Wheeler, Michael. "Martin Heidegger." (STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY).

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) was a German philosopher whose work is perhaps most readily associated with phenomenology and existentialism, although his thinking should be identified as part of such philosophical movements only with extreme care and qualification. His ideas have exerted a seminal influence on the development of contemporary European philosophy. They have also had an impact far beyond philosophy, for example in architectural theory (see e.g., Sharr 2007), literary criticism (see e.g., Ziarek 1989), theology (see e.g., Caputo 1993), psychotherapy (see e.g., Binswanger 1943/1964, Guignon 1993) and cognitive science (see e.g., Dreyfus 1992, 2008; Wheeler 2005; Kiverstein and Wheeler forthcoming). . . .

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger/

Mulhall, Stephen. Review of Michael Watts, THE PHILOSOPHY OF HEIDEGGER. NDPR (October, 2011).

Watts, Michael.  The Philosophy of Heidegger.  Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 2011.

This book enters what is by now a rather crowded field: that of providing an introduction to Heidegger's thought (as opposed to a detailed critical engagement with any specific element of it). It aims to survey at least the main themes of Heidegger's writings early and late, rather than focusing exclusively on a particular text or phase of thinking within that immense body of work; and because it also aspires to a certain immediacy and accessibility of style, it tends to avoid detailed engagement with either the established secondary literature or the broader philosophical debates that literature invokes. Both the strengths and weaknesses of the book follow more or less directly from these choices of focus and method.

The structure of the discussion is clear at a general level. After a very brief summary of the main events of Heidegger's life, the second chapter presents Heidegger's interest in the question of (the meaning of) Being as the thread that holds together his life's work; then chapters 2 to 7 present some of the central concepts and themes of Being and Time; chapters 7 to 11 examine a handful of dominant issues in the later writings (covering the period from the 1930s to the 1970s); and the book ends with the now obligatory chapter on Heidegger's politics.

Since there isn't a conclusion, and only a very brief introduction, the reader is given no explicit account of the specific aspects of Heidegger's thought that particularly interest the author, or of what distinguishes the perspective Watts brings to bear on the material from those of any other commentator on Heidegger (not even from those who have similarly attempted to provide an introduction to Heidegger's thought). One might wonder whether the individuality of the treatment rather comes through implicitly, in the choice of concepts or topics to focus upon: but it is hard to believe that anyone faced with the (admittedly unenviable) task of covering the basic elements of Heidegger's thinking would not feel obliged to attend to readiness-to-hand and authenticity, guilt and conscience, truth and meaning in Being and Time, and to art and poetry, technology and Asian thought with respect to the later essays and lectures. Judging by the preliminaries and (as it were) the contents page, then, it's not at all obvious what is meant to distinguish this introduction from its many competitors. . . .

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/26751-the-philosophy-of-heidegger/

Withy, Katherine. Review of Martin Heidegger, INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHY. NDPR (September 2011).

Heidegger, Martin.  Introduction to Philosophy -- Thinking and Poetizing.  Trans. Phillip Jacques Braunstein.  Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2011.

In the winter semester of 1944, Martin Heidegger began what would be his final lecture course at the University of Freiburg -- indeed, his last official lectures as a professor. Translated here, Einleitung in die Philosophie -- Denken und Dichten (Introduction to Philosophy -- Thinking and Poetizing) asks after the inner relationship of philosophy and poetry, thinking and poetizing. Pursuing this question does not 'introduce' (einleiten) us to philosophy; by our essence, we are already 'in' philosophy. But we are not at home in our philosophizing essence, and so we need a guide (Anleitung) in this "unknown region" (p. 3). Our guides in this course are Nietzsche, the poetizing thinker of homelessness, and Hölderlin, the thoughtful poet of homecoming. An encounter with Nietzsche's poetizing thinking and with Hölderlin's thinking poetizing will guide us towards a dwelling in our essence. Heidegger had spent much of the previous decade in confrontation with both Nietzsche and Hölderlin; here, he finally promises to think them together. Unfortunately, this promise is not fulfilled. . . .

