This work, the text of Martin Heidegger's lecture course of 1929/30, is crucial for an understanding of Heidegger's transition from the major work of his early years, Being and Time, to his later preoccupations with language, truth, and ...

Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes.--Die Zeit des Weltbildes.--Hegels Begriff der Erfahrung.--Nietzsches Wort "Gott ist tot".--Wozu Dichter?--Der Spruch des Anaximander.

'... diese 'Einführung in die Metaphysik' [ist] echte Einführung in Heidegger... keines der Werke Heideggers [ist] so lebendig zu lesen und so unmittelbar aufzufassen...' Universitas 4 (1954) 'Unter dem Titel dieser Vorlesung aus dem Jahre 1935 verbirgt sich in Wirklichkeit eine große Auseinandersetzung mit den Grundlagen unserer planetarischen Situation.' Süddeutsche Zeitung vom 7./8.11.1953.

ANMERKUNGEN ZU KARL JASPERS »PSYCHOLOGIE DER WELTANSCHAUUNGEN« Das eingangs kundzugebende Zugeständnis, daß eine »angemessene« Richtung für eine positiv auf ...

Heideggers Sprachphilosophie gehört, neben der analytischen Beschäftigung mit der Sprache, zum Angelpunkt der Philosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts und beeinflußte vor allem die philosophische Hermeneutik.

v. 1. The will to power as art. v. 2. The eternal recurrence of the same (1 v.) / translated from the German by David Farrell Krell.

This collection of texts (originally published in German under the title Holzwege) is Heidegger's first post-war book and contains some of the major expositions of his later philosophy. Of particular note are 'The Origin of the Work of Art', perhaps the most discussed of all of Heidegger's essays, and 'Nietzsche's Word 'God is Dead',' which sums up a decade of Nietzsche research. Although translations of the essays have appeared individually in a variety of places, this is the first English translation (...) to bring them all together as Heidegger intended. The text is taken from the last edition of the work, which contains the author's final corrections together with important marginal annotations that provide considerable insight into the development of his thought. This fresh and accurate new translation will be an invaluable resource for all students of Heidegger, whether they work in philosophy, literary theory, religious studies, or intellectual history. (shrink)

»Selten hat in den neueren Jahrhunderten ein philosophischer Erstling so durchgeschlagen und einen so unverrückbaren Platz unter den >großenHans Georg Gadamer in DIE ZEIT Nr. 47 vom 19.11.1982.

Die im Wintersemester 1929/30 an der Freiburger Universität vierstündig gehaltene Vorlesung ist in zweierlei Hinsicht erregend. Zum einen enthält sie eine breit durchgeführte Analyse der in der Freiburger Antrittsvorlesung 'Was ist Metaphysik?' nur gestreiften Langeweile, zum anderen bietet sie eine ebenso ausführliche Wesensbestimmung des Organismus und des Lebens - eine Thematik, die Heidegger in 'Sein und Zeit', § 12, nur benennt. 'Diese Vorlesung ist wohl die bedeutendste, die Heidegger gehalten hat, und schon fast ein zweites Hauptwerk.' Rüdiger Safranski.

_Heidegger's Hidden Sources_ documents for the first time Heidegger's remarkable debt to East Asian philosophy. In this groundbreaking study, Reinhard May shows conclusively that Martin Heidegger borrowed some of the major ideas of his philosophy - on occasion almost word for word - from German translations of Chinese Daoist and Zen Buddhist classics. The discovery of this astonishing appropriation of non-Western sources will have important consequences for future interpretations of Heidegger's work. Moreover, it shows Heidegger as a pioneer of comparative (...) philosophy and transcultural thinking. (shrink)

"... elegant and provocative... Exhibit[s] a subtle mastery of Heidegger's works." —Review of Metaphysics "... splendidly precise study of Heidegger... to be recommended not only to Heidegger scholars but also to those interested in the question of what philosophical thinking has as its task in the modern technological world." —Religious Studies Review "... indispensable to understanding the later Heidegger." —Choice.

