Miles Groth

The present study compares the philosophy of Leibniz with Heidegger’s thought, in particular his analysis of the principium reddendae rationis sufficientis, the so-called principle of reason: nihil est sine ratione. Early on, the author notes that this version of what Leibniz referred to, in 1686, in a letter to Antoine Arnauld as “my great principle” was for Leibniz merely a “vulgar axiom,” the fundamental form of which “[is that] whereby one can always account for why something has happened this way rather than in some other way”. Heidegger, for his part, finds philosophical meat precisely in the modifying phrase “[in] this way rather than in some other way,” not in the traditional “axiom” that “nothing is without a reason”. Although Leibniz does not give the principium in its pure form in the text cited by Cristin, we are to understand that it is a metaphysical principle, not a logical principle. It is not, however, the principle of causality, which demands an answer to the question about why things are, but rather an ontological principle, which shows that and how things are as they are and not otherwise. The foundation of things, which is expressed in Leibniz’s “great principle,” is like the rose spoken of in a line from Johannes Scheffler’s Cherubinischer Wandersmann that Heidegger admired so much: “The rose is without a ‘why’; it blooms because [weil] it blooms”. Like the rose, the nature of the foundation is not gained by asking “Why?” Yet how can that be? What is more fundamental than asking about etiology, reasons, or grounds? In Der Satz vom Grund [The Principle of Ground], a lecture course from 1955/56, Heidegger replies: “The Why [Warum] looks for [sucht] the foundation. The While [Weil] brings about [bringt] the foundation”. Incidentally, when Heidegger makes a noun from the adverb “weil” in this text, he restores the original meaning of the adverb, which is an abbreviated form of “dieweil,” meaning a span of time. In so doing, he points to the temporal nature of the foundation. We can now better understand how, for Heidegger, the principle of the foundation should not be understood as a proposition or utterance, but rather as something like a tempo marking that leads thinking along its path.

Most of Heidegger’s readings of early and classical Greek texts are unconventional by traditional philosophical and philological standards. The present reading of Plato is no exception. Heidegger suggests that the “essence of truth is what first allows the essence of man to be grasped” and “the man whose liberation is depicted in the allegory is set out into the truth.” But since such “setting out” is the very “mode of his existence, the fundamental occurrence of his Dasein,” the allegory is not chiefly about the essence of truth but, as already noted, rather about “an occurrence happening ‘in man’, that is, in his history”. The real novelty of Heidegger’s reading, however, is his conclusion that the “decisive result of the interpretation of the cave allegory... [is] the insight that the question concerning the essence of truth as unhiddenness must be transformed into the question concerning untruth”, that is, “that untruth belongs to the essence of truth”. For this reason Heidegger’s course takes a turn to a passage in the Theaetetus, which he dramatically characterizes as “that stretch of the road of the question concerning untruth which, for the first and last time in the history of philosophy, Plato actually trod”. While the dialogue is generally taken to be about knowledge, for Heidegger it is about untruth.

There are by now a number of detailed expositions of Being and Time and very many studies in which the basic argument of Heidegger's best known work is reconstructed. Seeing the Self is among the latter. As elsewhere in the recent secondary literature, the extreme novelty of Being and Time is challenged. Øverenget goes so far as to say “[i]t may very well be that for the most part there is nothing really new in Heidegger apart from his investigations of Aristotle, Kant, and Husserl, and that his genius was in the way he synthesized the insights of these thinkers”. Seeing the Self is distinctive among the reconstructions of Heidegger's fundamental ontology as it was worked out in Being and Time in being an attempt to show that “the formal structure of Husserl's phenomenology is at work in Heidegger's thinking” in that work. The author believes that Heidegger's project is unthinkable without Husserl’s notion of categorial intuition, which Øverenget claims appears in Heidegger as disclosedness [Ersctdossenheit], his theory of wholes and parts, that is, abstracta and concreta, and his concept of a priorism, which is “the unfolding of the theory of wholes and parts in its full range”. In fact, “the theory of wholes and parts, the interpretation of Dasein as Being-in-the-world, and the phenomeno-logical sense of the apriori are intrinsically related” in Heidegger's existential analytique. To demonstrate this, the author, who teaches at the University of Oslo, closely examines the argument in Being and Time against the background of Heidegger's lecture course “History of the Concept of Time” and other near-contemporary texts, including the “Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle: Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation”. Øverenget claims that “Dasein is structurally related to Husserl’s notion of pure consciousness because both refer to subjectivity”. He thinks Heidegger's claim to fame may be that he “redefines subjectivity in a phenomenological manner”, since Dasein “designates a new way of interpreting what was traditionally known as the subject”. At the same time, it is important to keep in mind that “Dasein not only refers to subjectivity but that this concept in fact designates transcendental subjectivity”.

