Toward the beginning of 2013, I received reports of passages in the Black Notebooks that offered observations on Jewry, or as the case may be, world Jewry. It immediately became clear to me that the publication of the Black Notebooks would call forth a wide-spread international debate. Already in the Spring of 2013, I had asked Professor Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, last private assistant – and in the words of my grandfather, the “chief co-worker of the complete edition”, – if (...) he might review the Notebooks as a whole, based on his profound insight into the thought of Martin Heidegger, and in particular, review those Jewish-related passages that were the focus of the public eye. Publications about the Black Notebooks quickly came to propagate catchy expressions such as “being-historical anti-Semitism” and “metaphysical anti-Semitism”. The first question that obviously arises is: Does the thought of Martin Heidegger exhibit any kind of anti-Semitism at all? In this book Professor von Herrmann now advances his hermeneutic explication. With Professor Francesco Alfieri of the Pontificia Università Lateranense he has found a colleague who has drawn up a comprehensive philological analysis of volumes GA 94 through GA 97 of the Complete Edition. The fact that Heidegger designated the hitherto published “black notebooks” as Ponderings and as Observations has been given little consideration. He intentionally placed them at the conclusion of the Complete Edition because without acquaintance with the lectures, and above all, with the being-historical treatises that would come to be published in the framework of the Complete Edition, they would not be comprehensible. (shrink)

Book digitized by Google from the library of the University of Michigan and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb.

1. Grundgestalt, Bewegung, Stufung.--[Beilage]: Musik-Beispiele.

Abstract:The "Remarks on Pragmatism" include two texts by Wilhelm Jerusalem that have never been published in English, in a translation by Daniel R. Huebner. This translation is supplemented with a few excerpts related to pragmatism from a 1910 English translation, by Charles Finley Sanders, of the fourth edition of Jerusalem's Introduction to Philosophy. For background information on Jerusalem, his legacy, and the current texts and translations, see Huebner's introductory essay in this issue.