One of the most eminent Heidegger scholars of our time, Theodore Kisiel has found worldwide critical acclaim, his particular strength being to set Heidegger's ...

This book, ten years in the making, is the first factual and conceptual history of Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (1927), a key twentieth-century text whose background until now has been conspicuously absent. Through painstaking investigation of European archives and private correspondence, Theodore Kisiel provides an unbroken account of the philosopher's early development and progress toward his masterwork. Beginning with Heidegger's 1915 dissertation, Kisiel explores the philosopher's religious conversion during the bleak war years, the hermeneutic breakthrough in the war-emergency semester (...) of 1919, the evolution of attitudes toward his phenomenological mentor, Edmund Husserl, and the shifting orientations of the three drafts of Being and Time. Discussing Heidegger's little-known reading of Aristotle, as well as his last-minute turn to Kant and to existentialist terminology, Kisiel offers a wealth of narrative detail and documentary evidence that will be an invaluable factual resource for years to come. A major event for philosophers and Heidegger specialists, the publication of Kisiel's book allows us to jettison the stale view of Being and Time as a great book "frozen in time" and instead to appreciate the erratic starts, finite high points, and tentative conclusions of what remains a challenging philosophical "path.". (shrink)

Devoted to the rediscovery of Heidegger’s earliest thought leading up to his magnum opus of 1927, Being and Time.

The following overview of the present situation and recent trends in the philosophy of science in the USA brings together bibliographical and institutional evidence to document the last stages of the supersession of logical positivism, the emergence of the historical school , its widespread influence upon other fields as well as within philosophy of science, and finally some of the reactions to it, many of which envision their endeavors as mediations between the historical school and the older logical approaches As (...) well as recording pertinent institutional trends, the report provides a series of capsule summaries of representative work from the extant literature primarily from 1966 to the present. (shrink)

The following article was researched and written during the period of a summer grant from Northern Illinois University and a fall grant from Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung, both of which are gratefully acknowledged here. I also wish to express my appreciation to the students of Northwestern University who provided this issue for me.

The initial obstacle to the development of a hermeneutics of the natural sciences has been the inadequate translation, and thus misunderstanding, of the basic terms of Heidegger's ontological analysis ofthe protopractical human situation and its progressive technicization. Pragmatism's parallel analyses of the problem situation of scientists has promoted a more idiomatically English vocabulary. But 1) Gadamer's exclusion of domains and disciplines working with technical methods from his universal hermeneutics continues to be influential, this in spite of the genesis of his (...) project in Helmholtz's insights into the process of scientific discovery. 2) Markus thus depicts a distinctly different style of production, transmission, and reception of the technological texts of natural science. 3) Rouse's 1987 extension of pragmatic hermeneutics into the incipient politics of knowledge/power relations in laboratory science presents the usual frightening prospects connected with laboratory experimentation impacting on disciplinary social institutions. 4) Rouse's 1996 analysis of scientific practices in local narrative situations eschews the banner of hermeneutics and instead proposes to examine scientific-technological work by way of interdisciplinary ’ cultural studies, once the traditional loci of hermeneutic methodology. 5) A hermeneutic phenomenology of the natural sciences thus finds itself fundamentally challenged with respect to its rightful topics and roles in the analysis of increasingly technicized disciplines and domains. (shrink)

A revisionist movement in Anglo-Saxon philosophy of science seeking to modulate the positivistic stress on formalized systems and to consider science as ongoing research in finite historical context strikes resonances with hermeneutical phenomenology , whose ontology likewise shifts the locus of truth from verification to discovery. Fusion of the two traditions is utilized to illuminate hitherto relatively unexplored facets of the logic and psychology of scientific discovery, as well as its ontology, here developed from the intentional intertwining of man and (...) nature and finding its locus in the linguistic historicity of fundamental scientific concepts. (shrink)

Heidegger's Being and Time: Critical Essays provides a variety of recent studies of Heidegger's most important work. Twelve prominent scholars, representing diverse nationalities, generations, and interpretive approaches deal with general methodological and ontological questions, particular issues in Heidegger's text, and the relation between Being and Time and Heidegger's later thought. All of the essays presented in this volume were never before available in an English-language anthology. Two of the essays have never before been published in any language ; three of (...) the essays have never been published in English before , and two of the essays provide previews of works in progress by major scholars. (shrink)

This survey seeks to define the present situation and climate for translating Heidegger into English after the disastrous translation (1999) of the Beiträge, Heidegger’s second magnum opus after Sein und Zeit. The 12 translations that have appeared since then tend to handle Heidegger’s neologisms in less ludicrous ways and continue to find ways to bend the highly restrictive rules imposed on translations by Heidegger’s literary executor. There are still errors of omission and commission in the German originals that carry over (...) into the translations. A few of the English translators add to the errors of omission and commission but most tend to be competent and conscientious, producing excellent results. Yet even the best translators slack off in their production of the permitted glossaries, which are indispensable for demarcating Heidegger’s terminology in the time period involved and provide the reader a starting basis for an index, which is prohibited. (shrink)

This response defends the relevance and indeed the necessity of the “grassroots archival perspective” in exposing the errors of transcription, omission, dating, etc. in the “German originals”, recording the erratic history of the Heidegger-Gesamtausgabe and its largely posthumous editorial principles, and tracing the genealogy and development of Heidegger’s shifting conceptual constellations. Further suggestions are made toward improving the readability of the forthcomingnew English translation of the Beiträge. A thoroughgoing grammatology of be-ing is offered as a more adequate “alternative” to the (...) verbally superficial framework propounded by the Translators’ Foreword of the Contributions. (shrink)

The point of departure in the paper is the problem of Heidegger’s well known question of being. The author undertakes the inner analysis of the relationship that man has with his being and with being itself, the Sein-Da-sein relationship. The question of being understood as the question of the sense of being contains two main relations: the understanding relationship and the existential relation that establish, respectively, the context and direction of the question . Th e interplay of under-standing and ex-sistence (...) throws light on the other dimensions of Da-sein, it is its disclosiveness, properizing power and historicity. The author indicates the fruitfull consequences of Heidegger’s fundamental questionability of being in Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics and Derrida’s deconstruction of logocentrism. (shrink)

A view of Heidegger's divergence from the traditional philosophies of reason.