Introduction Heidegger Companion

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Introduction

The Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger provides succinct and lucid essays introducing the

thinking of Martin Heidegger (September 26, 1889 May 26, 1976), one of the twentieth

century s most noteworthy, innovative, and controversial philosophers. Heidegger s ground-

breaking works have had a notable impact on twentieth and twenty-first century thought through

its extensive reception, appropriation, critique, and even polemical rejection and condemnation.

Heidegger s impact can be traced in the responses of philosophers as diverse as Adorno, Arendt,

Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Gadamer, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre, among others.In addition to Heidegger s formative role in intellectual movements such as

phenomenology, hermeneutics, existentialism, structuralism and post-structuralism,

deconstruction and post-modernism, Heidegger has had a transformative effect on diverse areas

of inquiry such as political theory and historiography, cultural studies and literary criticism,

architecture and art theory, theology and religious studies, gender theory and feminism, and

technology and environmental studies.

It is the ambition of this volume to offer a definitive reference guide to Heidegger s path

and thought by presenting fifty-eight original essays written for this volume by an international

group of leading Heidegger scholars. This collection provides a detailed, extensive and

comprehensive resource for introductory and more advanced audiences to explore and further

reflect on Heideggers thought, key writings, themes and topics, and reception and influence.


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I.

Heidegger was born on September 26, 1889 in the small, provincial, conservative village

of Mekirch. The young Heidegger s initial intellectual development was shaped by the rhythms

and rituals of everyday rural Catholic life and gradually informed by Catholic theological

studies. After initially studying theology, Heidegger studied philosophy and worked with the

Neo-Kantian philosopher Heinrich Rickert and the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl. Heidegger

narrates later in life how his philosophical journey began with the question of being posed in

Brentano and Aristotle, a question to which he would repeatedly return. Despite his early

interests in Catholic scholasticism, his philosophical training was in the modern epistemologicaltraditions of German academic philosophy, and his habilitation work on the philosophy of Duns

Scotus (1915) reflects the intersection of both.

During the First World War, and increasingly as it came to an end, Heidegger was

inspired not only by Husserl s phenomenological method but by the existential and life-

philosophical crises and tendencies of his time. Unlike his teachers Rickert and Husserl, who

wrote polemically of these tendencies during this period, the early Heidegger attempted to make

them philosophical while at the same articulating philosophy out of the context of that life. In

contrast with prevalent popular or vulgar conceptions of life-philosophy, the early Heidegger

focused on the temporal event character of life (the es eriegnet of 1919 in GA 56/57, 73-75)

and increasingly the hermeneutical situation and historical intersection of meaning and life.

Under Diltheys influence, life is understood as fundamentally historical and interpretive rather

than as biological or intuitive life.

Heidegger perceived the philosophical significance of life-philosophy that had failed to

think the issue of life radically enough. This insight was unfolded in Heidegger s developing


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fall back into a subjectivist metaphysics. Heidegger recognized this possibility when, in Der

europische Nihilismus , evoking the interruption of the path opened by Sein und Zeit , he

admited: The reason for the disruption is that the attempt and the path it chose confront the

danger of unwillingly becoming merely another entrenchment of subjectivity (GA 6.2, 194/N

III, 141). In the same passage, Heidegger explained that far from any subjectivism, Being and

Time undertook an ontological questioning on the human being, interrogated solely in terms of

its being , that is to say, in terms of being itself: on the basis of the question concerning no longer

the truth of beings but the truth of being itself, an attempt is made to determine the essence of

the human being solely in terms of his relationship to Being ( aus seinem Bezug zum Sein ). Thatessence was described in a firmly delineated sense as Da-sein (GA 6.2, 194/N III, 141). The

term Dasein then became oftentimes hyphenated as Da-sein, in order to stress this sheer

relatedness to being.

