In this article, I attempt to analyze some of the contexts of the language of being after Heidegger’s “turn” (Kehre), a clearly discernible change in his philosophy in the second half of the 1930s. Heidegger proposed a new concept to revealing being itself, namely its “event‑enowning” (Ereignis). The key to this understanding of being is that now language becomes “the house” of being. Heidegger combined this with the “joint” (fugue) function. Language as a fugue joins with being itself, (...) and therefore constantly follows and touches upon the boundary of silence. Silence is the ultimate complement of language and constantly limits it, because what is said only reveals a part of being, while the rest remains hidden and “expresses” silence, as it is in the case of a fugue, where the main motif of the theme “escapes” into silence. In the text, I first consider the fugue of being, then the language of being as its expression, in order to consider the problem of saying further, and finally analyze the limit of language, i.e. the way to silence. (shrink)

' Speaking out of Turn : Martin Heidegger and die Kehre ' examines the difference between Heidegger's own understanding of 'the turning' and that understanding which originated with Karl Lowith and was later presented to English-speaking readers by William Richardson in Martin Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought . The study focuses on Heidegger's own introduction to Richardson's book, and argues that, far from confirming Richardson's view that there is a 'Heidegger I' and 'Heidegger II' connected by the 'reversal' (...) or turning, Heidegger sought to indicate with (sometimes indirect) reference to his own works that the 'turning' is a movement in thought that it was part of the original project of Being and Time to carry through, but which he only succeeded in describing much later. The study attempts to illustrate this by a close examination of the works to which Heidegger alludes in his Foreword to Richardson's book. Many of these were not available when Richardson published (1963), and so it has only more recently been possible to amplify Heidegger's earlier published works with reference to his lecture courses. The study concludes that the horizon of time and the analytic of Dasein never really disappear from his later thinking, as many have claimed, and proposes that the relationship between the earlier and later Heidegger be re-examined. This re-examination takes the form of accepting that far from the 'turning' representing a fracture, where Heidegger abandons the existential-temporal analytic of Dasein in favour of an attempt to think only being ( das Sein ) as such, the 'turning' represents the point of unity in Heidegger's work. This point of unity shows how Dasein and being 'belong together' in 'the event' ( das Ereignis ). (shrink)

Interpretations of Heidegger often fail to distinguish between two very different matters -- on the one hand “the turn” (die Kehre), and on the other hand “the change in Heidegger’s thinking” (die Wendung im Denken), that is, the shift in the way Heidegger formulated and presented his philosophy beginning in the 1930s. Failure to make this distinction can be disastrous for understanding Heidegger, and the danger becomes more acute the closer one gets to texts like Introduction to Metaphysics, (...) where both the “turn” and the “change” begin to come into their own.1.. (shrink)