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/26609-introduction-to-philosophy-thinking-and-poetizing/

Thompson, Iain. Review of Martin Heidegger, COUNTRY PATH CONVERSATIONS. NDPR (September 2011).

Heidegger, Martin.  Country Path Conversations.  Trans. Bret W. Davis.  Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2010.

Heidegger wrote these rich, fascinating, and deeply hopeful philosophical dialogues in the middle of what was probably the darkest period in his life. The time between November 1944 and February 1946 centered around Germany's defeat in the Second World War. It began with the 55 year-old Heidegger's conscription into the Volkssturm or German Territorial Army (along with all the other remaining German men between the ages of 16 and 60), where he spent several exhausting weeks digging trenches in the Alsace region between Germany and France (as the Nazis desperately sought to defend their borders from advancing Allied troops). It ended with Heidegger's dismissal from Freiburg University by the French de-Nazification committee and his subsequent psychiatric hospitalization for depression. In the interval, Heidegger supervised the hiding of his voluminous philosophical manuscripts in a cave (after the bank where they had been stored in a vault was reduced to rubble by an Allied air raid on Messkirch); his two sons both went missing in action in Russia (and became captives in Russian prisoner of war camps); his two year-old love affair with Princess Margot of Saxony-Meiningen came to threaten his marriage (when his wife Elfride demanded he choose between them; Heidegger chose Elfride but the Prince and Princess were divorced in 1947); and he lost drawn-out trials with the local and French de-Nazification committees. All these stressful events, especially the last two, precipitated the depressive crisis for which he was hospitalized.

And yet there was also a brief period of calm in the eye of this storm. As soon as Heidegger was discharged from the Volkssturm in December (for the recurrent "heart problems" that now look like psychosomatic symptoms of severe anxiety), he fled on his son's bicycle from the city of Freiburg (where he lived and taught) to his hometown of Messkirch (some 75 miles away!) so as to stay out of the grasp of the French Army. Heidegger spent the next few months writing in Messkirch and teaching at the nearby Wildenstein Castle (an idyllic site high in the hills above Beuron, with a panoramic view of the Danube river valley below), where has was soon joined by what remained of Freiburg University's philosophy department. The philosophy faculty taught joint seminars to about 30 women students and also helped the local farmers bring in their hay harvest in order to earn their own keep (food and other necessities being extremely scarce).

Heidegger felt truly in his element here, and even planned to have one of the towers of Wildenstein Castle restored with hopes of working there in close proximity to the Princess. (He paid a year's rent on the tower but the shortage of laborers and materials made the project impossible to complete at the time. Still, the romantic, Hölderlinian idea of living and working in a tower looms large in the second of these dialogues, "The Teacher Meets the Tower Warden [or, better, the Tower Dweller] at the Door of the Tower Stairway."^[1]) While lecturing primarily on Heraclitus and Hölderlin, on such timely topics as the spiritual riches that material poverty can help disclose, Heidegger also discovered Daoism (recognizing profound affinities with his own views, on the basis of which he hoped one day to conduct a dialogue with the East).^[2] It was during this temporary reprieve -- a brief stay (or Aufenthalte) in the midst of intense historical, political, and psychological turmoil -- that Heidegger wrote his first philosophical dialogues, the Country Path Conversations. In them, the thinker seeks to make sense of some of the troubling events through which he was living by placing them in the broader context of the "history of being," that is, his growing understanding of the way metaphysics focuses and transforms Western humanity's basic sense of what it means to be. . . .

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/26610-country-path-conversations/

Kisiel, Theodore. Review of Daniel Dahlstrom, ed. INTERPRETING HEIDEGGER. NDPR (July 2011).

Dahlstrom, Daniel O., ed.  Interpreting Heidegger: Critical Essays.  Cambridge: CUP, 2011.