In fact, the understanding of being is not a property of humans among others, but that

which defines the human being. This is why such understanding is not a "human" determination,

but a characteristic of being . The privilege of Dasein is not ontic or anthropological, but

ultimately ontological . "Understanding of being is itself a determination of being of Dasein

[Seinsverstndnis is selbst eine Seinsbestimmtheit des Daseins ]. The ontic distinction of Dasein

lies in the fact that it is ontological (SZ, 12/BT, 11). Humans are then made possible by the

understanding of being and not the inverse. Accordingly, the understanding of being is the

ground of the possibility of the essence of the human being (GA 31, 125/EHF, 87, modified). To

this extent, it is not posited by us, but is an event in which we find ourselves among all other

beings. With the existence of human beings there occurs an irruption into the totality of beings,

so that now the being in itself first becomes manifest (GA 3, 228/KPM, 160).


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Therein lies the turn, from a thinking centered on Dasein s openness to being to a

thinking that meditates the openness of being to Dasein: The thinking that proceeds from Being

and Time , in that it gives up the word meaning of being in favor of truth of being, henceforth

emphasizes the openness of being itself, rather than the openness of Dasein in regard to this

openness of being. This signifies the turn, in which thinking always more decisively turns to

being as being (FS, 41). This does mean the passage to another problematics, to another

question. "This turning is not a change of standpoint from Being and Time, but in it the thinking

that was sought first arrives at the location of that dimension out of which Being and Time is

experienced, that is to say, experienced from the fundamental experience of the oblivion ofBeing." (GA 9, 325/ BW, 231).

In this later stage of his work, Heidegger s thinking turned towards the truth of be-ing as

such (and no longer beingness), and inquired into the truth of be-ing out of be-ing itself . One

moves from a thematic of the understanding of being to that of a happening of being. This

opened the way to new directions in his work, which focused more on the various modes of

givenness of being in its happening, in its historical sendings and epochs. This led

Heidegger, in a Seynsgeschichtliche Denken or beyng-historical thinking , to stress the

historicality of being itself, understood as history of being, 1 engaging a project of overcoming

of metaphysics in dialogue with Nietzsche, and a return to the Greeks and the dawn of

philosophy, by way of a dialogue with Hlderlin and other poets. In that historical meditation on

the destiny of the West (and its confrontation with Asian philosophy, explored by Bret Davis in

this volume), Heidegger also was able to develop further the thematization of technology, of

nihilism and the Gestell (see Andre w Mitchells essay on The Bremen Lectures, which he

1 On this question, see Peter Warnels The History of Being, in Martin Heidegger. KeyConcepts. Edited by Bret W. davis (Dueham, UK: acumen, 2010), pp. 155-167).


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recently translated into English 2), of the end of philosophy and of a possible other beginning.

As Richard Polt reminds us, in contrast with the first beginning of Western thought , which

asks: what are beings? , the other beginning would ask: How does beyng occur essentially?

[Wie west das Seyn? ] (GA 65, 75, 7/CP2, 60, 8). . The thinking of being, from the Dasein-

centered analyses of Being and Time to the happening of being as such also led Heidegger to a

further reflection on the very event of givenness of being, or Ereignis . This reflection

( Besinnung ) on the event ( Ereignis ) of being ( Sein) that emerged in the 1930s, as well as his

support of National Socialism and its disastrous consequences, informs his later lectures and

writings on topics that encompass architecture and art, animals and humanism, the body and psychology, language and listening, letting releasement ( Gelassenheit ) and the thing, the poetic

word and technology, space and sense of place, among others.

In Heidegger s later work, the emphasis shifts from a questioning of being to one that

gestures towards the dimension from which being is given, from the event of givenness of being,

or Ereignis . That focus on the es gibt of being led Heidegger to rethink the meaning of being

as letting (see FS, 59). Beginning from a reflection on the sense of Ereignis as event of the

givenness of presence, Heidegger states that it is a matter hereof understanding that the

deepest meaning of being is letting [Lassen]" (FS, 59). Being is not the horizon for the

encountering of beings, nor the "there is" of beings, and not simply time itself. Rather, being

means now: Letting the being be (Das seiende sein-lassen). This letting is not a cause, for

causality still draws from the logic of beings and their "sufficient" grounding. It is also not a

"doing," which draws from the philosophy of an acting subject. Letting is to be thought instead

from "giving". The giving here in question should not refer primarily to a present being, or even

2 Martin Heidgger. The Bremen Lectures , trans. Andrew J. Mitchell (Bloomington, IN: IndianaU. Press, 2012).


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to the presence of beings. The "giving" should be separated from presence itself, for the issue

instead is to give thought to the "es gibt," to giving, from an interpretation of the "letting itself."