Within the context of Heidegger’s claim that his thinking has moved from the “meaning of being” to the “truth of being” and finally to the “place of being,” this paper examines the “spatial” motifs that become pronounced in his post-1930 attempts to think being apart from temporality. My contention is that his “shift” (Wendung) in thinking was a move beyond his earlier focus upon the project-horizon of the meaning (Sinn) of being, i.e., time, based on the existential hermeneutic of mortality, (...) and instead towards a focus upon the “space”—variously discussed in terms of the open, the clearing, the expanse, the region, etc.—that allows fur such horizonal projection. The very matter of thought that becomes discussed in the 1930s Beiträge as the “turning” (Kehre) of “en-ownment” (Ereignis) involves this clearing or opening of a “space” in the strife of unconcealment-concealment. This in turn underscores the alterity from out of which the emission of the Sinn of being is possible. In the 1940s and ‘50s this spacing becomes developed in terms of a “regionalizing” (Gegnen) in explicit distinction from the “horizon.” I shall also examine the implications for human spatiality, i.e., our receptivity vis-à-vis this alterity of Ereignis or Gegnen, which Heidegger discusses in terms of “letting” or “releasement.”. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger is now widely recognized as the most influential philosopher of the Twentieth Century. Until the late 1960's, this impact derived mainly from his early magnum opus, 1927's Being and Time. Many of this century's most significant Continental thinkers---including Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Arendt, Gadamer, Marcuse, Habermas, Bultmann, and Levinas---acknowledge profound conceptual debts to insights first elaborated in this text. But Being and Time was never finished, and Heidegger continued to extend, develop, and in some places revolutionize his own thinking for (...) another fifty years. This "later" Heidegger's prolific body of work has decisively influenced the next generation of Continental thinkers, shaping the concepts and concerns of important figures such as Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Blanchot, and Baudrillard. Despite this unparalleled impact, several basic aspects of Heidegger's later philosophy remain shrouded in mystery, confusion, and controversy. ;The End of Onto-Theology: Understanding Heidegger's Turn, Method, and Politics explains four central aspects of Heidegger's later thought: his controversial understanding of metaphysics as onto-theology, his famously recondite Kehre, his heretofore overlooked philosophical methodology, and his appalling misadventure with Nazism. ;Chapter I introduces the basic structure and unifying thesis of the text. Chapter II clarifies and periodizes Heidegger's mysterious Kehre or "turn," the philosophical transformation which distinguishes his "early" and "later" work. Chapter III uncovers another sense of Kehre, connecting this "turning" to Heidegger's infamous political misadventure. Chapter IV reconstructs Heidegger's famous Destruktion of the history of metaphysical foundationalism, showing how this "deconstruction" both disabused Heidegger of his own politically disastrous metaphysical ambition to recover a "fundamental ontology" and provides the necessary philosophical background for understanding Heidegger's later philosophy. Chapter V explicates Heidegger's later methodology, "ontohistorical placement through hermeneutic altercation," using the case of Nietzsche to demonstrate how Heidegger developed and deployed this method to situate other philosophers' contributions to the history of intelligibility. Chapter VI addresses the complex intersection of Heidegger's critique of Nietzsche's nihilistic legacy with his failed bid to assume philosophical leadership of the National Socialist "revolution," isolating its philosophical sources and establishing the important philosophical lessons Heidegger learned from his "great political error.". (shrink)

In the mushrooming literature on the late Heidegger, Pugliese's book stands with the distinction of an immense and sometimes almost exasperating amount of learned notes and excurses [[sic]]. On the other hand, the speculative core of the work is a highly original one. It treats the famous "Kehre" in the continuity of Heidegger's thought and proves quite convincingly that it can be organically developed from the original thesis of "historicity" as it stands in Sein und Zeit. Making use of (...) the earliest texts as well as of a number of unpublished lecture-notes, Pugliese tries to back those interpretations which claim that the "Kehre" is indeed a turning-point in the history of metaphysics--even though it represents no break or revolution in Heidegger's own thought. This is a difficult book but fortunately devoid of the affected mannerism of so many Heidegger admirers, and a telling example of the frequent success of French and Spanish "translations" of German speculation.--M. J. V. (shrink)

Although it is one of the indispensable standards of relevant research that Heidegger shortly after Being and Time made a „turn“ („Kehre“) in the development of his thinking, it can be shown that this is merely due to a misunderstanding or misinterpretation that began in 1949/50 with an at least incorrect reading of the corresponding passage in the Letter of Humanism. But if this legend of research can be proven as such, the question arises as to what consequences (...) this will have for the comprehension of Heidegger’s thinking, for it is said that with the „turn“, the transcendental approach was given up in favor of an aletheiological one with which it was possible for Heidegger to overcome subjectivism. In rejection of this by now equally canonical interpretation scheme it is shown here that the aletheiological approach is merely a recourse to conceptions important to Heidegger even before Being and Time and that after the failure of its third section – Time and Being – subjectivistic features were rather transferred, partially into a being that was increasingly thought of as an active one, partially into concepts like that of the „first thinker“ („erster Denker“) or the „messenger of being“ („Botenganger des Seins“). All in all, it is argued that the paradigm of „Heidegger‘ s turn“ should be abandoned in order to enable an unobstructed view on Heidegger’s thinking. (shrink)

