Heidegger scholars consider the philosopher's recently published notebooks, including the issues of Heidegger's Nazism and anti-Semitism. For more than forty years, the philosopher Martin Heidegger logged ideas and opinions in a series of notebooks, known as the “Black Notebooks” after the black oilcloth booklets into which he first transcribed his thoughts. In 2014, the notebooks from 1931 to 1941 were published, sparking immediate controversy. It has long been acknowledged that Heidegger was an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazi Party in the (...) early 1930s. But the notebooks contain a number of anti-Semitic passages—often referring to the stereotype of “World-Jewry”—written even after Heidegger became disenchanted with the Nazis themselves. Reactions from the scholarly community have ranged from dismissal of the significance of these passages to claims that the anti-Semitism in them contaminates all of Heidegger's work. This volume offers the first collection of responses by Heidegger scholars to the publication of the notebooks. In essays commissioned especially for the book, the contributors offer a wide range of views, addressing not only the issues of anti-Semitism and Nazism but also the broader questions that the notebooks raise. Contributors Babette Babich, Andrew Bowie, Steven Crowell, Fred Dallmayr, Donatella Di Cesare, Michael Fagenblat, Ingo Farin, Gregory Fried, Jean Grondin, Karsten Harries, Laurence Paul Hemming, Jeff Malpas, Thomas Rohkrämer, Tracy B. Strong, Peter Trawny, Daniela Vallega-Neu, Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Nancy A. Weston, Holger Zaborowski. (shrink)

The history of Heidegger's relationship to the neo-Kantians is still largely unwritten, despite the fact that in his formative period Heidegger was very close to the neo-Kantian school, especially Windelband and Rickert, Lask and Natorp. With regard to the concept of history and the importance of historical philosophizing, it is the received view that Dilthey was early Heidegger's main and only source of inspiration. This paper argues against this one-sided view by showing the historical and systematic connections between early Heidegger's (...) views on history and the philosophy of history developed by Windelband and Rickert. (shrink)

Hermeneutical Heidegger critically examines and confronts Heidegger's hermeneutical approach to philosophy and the history of philosophy. Heidegger's work, both early and late, has had a profound impact on hermeneutics and hermeneutical philosophy. The essays in this volume are striking in the way they exhibit the variety of perspectives on the development and role of hermeneutics in Heidegger's work, allowing a multiplicity of views on the nature of hermeneutics and hermeneutical philosophy to emerge. As Heidegger argues, the rigor and strength of (...) philosophy do not consist in the development of a univocal and universal method, but in philosophy's ability to embrace—not just tolerate—the questioning of its basic concepts. The essays in Hermeneutical Heidegger are exemplars of this kind of rigor and strength. (shrink)

In this paper I analyze Hegel’s concept of life in the Phenomenology of Spirit and Heidegger’s critical comments regarding this concept of life in his 1930/31 Lecture Course on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. I claim that Heidegger's lecture course shows his continued fascination with life, despite his official distance to Dilthey and the then contemporary life-philosophy. I argue that one of the fundamental tenets of life-philosophy, the opposition of "life" to "reason," still motivates Heidegger’s critique of Hegel’s supposedly logocentric concept (...) of life. I begin the paper with a brief review of Heidegger’s life-philosophical starting point after World War One (Section I)and, drawing on Hans Jonas, suggest some meta-reflections on the reasons behind the renewed interest in "life" in the last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century (section II). After a sketch of Hegel’s concept of life in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Section III), I then turn to Heidegger’s interpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in 1930/31 (Section IV), in particular Hegel’s conception of the correlation of life and time. (shrink)

Original and critical essays by leading scholars on the question of the human in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger.

