis briefly and only to protect the university -- was shattered by the evidence Farías mustered of Heidegger's deep and long-lasting commitment to National Socialism, his blatant anti-Semitism, his blackballing of colleagues for no more than holding pacifist convictions, associating with (...) Jews, or being "unfavorably disposed" toward the Nazi regime. (shrink)
by Victor Farías, translated from Spanish and German into French by Myriam Benarroch and Jean-Baptiste Grasset, preface by Christian Jambet. Editions Verdier, 332 pp., Fr125 (paper).
Martin Heidegger taught philosophy at Freiburg University (1915-1923), Marburg University (1923-1928), and again at Freiburg University (1928-1945). Early in his career he came under the influence of Edmund Husserl, but he soon broke away to fashion his own philosophy. His most famous work, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) was published in 1927. Heidegger's energetic support for Hitler in 1933-34 earned him a suspension from teaching from 1945 to 1950. In retirement he published numerous works, including the first volumes of (...) his Collected Edition. His thought has had strong influence on trends in philosophy ranging from existentialism through hermeneutics to deconstruction as well as on the fields of literary theory and theology. (shrink)
The world, the all-inclusive unity of entities in real actuality, is the field whence the various positive sciences draw their realms of research. Directed straight at the world, these sciences in their allied totality seem to aim at a complete knowledge of the world and thus to take charge of answering all questions that can be asked about entities. It seems there is no field left to philosophy for its own investigations. But does not Greek science, already in its first (...) decisive beginnings, direct its unceasing efforts towards entities as such? Do not entities as such serve it as the subject matter of a fundamental science of being, a "first philosophy"? For Greek science, to directly determine entities -- both individuals and even the universal whole, and in whatever regard they be taken -- did not mean to understand entities as such. Entities as entities -- that is, with regard to their being -- are enigmatic.2 For a long time the lines of inquiry and the answers remain tangled in obscurities. Nonetheless, in the first steps of this "first philosophy"3 one may already see the source whence springs the questionability of entities as such. Parmenides seeks to clarify being4 via a reflection on one's thinking about entities. Plato's disclosure of the Ideas takes its bearings from the soul's.. (shrink)
Engelbert Krebs, a Catholic priest and professor of theology at Freiburg University, was a close friend of her husband, the philosophy lecturer Martin Heidegger. In fact, Krebs was the minister who had officiated at the Heideggers' Catholic wedding in Freiburg Cathedral on March..
Since those times "nature" has become the basic word designating essential relations that Western historical humanity has to beings, both to itself and to beings other than itself. This fact is shown by a rough list of dichotomies that have become prevalent: nature and grace (i.e., super-nature).
[203] The knowledge that comes from the sciences is usually expressed in propositions and laid before us as conclusions that we can grasp and put to use. But the "doctrine" of a thinker is that which remains unsaid within what is said, that to which we are exposed so that we might expend ourselves on it.
[164] As is well known, over the last decade some of the younger generation of German philosophers have been gravitating with ever increasing speed toward philosophical anthropology. Currently Wilhelm Dilthey's philosophy of life, a new form of anthropology, exercises a great deal of influence. But even the so-called "phenomenological movement" has got caught up in this new trend, which alleges that the true foundation of philosophy lies in human being alone, and more specifically in a doctrine of the essence of (...) human being's concrete worldly Dasein. Some view this as a necessary reform of the original constitutive phenomenology, one that for the very first time would supposedly permit phenomenology to attain the level of authentic philosophy. All of this constitutes a complete reversal of phenomenology's fundamental standpoint. Original phenomenology, which has matured into transcendental phenomenology, denies to any science of human being, whatever its form, a share in laying the foundations for philosophy, and opposes all related attempts at foundation-laying as being anthropologism or psychologism. Nowadays, however, the exact opposite is supposed to hold. Phenomenological philosophy is supposedly now to be constructed entirely anew from out of human Dasein. (shrink)
Some, of course, would go further and claim that Jesus was the very content of what he preached, the ontological embodiment of his message, or as Origin put it centuries ago, the kingdom-of-God-in-person, ho autobasileia.1 This affirmation in fact lies at the heart of the Christian tradition, and if the guardians of that orthodoxy were to answer the question we are posing today, they would say: What the Christ of faith will be is the same as what the Jesus of (...) history was: the incarnate presence of the self-communicating God. (shrink)
The first mistake would be to think the Vatican's recent declaration Dominus Iesus is primarily a theological document. It is not -- even though it advertises itself as being that, with a specific focus on (according to its subtitle) "The Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church.".
Aristotle's treatment of logos apophantikos is found within the treatise that bears the title Peri Hermeneias, On Hermeneia. And it was to this treatise -- or, more accurately, to the first four sections of it -- that the early Heidegger turned again and again in his courses during the 1920s in an effort to retrieve from this phenomenon a hidden meaning.