Editor Dan Dahlstrom is quick to place this entire collection of "critical essays" under the Dilthey-Heideggerian preconception of the pan-hermeneutic character of human life: Das Leben selbst legt sich aus: "Life itself lays itself out, interprets itself, articulates itself." Aristotle's definition of humans as talking animals readily slips into our being "interpreting animals" irrevocably caught up in an interpretive process with "every move we make," thereby "elaborating, exposing, and shaping our self-understanding and, in the process, our relationships to ourselves, our world, and other things within the world." Moreover, having been thrown into this interpretive process of life willy-nilly, "our interpretations are not ours alone, but the often mindless yet time-tested iteration of a tradition of interpretations written into our most common practices and beliefs" (p. 1). The need for more thoughtful interpretations of this tradition of interpretations readily develops into some of the larger tasks assumed in the Heideggerian opus, like the need to interpret the entire history of Western thinking from its Greek beginnings to the present in order to come to terms with the "hermeneutic situation" of the revolutionary age in which we now find ourselves.

The essays are grouped into three divisions: I. Interpreting Heidegger's Philosophy; II. Interpreting Heidegger's Interpretations; III. Interpreting Heidegger's Critics. . . .

http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/24783/?id=24338

Braver, Lee. Review of Iain D. Thomson, HEIDEGGER, ART AND POSTMODERNITY. NDPR (July 2011).

Thomson, Iain D.  Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity.  Cambridge: CUP, 2011.

Heidegger is the focal point of the history of continental philosophy. He gathers together the movements before him -- transcendental idealism, existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics -- and profoundly influences those that follow -- post-structuralism, the Frankfurt school, postmodernism. It is the last of these that Iain Thomson writes about in his excellent new book, Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity, using the topic of art to mutually illuminate Heidegger's later writings and postmodernity. More than just tracing a line of influence, Thomson uses Heidegger's later work to critique certain problematic aspects of postmodernism (i.e., the philosophical movement) which can then provide a "meaningful postmodernity" (p. 1) (i.e., the period following the present one).

Thomson tells his readers at the outset that he has difficulty placing himself in the contemporary division of philosophy between analytic and continental thinkers. As someone who has also tried to defy or "bridge" this divide, I find works like this extremely heartening. Thomson's explanations of Heidegger's difficult later works are unfailingly clear, carefully laying out the arguments and explaining all technical terms. Furthermore, the book's organization guides the reader so smoothly through the steps of his discussion that it should make knee-jerk objections about Heideggerian obscurantism much harder to make. . . .

http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=24232

Kaufer, Stefan. Review of Mark A. Wrathall, HEIDEGGER AND UNCONCEALMENT. NDPR (July 2011).

Wrathall, Mark A.  Heidegger and Unconcealment: Truth, Language, and History.  Cambridge: CUP, 2010.

This volume collects eight previously published and two new essays Mark Wrathall has written on the topics of truth, language, and history in the work of the later Heidegger. This body of work is an astonishing achievement. Wrathall's writing is clear and comprehensive, ranging across virtually all of Heidegger's collected works. The essays are full of illuminating examples and draw with equal expertise on the history of philosophy and the literary and religious contexts that inform Heidegger's writing. Wrathall's overall interpretation of Heidegger's work is crystal clear, compelling, and relevant. Every philosopher interested in Heidegger should read this book.

Wrathall's work provides a much need roadmap to Heidegger's later work. "Later Heidegger" refers to views worked out after Being and Time. Beginning in the 1930s Heidegger no longer focuses on the phenomenology of individual existence. Instead, he turns to broader themes about the history of being, i.e., the different ways humans have experienced the being of entities, the nature of language, and the receding role of the divine in our technological age. Around the same time Heidegger also adopts novel styles of doing philosophy. He interprets paintings, poetry, and the pre-Socratics, and he often ventures poetical uses of language in his own writing. For almost half a century he produces essays, talks, letters, dialogues, and lecture notes, but no real book that sums up his views.

Clear philosophical interpretations of "early Heidegger," in particular of Being and Time, have been available for more than two decades now, and a generation of interpreters has produced excellent scholarship on Heidegger's existential analytic and its implications for the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, the philosophy of perception, and related fields. Later Heidegger, however, has largely resisted fruitful interpretations. In part this is because Heidegger's topics are so broad and abstract, and because he frequently uses language in unconventional ways. Further, the lack of a single, sustained authoritative text requires scholars to piece together a view from lecture notes and essays. Most significantly, there are some basic misunderstandings that impede progress towards successful interpretations. One reason why Wrathall's essays are so important is that he patiently and convincingly clears up some of these basic misunderstandings. . . .

http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=24212

de Beistegui, Miguel. Review of Martin Heidegger, BEING AND TRUTH. NDPR (June 2011).

