Polt, Richard. Review of Martin Heidegger, BASIC CONCEPTS OF ARISTOTELIAN PHILOSOPHY. NDPR (November 2009).

Heidegger, Martin. Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy. Trans. Robert D. Metcalf and Mark B. Tanzer. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2009. This volume presents a lecture course delivered by Heidegger in Summer Semester 1924 at the University of Marburg in which he examines a variety of Aristotelian texts, elucidating key concepts and exploring how these concepts are rooted in the Greek experience of the world. The book was first published in German in 2002 as volume 18 of the collected edition of Heidegger's writings. We now have access to many of Heidegger's interpretations of Aristotle from the 1920s, and most of these are now available in English. Texts such as these make it clear that, despite the revolutionary impact of Being and Time (1927), Heidegger developed some of its central ideas by the most traditional of routes: commentary on the Philosopher. To be sure, Heidegger's is an unusual sort of commentary, which retrieves Aristotle as a proto-phenomenologist and reads him in terms of a larger agenda that is not always explicit. So it would be wrong to call Heidegger an Aristotelian, but it would also be wrong to say that he turns Aristotle into a Heideggerian. Such labels presume that a philosophy consists of a set of propositions to which a philosopher has given assent. But for Heidegger, propositional meaning depends on a deeper, lived engagement with one's situation; he tries to cultivate that engagement in his students and himself by finding evidence of such engagement in Aristotle. In this way, antiquity may give a "jolt to the present, or better put, to the future" (5). No theorems of Aristotelian or Heideggerian philosophy are brought into a system here. Instead, by weaving through a wide range of Aristotle's texts, Heidegger gradually familiarizes us with the Greek sense of being and tries to motivate us to attend to the phenomena just as seriously as Aristotle did (12, 229). If this is not what one expects from a philosopher, then Heidegger prefers not to call what he is doing philosophy at all: let it be called philology (4, 225). As for biographical considerations, he makes the famous statement, "Regarding the personality of a philosopher, our only interest is that he was born at a certain time, that he worked, and that he died" (4). The volume under review presents a major textual challenge that the editor, Mark Michalski, has met in a responsible and reasonable way. The frequent quotations and paraphrases from Aristotle and others require numerous footnotes; a more serious problem is that only about a third of Heidegger's lecture notes are extant, and the rest of what Heidegger actually said must be reconstructed from student transcripts (not "Student Writings", as the translation has it [1]). Since Heidegger's notes are brief and often cryptic, we must admire the improvisational skill with which he apparently delivered an organized, fleshed-out presentation at the lectern. We must also be grateful for the shorthand skills of Walter Bröcker and Gerhard Nebel, the students who recorded Heidegger's spoken German and Greek (275); thanks to their efforts, we can imagine ourselves following along in the lecture hall in 1924. If we had actually been there, we would have had some very gifted classmates, including Hans-Georg Gadamer, Helene Weiss, Jacob Klein, Hans Jonas, Leo Strauss, and Karl Löwith. These promising students were drawn to Marburg by a "rumor of the hidden king", as Hannah Arendt, who joined them in the next semester, was to recall. Heidegger was developing a reputation for thinking in a fresh and exciting way, for bringing the ancients back to life, and even for reviving philosophy itself in Germany. Courses such as the one reconstructed in this volume were to inspire Heidegger's students permanently, even if most came to resist his thought after the shock of his support for the Nazi regime. . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=18065.