With the publication of these lectures, given in the summer semester of 1907 at the University of Göttingen, all of Husserl’s course on the “Main Parts of the Phenomenology and Critique of Reason” is now available. They were preceded by the publication in 1964 of a translation of the first five lectures of the course under the title The Idea of Phenomenology, which was first published in German in 1950. As Husserl wrote in a private notebook, the themes of the course were to be the “problems of a phenomenology of perception, of phantasy, of time, of the thing”. As worked out in the course, the lectures describe the conditions of possibility of the presentation of a thing in visual perception, the role of kinaesthetic experience in the unification of the series of images of the thing presented, and the temporal background of the presentation.

This volume is comprised of twenty-two essays on the early writings of Martin Heidegger, including a number of lecture courses he gave at Freiburg University and Marburg University from 1919 until the publication of Sein und Zeit in 1927. Four of the essays have already been published in another form. Seven have been translated for the volume, two of them by the authors. In recently published studies, the editors have been responsible in great part for bringing to light the influence of the work of the young Heidegger on the presiding themes of his mature work. Their own essays in Reading Heidegger from the Start, "Heidegger on Becoming a Christian," and "Martin Heidegger: Martin Luther," summarize and supplement selected results of their work, which the present volume complements.

This collection of conference papers is the third in a series of related volumes published under the auspices of the World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning, an organization headed by the editor of the collection and based at her home in Belmont, Massachusetts. It was preceded, in 1996, by Life. In the Glory of Its Radiating Manifestations and Life. The Human Quest for an Ideal. The editor, who has assembled nearly all of the fifty-seven volumes of the series Analecta Husserliana published to date, explains that the twenty-one texts included here, all but four of which are in French, “present the work of [the Institute’s] fifth International Phenomenology Congress held in Paris, October 6th to 9th, 1994”, the theme of which was the editor’s own “phenomenology of life as a scientific, integrated philosophy of life”.

The initial collaboration and subsequent parting of the ways of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, and the closely related course of the early development of the phenomenological movement, are chronicled in part in the history of a text Husserl wrote for the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The article, “Phenomenology,” which, until 1956, remained an important source of many a general reader’s information about phenomenology, was both one of Husserl’s few attempts to present in a concise way an account of the new fundamental science that he originated and “a programmatic outline for his future endeavors” from 1928 on. The five versions of the article and a set of lectures on phenomenological psychology that Husserl gave in Amsterdam in 1928 are brought together in the present volume. The fifth version of Husserl’s article was finally “done into English” by one of Husserl’s doctoral students, Christopher V. Salmon, whose version was eventually further truncated by the editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The actual Britannica text is not reproduced here. The transmogrifications of this ill-fated text are meticulously illuminated by Thomas Sheehan, who has also prepared a complete edition of the marginalia to Husserl’s copy of Sein und Zeit. Richard E. Palmer has edited and translated the Amsterdam Lectures and Husserl’s marginal remarks in his copy of Heidegger’s Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik. Both sets of marginalia occupy about two-hundred pages of the volume. Also included are several other documents relevant to the history of the philosophical and personal relationship between Husserl and Heidegger, whom Husserl had chosen to be his academic successor and philosophical heir: remarks made by Heidegger in April 1929 on the occasion of Husserl’s seventieth birthday; Husserl’s letter to Alexander Pfänder from January 1931, in which he reveals his disappointment with Heidegger; and a lecture on “Phenomenology and Anthropology,” given by Husserl in June 1931, in which he publicly rejects Heidegger’s philosophy. The editors have worked with and, at times, updated Walter Biemel’s critical edition of Husserl’s texts on phenomenological psychology, as well as other materials available in the Husserl archives, at Louvain.