Heidegger, Martin.  Being and Truth.  Trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt.  Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2010.

The two lecture courses collected in the volume entitled Being and Truth were delivered during Heidegger's tenure as the first Nazi rector of the University of Freiburg and thus in his darkest hour as a philosopher. The lecture course The Fundamental Question of Philosophy was held in the Summer Semester of 1933. It is devoted to an exploration of the fundamental question of philosophy and its difference from what Heidegger calls the guiding question of philosophy, understood (and deconstructed) as the question concerning the beingness of beings. Its short, incomplete and largely programmatic state is most certainly due to Heidegger's responsibilities and duties as rector, which, according to the editor, must have forced him to cancel a number of lectures (it is unclear when the lectures began and ended).

The second lecture course, entitled On the Essence of Truth, ran between 7 November 1933 and 27 February 1934. Based on a thorough transcript by Wilhelm Hallwachs, it consists of a detailed exploration of the essence of truth (and untruth) and its connection with the question of Being. Yet, apart from its long introduction and numerous remarks regarding the historical and political situation of Germany, it repeats a lecture course of the same name from the Winter Semester of 1931-32 (GA 34). As such, the volume's originality and importance lie not so much in its often sketchy or repetitive philosophical content as in the manner in which it relates that content to the historical and political situation facing Germany at the time. In that respect, it supplements Heidegger's already published political texts from 1933-34, including his rectoral address of 1 May, 1933. Given the politically sensitive nature of those lectures and the room for possible mistranslations, I found the translation mostly accurate and reliable. . . .

Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=23789.

Hodge, Joanna. Review of Michael Ehrmantraut, HEIDEGGER'S PHILOSOPHIC PEDAGOGY. NDPR (March 2011).

Ehrmantraut, Michael.  Heidegger's Philosophic Pedagogy.  London: Continuum, 2010.

There is, of course, a mountain of commentary on the thinking of Martin Heidegger, and claims to open up a genuinely new line of enquiry can be only rarely made out. Nevertheless, Michael Ehrmantraut does bring into focus a new angle of entry: the question of the importance for Heidegger's enquiries of the process of teaching philosophy. This question is then narrowed down again, for Ehrmantraut does not propose to pursue the interpretation given by Heidegger of Plato's practice in general, nor yet of the famous readings of the allegory of the cave in both GA 34 (Lectures on Plato's Allegory and on the Theaetetus) and in the second set of lectures from GA 36/37 (recently translated as Being and Truth by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt). The question is focused rather on Heidegger's own activity as teacher. In this Ehrmantraut proposes to provide a motivation for Heidegger's otherwise unexplained enthusiasm for Graf Yorck von Wartenburg's contribution to a discussion of historicality, expressed in the latter sections of Being and Time (1927), and it is with Heidegger's response to Yorck that Ehrmantraut begins his study. Against Dilthey, Yorck insists on the ontological status and futural orientation of historicality, and Ehrmantraut shows Heidegger seizing on the notion of historicality as a virtuality awaiting actualisation. That actualisation is to take place through the task of educating the next generation to take up a stance in the world as oriented towards another kind of future. In this task, philosophy in general, and more specifically the radically transformative philosophy proposed by Martin Heidegger, is to play a significant role.

