Bret W. Davis

Heidegger often asserted that Germany, as “the land of poets and thinkers,” has a central world-historical role to play in any possible recovery from the technological nihilism of the modern epoch. And yet, on numerous occasions, Heidegger also demonstrated a serious interest in dialogue with the East Asian traditions of Daoism and Zen Buddhism. How are Heidegger’s entrenched ethnocentrism and his interest in East-West dialogue related? While neither can be wholly confined to one or another period in his thought, this article shows how, in the late 1930s, Heidegger begins to recover from the most ethnocentric period of his thought, and how he starts thinking of his reflections on the Western history of being as a preparation for what he came to call “the inevitable dialogue with the East Asian world.”

This chapter examines the six forms that the teaching of emptiness takes in Zen. Before doing this, the chapter comments briefly on Zen's relation to the doctrinal sources upon which it critically and creatively draws. The Zen tradition understands itself to be based on Śākyamuni Buddha's profoundest teaching of Mahāyāna Buddhism, which has been passed down not through texts and doctrines but by way of face‐to‐face acknowledgment of awakening. The six rubrics which the notion of emptiness is used in the Zen tradition are lack of ownbeing, formlessness of ultimate reality, distinctionless state of meditative consciousness, no‐mind in the action of non‐action, emptiness (or emptying) of emptiness, and emptiness of words. Each of the six rubrics contains a cluster of closely related teachings. Moreover, there are certainly many interconnections, and arguably some tensions, among the rubrics.

Heidegger's writings are among the most formidable in recent philosophy. The pivotal concepts of his thought are for many the source of both fascination and frustration. Yet any student of philosophy needs to become acquainted with Heidegger's thought. "Martin Heidegger: Key Concepts" is designed to facilitate this. Each chapter introduces and explains a key Heideggerian concept, or a cluster of closely related concepts. Together, the chapters cover the full range of Heidegger's thought in its early, middle, and later phases

Nishida Kitarō developed a revolutionary account of the I-Thou relation, according to which the true self, in its deepest recesses, is turned inside out so as to be radically open to alterity. He thus offers an original and significant contribution to a countercurrent to the tendency toward solipsistic subjectivity in the history of modern Western philosophy. With his watershed essay ›I and Thou‹ he deserves to be recognized as key figure in the revolutionary movement toward an appreciation of alterity, a rethinking of community, and the development of an essentially dialectical, dialogical, interpersonal, and social conception of the self. The aim of this essay is to elucidate Nishida’s account of the I-Thou relation and to make a case for its contemporary significance by setting it in critical dialogue with other philosophers who have addressed this topic, including Scheler, Husserl, Buber, Lévinas and Ricoeur.

This dissertation shows how the problem of the will is at the very heart of Heidegger's thought---not only explicitly in his post-turn critique of the technological "will to will" and in his intimations of Nicht-Wollen or Gelassenheit---but in the twistings and turnings of the development of his thought-path as a whole. ;In Chapter 1, in the course of laying out the interpretive terms of the investigation, I also begin with a consideration of the "debate" between the two great 19th century philosophers of the will: Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Chapter 2 interprets the problem of the will in Being and Time as the "unsaid" problematic which the early Heidegger is working through and around. Chapter 3 deals with the turbulent turning through an embrace of the will---most infamously in his call for self-assertion and sacrifice to the Nazi state---in the transitional period of the 1930's. ;Chapters 4 and 6 examine many of the major themes of the later Heidegger's thought in light of this problematic---the former explicating his critique of the rise of the will through the history of metaphysics which culminates in the extreme epoch of the technological will to will, and the latter interpreting his many compelling intimations of non-willing ways of dwelling, letting things be, poetic creation, and thoughtful co-respondence to Being. Chapter 5 considers the complexities of the transition from the will to non-willing, focussing in particular on the enigmatic question of how to "will non-willing." ;Chapter 7 doubles back to turn the light of Heidegger's critique of the will back on those moments or aspects of his later thought which retain "residues of will." Chapter 8 then attempts to carry forward a critical appreciation for Heidegger's---and now our own---way of maintaining the problem of the will and the possibility of non-willing