Like Aristotle’s texts, the present volume consists of logoi, lecture notes Heidegger left behind which later in his life he considered for possible inclusion in his Gesamtausgabe. Omissions in the manuscript amounting to about eleven pages were made good by referring to two transcripts of what was heard, respectively, by Walter Bröcker and Helene Weiss, two of Heidegger’s students at Freiburg University in the summer of 1923, when the course was given. Here and there in the manuscript, Heidegger provided headings for sections of the text and for a number of inserts and supplements added later. The detailed section and subsection headings, which are an outline of the course, were added by the German editor, Käte Bröcker-Oltmanns. According to the translator, by Heidegger’s own admission, the text comprises “the first notes for Being and Time”, and therein lies one element of our interest in these logoi, the other being the possibility that “Ontology—The Hermeneutics of Facticity” was “the original form of Heidegger’s ‘original ethics’”.

Fewer than half of the fifty-two courses Martin Heidegger gave between 1915 and 1956 have now been translated into English. Twelve of them have not yet appeared in the first Gesamtausgabe of his works. The present volume, which was first published in German in 1977, is the translation of a course given during the winter semester of 1927–8, at Marburg University. As the translators note, with its publication, all of Heidegger’s published texts on Kant are now available in English. The text thus complements Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, What Is a Thing?, and “Kant’s Thesis about Being [Sein]”.

Translation is an early and ongoing, but as yet for the most part unexamined, theme of Heidegger's lecture courses and essays. According to Heidegger, translation became a central philosophical issue in the Western tradition soon after its beginnings when a number of the basic words of the early Greek thinkers were sometimes mistranslated into Latin and that, as a result, the thought of the pre-Socratics and the classic Greek philosophers, especially Aristotle, has remained obscure. ;For Heidegger, because of the relation between thinking and translating, and the relation of both to language, it is not a thinker's words, but rather the translator's thought, that is translated when he attempts to render a text in his own native language. The resulting text is a recomposition of the original text, not the exchange of words between the vocabularies of two natural languages. Translation also goes on within the same language whenever one speaks and writes. ;I first present the principles of Heidegger's philosophy of translation and present them as ontological, hermeneutic and methodological elements. Next, I examine Heidegger's rendering of Parmenides' Fragment VI as an example of his method of paratactic translation, in which each word of an utterance, rather than the syntactic ensemble, initially guides the rendering. Finally, I apply Heidegger' s own principles to a translation of Was ist Metaphysik? and argue on philosophical grounds for new renderings of Heidegger's basic words, including Sein, Seiende, Dasein and Existenz. I also explore the relation of Heidegger's view of translation to the question about the meaning of Sein and the relation of Sein and thinking. ;Heidegger's hermeneutics complements interpretation theory since Schleiermacher, but in suggesting that thinking does not occur in words, Heidegger also challenges that view