The role in the enquiries of Being and Time of Dasein and Sein, of Seinsverständnis and das Man, are well enough known; those of the privilege to futurity over pastness and presentness, and to historicality over everydayness and within-timeness, less so. The stance of radical self-appropriation in the moment of Entschlossenheit, the defining moment of opening up to this futurity and historicality has been the focus of controversy for decades, at least since the decisive intervention of Ernst Tugendhat. In his magisterial Wahrheitsbegriff bei Husserl and Heidegger (1968), Tugendhat argues that the departure from a close tie between meaning, truth and expressibility in language renders the notion of Entschlossenheit otiose. This is a serious criticism; but what it precisely refuses to engage with is Heidegger's implicit appeal to future meanings, conjured into existence by that very stance which, in time, appropriates to itself both past, present and, more importantly, future conditions for meaningfulness. This very basic disagreement concerning truth is matched by a less obvious but no less basic challenge posed by Heidegger to the commonly understood notion of practice. The fallen, everyday notion of practice presumes that there is a theoretical orientation and specification of aims of living, given in advance of activity, and that there is then a subsequent turn to their practical realisation. Heidegger's proposal in Being and Time is to up-end this ordering, in line with the up-ending of the notion of truth: the practical orientation, a willingness to be put in question by being, precedes all determination of Dasein as self-questioning with respect to its circumstances, its past, its present and its future engagements. The radicality of these two moves comes to the fore in Ehrmantraut's analyses. . . .

Visit: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=23190.

Hackett, Jeremiah. Review of Philip Tonner, HEIDEGGER, METAPHYSICS AND THE UNIVOCITY OF BEING. NDPR (February 2011).

Tonner, Philip.  Heidegger, Metaphysics and the Univocity of Being.  London: Continuum, 2010.

This book is a study of Heidegger's works, early and late, in the light of the idea of the univocity of being. The central thesis is that, allowing for differences of context, project, history, and the Kehre or turn in Heidegger's ways from Phenomenology to Thought, one can argue for the consistent presence of the notion of univocity of being in all of his works. "I aim to show that there is an underlying univocal sense of being in Heidegger's philosophy" (p. 65). This is the explicit thesis of the book, which is repeated in every chapter. It claims to be a radically new thesis. The evidence for this thesis is gathered from many of Heidegger's works, beginning with the Habilitation text and ending with the later works. There is an Introduction, a conclusion and an appendix. . . .

Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=22751.

Sluga, Hans. Review of Peter E. Gordon, CONTINENTAL DIVIDE. NDPR (February 2011).

Gordon, Peter E.  Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2010.

In 2003, Peter Gordon, Professor of History at Harvard University, published a remarkable book on the kinship between two distinctive figures of Weimar culture: the German Jewish philosopher, theologian, and mystic Franz Rosenzweig and the famed author of Being and Time, Martin Heidegger. The inspiration for this book had come from a short piece Rosenzweig had written on a momentous philosophical debate between Heidegger and his colleague Ernst Cassirer that had taken place at Davos, Switzerland, in 1929 in front of a large international audience. Gordon's new book, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos, deals directly with this encounter -- with its content, its setting, its antecedents, consequences, and implications. The book can usefully be read as a sequel to Gordon's earlier work, for the two books together draw an extraordinary picture of a unique moment in the history of twentieth-century German philosophy and culture. . . .

Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=22849.

Ginev, Dimitri. Review of Don Ihde, HEIDEGGER'S TECHNOLOGIES. NDPR (January 2011).

Ihde, Don.  Heidegger's Technologies: Postphenomenological Perspectives.  New York: Fordham UP, 2010.

Don Ihde dedicated his book Technics and Praxis (1979) to the memory of Martin Heidegger. Twenty seven years later he wrote:

I have come to regret that dedication . . . My aversion was not only because of the moral discrepancy, which does arise by equating gas chamber victims and biotechnological corn, but also because I saw that for Heidegger, every technology ended up with exactly the same output or analysis. (1)

The book under review, an impressive collection of interesting studies (some of which have been published previously), supplements the negative sentiments of aversion with a profound critique of Heidegger's philosophy of technology. The range of Ihde’s discussion is remarkable: ideas about the genesis and history of the philosophy of technology; a view about the rise of techno-romanticism; a re-reading of "the Heidegger corpus" from the empirical perspective of science-technology studies; a comparative analysis of the variants upon "autonomous technology" put forward by Heidegger, Jacques Ellul and Lewis Mumford; an explanation of the sense in which Heidegger's philosophy of technology is an existential-phenomenological enterprise; a rebuttal of the arguments for the thesis that modern technology is applied science; a search for a rationale for differentiating between handwork technology and scientific technology; and the doctrine that modern technology is both historically and ontologically prior to modern science. In handling these issues, Ihde tries to avoid appeal to representationalist epistemology in discussing science's cognitive specificity and the science-technology relationship, to replace the metaphysical meta-narrative about the "essence of technology" with a pragmatist account of science-technology, and to combine his phenomenological account of the life-world "in the midst of myriad technologies" with a multicultural diversifying of the Eurocentric story about the metaphysical trajectory of modern technology. . . .

Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=22570.

"Selfhood, Authenticity and Method in Heidegger’s BEING AND TIME: Four Seminars," February - November, 2011.

Although Heidegger’s Being and Time is often cited as one of the most important philosophical works of the last century, its second division has largely been ignored, especially by commentators from the analytic tradition. But an increasing appreciation of the philosophical and theological influences that shape Heidegger’s thought has led to a re-examination of this difficult second division and the suspicion is growing that there is something of real philosophical substance in its concerns; in particular, its discussion of ‘authenticity’ is coming to be seen as having significant implications for how we ought to understand, for example, intentionality and autonomy. In 2011, the Universities of Southampton, Oxford and Essex will host a series of seminars which will extend these fascinating in-roads that are beginning to be made into the difficult hinterland of Heidegger’s magnum opus.

9th February 2011
Christ Church, Oxford University

Taylor Carman (Barnard, Columbia), ‘Heidegger on the Necessity and Finality of Death’
Daniel Dahlstrom (Boston), ‘Authenticity and the Absence of Death’
Denis McManus (Southampton), 'Being-towards-death and One’s Own Best Judgment'

23rd March 2011
University of Southampton

Steven Galt Crowell (Rice), ‘Being Answerable: Reason-Giving as Authentic Discourse’
Stephen Mulhall (Oxford), ‘Nothingness and Phenomenology: Heidegger and Sartre’
Peter Poellner (Warwick), ‘Sartre and Heidegger on Authenticity and Intersubjectivity’

18th May 2011
University of Southampton

Hubert Dreyfus (Berkeley), ‘Authenticity and the Phenomenology of Action’
Béatrice Han-Pile (Essex), ‘Heidegger on Freedom in Being and Time’
Charles Guignon (South Florida), ‘Authenticity, Phenomenology, and the Question of Being’

16th November 2011
University of Essex

Clare Carlisle (Liverpool), ‘Repetitions: Kierkegaard, Heidegger and the Question of Being’
George Pattison (Oxford), ‘Guilt, Death and Nothingness in Luther, Kierkegaard and Being and Time’
Mark Wrathall (California, Riverside), ‘Demanding Authenticity of Ourselves’

Organisers: Denis McManus, George Pattison, amd Béatrice Han-Pile
For further information, visit: http://www.soton.ac.uk/philosophy/news/conferences/sam2011.shtml.

"Heidegger and Wittgenstein," Department of Government and International Studies, Harvard University, December 10, 2010.

10:00am OPENING REMARKS

10:15-11:15am

• MICHAEL ROSEN AND PETER GORDON (Harvard) – European Philosophy in the Early Twentieth Century: a discussion

11:45-1:00pm

• EDWARD MINAR (University of Arkansas) – “Understanding the Being of the Philosophical ‘We’: Thoughts on Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Idealism” (Chair: SEAN KELLY [Harvard])

1:00-2:15pm LUNCH BREAK

2:15-3:45pm

• ANDREAS ELPIDOROU (Boston University) – “The Epistemology of Moods Revisited”
• EYLEM ÖZALTUN (Harvard) – “Non-cognitivism and the critique of traditional metaphysics in Wittgenstein and Heidegger”

4:15-5:30pm

• MAX DE GAYNESFORD (University of Reading) – “Mineness and Meanness in Heidegger and Wittgenstein” (Chair: RICHARD MORAN [Harvard])

5:30-6:00pm RECEPTION

6:00pm DINNER

For further information, contact Bernardo Zacka: bzacka@fas.harvard.edu.

