Richard M. Capobianco

"This collection of diverse essays represents a unified, perceptive look into seminal ideas of Heidegger's lifelong attention to the question of Being, and suggests some thought-provoking attempts, philosophical ventures, to go beyond them, to think them through in a new way, to deepen and expand their understanding. It offers an initial, balanced, measured, well-targeted Socratic response to the hermeneutic closure imposed on them, at least by some ideological and pre-fixed hermeneutical assumptions and prejudices, by short-circuiting the hard, scholarly labor with the texts themselves, with the writings of the philosophers in question. The clear, short, interconnected discussions of Heidegger's insights, focused on Being and based on his lectures, coalesce into a unified exposition and grasp of his multi-dimensional thinking; they prepare the ground for their questioning, for expanding the range of their understanding. The lucidity of writing, its dexterity and fluency, combined with scholarly diction and terminology, enhanced by Capobianco's attunement to Heidegger's language, indispensable for grasping his thought, render the manuscript at hand suitable for beginners and daring, curious readers, for scholars in many fields and for "generalists" as well."--

The holy (Being-as-the-holy) is a distinctive theme in Heidegger’s work that is perhaps well-known to readers, yet not attended to sufficiently in contemporary Heidegger studies. The essays in this volume, authored by an international group of scholars, offer readers an opportunity to consider the many dimensions and possibilities of the notion of “the holy” (_das Heilige_) in his thinking. The authors in this volume document the multiple texts and contexts of Heidegger’s discussions of the holy, and they offer detailed readings and their own particular interpretations and applications. The chapters, taken together, make a significant contribution not only to Heidegger scholarship but also to our understanding of our fundamental human situation in relation to Being-as-the holy.

Martin Heidegger wrote one and only one preface for a scholarly work on his thinking, and it was for William J. Richardson’s study Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, first published in 1963. Ever since, both Heidegger’s Preface and Richardson’s groundbreaking book have played an important role in Heidegger scholarship. Much has been discussed about these texts over the decades, but what has not been available to students and scholars up to this point is Richardson’s original comments and questions to Heidegger that led to the famous Preface. These are published here for the first time both in the German original and in our English translation. In our commentary we 1) discuss how Heidegger’s Preface came about, 2) explain the source and status of the materials published here, and 3) pair selected passages from Richardson’s text with Heidegger’s reply in his Preface to highlight the consonance of their thinking.

William Blattner is surely right that not enough scholarly attention has been paid to one of Heidegger's most central and most important philosophical notions: “originary temporality”. Blattner's exhaustive effort to lay bare and scrutinize Heidegger's arguments regarding temporality and time in Being and Time and in other early texts is impressive, and he offers several valuable new readings and insights. Yet, regrettably, Blattner tries too hard to trump Heidegger. He is bent on showing that Heidegger “failed” in his thinking about temporality and time, and his overly polemical account mars an otherwise illuminating discussion of Heidegger's texts.

In Heidegger's Way of Being, the follow-up to his 2010 book, Engaging Heidegger, Richard Capobianco makes the case clearly and compellingly that the core matter of Heidegger's lifetime of thought was Being as the temporal emergence of all beings and things. Drawing upon a wide variety of texts, many of which have been previously untranslated, Capobianco illuminates the overarching importance of Being as radiant manifestation - "the truth of Being" - and how Heidegger also named and elucidated this fundamental phenomenon as physis, Aletheia, the primordial Logos, and as Ereignis, Lichtung, and Es gibt. Heidegger's Way of Being brings back into full view the originality and distinctiveness of Heidegger's thought and offers an emphatic rejoinder to certain more recent readings, and particularly those that propose a reduction of Being to "sense" or "meaning" and maintain that the core matter is human meaning-making. Capobianco's vivid and often poetic reflections serve to evoke for readers the very experience of Being - or as he prefers to name it, the Being-way - and to invite us to pause and meditate on the manner of our human way in relation to the Being-way.

One of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger was primarily concerned with the 'question of Being.' However, recent scholarship has tended to marginalize the importance of the name of Being in his thought. Through a focused reading of Heidegger's texts, and especially his late and often overlooked Four Seminars, Richard Capobianco counters this trend by redirecting attention to the centrality of the name of Being in Heidegger's lifetime of thought. Capobianco gives special attention to Heidegger's resonant terms Ereignis and Lichtung and reads them as saying and showing the very same fundamental phenomenon named 'Being itself '. Written in a clear and approachable manner, the essays in Engaging Heidegger examine Heidegger's thought in view of ancient Greek, medieval, and Eastern thinking, and they draw out the deeply humane character of his 'meditative thinking.'

This essay draws on texts previously untranslated into English, and in particular Heidegger’s brilliant 1943 lecture course on Heraclitus, to show how Heidegger understood kosmos as an early Greek name for Being itself. The contemporary scholarship has altogether missed the significant role that this Greek Ur-word plays in his later thinking. The “gleaming,” “adorning” kosmos—which the later Heidegger understood to be “world” in the fullest and richest sense—is not in the first place any kind of transcendental-phenomenological “projection” of the human being; rather, it is the resplendence of the “ever-living” Being-unfolding-way itself from out of which both the gods and human beings come to pass and pass away. The independence of kosmos/Being itself in relation to the human being is highlighted. An Ode by Pindar and a painting by Andrew Wyeth are also considered.

This essay, drawn from the book Heidegger's Way of Being, brings back into view the core matter of Heidegger's lifetime of thought: Being as the temporal emerging, showing, shining-forth, manifestation of all beings and things. Highlighted is the overarching importance of Being as radiant manifestation—"the truth of Being"—and how Heidegger also named and elucidated this Ur-phenomenon as aletheia, Ereignis, Lichtung, and Es gibt. The essay is part of a larger project that aims to recall and restate the originality and distinctiveness of Heidegger's thought and to offer a rejoinder to certain more recent readings, and especially those that propose a reduction of Being to "sense" or "meaning" and maintain that the core matter is human "meaning-making."

Is Dasein primordially—that is, at the very core of its being—“at home” or “not at home” in Being? One of the more overlooked or understated issues in Heideggerstudies is how Heidegger, over the course of a lifetime of thinking, transformed his answer to such a question about Dasein’s fundamental relation to Being. In several important texts of the 1920s and 1930s, The History of the Concept of Time, Being andTime, and Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger maintained the position that Dasein is primordially unheimlich, “unsettled,” and thus also unheimisch, “unhomely,” at the core of its being. Yet, we discover a significant turning in his thinking toward home, especially in the early 1940s. The 1942 commentary on Hölderlin’s poem “The Ister” stands out as a bridge text between the early and later Heidegger on this issue; in particular, we find a striking and significant difference in his reading of Sophocles’ Antigone compared with the more well-known reading in the 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics. In the “Ister” commentary, Heidegger engaged both Sophocles and Hölderlin to work out the motif—so prominent in his later work—that human beings are primordially “at home” in Being, the sheltering source and origin of all beings. We also find a further development in his thinking in the 1950s and 1960s. In all, I propose that the “middle” Heidegger of the early 1940s offers the most satisfying phenomenological account of being human.