Abstract

The sudden death of Fridolin Wiplinger of Vienna in 1973 at the age of 41 cut short a brilliant career that had already found expression in two important works: Wahrheit und Geschichtlichkeit and Physis und Logos. In the former he entered into dialogue with Heidegger on the question of truth in the "correlativity" of Being and logos, whereas in the latter, still in connection with Heidegger, he attempted to work out the bond between physis and logos as the concretion of the Being-question, a topic which Heidegger himself treated inchoatively in his early Freiburg courses on Aristotle: the unity of logos as letting-be-seen and physis as the self-hiding Being of beings. The present work on the basic questions of the origin and "fulfillment" of metaphysics is edited from Wiplinger’s 1972-73 lecture course at Vienna, "Basic Questions of Metaphysics," and was conceived of as the introduction to a whole series of lecture courses on the topic. The next semester was to have treated Fichte as the end or fulfillment of metaphysics, followed by a course on the overcoming of metaphysics.