Tom Sheehan

In 1987 Victor Farías' Heidegger et le nazisme dropped like a bomb on the quiet chapel where Heidegger's disciples were gathered, and blew the place to bits. The myth Heidegger had concocted after the war -- that he supported the Nazis briefly and only to protect the university -- was shattered by the evidence Farías mustered of Heidegger's deep and long-lasting commitment to National Socialism, his blatant anti-Semitism, his blackballing of colleagues for no more than holding pacifist convictions, associating with Jews, or being "unfavorably disposed" toward the Nazi regime.

The world, the all-inclusive unity of entities in real actuality, is the field whence the various positive sciences draw their realms of research. Directed straight at the world, these sciences in their allied totality seem to aim at a complete knowledge of the world and thus to take charge of answering all questions that can be asked about entities. It seems there is no field left to philosophy for its own investigations. But does not Greek science, already in its first decisive beginnings, direct its unceasing efforts towards entities as such? Do not entities as such serve it as the subject matter of a fundamental science of being, a "first philosophy"? For Greek science, to directly determine entities -- both individuals and even the universal whole, and in whatever regard they be taken -- did not mean to understand entities as such. Entities as entities -- that is, with regard to their being -- are enigmatic.2 For a long time the lines of inquiry and the answers remain tangled in obscurities. Nonetheless, in the first steps of this "first philosophy"3 one may already see the source whence springs the questionability of entities as such. Parmenides seeks to clarify being4 via a reflection on one's thinking about entities. Plato's disclosure of the Ideas takes its bearings from the soul's..

Some, of course, would go further and claim that Jesus was the very content of what he preached, the ontological embodiment of his message, or as Origin put it centuries ago, the kingdom-of-God-in-person, ho autobasileia.1 This affirmation in fact lies at the heart of the Christian tradition, and if the guardians of that orthodoxy were to answer the question we are posing today, they would say: What the Christ of faith will be is the same as what the Jesus of history was: the incarnate presence of the self-communicating God.

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action.

Emmanuel Faye’s Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy is so freighted with mistranslations, misinterpretations, the wrenching of sentences from their context, and perverse rewritings of Heidegger’s texts that it raises questions about (1) whether Faye intentionally rewrote and misinterpreted Heidegger or is simply a sloppy scholar; and (2) whether he is a competent reader of any philosophical texts, and especially Heidegger’s. Detailed evidence is provided of the countless errors, falsifications, and howlers that populate his books and lectures. However, the question of whether Faye is a fraud or simply incompetent is left to the reader’s judgment.

For your students, celebrating this day is a source of rare and pure joy. The only way we can be adequate to this occasion is to let the gratitude that we owe you become the fundamental mood suffusing everything from beginning to end. In keeping with a beautiful tradition, today on this celebratory occasion we offer you as our gift this slender volume of a few short essays. In no way could this ever be an adequate return for all that you, our teacher, have lavished upon us, and awakened and nourished in us. In the coming days many will try to survey your work in philosophy and to evaluate its impact and effect on various scales. In so doing, they will bring to mind many things that we should not forget. However, that way of parceling out a person's intellectual impact and of calculating the influence of his writings fails to grasp the essential matter for which we owe you our thanks. That essential element will not be found by considering how fruitful your teaching career has been. Surely such effectiveness will continue to be the prerogative and good fortune of every professor as long as German university escapes the doom of getting turned into a mind-numbing trade school. No, the essence of your leadership consists in something else, namely that the content and style of your questioning immediately forces each of us into an intense, critical dialogue, and it demands that we always be ready to reverse or even abandon our position. There is no guarantee, of course, that any of us will find our way to the one thing that, so unpretentously, your work sought to lead us to: that releasement in which one is seasoned and ready for the problems.2 So too the works we present to you are mere witnesses to the fact that we wanted to follow your guidance, not proof that we succeeded in becoming your disciples.3 But there is one thing we will retain as a lasting possession: Each of us who had the privilege of following in your footsteps was confronted by you, our esteemed teacher, with the option either of becoming the steward of essential matters or of working against them. On this celebratory occasion, as we view your philosophical existence in this light, we also acquire secure points of reference for giving a true assessment of the value of your work in philosophy. Does it consist in the fact that some decades ago a new movement emerged in philosophy and gained influence among the then-dominant trends? Or that a new method was added to the list of previous ones? Or that long-forgotten problem-areas got reworked..

[164] As is well known, over the last decade some of the younger generation of German philosophers have been gravitating with ever increasing speed toward philosophical anthropology. Currently Wilhelm Dilthey's philosophy of life, a new form of anthropology, exercises a great deal of influence. But even the so-called "phenomenological movement" has got caught up in this new trend, which alleges that the true foundation of philosophy lies in human being alone, and more specifically in a doctrine of the essence of human being's concrete worldly Dasein. Some view this as a necessary reform of the original constitutive phenomenology, one that for the very first time would supposedly permit phenomenology to attain the level of authentic philosophy. All of this constitutes a complete reversal of phenomenology's fundamental standpoint. Original phenomenology, which has matured into transcendental phenomenology, denies to any science of human being, whatever its form, a share in laying the foundations for philosophy, and opposes all related attempts at foundation-laying as being anthropologism or psychologism. Nowadays, however, the exact opposite is supposed to hold. Phenomenological philosophy is supposedly now to be constructed entirely anew from out of human Dasein.

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.