Simms, Karl. Review of Gert-Jan van der Heiden, THE TRUTH (AND UNTRUTH) OF LANGUAGE. NDPR (November 2010).

van der Heiden, Gert-Jan.  The Truth (and Untruth) of Language: Heidegger, Ricoeur and Derrida on Disclosure and Displacement.  Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 2010.

Van der Heiden's project is deceptively modest: to understand how Heidegger, Ricoeur and Derrida address poetic language and truth through the twin concepts of disclosure and displacement. This, of course, already presupposes much: that truth is to be found in poetic language rather than any other sort (scientific, propositional, etc.), and that the concepts of disclosure and displacement are central to discerning a certain commonality of purpose between these three thinkers.

Van der Heiden's book is organised into four principal chapters: 'Heidegger on Disclosure and Language', 'The Transference of Writing', 'Inventions of Metaphor', and 'Mimesis in Myth and Translation'. . . .

Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=21870.

Wilberg, Jonah. Review of Greg Shirley, HEIDEGGER AND LOGIC. NDPR (October 2010).

Shirley, Greg.  Heidegger and Logic: the Place of Lógos in Being and Time.  London: Continuum, 2010.

In his inaugural address at Freiburg University in 1929, Heidegger explicitly challenged the central place given to logical principles in neo-Kantianism, on the basis of a radical account of 'the nothing'. Two years later, Carnap used the tools of symbolic logic to show how Heidegger's assertions about the nothing were illogical and thus meaningless, like much of traditional metaphysics. With Anglo-American philosophers today increasingly interested in the methodology and history of the analytic tradition, it is appropriate that increasing attention is being paid to this emblematic confrontation between Carnap and Heidegger and the philosophical issues emerging from it. Among Heidegger scholars in particular, a fascinating debate has arisen about whether Heidegger's opposition to the methods of modern symbolic logic went as far as Carnap and those following him have claimed.

Greg Shirley's Heidegger and Logic aims to take this debate to the next level, in large part by providing the first sustained treatment of the relevant aspects of Heidegger's early philosophy. Shirley traces Heidegger's treatment of logical issues back to his very earliest work and its neo-Kantian context. He provides a sophisticated interpretation of Heidegger's account of the copula, truth, negation and the nothing in the period surrounding Being and Time. He also gives a detailed interpretation of Heidegger's lecture course on 'The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic', showing that for Heidegger the normativity of formal inference is grounded in the for-the-sake-of structure of the world. . . .

Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=21589.

Davis, Bret W. Review of Richard Capobianco, ENGAGING HEIDEGGER. NDPR (September 2010).

Capobianco, Richard. Engaging Heidegger. Foreword by William J. Richardson. Toronton: U of Toronto P, 2010.

On numerous occasions throughout his life, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) stated that his abiding philosophical concern was with "the question of Being." And yet, oddly, this question has been somewhat marginalized in much of recent scholarship on Heidegger. Indeed, when discussing last year a then forthcoming volume on Heidegger's "key concepts," I was asked by a colleague from Germany, with more than a tinge of irony, "Are you including anything on the question of Being?" Without diminishing the significance of investigations into the relevance of Heidegger's thought to everything from cognitive science to environmental ethics, it is perhaps high time for Heidegger scholars to also return their attention to his fundamental question of Being. This is exactly what Richard Capobianco does, especially in the first two chapters of his concise volume, Engaging Heidegger, a volume that is refreshing for its clarity and scholarly precision.[1] In the remaining chapters of his book, Capobianco variously attends to the matter that, for Heidegger, the question of Being (Sein) always entails at the same time the question of human being (Dasein). . . .

Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=21268.

Ennis, Paul J. Review of HEIDEGGER'S LATER WRITINGS. KRITIKE 4.1 (2010).

Braver, Lee.  Heidegger's Later Writings: a Reader's Guide.  London: Continuum, 2009.