From its Presocratic beginnings, Western philosophy concerned itself with a quest for unity both in terms of the systematization of knowledge and as a metaphysical search for a unity of being—two trends that can be regarded as converging and culminating in Hegel’s system of absolute idealism. Since Hegel, however, the philosophical quest for unity has become increasingly problematic. Jussi Backman returns to that question in this book, examining the place of the unity of being in the work of Heidegger. Backman (...) sketches a consistent picture of Heidegger as a thinker of unity who throughout his career in different ways attempted to come to terms with both Parmenides’s and Aristotle’s fundamental questions concerning the singularity or multiplicity of being—attempting to do so, however, in a “postmetaphysical” manner rooted in rather than above and beyond particular, situated beings. Through his analysis, Backman offers a new way of understanding the basic continuity of Heidegger’s philosophical project and the interconnectedness of such key Heideggerian concepts as ecstatic temporality, the ontological difference, the turn (Kehre), the event (Ereignis), the fourfold (Geviert), and the analysis of modern technology. (shrink)

For Heidegger, the modern understanding of beeing is located within the space-time horizon of metaphysics in the form of a nihilistic "will to power", which makes it increasingly difficult for it to free itself from metaphysical thinking. With the progress and success of science and technology, the addiction of the modern age to metaphysics even seems to increase; man will ultimately be brought into the closed horizon of a tragic and nihilistic interpretation of beeing. The age of enlightenment, is in (...) fact - according to the thesis of the author - not yet at an end: Only if enlightenment, through basic "philosophical thought", reflects on its own foundation in a more fundamental and critical way and really makes the "turning" ("Kehre"), might it be able to overcome its unexplored addiction to the horizon of metaphysics, as well as to overcome modern man's alienation of the self and being, and to find its way back to the Greek beginnings of western thought. (shrink)

This thesis maintains that Friedrich Holderlin's poetic thought is a key element not only in the development of Martin Heidegger's philosophical thought from 1929/30 to 1933 but also in his decision to become politically involved with National Socialism. Although Heidegger was familiar with Holderlin's poetry prior to 1929, he did not perceive the significance of the poet's thought and language until he was able to overcome the position of transcendental subjectivity which haunts Being and Time. Heidegger did so in 1929/30 (...) by shattering the unity of Dasein's temporal horizon--a unity which still preserved the assumption of being as permanent presence. This enabled Heidegger to think through the turn or Kehre to the occurrence of being as difference as the originary event which gave rise not only to Greek philosophy but the Western tradition as a whole. ;It is precisely at this juncture that Holderlin's poetic thought and language became significant for Heidegger. The turn from the unity of Dasein's temporality to the occurrence of being as time implies not only a revolution in thinking but also a revolution in language. Heidegger's attempt to set this revolution in motion by setting the originary sense of the Greek logos to work linguistically in his own work is the philosophical counterpart of what Norbert von Hellingrath first described as Holderlin's harte Fugung or hard style. ;The pre-logical grammar and syntax Heidegger employed, I have called the language of revolution. Its purpose is to dislocate thinking out of metaphysics toward a hidden Greek origin in the past which shows itself in the future as what is left unthought of the Greek beginning and what still remains to be thought. This back-and-forth movement of questioning is the philosophical counterpart to Holderlin's poetic andenken. In dislocating political and ideological thought from its metaphysical foundations, Heidegger intended to shift the political revolution, especially in the universities, toward a second, deeper revolution which would confront the hidden origin of the Western tradition itself. (shrink)

