Abstract

The philosophical work of Jean-François Courtine suffers undeservedly from under-representation to English-speaking readers. Over the last fifteen years, his commentaries and translations have made available to French students of German idealism, significant works of Schelling and J. G. Hamann. Now the present collection of essays shows that Courtine is as much at ease in the universe of late idealism as he is before the fundamental ontology of Martin Heidegger. Heidegger et la Phénoménologie assembles articles and lectures published from 1978 through the end of the 1980’s. If one were to imagine, for the sake of heuristics, a subtitle for the present work, it might read, “the cause of phenomenology and the possibility of a teleology of the I and the other.” Indeed, the first part of the book, “Phénoménologie et histoire de l’être”, examines the unfolding of Heidegger’s project of fundamental ontology in light of the reciprocal questions ‘what is the meaning of Being?’ and ‘what is man?’. Courtine’s reading of the Heideggerian corpus is polemical to the extent that it argues for, and justifies, the essential continuity of the latter’s investigation into the meaning and historiality of Being, against interpretations that interpret the Kehre in Heidegger’s thought as a profound thematic rupture, with a view to highlighting discontinuities in that thought. Courtine’s reading also rejects claims that a surreptitious, formal anthropomorphism hides at the root of the analytic of Dasein. Instead, the tone of Heidegger et la Phénoménologie is set by Courtine’s arguments for reading Heidegger’s work as a comprehensive deconstruction of the philosophic tradition, committed to liberating the most radical, underlying sense of the meaning of Being.