Heidegger’s Later Writings is a reader’s handbook belonging to the Continuum Reader’s Guide series. Tellingly it is the only book in the series that is not dedicated to the explication of a single major work. It covers Heidegger’s output after the publication of Being and Time (1927) beginning with the lecture known in English as ‘What is Metaphysics.’  Being and Time is covered in the same series by William Blattner (Heidegger’s Being and Time, 2007). Braver’s book covers a total of eight essays including the aforementioned ‘What is Metaphysics’ and concludes with one of Heidegger’s last important works ‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking' (1964). It includes commentaries on the most famous essays produced by Heidegger in the later period such as ‘The Origin of the Work of Art' (1935-6), ‘Letter on Humanism' (1946), and ‘The Question Concerning Technology' (1949). Alongside the commentaries there is also a short section dealing with context which is essentially an explanation of the Kehre or the turn in Heidegger’s thinking, an overview of the significant themes that preoccupied Heidegger during this period, and a short section on the reception and influence of Heidegger’s ideas upon Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, the Frankfurt School, Gadamer, Foucault, and Derrida. The book also includes a detailed set of notes that will appeal to readers already grounded in Heidegger’s work. The section on further reading will prove useful to students seeking to explore the main currents in Heidegger scholarship and finally the bibliography is concise but it is clear that Braver has assembled the bibliography with some care. . . .
 
Read the rest here: http://www.kritike.org/journal/issue_7/ennis_june2010.pdf.

Zuckert, Catherine H. Review of Alan Kim, PLATO IN GERMANY. NDPR (August 2010).

Kim, Alan. Plato in Germany: Kant -- Natorp -- Heidegger. Gent: Academia, 2010.

Like Hans Georg Gadamer in his Philosophical Apprenticeships, Alan Kim suggests that we will understand Heidegger's thought better if we know more about his debates with his colleagues at the University of Marburg. In particular, Kim contends that we will not truly understand Heidegger until we understand the position Heidegger was most immediately and directly critiquing in his interpretation of Plato -- that taken by Paul Natorp in his Platos Ideenlehre. . . .

Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=21108.

Smith, Stephen B. "Nazi or Philosopher?" CLAREMONT REVIEW OF BOOKS (Spring 2010).

Faye, Emmanuel. Heidegger: the Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy. Trans. Michael B. Smith. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009.

Sometime shortly after the publication of Victor Farias's Heidegger and Nazism (1987), I recall a conversation with the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre who complained that the title of Farias's book was misleading. The "and" suggested that Heidegger was one thing and National Socialism something else; the correct word should have been "is." The publication of Emmanuel Faye's Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy would seem to be the work that MacIntyre was looking for.

Faye is far from the first to detail Heidegger's love affair with the Nazis. In addition to Farias, it suffices to mention the work of Hugo Ott and Guido Schneeberger in Germany and Tom Rockmore and Richard Wolin in the United States. But the links between Heidegger and Nazism have never been drawn so clearly and explicitly as Faye draws them. Indeed, Faye goes farther—much farther—than Heidegger's earlier critics. Most of Heidegger's critics have been content to ask the question how could a great philosopher be a Nazi? Faye, an associate professor at the Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, argues that Heidegger's embrace of National Socialism is sufficient to eliminate him from the ranks of philosophy altogether.

In Faye's view, Heidegger systematically distorted the meaning of philosophy to make it serve the ends of Nazi propaganda. What else can you say of a man who used apparently philosophical titles such as "The Fundamental Question of Philosophy," "Of the Essence of Truth," and "Logic" to smuggle in doctrines of Aryan supremacy, völkisch German nationalism, and the Führerprinzip? Henceforward, Faye argues, Heidegger's works should be removed from the philosophy sections of libraries and bookstores and placed under the category of Nazi Studies. A strong thesis, to say the least.

The book concentrates on Heidegger's work of the mid-1930s, at the height of his enthusiasm. Faye begins with a brief, selective treatment of proto-Nazi themes in Heidegger's masterpiece Being and Time (1927), but concentrates on his speeches, seminars, and writings from the 1933-45 period. In addition to the heavily redacted Gesamtausgabe (Complete Works), Faye has had access to previously unpublished seminar materials in which Heidegger often speaks more openly and politically than in the published texts. . . .

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