The Truth of Being and the Historicity of the Earth This essay reads Graeme Nicholson’s Heidegger on Truth in conjunction with Frank Schalow’s Heidegger’s Ecological Turn. It calls for the appropriation of Heidegger’s understanding of Da-sein to elaborate a radically other, earth-based political order. Nicholson and Schalow independently draw the conclusion that the technocratic world order, founded in the metaphysics of presence, is incapable of adequate response to a hermeneutic situation defined by instrumental reason and ecological collapse. Schalow’s carefully (...) elaborated contribution to eco-philosophy offers a creative adaption of Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology and specifies how it is integrated into the project of the history of being. (shrink)

The article delves into two closely intertwined notions that have increasingly taken centre stage in Gianni Vattimo’s thought since the mid-eighties: secularisation and kenosis. The significance of these themes in Vattimo’s late work is such that, it is argued, it amounts to an actual Kehre, or turn. However, akin to Heidegger, Vattimo’s Kehre is not a radical break but a shift in research and reflection towards themes that, although already present in his philosophy, have assumed more distinctly (...) religious nuances and have progressively developed up to the point where they have formed an organic perspective. The article traces this development, commencing with the notion of secularisation to then explore its interweaving with themes of emancipation and the violence of metaphysics. It concludes with a reflection on the central role of kenosis and its significance in Vattimo’s thought. (shrink)

The task of this paper is to propose an answer to these relatedquestions. It amounts to an attempt to work through conceptually step by step Heidegger’s so called “overcoming of metaphysics”. It is true of course that the locution, “the overcoming of metaphysics”, does not appear in Being and Time. The discourse of the overcoming of metaphysics is held by Heidegger’s commentators to belong to a period post-dating the early work, after the so called Kehre. I shall stubbornly evade (...) this knotty issue of Heidegger interpretation here. For my purposes it suffices merely if our understanding ofBeing and Time, its content, intent and consequence, can be deepened or expanded if it is read in the light of the task of overcoming metaphysics—or at least in the light of that task as it is to be conceived in the context I shall present here. What is to be understood by the phrase “the overcoming of metaphysics”? (shrink)

Attempts to resolve the question of Foucault's relationship to Heidegger usually look for points of substantive correlation between them: the coincidence of being and power, the meaning of truth, technology, ethics, and so on. Taking seriously Foucault's claim in his final interview that he uses Heidegger as an 'instrument of thought', this paper looks for a correlation in practice. The argument focuses on a structural isomorphism between Heidegger's concept of the fourfold event (Ereignis) of being and later Foucault's critique of (...) 'problematization' (problématique). This isomorphism, I argue, indicates a covert philosophical confrontation between Foucault and Heidegger, which was determinative for Foucault in the period of the turn to ethics (1976-84). This is a confrontation over the meaning of the 'event of thought'. Such an interpretation not only permits a literal reading of Foucault's comments regarding Heidegger in his final interview, but also casts the developments in Foucault's later work in a fascinating new light. Foucault's critique of problematization, on this view, is founded in an historicized version of Heideggerian 'other' thinking, and pivots on a ontologically tempered enactment of the Heideggerian turn (Kehre). (shrink)

The text is looking for a political explanation of the turn in Western attitude to pornography which has taken place since the sixties and even more so since the seventies. More surprising than the liberalization of pornography itself appears the massive pornographic self-exposure even by minors since the turn of the millennium. In addition to the reasons for this extraordinary permissiveness, the paper questions the role of technical and audiovisual media in this social development.

The aim of this article is to show the crucial role of Blaise Pascal’s work for the development of Martin Heidegger’s early philosophical project – which lasted until the Turn [Kehre] of the 1930s. The scattered but decisive presence of quotes from the French thinker clearly shows how fundamental he was, both methodologically and content-wise, for Heidegger’s initial elaboration of the question of Being [Seinsfrage] and the Existential Analytic of Dasein [Daseinanalytik].

