•  61
    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
  •  56
    To Work at the Foundations: Essays in Memory of Aron Gurwitsch
    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
  •  55
    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
  •  53
    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
  •  48
    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
  •  45
    Seeing the Self: Heidegger on Subjectivity
    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
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    Basic Concepts (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 48 (2): 406-408. 1994.
    During the summer semester of 1941 Martin Heidegger gave a course of lectures on Grundbegriffe at the University of Freiburg. The German text was first published in 1981 as volume 51 of the Gesamtausgabe of Heidegger's writings. Each of the first five lectures is followed by a "review" which further illuminates the lecture itself. The titles of the subsections of the work have been provided by the editor, Petra Jaeger.
  •  37
    The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (review)
    International Philosophical Quarterly 37 (1): 109-110. 1997.
  •  36
    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
  •  35
    Heidegger and Leibniz: Reason and the Path
    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
  •  35
    Aristotle’s Metaphysics Θ 1-3 (review)
    International Philosophical Quarterly 36 (4): 492-493. 1996.
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    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
  •  35
    Empathy and Agency (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 54 (3): 663-665. 2001.
    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, t…Read more
  •  35
    Heidegger: An Introduction (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 53 (2): 471-472. 1999.
    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, “mi…Read more
  •  33
    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
  •  33
    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
  •  33
    Ontology (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 54 (1): 147-149. 2000.
    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, Heidegge…Read more
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    Ethics and Finitude: Heideggerian Contributions to Moral Philosophy (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 54 (4): 918-919. 2001.
    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…Read more
  •  32
    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
  •  32
    Heidegger’s Hidden Sources. East Asian Influences on His Work (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 51 (2): 432-433. 1997.
    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 Ri…Read more
  •  32
    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
  •  31
    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”…Read more
  •  31
    Endings: Questions of Memory in Hegel and Heidegger (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 55 (1): 127-128. 2001.
    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 Kathlee…Read more
  •  29
    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
  •  28
    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
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    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.