Reading Heidegger

Heidegger is perhaps the most influential, yet least readily understood, philosopher of the last century. Mark A. Wrathall unpacks Heidegger's dense prose and guides the reader through Heidegger's early concern with the nature of human existence and his later preoccupation with the threat that technology poses to our ability to live worthwhile lives. Wrathall pays particular attention to Heidegger's revolutionary analysis of human existence as inextricably shaped by a shared world. This leads to an exploration of his views on the banality of public life and the possibility of authentic anticipation of death as a response to that banality. Wrathall reviews Heidegger's scandalous involvement with National Socialism, situating it in the context of his views about the movement of world history. He also explains Heidegger's important accounts of truth, art and language. Extracts are taken from Heidegger's magnum opus, Being and Time, as well as a variety of his best-known essays and lectures.

Heidegger is a classic introduction to Heidegger's notoriously difficult work. Truly accessible, it combines clarity of exposition with an authoritative handling of the subject-matter. Richard Polt has written a work that will become the standard text for students looking to understand one of the century's greatest minds.

Heidegger scholars consider the philosopher's recently published notebooks, including the issues of Heidegger's Nazism and anti-Semitism. For more than forty years, the philosopher Martin Heidegger logged ideas and opinions in a series of notebooks, known as the “Black Notebooks” after the black oilcloth booklets into which he first transcribed his thoughts. In 2014, the notebooks from 1931 to 1941 were published, sparking immediate controversy. It has long been acknowledged that Heidegger was an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazi Party in the early 1930s. But the notebooks contain a number of anti-Semitic passages—often referring to the stereotype of “World-Jewry”—written even after Heidegger became disenchanted with the Nazis themselves. Reactions from the scholarly community have ranged from dismissal of the significance of these passages to claims that the anti-Semitism in them contaminates all of Heidegger's work. This volume offers the first collection of responses by Heidegger scholars to the publication of the notebooks. In essays commissioned especially for the book, the contributors offer a wide range of views, addressing not only the issues of anti-Semitism and Nazism but also the broader questions that the notebooks raise. Contributors Babette Babich, Andrew Bowie, Steven Crowell, Fred Dallmayr, Donatella Di Cesare, Michael Fagenblat, Ingo Farin, Gregory Fried, Jean Grondin, Karsten Harries, Laurence Paul Hemming, Jeff Malpas, Thomas Rohkrämer, Tracy B. Strong, Peter Trawny, Daniela Vallega-Neu, Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Nancy A. Weston, Holger Zaborowski

A new 2024 translation of Martin Heidegger's major work "Being and Time" (Sein und Zeit), originally published in 1927 in multiple publications. This edition contains a new afterword by the Translator, a timeline of Heidegger's life and works, a philosophic index of core Heideggerian concepts and a guide for terminology across 19th and 20th century Existentialists. This translation is designed for readability and accessibility to Heidegger's enigmatic and dense philosophy. Complex and specific philosophic terms are translated as literally as possible and academic footnotes have been removed to ensure easy reading. Being and Time presents a complex philosophical discourse on the nature of being (Sein) and time (Zeit), focusing in particular on the temporal-existentialist concept of Dasein, a term that combines the German words for "to be" (sein) and "there" (da). This classic philosophic work examines the traditional metaphysical understanding of being, arguing that this understanding, typically based on the idea of a constant presence, fails to account for the temporal and existential dimensions of being. Heidegger proposes that an understanding of being requires an analysis of Dasein, which is characterized not only by its existence, but also by its being in the world and its temporal existence. The concept of Dasein is central to the his argument, emphasizing that Dasein is always already situated in a world, and its understanding of being is shaped by its temporal existence. This perspective challenges traditional metaphysical notions of being as static and unchanging, proposing instead that being is fundamentally temporal and connected to human existence and understanding. As the title suggests, Heidegger sees the question of Being as indistinguishable from Time, arguing that Newtonian conceptions of time as a series of now-points are inadequate for understanding the being of Dasein. His Ontochronology argues that the existential and ontological analysis of Dasein reveals a more fundamental concept of time, one that is integral to the structure of Being itself. The text further elaborates on the idea of "thrownness" and several other existentialist themes. Thrownness is one of the three conditions that signifies Dasein's immersion in the world, where it finds itself already entangled in a web of relations and meanings. This "thrownness", combined with Dasein's inherent being-toward-death, underscores the existential condition of human beings, framing their existence as a continual engagement with their own finitude and the possibilities of their being. Heidegger posits that understanding the nature of being requires a fundamental rethinking of both being and time, dogmatically stating that the true nature of being can only be grasped through an understanding of the temporality that characterizes the existence of being.

Presents key texts from the entire course of Heidegger's philosophical career. This book offers insight into Heidegger's thought. It also traces the many thematic paths that are useful for developing a comprehensive understanding of Heidegger's most important work.