Martin Heidegger taught philosophy at Freiburg University (1915-1923), Marburg University (1923-1928), and again at Freiburg University (1928-1945). Early in his career he came under the influence of Edmund Husserl, but he soon broke away to fashion his own philosophy. His most famous work, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) was published in 1927. Heidegger's energetic support for Hitler in 1933-34 earned him a suspension from teaching from 1945 to 1950. In retirement he published numerous works, including the first volumes of (...) his Collected Edition. His thought has had strong influence on trends in philosophy ranging from existentialism through hermeneutics to deconstruction as well as on the fields of literary theory and theology. (shrink)
In 1983 Otto Pöggeler wrote: "Regrettably, even today there is still no reliable overview of Heidegger's early lecture courses based on the extant student transcripts and Heidegger's manuscripts." Ten years later, and the lacuna has been filled with Theodore Kisiel's The Genesis of Heidegger's BEING AND TIME. This brilliant and complex work provides, in its own words, the first "reliable, complete, and relatively uninterrupted story" of how Heidegger got from there to here, where "there" is 1915 and "here" is the (...) spring of 1926. By the end of his treatise Kisiel can make the justifiably proud claim: "BT can now be understood genealogically." (K 457). (shrink)
The period after World War Two saw the emergence both of the so-called later Heidegger and of the corresponding problem of the unity of his thought. Although his major work, Sein und Zeit, 1927 (=SZ) had announced Heidegger's intention of working out the meaning of being (Sein), his publications up through 1943, with the exception of the brief Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, presented only his preparatory analysis of human openness (Dasein). However, Heidegger's post-war publications seemed to emphasize “being itself” (the (...) history of being, being as language, pre-Socratic notions of being, the withdrawal of being in the modern world) and indeed almost seemed to hypostasize being into an "other" with a life of its own. This state of affairs, combined with Heidegger's announcement in 1953 that SZ would be left a torso, gave rise to such questions as whether his later thought was still phenomenological, how it might be continuous with his earlier writings, and how, if indeed at all, it was to be understood. (shrink)
Interpretations of Heidegger often fail to distinguish between two very different matters -- on the one hand “the turn” (die Kehre), and on the other hand “the change in Heidegger’s thinking” (die Wendung im Denken), that is, the shift in the way Heidegger formulated and presented his philosophy beginning in the 1930s. Failure to make this distinction can be disastrous for understanding Heidegger, and the danger becomes more acute the closer one gets to texts like Introduction to Metaphysics, where both (...) the “turn” and the “change” begin to come into their own.1.. (shrink)
Many of us first met this translation some twenty years ago in its then typed format--690 double-space pages replete with hundreds of handwritten corrections. Now two decades later, a glance at that earlier manuscript reveals that little has changed in the intervening years: The published book is virtually identical to the earliest typed manuscript. So too, the Introduction here (JS 1-35) is the same one that appeared in Basic Writings (1977, 41-89), with only minor orthographical changes.
These are two of the questions that inform the extraordinary open letter that Martin Heidegger published in 1955 in a Festschrift celebrating Ernst Jünger's sixtieth birthday.2 Heidegger's letter was in response to an essay that Jünger had contributed six years earlier, in 1949, to a Festschrift on Heidegger's own sixtieth birthday. So there was a certain reciprocity in the exchange: a favor returned, a public gesture of respect mirroring an earlier one.
It is very significant that Heidegger chose Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, the lecture course he gave in the summer semester of 1927, to be the first publication in his monumental Gesamtausgabe.1 The text is rich in many ways, but one of its major claims to fame may rest in a footnote, taken from Heidegger's own manuscript of the course, that appears on page 1 of the published version. This elliptical footnote, which in fact functions like a subtitle for the whole (...) volume, asserts that the lecture course represents a "New elaboration of Sein und Zeit, Part One, Division Three.". (shrink)
The Beiträge zur Philosophie mandates a paradigm shift in Heidegger scholarship. In the face of (1) widespread disarray in the current model, the new paradigm (2) abandons Sein as a name for die Sache selbst, (3) understands Welt/Lichtung/Da as that which gives being, (4) interprets Dasein as apriori openedness rather than as being-there, (5) understands the Kehre as the interface of Geworfenheit and Entwurf, not as a shift in Heidegger's thinking, (6) interprets Ereignis as the opening of the Da rather (...) than as appropriation, and (7) understands human finitude as what gives all forms of being and all epochs in the history of being. The conclusion alludes to the function of Mitdasein (co-openness) as die Sache selbst. (shrink)
What follows is an English reading of the first edition of Martin Heidegger's inaugural lecture at Freiburg University,“Was ist Metaphysik?” delivered on Wednesday, July 24, 1929. The German text was first published in December of 1929, some five months after it was delivered, by Friedrich Cohen Verlag in Bonn, to whose heirs gratitude is expressed for the requisite arrangements. The original German publication of 1929 differs in a number of relatively minor ways from later editions -- for example, changes in (...) wording, additions of certain phrases (and at one place two sentences), paragraphization, and the like – without any basic alteration of sense. Some of those changes are listed in an appendix at the end. (shrink)
In this article we present (1) a close paraphrase--virtually a translation--of Heidegger's Sein und Zeit, §74, "Die Grundverfassung der Geschichtlichkeit," pp. 382-387, together with an analytical outline found in the Appendix; and (2) a brief commentary on the text. What Heidegger says about his own translation of Aristotle's Physics B 1 applies here as well: "The ‘translation' is already the interpretation proper. Thereafter only an explanation of the ‘translation' is called for.".
How did faith in the resurrected Jesus arise? Can we reconstruct, or deconstruct, the original Easter story? What are the implications of the empty tomb, the women’s failure to believe, and the lack of appearances in Mark? These questions are raised and a proposal offered in this chapter from the author’s forthcoming book, The First Coming.
