Tom Sheehan

It is very significant that Heidegger chose Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, the lecture course he gave in the summer semester of 1927, to be the first publication in his monumental Gesamtausgabe.1 The text is rich in many ways, but one of its major claims to fame may rest in a footnote, taken from Heidegger's own manuscript of the course, that appears on page 1 of the published version. This elliptical footnote, which in fact functions like a subtitle for the whole volume, asserts that the lecture course represents a "New elaboration of Sein und Zeit, Part One, Division Three.".

The period after World War Two saw the emergence both of the so-called later Heidegger and of the corresponding problem of the unity of his thought. Although his major work, Sein und Zeit, 1927 (=SZ) had announced Heidegger's intention of working out the meaning of being (Sein), his publications up through 1943, with the exception of the brief Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, presented only his preparatory analysis of human openness (Dasein). However, Heidegger's post-war publications seemed to emphasize “being itself” (the history of being, being as language, pre-Socratic notions of being, the withdrawal of being in the modern world) and indeed almost seemed to hypostasize being into an "other" with a life of its own. This state of affairs, combined with Heidegger's announcement in 1953 that SZ would be left a torso, gave rise to such questions as whether his later thought was still phenomenological, how it might be continuous with his earlier writings, and how, if indeed at all, it was to be understood.

Martin Heidegger taught philosophy at Freiburg University (1915-1923), Marburg University (1923-1928), and again at Freiburg University (1928-1945). Early in his career he came under the influence of Edmund Husserl, but he soon broke away to fashion his own philosophy. His most famous work, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) was published in 1927. Heidegger's energetic support for Hitler in 1933-34 earned him a suspension from teaching from 1945 to 1950. In retirement he published numerous works, including the first volumes of his Collected Edition. His thought has had strong influence on trends in philosophy ranging from existentialism through hermeneutics to deconstruction as well as on the fields of literary theory and theology.

Interpretations of Heidegger often fail to distinguish between two very different matters -- on the one hand “the turn” (die Kehre), and on the other hand “the change in Heidegger’s thinking” (die Wendung im Denken), that is, the shift in the way Heidegger formulated and presented his philosophy beginning in the 1930s. Failure to make this distinction can be disastrous for understanding Heidegger, and the danger becomes more acute the closer one gets to texts like Introduction to Metaphysics, where both the “turn” and the “change” begin to come into their own.1..

In 1983 Otto Pöggeler wrote: "Regrettably, even today there is still no reliable overview of Heidegger's early lecture courses based on the extant student transcripts and Heidegger's manuscripts." Ten years later, and the lacuna has been filled with Theodore Kisiel's The Genesis of Heidegger's BEING AND TIME. This brilliant and complex work provides, in its own words, the first "reliable, complete, and relatively uninterrupted story" of how Heidegger got from there to here, where "there" is 1915 and "here" is the spring of 1926. By the end of his treatise Kisiel can make the justifiably proud claim: "BT can now be understood genealogically." (K 457).

Many people consider Martin Heidegger the most important German philosopher of the twentieth century. He is indisputably controversial and influential. Athough much has been written about Heidegger, this may be the best single volume covering his life, career, and thought. For all its breadth and complexity, Heidegger's perspective is quite simple: he is concerned with the meaning of Being as disclosure. Heidegger's life was almost as simple. He was a German professor, except for a brief but significant period in which he supported the Nazi regime. While that departure from philosophy continues to haunt his name and work, one must question whether his thought from 1912 to 1976 should be measured by the yardstick of his politics from May, 1933, through February, 1934. Th is anthology addresses his complex but simple thought and his simple but complex life. In a real sense, Sheehan claims, there is no content to Heidegger's topic and legacy, only a method. But method must not be taken to mean a technique or procedure for philosophical thinking. Rather, the topic of Heidegger's thought and his pursuit of that topic, the "what" and the "how," are one and the same thing. Heidegger writes, "Alles ist Weg," "Everything is way," and man's Being is to be on-the-way in essential movement. Heidegger, argues in our essence we humans are the topic and the point is not to be led there so much as to come to know what we already know and to become what we already are. This brilliant collection confirms this truism, and is an excellent introduction to the work of this seminal thinker.

What follows is an English reading of the first edition of Martin Heidegger's inaugural lecture at Freiburg University,“Was ist Metaphysik?” delivered on Wednesday, July 24, 1929. The German text was first published in December of 1929, some five months after it was delivered, by Friedrich Cohen Verlag in Bonn, to whose heirs gratitude is expressed for the requisite arrangements. The original German publication of 1929 differs in a number of relatively minor ways from later editions -- for example, changes in wording, additions of certain phrases (and at one place two sentences), paragraphization, and the like – without any basic alteration of sense. Some of those changes are listed in an appendix at the end.

En la época moderna se prioriza uno de nuestros dos «lados», el «lado» analítico, a expensas de nuestro «lado» más sintético e intuitivo. Las nefastas consecuencias del énfasis en la razón instrumental que empezó en la época de Francis Bacon han sido descritoselocuentemente por varios pensadores importantes, incluyendo Max Weber, Martin Heidegger y Jürgen Habermas. El descuido de nuestras capacidades imaginativas puede empobrecer nuestras producciones artísticas y científicas y puede dificultar el acceso a la experiencia religiosa. La solución pasa por fomentar las habilidades que están siendo marginadas progresivamente en el sistema educativo actual en un intento de conseguir un sano equilibrio o armonía entre las distintas habilidades cognitivas del ser humano.

This chapter discusses the question of sense and meaning in Heidegger's hermeneutics. As sense and meaning are matters of intelligibility, it first explores how Heidegger deals with that topic. Then the chapter sketches out how Heidegger's doctrine of sense and meaning grew out of his reading of Aristotle's De interpretatione 1–4. Phenomenology in Heidegger is about hermeneutical questions. Heidegger's hermeneutics grew out of his interpretation of Aristotle's treatise Πϵρì [See PDF for text that cannot be displayed in HTML]ρμηνϵíας yet in that entire text we do not find a single reference to “hermeneutics”. Aristotle's definition of [See PDF for text that cannot be displayed in HTML]ρμηνϵíα in De interpretatione 1–4 has many moving parts. In the broad sense of the term, animals as well as human beings can enact a [See PDF for text that cannot be displayed in HTML]ρμηνϵíα, which in its broadest sense means a communication. More specifically it is any expression, animal or human, that is meaningful, that intends to communicate, and that seeks to stimulate attention, acknowledgment, or agreement.