Diese Ausgabe enthalt auch die in dem seit langerem vergriffenen Band "Vier Seminare" 1977 erstmals veroffentlichten Seminare, die Heidegger mit sieben franzosischen Gelehrten und dem Dichter Rene Char in Le Thor (1966, 1968 und 1969) und Zahringen (1973) abgehalten hat. Der Band fasst die zu Lebzeiten Martin Heideggers veroffentlichten Protokolle der Seminare zusammen, die er geleitet oder an denen er teilgenommen hat. Die Beschaffenheit der Texte ist verschieden, denn die Protokolle sind auf unterschiedliche Weise entstanden, wozu die Nachworte das Nahere (...) mitteilen. Der einzige Text, der eine eigene Handschrift Heideggers wiedergibt, ist die als "Nachtrag" zum letzten der "Vier Seminare" hier erstmals veroffentlichte Erlauterung zu einem Wort des Parmenides mit kurzer Vorbemerkung "Die Herkunft des Denkens". Eine Besonderheit des Bandes bilden die Textbeitrage, die von Seminarteilnehmern stammen, unter denen Eugen Fink mit der eigenen Heraklit-Interpretation den herausragenden Anteil hat. Die mit Franzosen abgehaltenen "Vier Seminare" vermitteln beilaufig einige Einblicke in Heideggers Beziehungen zum geistigen Frankreich und zu seinen wohl wichtigsten Freunden (und Ubersetzern), von denen Rene Char und Jean Beaufret am bekanntesten sind. Heidegger begegnet dem Leser hier im Dialog, als Leiter und Partner im Gesprach, dessen Wiedergabe oft eine eigene Lebendigkeit aus dem jeweiligen Eingehen auf die Teilnehmer gewinnt. Dieser andere Duktus der Texte unterscheidet die Seminare vom Stil der Vorlesungen und der veroffentlichten Schriften. Die Nachworte geben Aufschluss uber das Zustandekommen der einzelnen Seminare und der fruheren Protokoll-Veroffentlichungen; sie enthalten auch Hinweise auf die Teilnehmerkreise. (shrink)

The “shrinking” of the globe in the last few centuries has made explicit that the world is a tense unity of many: the many worlds are forced to contend with one another. Nishida Kitarō, the founder of the Kyoto school, once stated that to be is to be implaced. We exist by partaking in “the socio-historical world.” More recently, Jean-luc Nancy has conceived of the world in terms of sense. What is striking in both is that the world emerges out (...) of a nothing, created ex nihilo—the phrase stripped of its theistic connotations. While for Nishida the world is ultimately implaced in the “place of absolute nothing,” Nancy speaks of the nothing that is the basis of the world’s self-creation. I will explore a possible convergence between these and any light it may shed upon our contemporary situation of globalization and its implications for praxis. I look to a sense of the nothing as a chōratic spatiality, an opening that provides space for co-being and serves as the source of creativity. In face of globalization, the project for meaning through mondialisation (in Nancy) and within a multi-cultural world (in Nishida) would imply the appropriation of such an originary spatiality. (shrink)

: Two major philosophers of the twentieth century, the German existential phenomenologist Martin Heidegger and the seminal Japanese Kyoto School philosopher Nishida Kitarō are examined here in an attempt to discern to what extent their ideas may converge. Both are viewed as expressing, each through the lens of his own tradition, a world in transition with the rise of modernity in the West and its subsequent globalization. The popularity of Heidegger's thought among Japanese philosophers, despite its own admitted limitation to (...) the Western "history of being," is connected to Nishida's opening of a uniquely Japanese path in its confrontation with Western philosophy. The focus is primarily on their later works (the post-Kehre Heidegger and the works of Nishida that have been designated "Nishida philosophy"), in which each in his own way attempts to overcome the subject-object dichotomy inherited from the tradition of Western metaphysics by looking to a deeper structure from out of which both subjectivity and objectivity are derived and which embraces both. For Heidegger, the answer lies in being as the opening of unconcealment, from out of which beings emerge, and for Nishida, it is the place of nothingness within which beings are co-determined in their oppositions and relations. Concepts such as Nishida's "discontinuous continuity," "absolutely self-contradictory identity" (between one and many, whole and part, world and things), the mutual interdependence of individuals, and the self-determination of the world through the co-relative self-determination of individuals, and Heidegger's "simultaneity" (zugleich) and "within one another" (ineinander) (of unconcealment and concealment, presencing and absencing), and their "between" (Zwischen) and "jointure" (Fuge) are examined. Through a discussion of these ideas, the suggestion is made of a possible "transition" (Übergang) of both Western and Eastern thinking, in their mutual encounter, both in relation to each other and each in relation to its own past history, leading to both a self-discovery in the other and to a simultaneous self-reconstitution. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore a possible convergence between two great twentieth century thinkers, Nishida Kitarō of Japan and Martin Heidegger of Germany. The focus is on the quasi-religious language they employ in discussing the grounding of human existence in terms of an encompassing Wherein for our being. Heidegger speaks of “the sacred” and “the passing of the last god” that mark an empty clearing wherein all metaphysical absolutes or gods have withdrawn but are simultaneously indicative of an opening wherein (...) beings are given. Nishida speaks of “the religious” dimension in the depths of one's being, that he calls “place,” and that somehow envelops the world through its kenotic self-negation. In both we find reference to a kind of originary space—the open or place—associated with quasireligious themes. I also point to their distinct approaches to metaphysical language in their attempts to give voice to that abysmal thought. (shrink)