This article aims at answering the following problem: since for Heidegger the historicity of Being presupposes the withdrawal of the transcendental source of such a historicity, then does Heidegger’s perspective lead to a form of relativism of the kind of an epochal historicism? If on the contrary one judges that for Heidegger there is after all, beyond the ordered unfolding of epochs in the history of Being, an ultimate transcendental or at least trans-epochal dimension, does Heidegger’s thinking lead back to (...) an ahistorical Absolute beyond historicity? In order to answer these questions, I propose to divide Heidegger’s philosophy in three stages, rather than the two stages that have usually been retained by commentators ever since the works of Richardson, in conformity with Heidegger’s own indications regarding the Turning (Kehre) of his philosophy. Indeed, Heidegger in the 1930’s develops the notion of machination (Machenschaft) and thus gives historicity a hegemonic function in Being’s essential occurrence (Wesung), itself understood as the intensification of the program of machination starting in the Greek inceptual thinking and developing itself until today’s planetary technological era. However, after 1945 Heidegger does not think anymore that the truth of Being is entirely determined by historicity and that Being essentially abandons Dasein to machination and to its gradual historical unfolding, because there is now according to him, beyond the epochs that are destined to Dasein, a trans-epochal giving (and perhaps generous) origin of presence that constitutes the supreme cause for thinking (Sache des Denkens). (shrink)

This article attempts an organological and pharmacological re-interpretation of the later Heidegger’s understanding of modern technology as a provocative mode of revealing of beings, in particular of its central notions of Gestell [enframing] Gefahr [danger], Kehre [turning] and Ereignis [event]. Although these notions in principle allow us to think what is at stake currently in the Anthropocene as the age of total automation, generalized toxicity of the technical milieu and post-truth calling for a radical bifurcation, they need to be (...) reframed and re-imagined in terms of the process of exosomatization issuing from humanity’s original and necessary default of origin and situated within the perspective of entropy and negentropy, both unthought by Heidegger. Only thus will it become possible to really think and take care of what Heidegger called the danger of technology and its turning into the event as the destiny of enframing. This also requires a rethinking of Aristotle’s theory of four causes as it is invoked by Heidegger in his analysis of technology, in particular the efficient and final causes, in terms of what Deleuze called quasi-causality, here understood as the need and the obligation for mortals to make their fault come true, i.e., to make it truly happen or make it advene in truth, out of the experience of the danger as the ordeal of the necessary default. Thus becoming the anti-anthropic cause of anthropic toxicity, humans would restore final causality as quasi-causality and inaugurate, as neganthropos, the bifurcation into the Neganthropocene. (shrink)

Obrat (Kehre) v Heideggerovom myslení má dosah nielen na skúmanie otázky bytia (Seinsfrage), ale aj na zmenu postavenia človeka vo vzťahu k bytiu. Túto zmenu je možné ukázať aj prostredníctvom Heideggerovej interpretácie predsokratovskej filozofie. Pokým v období pred obratom je človek ako pobyt (Dasein) schopný porozumieť bytiu a je s ním spojený, po obrate sa tento vzťah zásadným spôsobom mení. Bytie sa Heideggera po obrate stáva Bytím, ktoré má charakter ne-časovosti či pred-časovosti a ako také má aj svoje vlastné (...) dejiny. Poznanie pravdy Bytia už nie je záležitosťou človeka, ale závisí od toho, či sa Bytie samo človeku ukazuje, alebo skrýva.Turning (Kehre) in Heidegger’s thinking reaches not only his search of the question of Being (Seinsfrage) but also the change of the status of human being in relation to Being. This change can be displayed also through Heidegger’s interpretation of pre-Socratic philosophy. While during the period before turning human being as being-there (Dasein) is able to understand Being and he is connected to it, in the period after turning this relationship changes completely. For Heidegger Being after turning becomes Being with the character of non-temporality or pre-temporality and it has its own history. Knowledge of the truth of Being happens not to be a matter of human being but it depends on the fact whether Being hides or unhides. (shrink)