The "es gibt" is then the gift of a giving as such, a giving which withdraws in the very movement

of its event: it lets being (Es lt Sein). With this last sense, one is engaging the question of

Ereignis

Heidegger makes the important suggestion that being is to be thought from Ereignis, that

in fact "Being is appropriated through the appropriative event [Sein ist durch das Ereignis

ereignet] (FS, 60, modified ). A few lines further, we read: "The appropriatove event

appropriates being [das Ereignis ereignet das Sein]." One of the most important contributions ofthese final seminars (1966, 1968, 1969, 1973) is the way in which Heidegger distinguishes

between Ereignis and being, showing how Ereignis exceeds being and its economy. One should

not think Ereignis with the help of the concepts of being or of the history of being, we are told.

Ereignis is said to exceed the ontological horizon, as it exceeds the Greek "sending" in the

history of being. It then also appears that Heidegger's thought as such is not contained within the

horizon of ontology, nor of the thought of being; he in fact explains that his thinking of the

ontological difference especially in the period from 1927 to 1936, which is taken to be the crux

of this work was a "necessary impasse" (Holzweg) (FS, 61). Further, there is no destinal epoch

of Ereignis. Ereignis is not an epoch of being, and nor is it the end of the history of being, in the

sense in which the history of being would have "reached its end." Rather, the history of being is

able to appear as history of being from Ereignis. In fact, the historical sendings of being are to be

thought from Ereignis. "Sending is from the appropriative event [Das Schicken ist aus dem

Ereignen]" (FS, 61). Heideggers own summations of his path o f thought takes us from the early

focus upon the meaning of being all the way to his late notion of a topology of being and


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"tautological thinking". It is here, finally that Heidegger names his final thinking as a

phenomenology of the inapparent (FS, 80).

.

II.

Part 1. Life and Contexts

This volume is composed of 5 sections, including an extensive list of entries on

Heideggers life and contexts (7 essays), his sources, influences and encounters (13 essays), his

key writings (10 essays), themes and topics (15 essays), and his impact on philosophicalmovements and major contemporary continental thinkers, in Reception and Influence (13

essays). The seven essays in the first section, Life and Contexts , examine Heidegger s thought in

in the context of his life, the trajectory of his work, and his career as a whole, including his

involvement with National-Socialism. As Theodore Kisiel reminds us in Heidegger and the

Question of Biography, Heidegger was famously skeptical of biographies when it comes to the

work of thought. He famously declared in an early lecture course, when introducing Aristotle,

As for the personality of a philosopher, our only interest is that he was born at a certain time,

that he worked, and that he died. The character of the philosopher, and issues of that sort, will

not be addressed here (GA18, 5/BCAR, 4). However, what is relevant is the history, trajectory,

and in a sense the biography of the thinking itself, in other words, the story and history of

Heidegger s philosophical development within his particular historical and hermeneutical

context, which is the task of the first part.

The section is structured according to the defining periods of Heidegger s intellectual life,

beginning with Theodore Kisiel, who reworks the very notion of biography in terms of


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Heidegger s view on the hermeneutic character of life in its facticity, that is, the fact that life

interprets itself, explicates itself, and articulates itself, i.e., that it has a hermeneutic structure. In

turn, the work of sense refers ultimately to life in its facticity: The very idea of facticity implies

that only authentic and proper [eigentliche ] facticity understood in the literal sense of the

word: one s own [eigene ] facticity that is, the facticity of one s own time and generation, is the

genuine object of research (GA 62, 366/BH, 167). In this sense, thinking leads us back to life

to bio-graphy, understood as the concrete and hermeneutic existing of human Dasein.