Heidegger and East-Asian thought have traditionally been strongly correlated. However, although still largely unrecognized, significant differences between the political and metaphysical stance of Heidegger and his perceived counterparts in East-Asia most certainly exist. One of the most dramatic discontinuities between East-Asian thought and Heidegger is revealed through an investigation of Kitarō Nishida’s own vigorous criticism of Heidegger. Ironically, more than one study of Heidegger and East-Asian thought has submitted that Nishida is that representative of East-Asian thought whose philosophy most closely (...) resembles Heideggerian thought. In words that then and now resound discordantly within the enshrined, established view of Heidegger’s relationship to East-Asian thought, Nishida stated uninhibitedly his own view of Heidegger in the noteworthy statement: “Heidegger is not worth your time… He…does not recognize that which is indispensible and decisive, namely, God.” This present study lays out for the first time in English, the significant differences between the metaphysical and political stances of Nishida and Heidegger, Nishida’s own critique of Heidegger, and Heidegger’s own rather dismal assessment of non-Western philosophy, all of which demonstrate a remarkable, hitherto unrecognized discontinuity between Heidegger and East-Asian thought. (shrink)

The volume contains an interpretation of Schelling's treatise on freedom from the summer semester of 1936. In the first part of the lecture, Heidegger, following Schelling's introduction, discusses the possibility of a system of freedom in view of the apparent incompatibility of system and freedom. The clarification of the term pantheism serves as a guide to the question of the principle of system formation, in particular of German idealism.It shows that the formal concept of freedom achieved by idealism is not (...) sufficient to grasp the fact of human freedom, a freedom to do good and evil. The question of the inner possibility and the nature of the reality of evil requires a new approach. Schelling finds it in the distinction between ground and existence, which Heidegger calls Seynsfuge, and from this develops his metaphysics of evil. The second part of the interpretation applies to you. Later marginal notes by Heidegger on a copy of the copy have been included as marginalia. They underline the intention of the interpretation: the emphasis of the ontological topic and the collection of all questions towards the question of being.[Publisher's synopsis]. (shrink)

This chapter will explicate what Nishida means by “nothing” (mu, 無), as well as “being” (yū, 有), through an exposition of his concept of the “place of nothing” (mu no basho). We do so through an investigation of his exposition of “the place of nothing” vis-àvis the self, the world, and God, as it shows up in his epistemology, metaphysics, theology and religious ethics during the various periods of his oeuvre – in other words, his understanding of nothingness that he (...) takes to be the root of the self, the world, and the religious notion of an absolute or God. We will also indicate some of the sources of his notion from the Eastern and the Western traditions. What unites his view to nothing from the different periods is an existential praxis, and what I call an “anontology” that avoids reduction to either opposites of being and non-being (on-mēon). (shrink)

Every metaphysic, according to Reiner Schürmann, involves the positing of a first principle for thinking and doing whereby the world becomes intelligible and masterable. What happens when such rules or norms no longer have the power they previously had? According to Cornelius Castoriadis, the world makes sense through institutions of imaginary significations. What happens when we discover that these significations and institutions truly are imaginary, without ground? Both thinkers begin their ontologies by acknowledging a radical finitude that threatens to destroy (...) meaning or order. For Schürmann it is the ontological anarchy revealed between epochs when principles governing modes of thinking and doing are foundering but new principles to take their place have not yet emerged. For Castoriadis it is chaos that names the indeterminationdetermination that governs the unfolding of the socio-historical with contingency and unpredictability. And yet for both thinkers their respective ontologies have political or ethical implications. On the basis of the anarchy of being, Schürmann unfolds an anarchic praxis or ethos of “living without why.” And on the basis of his notion of being as chaos, Castoriadis develops his political praxis of autonomy. The challenge for both is this move from ontology to practical philosophy, how to bridge theory and practice. The key for both seems to be a certain ontologically derived sense of freedom. In this paper, I analyze and compare their respective thoughts, and pursue the question of how anarchy or chaos and the implied sense of an ontological freedom might be made viable and sensible for human praxis, how radical finitude in the face of ontological groundlessness might nevertheless serve to situate a viable political praxis. (shrink)