: In this paper I analyze early Heidegger’s concept of history. First, I argue that early Heidegger makes use of three distinct concepts or spheres of history, namely (1) history as intergenerational process, (2) history as personal or autobiographical development, and (3) history as the real center and origin of all intentional acts in the intentional self. Second, I argue that an essential motif in Heidegger’s discussion is the re-appropriation of what he considers the externalized and expropriated historical reality in (...) all three spheres. I suggest that this constitutes an objective parallelism to similar moves in Marx and neo-Marxist thought, especially Lukaìcs and the Frankfurt School. I show that Heidegger is on his way towards an ethics of time. First, in opposition to theoretical historicism and historical aestheticism or determinism of his time, early Heidegger advocates the active historical participation in history, the engagement in one’s historical situation or praxis. Second, in opposition to the publically regimented and reified time frames, calendars and interpretations, Heidegger argues for the self-reflexive, historical shaping of one’s very own and unique lifetime. Third, because Heidegger finds the origin of all history in the historical enactments of intentions in the intentional self, he ultimately argues for the self-reflexive acknowledgment of this ultimate historicity at the very heart of human intentionality, calling for the always renewed accentuation of this inevitable and ultimate historicity as a necessary condition for authentic temporality. (shrink)

In this paper we discuss Heidegger’s conception of philosophy in the Black Notebooks. In particular, we set out a reading of the Notebooks from the 1930s and early 1940s as exhibiting an extremist view of philosophy, and its concern with being, which accords it an absolute and exclusive priority above and beyond everything else. We argue that such overcompensation for philosophy’s declining fortune involves a willful turning away from the realities of human life, and from the multifarious symbolic and functional (...) worlds in which the meaning of being is articulated, refracted, and lived by individuals. In contrast, we suggest that Heidegger’s early Freiburg lecture courses already contain the basis for a critique of such an inflated notion of philosophy, and that the shift in Heidegger’s thinking in the late 1940s—away from an onto-historical and towards a topological understanding—is a consequence of Heidegger’s own reaction against the extremity of his thinking, and a turning back to the properly human dimensions of thinking and the matters that call for thinking. (shrink)

Jeff Malpas’ book Experience and Place has become a significant landmark in philosophy. I take the publication of the revised and extended second edition of the book in 2018 as an opportunity to re...

The dissertation is a historical and systematic study of Heidegger 's philosophizing at Freiburg between 1919 and 1923. It is shown that Heidegger pursues a philosophy of life directed at articulating how human life is lived from within, rather than how it is objectively thought about in the various positive sciences. Heidegger 's basic thesis that life is inextricably tied to the historical world and centered in the personal self leads him to experiment with various forms of relativism or historicism, (...) which, however, cannot be defended. Moreover, Heidegger 's search for a non-objective, non-theoretical method of describing life ultimately leads to a dead-end, although it does raise important questions about the theory of phenomenological description and concept formation. ; Heidegger 's extreme anti-objectivist phenomenology of life draws on and radicalizes strands in Bergson, Simmel, Jaspers, Kierkegaard, Dilthey, and Husserl. However, it also co-opts anti-objectivist impulses about the non-naturalist conceptuality of history and psychology, as pioneered by Natorp, Windelband, and Rickert. The conclusion is that Heidegger is not starting out as a philosopher of being, but as a philosopher of life, being driven by the life-philosophical ferment of the time. ;In addition, it is argued that Heidegger 's life-philosophy is a "philosophy of crisis," putting at center stage the fragility of life and the tendency to fall away from original self-being and the unique historical situation. It is suggested that this corresponds to the lived through "crisis" of World War One, and the political upheavals in the immediate post-war period. As a crisis philosopher, Heidegger embraces modernism and its skeptical distance to the normative powers of the tradition. ;Last but not the least, it is argued that, in the early twenties, Heidegger 's philosophy does not carry the slightest traces of overt or covert reactionary political motifs. (shrink)

In this study Berkowitz challenges interpretations which claim Nietzsche as the "founding father of postmodernism" and its relativism and perspectivism. He argues that Nietzsche's commitment to a search for truth, wisdom, and virtue marks him as an ethicist proper, whose "break from traditional morality is by his own account, and is in fact, grounded in and a partial continuation of traditional morality".