Dermot Moran discusses Heideggers writings from 1912 to 1927, concentrating on the

Freiburg and Marburg lecture courses to Being and Time . Claiming that Heidegger sdevelopment was not as monolithic as presented by Heidegger retrospectively, Moran unmasks

a number of myths concerning that period, myths presumably entertained by Heidegger himself

(for instance, Moran stresses that the question of being was not central in these early writings,

and that Heidegger was instead occupied with factical life and the nature of philosophy, as well

as noting that Heidegger was in fact never a student of Husserl). Moran shows that in addition to

a critique of the primacy of theoretical knowledge-- the primacy of the theoretical ( Primat des

Theoretischen , GA 56/57, 87/TDP, 73), the analysis of such factical life led Heidegger to

underhand it as a hermeneutic notion including a world and a self. In such broadening,

Heidegger is envisaging that phenomenology must incorporate a new and expanded kind of

intuition hermeneutic intuition (die hermeneutische Intuition , GA 56/57, 117/TDP, 98).

Moran also identifies Heidegger s writings on a phenomenology of religious life as a prefiguring

of the themes of his existential analytic. Indeed, the very notion of a phenomenological

destruction ( Destruktion ) is shown to originate in the early project of a destruction of the

metaphysical edifice encrusted on religious experience. Following the Marburg years with its


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interpretive works on Aristotle and Kant, among others, the road is paved for the appearance in

1927 of Heidegger s magnum opus, Being and Time .

The essay by Thomas Sheehan focuses on the scope and significance of the turn ( die

Kehre ) in Heidegger s work. Beginning with the claim that Heidegger s main topic was not

being , but initially meaning or significance understood as the significance to us of whatever

we meet in the world, Sheehan points out that even significance was not Heidegger s main

concern. Rather, Heidegger s ultimate purpose was to move beyond such meaningfulness to

the X that makes it possible . Sheehan s contention is that the turn includes at least three

distinct but interrelated sense: the first, and primary, sense of the turn refers to what Heideggercalls the reciprocity (Gegenschwung ) between human existence ( Dasein ) and the clearing, which

Sheehan captures thus: Without human being, there is no clearing, and without the clearing,

there is no human being. The second sense of the turn, usually taken mistakenly, according to

Sheehan -- by Heideggerians as its proper signification, is the shift that occurs from the 1930 s,

from the earlier question on meaningfulness to the question of the provenance of such

meaningfulness. The third sense of the turn is the conversion, or transformation, of the self-

understanding of human Dasein, known in the Heideggerian lexicon as resolve

( Entschlossenheit ) and releasement (Gelassenheit).

Two more essays from leading Heidegger scholars Robert Bernasconi and Richard Polt are

devoted to Heidegger in the thirties. Polt investigates the problematic of Heidegger s thinking of

the people and the question who are we? in the thirties. The thirties are marked, according to

Polt, by Heidegger s attempt to leap actively into a singular, transformative event that would

bring Germany into its own. In this process, the question who are we? takes on a central role,

and can be taken as a guiding thread to understand Heidegger s thought during these years. Polt


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insists on the fact that Heidegger s orientation towards the question of the people includes a

radical critique of biologism. What matters ultimately is how our own being is put into question

and how, Our own proper Being is grounded in our belonging to the truth of Being itself (GA

65, 51/CP2, 42). This implies that the question of who we are remains as a question , the

question of human uncanniness. As Heidegger writes in Introduction to Metaphysics, The

determination of the essence of the human being is never an answer, but is essentially a

question (GA 40, 107/IM, 149).

Robert Bernasconi examines Heidegger s relation to Nietzsche and his troubled

involvement with National-Socialism. He contends that Heidegger s metaphysical concern wasuppermost in his treatment of Nietzsche s relation to Darwinism and biologism and that when

it came to readings of Nietzsche, Heidegger s resistance was directed primarily against those

among the Nazis whom he suspected of promoting both the Darwinian struggle for existence and

a biologistic conception of race. At the same time, Bernasconi shows how the distinction

between the biological and the metaphysical, as well as the distinction between the political and

the metaphysical, was proving more fluid than Heidegger had at first suspected. With respect

to Nietzsche in this history, Bernasconi states that Heidegger initially defended Nietzsche against

the charge of biologism only subsequently to locate him within the history of Western

metaphysics . However, in this account of Western metaphysics as destiny, Heidegger deprived

himself philosophically of a basis for a moral condemnation of National Socialism.

