Heideggers Conversations

The philosopher’s meditations on nature, technology, and evil, written in the final years of WWII, presented in “clear and highly readable translation” (Philosophy in Review). First published in German in 1995, volume 77 of Heidegger’s Complete Works consists of three imaginary conversations written as World War II was coming to an end. Composed at a crucial moment in history and in Heidegger’s own thinking, these conversations present meditations on science and technology; the devastation of nature, World War II, and the nature of evil. Heidegger also delves into the possibility of release from representational thinking into a more authentic relation with being and the world. The first conversation involves a scientist, a scholar, and a guide walking together on a country path; the second takes place between a teacher and a tower-warden, and the third features a younger man and an older man in a prisoner-of-war camp in Russia, where Heidegger’s two sons were missing in action. Unique because of their conversational style, this lucid and precise translation of these texts offers insight into the issues that engaged Heidegger’s wartime and postwar thinking.

Reading Martin Heidegger's five conversational texts together for the first time, Heidegger's Conversations elaborates not only what Heidegger thought but how he did so by attending to the philosophical possibilities of the genre of these under-studied texts written between 1944 and 1954. Though he wrote little on the topic of teaching and learning explicitly, Katherine Davies shows Heidegger performed an implicit poetic pedagogy in his conversations that remains to be recognized. Heidegger launched an experimental attempt to enact a learning of non-representational, non-metaphysical thinking by cultivating a distinctly collaborative sensitivity to the call of the poetic. Davies illustrates how each conversation emphasizes a particular pedagogical element—non-oppositionality, making mistakes, thinking in community, poetic interpretation, and the dangers of such pedagogy—which together constitute the developmental arc of these texts. Whether Heidegger is revising or reinforcing his own earlier pedagogical practices, Davies argues that attending to the dramatic staging of the conversations offers a distinct vantage point from which to contend with Heidegger's philosophy and politics in the post-war period.

Heidegger discusses early Greek thinking in friendly letters to French philosopher, Jean Beaufret.

Martin Heidegger is one of the most important as well as one of the most difficult thinkers of the last century. His masterpiece Being and Time has been described as the most profound turning point in German philosophy since Hegel. Raymond Tallis, who has been arguing with Heidegger for over thirty years, illuminates his fundamental ideas through an imaginary conversation, which is both relaxed and rigorous, witty and profound. The Conversation defines Heidegger's relevance to the philosophical agenda of the present century by illuminating his great contribution to our thinking about what it is to be a human being while identifying the weaknesses in his thought.

Long awaited and eagerly anticipated, this remarkable volume allows English-speaking readers to experience a profound dialogue between the German philosopher Martin Heidegger and the Swiss psychiatrist Medard Boss. A product of their long friendship, Zollikon Seminars: Protocols-Conversations-Letters chronicles an extraordinary exchange of ideas. Heidegger strove to transcend the bounds of philosophy while Boss and his colleagues in the scientific community sought to better understand their patients and their world. Boss approached Heidegger during World War II asking for help in reflective thinking on the nature of Heidegger's work. A correspondence ensued, followed by visits that soon became annual two-week meetings in Boss's home in Zollikon, Switzerland. The protocols from these seminars, recorded by Boss and reviewed, corrected, and supplemented by Heidegger himself, make up one part of this volume. They are augmented by Boss's record of the conversations he had with Heidegger in the days between seminars and by excerpts from the hundreds of letters that Heidegger wrote to Boss between 1947 and 1971. For the first time, Heidegger makes the fundamental ideas of his philosophy accessible to nonphilosophers. Heidegger confronts certain philosophical/psychological theories, including Freudian psychoanalysis, Ludwig Binswanger's and Boss's forms of Dasein (existential) psychoanalysis, and Indian philosophy that he has never previously addressed. The lectures, correspondence, and conversations span twenty-five years, offering an ongoing view of Heidegger's career and philosophical development. A richly detailed picture of one of the century's great philosophers, Zollikon Seminars is the best and clearest introduction to Heidegger's philosophy available.

Despite his predominance in twentieth-century philosophy, no intellectual biography of Martin Heidegger has yet appeared. This account of Heidegger's personal relations, originally published in German and extensively corrected by the author for this translation, enlarges our understanding of a complex figure. A well-known art historian and an intimate friend of Heidegger's, Heinrich Wiegand Petzet provides a rich portrait of Heidegger that is part memoir, part biography, and part cultural history. By recounting chronologically a series of encounters between the two friends from their meeting in 1929 until the philosopher's death in 1976, as well as between Heidegger and other contemporaries, Petzet reveals not only new aspects of Heidegger's thought and attitudes toward the historical and intellectual events of his time but also the greater cultural and social context in which he articulated his thought.

This book traces a most obscure and yet most intriguing theme concealed in Heidegger’s thinking and work, which has hitherto not yet been made the focus of a thorough and sustained investigation: that is, the emergence and course of Heidegger’s interest in East Asian thought and of his reflection on East-West dialogue. Lin Ma covers such complex issues as Heidegger’s thoughts on language, Being, technology, the other beginning, and the journey abroad, with a view to their implications for East-West dialogue. It reveals the significance of his remarks on the early Greek’s confrontation with the Asiatic, and presents contextualized interpretations of his fleeting references to the topic of East-West dialogue and of his encounter with the Daodejing. Finally, it delves into "A dialogue on language" and exposes the strains and tensions that accompany Heidegger’s extension of dialogue and the Same, the two notions central to his thought, to the question of East-West dialogue. In the end, Lin Ma concludes that Heidegger’s fundamental concerns and philosophical orientations as articulated in terms of the history of Being and the other beginning have restricted him from engaging more seriously with the irresolvable and yet enduring issue of East-West dialogue.

This work explores the troubled relationship and unfinished intellectual dialogue between Paul Celan, regarded by many as the most important European poet after 1945, and Martin Heidegger, perhaps the most influential figure in twentieth-century philosophy. It centers on the persistent ambivalence Celan, a Holocaust survivor, felt toward a thinker who respected him and at times promoted his poetry. Celan, although strongly affected by Heidegger's writings, struggled to reconcile his admiration of Heidegger's ideas on literature with his revulsion at the thinker's Nazi past. That Celan and Heidegger communicated with each other over a number of years, and in a controversial encounter, met in 1967, is well known. The full duration, extent, and nature of their exchanges and their impact on Celan's poetics has been less understood, however. In the first systematic analysis of their relationship between 1951 and 1970, James K. Lyon describes how the poet and the philosopher read and responded to each other's work throughout the period. He offers new information about their interactions before, during, and after their famous 1967 meeting at Todtnauberg. He suggests that Celan, who changed his account of that meeting, may have contributed to misreadings of his poem "Todtnauberg." Finally, Lyon discusses their two last meetings after 1967 before the poet's death three years later. Drawing heavily on documentary material—including Celan's reading notes on more than two dozen works by Heidegger, the philosopher's written response to the poet's "Meridian" speech, and references to Heidegger in Celan's letters—Lyon presents a focused perspective on this critical aspect of the poet's intellectual development and provides important insights into his relationship with Heidegger, transforming previous conceptions of it.

Article, television broadcasts, interviews, etc., about Martin Heidegger, b. 1889, German philosopher.

New and updated translations of a seminal collection of essays by Martin Heidegger.