In Heidegger’s thought, it is possible to recognize an accurate reflection about the pain that afflicts modern man, as well as a particular indication for its cure. In pain, man experiences his being destined to metaphysics like something incurable, which requires to think the topology of the gift of being. Pain and convalescence will be exposed in that topology, under the light of The Turn [die Kehre], The Event [Ereignis] and the line between Overcoming [Überwindung] and Twisting [Verwindung] (...) of Metaphysics, in order to recognize that, in Heidegger’s reflection, it is in pain “itself” where the cure of the incurable can be possible: the passion of human finitude, the experience of the giving of being and the care of nothingness. Before overcoming [überwunden] the Metaphysics, with its intention of appropriate the being, Metaphsyisics must be reestablished [verwunden] in its inappropriate truth. (shrink)

Preview: /Review: Emmanuel Faye, Arendt et Heidegger: Extermination nazie et destruction de la pensée, (Albin Michel, 2016), 560 pages./ The appearance of Martin Heidegger’s Black Notebooks (1932-38) in 2014 has posed profound questions to philosophers and political theorists. For a long time, in ways that the Black Notebooks have definitively undermined, Heidegger’s National Socialism was widely considered as limited to 1933-34. His larger thought, at least after a proposed turning or kehre in the mid-1930s, was presented as insulated from, (...) or even critical of, Nazism and antisemitism. The work of Emmanuel Faye (led by Martin Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy), has been at the forefront of scholarship which has taken seriously the many questions raised by the ongoing publication of Heidegger’s Nazi-era materials, since the 1990s. On one hand, can great philosophy be implicated in forms of openly ethnonationalist, even exterminist political movements, or does it necessarily involve normative commitments which abhor anything like Nazism? On the other hand, how should we understand a political movement like National Socialism, including its ideological dimensions, such that it could appeal to a thinker of the magnitude of the one-time Fuhrer-Rektor of Freiburg University? Finally, what does publication of Heidegger’s Nazi texts and positions, culminating in the Black Notebooks, say about its limitations, political dimensions, and the postwar reception history of Heidegger in the liberal nations. (shrink)

In a paradoxical manner, Heidegger's work is deeply tainted by his complicity with totalitarian (fascist) oppression, despite the fact that his philosophy, in its basic tenor, was always dedicated to freedom and resistance to totalizing uniformity. While acknowledging his early fascination with power struggles, the essay tries to show how, as a corollary of his turning (Kehre), Heidegger steadily sought to extricate himself from the tentacles of oppressive power (Macht) and manipulative domination (Machenschaft). The focus here is on recently (...) published treatises of the 1930's. The conclusion inserts Heidegger's thought into the contemporary arena of global standardization. (shrink)

Heidegger, in the writings of the so-called “turn” [Kehre] attributes to Plato a capital role in the history of philosophy, namely that of founder of metaphysics understood as the history of the oblivion of being. Yet, in his course on the Sophist (1924-25) Heidegger had not yet made such negative judgments. Is this double image of Plato that we can derive from Heideggerian writings the result of a rupture or is there perhaps a continuity? In this contribution I (...) will show the continuity, even if it is accompanied by a rather critical judgment on Plato’s role as the founder of Western metaphysics. (shrink)

The article deals with the constitution of a «historical people» in the conference munity that underlie to the interpretations of works of art in the conference are examined, pointing out the relationship of both with two types of different communities. In turn, they also constituted the images of ideal community of nacionalsocialism in power. This coincidence shows a deep agreement of Heidegger with governing nacionalsocialism different from a mere adhesion to the party. In this way, it is shown the (...) parallel of the question about the «new beginning» looked for by Heidegger starting from the Kehre and his political commitment for those years. (shrink)