Franoise Dastur engages Heidegger s later thought and work. She considers Heidegger s

thought from the Bremen Lectures after the war to the late seminars of The Thor in France in the

late sixties and early seventies by way of his various essays through the fifties and sixties on art,

technology, or psychotherapy. Her essay elaborates on the theme of the end of philosophy that


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emerged in Heidegger s latest writings, and in particular in his 1964 lecture on The End of

Philosophy and the Task of Thinking.

In the last essay of this first section, Alfred Denker explores an oft-neglected aspect of

scholarship on Heidegger, his correspondence, which offers fascinating insights into Heidegger s

private thoughts, his relation to his contemporaries, and his own work. Giving an overview of

Heidegger s correspondence, which comprises an estimated 10.000 letters, Denker shows the

extent of Heidegger correspondence: with philosophers (Heinrich Rickert, Edmund Husserl, Karl

Jaspers, Karl Lwith, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, Max Scheler, Jean-

Paul Sartre, Ernst Tugendhat); scholars in the humanities (Kurt Bauch, Beda Allemann, EmilStaiger); scientists (Werner Heisenberg, Carl-Friedrich von Weizscker); psychiatrists (Medard

Boss, Ludwig Binswanger); theologians (Conrad Grber, Karl Rahner, Johannes Baptist Lotz);

authors and poets (Ren Char, Paul Celan, Ernst and Friedrich-Georg Jnger), and artists (such

as Eduardo Chillida, Bernhard Heiliger, Georges Braque, Otto Dix, or Hans Kock). Heidegger s

largest correspondence was with his wife Elfride (over 1100 letters). Because these letters

provide many clarifications by Heidegger on his own thinking, they are to be taken as genuine

additions to his work.

Part II. Sources, Influences, and Encounters

The second section investigates Heidegger s sources, influences and encounters in

thirteen entries. Heidegger undsrtood his own work as a dialogue with the tradition. He

famously declared, in a response to a question about so-called Heideggerian philosophy :

There is no Heideggerian philosophy; and even if it existed, I would not be interested in that

philosophy... Rather, he characterized his thought as being engaged in a dialogue with the


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tradition. 3 Heidegger has always insisted on the historicity of the question of being, and this

historical character of the question of being would be further radicalized in his later thinking of

the history of being and its sendings, and Heidegger s thought has been formed through

rigorous readings and bold interpretations of the corpus of western philosophy. This section

explores such relation to our philosophical tradition. Essays in this section examine Heidegger s

reading and responses to Greek and medieval philosophy (Sean Kirkland, Holger Zaborowski),

modern philosophy and Kant (Frank Schalow), Hegel, Schelling and German Idealism (Peter

Trawny), Nietzsche (Ulrich Haase), Husserl (Leslie MacAvoy), and his encounters and

confrontations with philosophical movements such as neo-Kantianism and Cassirer (PeterGordon), hermeneutics and logical positivism (Eric Nelson) as well as his early students such as

Arendt (Peg Birmingham) and Marcuse (Andrew Feenberg).

Sean Kirkland shows the necessity for Heidegger and for contemporary thought to

engage with Greek philosophy. In fact, Heidegger s attempt to reopen the question of being is in

direct dialogue with the ancients, as the opening paragraphs of Being and Time testify. The

entire project of Being and Time can be said to unfold explicitly within a space opened up and

delineated by ancient Greek thought. Holger Zaborowski explores the often-neglected relation

of Heidegger to medieval philosophy in the literature. Heidegger s relation to medieval thought

and the scholastic tradition is closely tied up with his relation to Christianity, and to that extent

was determinative of Heidegger s early work. Through these early works, Heidegger made a

considerable move towards key insights of his later hermeneutics of facticity, of his

phenomenology of Dasein, and also of his being-historical thinking. In her essay, Heidegger

and Descartes, Emilia Angelova contrasts Heidegger s early lecture courses with the later

3 In a session from August 31 st 1955 in Cerisy, cited in Dominique Janicaud. Heidegger in France , Volume 1 (Paris, Albin Michel, 2001), p. 154. Hereafter HF.


