Abstract

This lecture course dating from 1955-56 is perhaps Heidegger's last truly important work. The book takes Leibniz's famous dictum, nihil est sine ratione--nothing is without reason--as the point of departure for a series of ruminations on the fate of modernity, modern philosophy, the atomic age, science, and the process of Seinsgeschick which is somehow responsible for our present fate of Seinsverlassenheit--abandonment by Being. Although many of these themes will be familiar to Heidegger readers from related works of the 1940s and 1950s, The Principle of Reason is a significant exemplar of the later Heidegger's manner of thinking and philosophical concerns.