Abstract

Heidegger’s first period in Freiburg (1919-23), where he taught as an assistant of Edmund Husserl, is characterized by a long, intense confrontation with the philosophy of Aristotle, manifested not only in the titles of his university lectures, but also in his explicit intention to write a book on Aristotle. This undertaking will recede in 1924 in Marburg, in view of the decision to write a treatise on time. This treatise will finally be composed in 1926 and will be published in 1927 under the title Being and Time. The shadow of Aristotle, however, still influences his philosophical work after 1924, and particularly in BT. The relevance of Heidegger’s Aristotle-interpretations can be determined in a twofold way: first, by tracing ‘tacit’ elements of Aristotelian thought, as they may emerge through Heidegger’s interpretations, and, secondly, by expounding the way in which the thought of Heidegger himself develops and takes shape in a dialogue with Aristotelian philosophy. Scholars agree that Heidegger’s confrontation with Aristotle does not amount to a passive adoption of Aristotelian positions, distinctions and evaluations, but is a kind of productive adaptation and reinterpretation of the Aristotelian heritage: appropriation, reappropriation, originelle Aneignung, “reinterprets and transforms”– these are the terms in which this relation has been described. But what precisely is the content and nature of this appropriation? A certain confusion is produced by an assumption implicitly shared by the vast majority of scholars, the conviction that Heidegger’s philosophy constitutes a unique corpus and that his thought evolves linearly and uniformly. Τhe paper attempts to challenge this assumption.