Paola Marrati considers the philosophical sources of Derrida's thought through his reading of both Husserl and Heidegger. Notions such as the contamination of the empirical and the transcendental, dissemination and writing, are explained as a guiding thread that runs through Derrida's early and later works.

A new 2024 translation of Heidegger's early work "Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics", originally published in 1910. This edition contains a new afterword by the translator, a timeline of Heidegger's life and works, a philosophic index of core Heideggerian concepts and a guide for Existentialist terminology across 19th and 20th century Existentialists. This translation is designed for readability and accessibility to Heidegger's enigmatic and dense philosophy. Complex and specific philosophic terms are translated as literally as possible and academic footnotes have been removed to ensure easy reading. Heidegger's analysis of Kant's Epistemology (specifically his three critiques) is rooted in the Heideggarian concept of "fundamental ontology," which he defines as the ontological analysis of finite human existence that prepares the ground for metaphysics. This idea is distinct from all forms of anthropology, including philosophical anthropology. Heidegger's aim is to show that the identified ontological analysis of Dasein (a term he famously uses to refer to human existence or being-there) is a necessary condition for understanding the fundamental question: "What is man?" Heidegger emphasizes the role of "transcendental imagination" in Kant's philosophy, which he sees as crucial for linking the categories of metaphysics with the phenomenon of time. This connection, according to Heidegger, is central to understanding Kant's approach to metaphysics. He argues that Kant's Critique of Pure Reason should be interpreted as a foundational text for metaphysics, suggesting that it presents the problem of metaphysics as that of a fundamental ontology. Heidegger emphasizes the importance of understanding what "foundation" means in this context, likening it to the design of a building plan that includes instructions on how and on what the building should be founded. In this analogy, metaphysics is not an existing building, but is inherent in all human beings as a "natural disposition. As with all of Heidegger's works, the concept of time and its relation to human cognition and understanding is the crux of his metaphysical project, and his criticism and praise of Kant. He proposes that Kant's work represents a shift in the traditional approach to metaphysics, from a focus on what is to a focus on how human beings understand and interact with the world. This shift, according to Heidegger, is indicative of a deeper, more fundamental level of inquiry into the nature of being and existence, which he believes is essential for a true understanding of metaphysics. In this sense, Kant is a critical nexus point in the history of Philosophy, representing a seismic shift.

Heidegger Explained is a clear and thorough summary of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). It gives a fascinating explanation of all stages of Heidegger’s life and career, and shows his entire philosophy to emerge from one simple but profound insight. Many philosophers believe that Heidegger was the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century. His influence has long been felt not just in philosophy, but also in such fields as art, architecture, and literary studies. Yet the great difficulty of Heidegger’s terminology has often scared away interested readers lacking an academic background in philosophy. Author Graham Harman shows that Heidegger is actually one of the simplest and clearest of thinkers. All the diverse topics of his writings, and all the lengthy analyses he gives of past philosophers, boil down to a single powerful idea: being is not presence. In any human relation with the world, our thinking and even our acting do not fully exhaust the world. Something more always withdraws from our grasp. Neither being itself nor individual beings are ever fully “present-at-hand,” in Heidegger’s terminology. This single insight allows Heidegger to revolutionize the phenomenology of his teacher Edmund Husserl. The method of Husserl was to focus entirely on how things present themselves to us as phenomena in consciousness. Heidegger understood that the things are always partly hidden from consciousness, living a secret life of their own. Human beings are not lucid scientific observers staring at the world and describing it, but instead are thrown into a world where light is always mixed with shadow. For Heidegger, the entire history of philosophy has reduced being to some sort of presence, whether by defining it as atoms, consciousness, perfect forms, the will to power, or even God. In this way, past philosophers have all chosen one specific kind of privileged being to represent being itself. Yet this is impossible, since being always partly withdraws from any attempt to define it. For this reason, philosophy needs to make a new beginning, one that would be just as great as the first beginning in ancient Greece. The book ends by shedding new light on Heidegger’s concept of the fourfold, which is so notoriously difficult that most commentators avoid it altogether.

The early Heidegger of Being and Time is generally believed to locate finitude strictly within the individual, based on an understanding that this individual will have to face its death alone and in its singularity. Facing death is characterized by the mood of Angst (anxiety), as death is not an experience one can otherwise access outside of one's own demise. In the later Heidegger, the finitude of the individual is rooted in the finitude of the world it lives in and within which it actualizes its possibilities, or Being. Against the standard reading that the early Heidegger places the emphasis on individual finitude, this important new book shows how the later model of the finitude of Being is developed in Being and Time. Elkholy questions the role of Angst in Heidegger's discussion of death and it is at the point of transition from the nothing back to the world of projects that the author locates finitude and shows that Heidegger's later thinking of the finitude of Being is rooted in Being and Time.