Heidegger scholars have sometimes assumed that Heidegger’s experience of thinking was unprecedented and that the peculiarity of his idiom was related to the novelty of that experience. Reinhard May’s study suggests that Heidegger’s thought is fundamentally indebted to his early familiarity with Zen Buddhist ideas and to his reading of Taoist classics, including the Tao te Ching of Lao Tse and the works of Chuang Zu, in German translations Heidegger knew by Victor von Strauss, Martin Buber and Richard Wilhelm, and, later, to his contact with Chinese and Japanese philosophers studying in Germany with Rickert, Husserl and Heidegger himself. Many European artists and intellectuals were engrossed by East Asian ideas, of course, but May’s conclusion is that Heidegger was in a sense a Taoist philosopher, and that the peculiarities of his philosophy are the same as those which inhere in East Asian philosophy, which prizes silence and rejects the hegemony of Western logic. While Heidegger’s appreciation for East Asian philosophy and his influence on modern Japanese thinkers have been noted often enough, the suggestion that the heart of Heidegger’s thought was profoundly oriented in the early 1920s by Taoist and Zen Buddhist ideas is provocative. The translator, Graham Parkes, who has supplemented his translation with an essay detailing Heidegger’s contact with Japanese philosophers, was among the first to suggest a deeper connection between Heidegger and East Asian philosophy in a series of essays he edited on Heidegger and Asian Thought, which includes contributions by Japanese and Chinese philosophers who knew Heidegger and were in contact with him for many years.

The eleven essays collected here include three papers, written in the 1980s, on the influence of Hegel on Heidegger’s thinking by Jacques Taminiaux, Dominique Janicaud, and Michel Haar, respectively; a paper on Heidegger’s several readings of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit by Robert Bernasconi ; two papers on Hegel’s aesthetics by Martin Donougho and John Sallis; a paper on Hegel’s philosophy of history by David Kolb; two papers on Hegel, Heidegger, and Antigone by Dennis J. Schmidt and Kathleen Wright; an essay on unpublished notes by Friedrich Hölderlin, with references to Heidegger’s philosophy by David Farrell Krell; and a general introduction to the volume by one of its editors, John McCumber. The French papers, which are in the background of many of the remaining papers, have been previously published, as has the contribution by Krell, which is reprinted from an earlier volume with a few minor changes and the addition of a short paragraph. The paper by Sallis is based on a chapter from a previously published book that has been expanded to include a discussion of Hegel’s aesthetics.

This is the third and final volume of the author’s “attempt to understand and communicate the insights of Martin Heidegger... the most important philosopher of modern times”. It is a discussion of the “later Heidegger” or “‘finished’ Heidegger,” which Julian Young defines as texts written after 1936 and characterizes as a “complementary mingling of both meditative and poetic thinking, a happy marriage of the two”. He comments: “The ground from which [the texts] spring lies, not in any product of ratiocination, but in, rather, poetic vision”. Professor Young, who teaches at the University of Auckland, sees Heidegger as “the ‘physician’ of modern Western culture” who “identifies three leading symptoms of modernity’s spiritual ‘sickness’: loss of the gods, the ‘violence’ of technology, and loss of ‘dwelling’ or ‘homelessness.’” The pathogen of the sickness is metaphysics, which “is one and the same error as that of believing there to be no more to truth than correspondence”. Like a malignancy that commandeers all of an organism’s energy in servitude to one pathological process, metaphysics “elevates a particular disclosure [of reality] to tyrannical status, a status which allows the possibility of no other reality-revealing horizon”. This small but rich volume concludes with a nuanced discussion of “the therapeutic aspect of Heidegger’s ‘medical’ thinking” on Western culture’s spiritual malady which the philosopher had diagnosed early in the twentieth century. In nine neatly argued chapters, the author offers a number of fresh interpretations of familiar themes in Heidegger scholarship, including the meaning of Sein, the Kehre that affected Heidegger’s way of thinking, Gestell, Wohnen, Ereignis, and the Geviert.

"The thesis of the present book is that we all possess, a priori, an awareness, or even understanding, of being that guides our daily practice as well as any subsequent philosophical interpretations". The awareness is preontological, and this "pre-ontological awareness [of being] is what does the philosophizing" in each historical epoch. It has yielded a series of interpretations of being as substance, reality, the Trinity, the principles of symbolic logic, dialectical reason, consciousness--to name the most important--which we recognize as the various major grounding concepts of metaphysics. But the interpretations are merely "illustrations of being." None is fundamental and others are possible.

