This enlightening study examines the relationship between being and God in Aristotle and Heidegger. Focusing on the methodology of each thinker, Catriona Hanley contrasts their beliefs on the infinite or finite nature of being, and on God’s role therein. The author also offers some indication of how modern thinkers might rethink the relation of the finite to the infinite, based on the work of these two philosophers. Being and God in Aristotle and Heidegger is a valuable book for philosophers of (...) religion. (shrink)

In courses in the twenties and early thirties, Heidegger argues that in Aristotle the question of the being of beings (ontology) and that of the unity of beings (theology) are distinct. Although he treated the two questions as part of one science, prôtē philosophía, Aristotle did not, in Heidegger's view, discuss the way in which these questions belong together. Being is determined theoretically as presence; and God, the first mover, is an aítion, an explanatory ground of motion in sensible ousía. (...) God is required as a ground for the presence of beings as a whole. Heidegger no longer seeks explanatory grounds, nor does he prioritize theory. Rather, he inquires into the essence of ground, and the poietical involvement of Dasein in understanding being. The unity of Aristotle's questions is found in a groundless ground: Dasein as transcendence. The metaphysical god is thus no longer required in Heidegger's phenomenology. (shrink)

The discussion of Heidegger's “destructive retrieve” of Aristotle has been intensified in recent years by the publication of Heidegger's courses in the years surrounding his magnum opus. Heidegger's explicit commentary on Aristotle in these courses permits one to read Being and Time with Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Metaphysics. My paper analyzes a network of differences between the two thinkers, focusing on the relationship between theory and praxis. From Aristotle to Heidegger, there is: a shift from the priority of actuality to (...) the priority of possibility. This shift, I argue, is itself the metaphysical ground of: a shift from the priority of theory to the priority of praxis. This shift is seen most clearly in the way in which Heidegger's notion of Theorie is a modification of his poíesis. The temporal ground of the reversal is seen in Heidegger's notion of transcendence towards the world, and not towards an eternal being. (shrink)