In this essay, I attempt first to clarify what non-metaphysical thinking as a thinking "in the Between" might mean for Heidegger, as presented in his Beiträge zur Philosophie . After determining this as the proper response to the self-concealment Heidegger sees as grounding the appearing of beings, I then attempt to show that the elenctic method of Socrates in Plato's early dialogues exhibits something like the same dynamic. That is, Socrates attempts to situate himself and his interlocutors in a space (...) defined both by the always prior appearance of 'what virtue is' to human beings and by the inevitable obscurity or withdrawal in that very appearing. In so doing, I hope to indicate that something as simple and familiar as Socratic elenctic conversation, although a relic of our tradition, might if properly understood provide us today with one model for how thinking could proceed after Heidegger's critique of metaphysics. (shrink)

In the Winter semester of 1925/26 Heidegger gave what appears to have been his first seminar on Hegel. Still unpublished in any form, this neglected seminar is of extraordinary importance, and not only for the in-depth and critical reading it pursues of Hegel’s Logic I, a critique that charges Hegel with not knowing how or where to begin. The seminar is also important for its attempt to demonstrate that Hegel’s philosophy was thoroughly Greek. In the class of 25 November 1925, (...) Heidegger is reported to have said: “Therefore am I in the habit of saying that Hegel is the most radical Greek there ever was. With the means that were pre-formed in Greek ontology as if in a seed, the means that lay at the roots of Greek ontology, Hegel mastered something (roughly speaking: spirit, history) that in this form was never experienced by the Greeks. This is only asserted here. Proof of this thesis is naturally very difficult.” Heidegger therefore turns towards the end of the seminar to Aristotle’s account of time in the Physics to show that both this understanding of time and the conception of being it presupposes are also Hegel’s. Yet Heidegger entrusts the initial presentation of Aristotle’s conception of time to a student whose reading is at odds with his own, so much so that Heidegger accuses the student of turning everything on its head. The student’s name is H.-G. Gadamer. (shrink)

Since his inaugural lecture at Freiburg in 1929 in which Heidegger delivered his most celebrated salvo against logic, he has frequently been portrayed as an anti-logician, a classic example of the obscurity resultant upon a rejection of the discipline of logic, a champion of the irrational, and a variety of similar things. Because many of Heidegger's statements on logic are polemical in tone, there has been no little misunderstanding of his position in regard to logic, and a great deal of (...) distortion of it. All too frequently the position which is attacked as Heidegger's is a barely recognizable caricature of it. Heidegger has, from the very beginning of his career, written and said much on logic. Strangely enough, in view of all that he has said, his critique of logic has not been singled out as the subject of any of the longer, more detailed studies on the various aspects of his thought. (shrink)