•  8
    Towards the Definition of Philosophy (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 56 (3): 651-652. 2003.
    The volume under review contains manuscript-based texts of two courses offered by Martin Heidegger, “The Idea of Philosophy and the Problem of Worldview” and “Phenomenology and Transcendental Philosophy of Value,” as well as a student’s transcript of a third course given by Heidegger, “On the Nature of the University and Academic Study,” for which there is no extant autograph manuscript. All of the courses were given in 1919, Heidegger’s first year as a teacher at the University of Freiburg, whe…Read more
  • To Work at the Foundations: Essays in Memory of Aron Gurwitsch (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 53 (1): 161-162. 1999.
    Today, too little is heard about Aron Gurwitsch, who was one of the clearest expositors of Edmund Husserl’s later philosophy and who, like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, brought together in fruitful synthesis the findings of phenomenology and Gestalt psychology. It is therefore timely that the present set of essays should be published. The collection is comprised of versions of papers, most of them by friends and former students of Gurwitsch, given on November 7–9, 1991, at the New School for Social Res…Read more
  •  16
    The Young Heidegger. Rumor of the Hidden King (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 49 (2): 445-447. 1995.
    This book is both an intellectual biography and a thematic analysis of Martin Heidegger's "youthful writings" from 1910 to the appearance of Sein und Zeit in 1927. It is nearly contemporaneous with the publication in the first Heidegger Gesamtausgabe of the texts of the lecture courses he gave during his first period at the University of Freiburg and while he taught at the University of Marburg, courses which figure prominently in the book. Van Buren's analysis covers early articles Heidegger wr…Read more
  •  9
    A Companion to Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 56 (2): 452-454. 2002.
    The coterie of commentators represented in the present volume include some of the clearest voices for Heidegger’s way of thinking among the second and third generations of American Heidegger scholars. Two of the contributors, who are also the volume’s editors, have just published a new translation of Einführung in die Metaphysik, an event that would appear to be one of the reasons for the project published here. Its thirteen essays are organized under three headings: the question of being, Heide…Read more
  •  25
    The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 59 (2): 435-437. 2005.
    It may seem remarkable that Professor Kroker also cites with nearly equivalent reverence Bill Gates’s Business @ the Speed of Thought, but the incongruity is eased when one realizes that, for the author, Gates is the living clue to the Heidegger–Marx/heidegger–nietzsche connections he identifies. In Kroker’s analysis, Gates plays the role of both heroic visionary and subtly sinister harbinger of the end of the fully human. Moreover, “[w]hat is disclosed in [Gates’s] book is nothing less than a g…Read more
  •  6
    Supplements: From the Earliest Essays to “Being and Time” and Beyond (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 57 (1): 149-150. 2003.
    As the editor notes, the importance of this collection of “Heidegger’s early experimental essays” is considerable for an appreciation and understanding of the formative period of Heidegger’s thought, including his early lecture courses, Being and Time, and even the transitional reflections from the late 1930s gathered under the title Contributions to Philosophy. Modestly entitled “supplements,” these texts are illuminating documents of the formative period of perhaps the twentieth century’s most…Read more
  •  15
    The Phenomenology of Religious Life (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 58 (2): 442-445. 2004.
    The present volume is a translation of Volume 60 of the Collected Edition of Heidegger’s works, Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens, which was first published in 1995 edited by Matthias Jung, Thomas Regehly and Claudius Strube. It consists of three parts: an “approximation of the train of thought and articulation” of a course of lectures Heidegger gave in the winter semester 1920–21 entitled “Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion,” edited by Jung and Regehly; the actual text of his summ…Read more
  •  19
    The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (review)
    International Philosophical Quarterly 37 (1): 109-110. 1997.
  •  1
    Phenomenological Epistemology (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 54 (4): 936-937. 2001.
    The “dominant feature” of the present volume is an “attempt to introduce realism as a partner in the discussion of phenomenological-transcendental epistemology,” in order to determine “whether realism as such is compatible with phenomenology”. By the term realism, the author means “classical realism of the kind advocated by Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Reid, and contemporary philosophers such as William Alston and Alvin Plantinga” ; namely, the view that “an entity has its own being,…Read more
  •  6
    Translating Heidegger
    Humanity Books. 2004.
    Part one : early translations of fundamental words -- Introduction -- Mistranslations in the early critical literature (1929-1949) -- The first Heidegger in English -- Part two : hermeneutics and philosophy of translation -- Elements of a theory of translation -- Paratactic method : translating parmenides, fragment VI -- Bibliography -- Part I : works by Heidegger cited in the text -- Part II : other sources -- A research bibliography of Heidegger in English translation.
  •  3
    A series of essays on Martin Heidegger's thought. An early iteration of the author's comprehensive bibliography of Heidegger translation in English.
  •  13
    The Other Heidegger (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 48 (3): 651-652. 1995.
    This book is "a series of [eight] philosophical-political essays in which the boundary between philosophy and politics remains hazy and the discussion shifts readily across this disciplinary divide". Four of the essays, all written since 1989, have already appeared in print, and two of those have been revised for this book. Fred Dallmayr, who is Dee Professor of Political Theory at Notre Dame, finds in Heidegger's writings after 1933 "a prolonged struggle to expel or subdue the virus" of fascism…Read more
  •  4
    Seeing the Self: Heidegger on Subjectivity (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 53 (4): 946-947. 2000.
    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…Read more
  •  34
    Thing and Space (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 52 (4): 948-950. 1999.
  •  4
    Heidegger and Leibniz: Reason and the Path (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 53 (3): 692-692. 2000.
    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 th…Read more
  •  7
    Thing and Space (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 52 (4): 948-950. 1999.
    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 …Read more
  • Safanski, R.-Martin Heidegger
    Philosophical Books 40 33-34. 1999.
  •  40
    The Essence of Truth (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 58 (4): 900-901. 2005.
    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…Read more
  •  19
    Reading Heidegger from the Start (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 50 (1): 162-164. 1996.
    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…Read more
  •  17
    Logic (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 65 (1): 163-164. 2011.
  •  11
    Pathmarks (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 52 (3): 684-686. 1999.
    Pathmarks is a collection of translations of the second edition of Wegmarken, an anthology of essays Heidegger published in 1967. Like its predecessor, Holzwege, the essays are, as Heidegger says, traces of the movement of thinking, “a series of sojourns on the way undertaken to the one question about be[ing].” They are not, as the editor translates, “stops under way”, but rather precisely living, moving sojourns with major thinkers in the Western tradition of philosophy.
  •  17
    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 c…Read more
  •  4
    Laing's Presence
    Janus Head 4 (1): 4-1. 2001.
    An encounter with R.D. Laing at a lecture he gave towards the end of his life in New York. The personality of this existential psychotherapist was powerful even in a large venue. His approach to psychotherapy is discussed.
  •  17
    Life. Phenomenology of Life as the Starting Point of Philosophy (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 52 (2): 494-496. 1998.
    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…Read more
  •  16
    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…Read more