One may ask why a new translation of Martin Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics is needed. The present volume is the second English version of Heidegger’s 1935 lecture course, Einführung in die Metaphysik, the text of which was first published in German only in 1953. An earlier translation appeared in 1959 and has remained in print until the present; now, however, we have a version that the student of twentieth-century Continental philosophy will likely find more congenial than the first, although important problems remain in the translators’ attempt to make Heidegger’s thought accessible. It is well known that Heidegger was in the habit of writing out the lectures for his courses, many of which have appeared posthumously. His Introduction to Metaphysics is no exception, and the text, which includes the author’s marginal notes made between 1935 and 1953, remains as compelling now as it was when Heidegger first presented the course soon after the troubling time of his rectorship at the University of Freiburg.

Among several recent short introductions to the thought and work of Martin Heidegger, this is perhaps the best, especially for beginning students, since for the most part it faithfully represents Heidegger’s thought while remaining free of excessive German terminology. The author stays close to the standard translations of Heidegger’s basic words, but also sometimes offers fresh versions of key terms that shed light on Heidegger’s thought in ways that will stimulate specialists; for example, “minding” for Sorge and “facing up [to]” for Vorlaufen. Polt’s introduction to Heidegger contains important discussions of the relevance of Heidegger’s thought to logic, language, and art, as well as to his political stance during the period of dominance of National Socialism in Germany.

The essays collected here are divided into two parts. The first group primarily considers the influence of Emil Lask’s philosophy of transcendental logic on Husserl and Heidegger. The second group focuses mostly on Heidegger’s thought, and its relation to Husserl and phenomenology. Overall, the book “argues that transcendental phenomenology is indispensable to the philosophical elucidation of the space of meaning”, which the author characterizes variously as the “transcendental field of inquiry” of any kind, “the intelligibility that is presupposed in all positive inquiry”, “the thematic field of philosophical inquiry”, the “horizon of intelligibility”, “the world horizon as such”, or simply “world” in the Heideggerian sense. The “aim [of the papers] is to suggest how transcendental phenomenology, as ‘first philosophy,’ provides an alternative to the ancient metaphysical paradigm and the modern epistemological one”.

In the late 1940s, a young French philosopher, Jean Beaufret, asked Martin Heidegger when he would write an ethics to complement his ontology of human existence. Now, in Ethics and Finitude, Lawrence Hatab, who teaches philosophy at Old Dominion University, sets out to show that even though Heidegger never published an ethics, “his manner of thinking is well suited to moral philosophy”. Professor Hatab believes it is possible “to speak from the atmosphere of Heidegger’s thinking with the hope of making significant contributions to ethical thought” : “My general aim,” he writes, “is to show how Heidegger’s way of thinking is able to articulate both the claims and the finite complexity of ethical existence”.

The present volume consists of the protocols of twenty séances held between 1966 and 1973 in which Heidegger was the central figure. They occurred as four seminars, the first three of which were given in Provence, the last one having taken place in Heidegger’s home in Zähringen, a suburb of Freiburg im Breisgau, three years before his death in 1976. Appended to the protocols are two brief texts, the first written in the winter of 1972–73 on part of Parmenides’ Fragment 1 which Heidegger read during the last session of the fourth seminar, on 8 September 1973, and an introduction to the Parmenides interpretation called “The Provenance of Thinking”, which was written at some point between 1973 and the spring of 1976. The two texts were added by the editor of the Gesamtausgabe edition of Heidegger’s Seminare in 1986. The five pages on which they appear contain the only sentences composed by Heidegger himself and are therefore the only ones, in fact, from Heidegger’s own German in Four Seminars.

Some of the interest of philosophers of mind in the results of recent research in the social sciences, including especially cognitive science and developmental psychology, is reflected in this anthology of eleven essays on the long-standing discussion about how minds understand other minds. In a few of the essays, enthusiastic and often seemingly uncritical acceptance of the empirical findings of contemporary psychological research may cause some readers well-warranted concern. Taken together, these essays are welcome additions to the discussion of an important problem of epistemology.