Consciousness – Bewußtsein – was one of the key concepts of Husserl’s phenomenology. In contrast to this, Heidegger – regarded as Husserl’s most outstanding pupil – placed Dasein at the center of his own phenomenology. This change in key concepts may be seen as an upheaval in the phenomenology that purports to study the “things themselves”: as a shift of focus from the activity of a Bewußtsein that constitutes the Being of objects, to the passivity of a Dasein that receives (...) the donation of Being. But there is another aspect of Dasein that lies in the concept of “Da” (disclosedness), and it implies another possibility for the development of phenomenology that Heidegger did not fully develop. Kitaro Nishida, the Japanese philosopher who introduced phenomenology to Japan during the first half of the 20th century, developed this concept in his own way by analyzing the structure of disclosedness in terms of self-consciousness. (shrink)

Castoriadis’s radical ontology of indeterminacy postulates a third term between the complete determinacy of the traditional conception of being and the absolute indeterminacy of the traditional conception of nothingness. Castoriadis himself made considerable efforts to demonstrate how ontological conceptions which equate being with determinacy fail to grasp the reality of being in all ontological regions and contexts. He did somewhat less in regard to the opposite pole of the ontological dichotomy, the identification of indeterminacy with nothingness, though he certainly recognized (...) this identification as equally suspect.This article examines the use and interpretation of the concept of nothingness in two of the most important and exemplary employments of this concept in twentieth century philosophy. Nothingness is a key concept for both Heidegger and Sartre, however they may differ in regards to its meaning and significance. In both, the concept of nothingness disguises indeterminate modes of being which both perceive but which they refuse to accord the status of being, preferring instead the stark and absolute opposition between being, which continues to be understood in traditional terms as determinacy, and nothingness, a catch-all category which absorbs and homogenizes anything falling short of the absolute determinacy predicated of true being. (shrink)

In Architecture as Metaphor, Kojin Karatani detects a recurrent "will to architecture" that he argues is the foundation of all Western thinking, traversing architecture, philosophy, literature, linguistics, city planning, anthropology, political economics, psychoanalysis, and mathematics. Kojin Karatani, Japan's leading literary critic, is perhaps best known for his imaginative readings of Shakespeare, Soseki, Marx, Wittgenstein, and most recently Kant. His works, of which Origins of Modern Japanese Literature is the only one previously translated into English, are the generic equivalent to what (...) in America is called "theory." Karatani's writings are important not only for the insights they offer on the various topics under discussion, but also as an example of a distinctly non-Western critical intervention. In Architecture as Metaphor, Karatani detects a recurrent "will to architecture" that he argues is the foundation of all Western thinking, traversing architecture, philosophy, literature, linguistics, city planning, anthropology, political economics, psychoanalysis, and mathematics. In the three parts of the book, he analyzes the complex bonds between construction and deconstruction, thereby pointing to an alternative model of "secular criticism," but in the domain of philosophy rather than literary or cultural criticism. As Karatani claims in his introduction, because the will to architecture is practically nonoexistent in Japan, he must first assume a dual role: one that affirms the architectonic (by scrutinizing the suppressed function of form) and one that pushes formalism to its collapse (by invoking Kurt Godel's incompleteness theorem). His subsequent discussions trace a path through the work of Christopher Alexander, Jane Jacobs, Gilles Deleuze, and others. Finally, amidst the drive that motivates all formalization, he confronts an unbridgeable gap, an uncontrollable event encountered in the exchange with the other; thus his speculation turns toward global capital movement. While in the present volume he mainly analyzes familiar Western texts, it is precisely for this reason that his voice discloses a distance that will add a new dimension to our English-language discourse. (shrink)