For Martin Heidegger the "fall" of philosophy into metaphysics begins with Plato. Thus, the relationship between the two philosophers is crucial to an understanding of Heidegger--and, perhaps, even to the whole plausibility of postmodern critiques of metaphysics. It is also, as the essays in this volume attest, highly complex, and possibly founded on a questionable understanding of Plato. As editors Catalin Partenie and Tom Rockmore remark, a simple way to describe Heidegger's reading of Plato might be to say that what (...) began as an attempt to appropriate Plato (and through him a large portion of Western philosophy) finally ended in an estrangement from both Plato and Western philosophy. The authors of this volume consider Heidegger's thought in relation to Plato before and after the " Kehre " or turn. In doing so, they take up various central issues in Heidegger's Being and Time (1927) and thereafter, and the questions of hermeneutics, truth, and language. The result is a subtle and multifaceted reinterpretation of Heidegger's position in the tradition of philosophy, and of Plato's role in determining that position. (shrink)

The coterie of commentators represented in the present volume include some of the clearest voices for Heidegger’s way of thinking among the second and third generations of American Heidegger scholars. Two of the contributors, who are also the volume’s editors, have just published a new translation of Einführung in die Metaphysik, an event that would appear to be one of the reasons for the project published here. Its thirteen essays are organized under three headings: the question of being, Heidegger and (...) the Greeks, and Politics and Ethics. The first part begins with Thomas Sheehan’s “prolegomenon to a fresh reading of Introduction to Metaphysics ” from the perspective of Heidegger’s later ruminations on Ereignis, “what brings about being,” that is “the opening of a clearing in which entities can appear as this or that”. Professor Sheehan’s discussion is both comprehensive of Heidegger’s major concepts and comprehensible to the beginning student. For specialists, the essay challenges the standing interpretation of one of the recurring topics in Heidegger scholarship, the so-called Kehre in which his way of thinking is said to have been implicated. According to Charles Guignon, Introduction to Metaphysics “undertakes the task of recovering the earliest ways of understanding Being for the purpose of revitalizing our contemporary understanding” of Being. He distinguishes in Heidegger’s thinking an “event ontology” that contrasts with the “ substance ontology” of metaphysics in effect since the classic Greek philosophers. Professor Guignon’s comments focus on Heidegger’s understanding of the early Greek concept of phusis and “how such a notion is illuminating in trying to make sense of things that the substance ontology fails to make intelligible”. He observes that history “provides a prime example of an entity whose Being is that of phusis”. Such an interpretation of phusis is in striking contrast to the standard understanding of phusis as physical nature. Later, in part 2, Susan Schoenbohm continues the discussion of Heidegger’s interpretation of phusis, noting that, according to Heidegger, in its fundamental sense, phusis does not mean nature but rather “the emerging, for the fist time, of something out of no determination at all.” It is “a name for the emerging of the originary difference of determination and no determination”, and, as such, must for certain reasons itself be “determinately ambiguous”. For Heidegger, she observes, phusis and Being are the same. Richard Polt, who is one of the volume’s editors, attempts “to lay the foundation for an adequate interpretation of Heidegger’s ‘Nothing’” in the context of the question brought into philosophical focus and prominence by Lebiniz: Why is there something instead of nothing? He notes that “the closest antecedents of Heidegger’s Nothing are to be found in nineteenth-century thought”, but that there are resonances of the topic as Heidegger treats it to be found in Eastern thought as well. In both traditions, “the question of Nothing forms part of the question of Being”, and that “precisely because Nothing is Being’s other, the question of Nothing is included in the question of Being”. Professor Polt points out the rich history of the notion of Nothing in Heidegger’s way of thinking. “We have found,” he writes, “that Heidegger uses ‘Nothing’ to refer to a wide variety of phenomena, including inauthenticity, uncanniness, death, guilt, meaninglessness, and the withdrawal of Be-ing”. He concludes that Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics does not contain a “‘doctrine’ of Nothing,” but rather should be understood as “a voyage and a provocation, not a treatise”, adding that “Heidegger himself did not always view the text as a success”, which may account for why he chose not to publish it for nearly twenty years after first presenting it in public. Daniel Dahlstrom sees Heidegger’s text as “an introduction to the end of metaphysics and [the] beginning of a new way of thinking.” He suggests that Heidegger is in search of understanding “what it means to say that something is at all”. The author’s focus is on Heidegger’s interpretation of the sense of logos in pre-Socratic philosophy. Professor Dahlstrom examines what he terms the “logical prejudice” in Western philosophy as Heidegger construes it and attempts to show why, for Heidegger, such a way of understanding the relation between thinking and being “is understandable but not inevitable”, but, regrettably, “disables thinking about being”. According to the author, Heidegger discovers among the pre-Socratics an understanding of thinking that is “more rigorous and original than judgmental or propositional thinking”. On Dahlstrom’s assessment, Introduction to Metaphysics is, in fact, an introduction to logic. Part 1 of the Companion concludes with a refreshingly challenging analysis of “a complication in Heidegger’s theory of language and its consequences” for his way of thinking about being as a whole. In his text, Dieter Thomä sets out to “turn the tables and claim that shortcomings in both the early and late thinking of Heidegger can be pointed out by means of the Introduction to Metaphysics … in the respective conceptions of language”. He uses “an approach that takes Heideggerian arguments as incentives for a way of thinking that leads beyond him”. Focusing on the philosophical possibility of the declaration “I am,” that is “indexical being”, Professor Thomä discusses changes in Heidegger’s view of language from Being and Time to the Introduction, which he claims, by the way, “is not to be regarded as one of Heidegger’s strongest texts,” in particular “[i]n terms of systematic cohesion and unity”: “The tone of the book is uneven, changing among bold appeals, philological details, simple mistakes and bold arguments”. Thomä’s discussion of Heidegger’s concept of naming is respectful of and fully conversant with the texts, without, however, being reverential in tone, a feature that unaccountably has characterized so much Heidegger scholarship. (shrink)

