Abstract

Heidegger’s later philosophy is marked by two conflicting claims about phenomenology. On the one hand, phenomenology and philosophy generally is tasked with “responding to the claim of what is to be thought” in a novel and unprecedented manner. On the other hand, Heidegger recognizes that there have been earlier attempts at thus doing justice to phenomena; in the ontological commitments of earlier thinkers, Heidegger finds accounts of the “things themselves,” each of which has different implications for what phenomenology should concern itself with. Phenomenology, as Heidegger conceives it, should thus both incorporate the history of philosophy and exceed it, yet it is unclear how these ideas can be reconciled. This chapter calls this problem the “dilemma of the historicity of phenomenology” and identifies different versions of it in Heidegger’s works after 1935/6.