Four Seminars

The present volume consists of the protocols of twenty séances held between 1966 and 1973 in which Heidegger was the central figure. They occurred as four seminars, the first three of which were given in Provence, the last one having taken place in Heidegger’s home in Zähringen, a suburb of Freiburg im Breisgau, three years before his death in 1976. Appended to the protocols are two brief texts, the first written in the winter of 1972–73 on part of Parmenides’ Fragment 1 which Heidegger read during the last session of the fourth seminar, on 8 September 1973, and an introduction to the Parmenides interpretation called “The Provenance of Thinking”, which was written at some point between 1973 and the spring of 1976. The two texts were added by the editor of the Gesamtausgabe edition of Heidegger’s Seminare in 1986. The five pages on which they appear contain the only sentences composed by Heidegger himself and are therefore the only ones, in fact, from Heidegger’s own German in Four Seminars.