Death is seen as a fundamental theme throughout the development of Heidegger's thought. Its role in each stage of this development is examined to show that the Kehre from Dasein to Sein gives the key to the concept of death, while death in turn is fundamental to the Kehre.—J. J.

Herman Philipse's massive work undertakes to interpret and critique the work of Martin Heidegger within the full range of the often inscrutable philosopher's corpus, and claims to be the first such work ever to incorporate the expanse of Heidegger's work in a unifying interpretive elucidation. Philipse draws from Heidegger's earliest work to his 1927 masterpiece Being and Time, through the Kehre, or turn, in his thought, in which he moves from the formal rigor of his seminal work to (...) enlist a mythical-mystical-poetic language to revive and transform the Aristotelian question of being. Given that the secondary literature in Heidegger scholarship has ballooned into the thousands of texts, Philipse makes a bold statement in claiming to be the first to offer a paninterpretive account of Heidegger's work. (shrink)

In this chapter I will bring together two seemingly irreconcilable aspects of Rorty’s intellectual biography: on the one hand its consistency, loyalty, and deference to what I call his “vision,” and on the other, the expansiveness, capaciousness, voraciousness, and encyclopedic thrust of that vision. I argue that in contrast to many canonical philosophers, Rorty did not undergo a turn, a “Kehre,” a shift, a revelation, a Damascus moment. Rather, when reading his epochal texts, and numerous essays, one gets (...) the impression of an Amazonian river widening its shores and drinking its tributaries, relentlessly moving forward following its own course. I thus argue that we think of Rorty, following Berlin’s famous allegory, as a foxy hedgehog, one that pursued one truth, while rummaging inquisitively along the plains and forests of Western culture. From Platonism to metaphilosophy, from metaphilosophy to post-philosophy, and from there to the project of a liberal utopia, which brings together what I called his Brechtian patriotism, with his honest, open, and sincere ethnocentrism, the Rortyan vision has been held steady by one thought: “There are only languages that serve some human purposes better than others. Human purposes and human languages change in tandem with each other” (Rorty 2010, p. 22). Another way of expressing this vision is to say that what makes humans a unique animal is that we can recreate ourselves by means of changing our vocabularies. (shrink)