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period. Whereas in the early period, the focus was on the ambiguity of Descartes problematic,

the later writings (in particular in the courses on Nietzsche, What is a Thing? , The Age of the

World Picture , and the final seminars) show a much more pronounced critical stance with

respect to Descartes subjectivism. Angelova retraces that trajectory and reflects on its

significance.

Reflecting on how Kant s destructive-retrieval of transcendental philosophy illuminates

the so-called impasse surrounding the unpublished, third division of Part I of Being and Time ,

Frank Schalow suggests that Heidegger s relation to Kant could shed light on the so-called

turn in his thinking. Two essays on Heidegger s relation to German Idealism, with its mainfigures, Hegel and Schelling (Peter Trawny) and Nietzsche (Ullrich Haase) follow, giving a

unique perspective on Heidegger s treatment of post-Kantian and 19 th Century philosophy, and

their role in his understanding of the history of being. Eric S. Nelson shows the importance of

Heidegger s relation to Dilthey, followed by an essay from Leslie MacAvoy on Husserl and

Heidegger. MacAvoy confronts their respective conception of phenomenology.

Peter E. Gordon returns to Heidegger s relation to Neo-Kantianism and considers the key

themes of Kantian and neo-Kantian philosophy that left their mark on Heidegger s early

thought . After Eric Nelsons chapter on Heidegger and Carnap discussing their conceptions of

nothingness, Peg Birmingham challenges the common understanding of the relation between

Heidegger and Arendt in terms of contrast (if not opposition) and shows their proximity with

respect to the notions of world and community. Emilia Angelova confronts Gadamer s

exposition of philosophical hermeneutics with Heidegger s project of fundamental ontology and

shows how Gadamer distanced himself from the later Heidegger. The last chapter of this section


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II, by Andrew Feenberg, engages Marcuse and Heidegger, discussing the various stages of

Marcuse s appraisal of Heidegger s thought, and confronts their conception of technology.

Part III. Key Writings

The third section offers ten essays bearing on Heidegger s key writings, following a

chronological order and highlighting the most influential writings: the early Lecture Courses

(Scott Campbell and Christopher Smith), Being and Time (Dennis Schmidt), The Origin of the

Work of Art (Gregory Schufreider), Introduction to Metaphysics (Gregory Fried), The

Contributions to Philosophy (Peter Trawny), the Hlderlin lectures (Will McNeill) , The Letter on Humanism ( Andrew Mitchell) , The Bremen Lectures (Franoise Dastur) and later essays and

seminars (Lee Braver). Scott Campbell approaches Heidegger s early writings in terms of three

main foci: the meaningfulness of life; religious experience; language and the Greeks. Christopher

Smith seeks to explore what he calls the early Heidegger s revolutionary rehabilitation of

rhetoric, which would show how Heidegger considered human existence to be fundamentally

rhetorical in a transformed sense.

Dennis Schmidt considers that unique text that is Being and Time , marking its irreducible

character with respect to the history in which it is otherwise situated. Schmidt remarks that, In

its efforts to set itself apart from philosophical traditions and languages, and to resist any easy

appropriation into well-established contexts, Being and Time quietly announces the radicality of

its own intentions. It is that extraordinary originality of the work that makes it a promise still to

come. While noting that there are about half a dozen versions of the The Origin of the Work of

Art, if not more if one takes into account the various transcripts of the lectures taken by students


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who attended them, Schufreider argues that Heidegger s aim in turning his attention to the work

of art in the 1930s is to provide a new model of philosophy.

Gregory Fried notes that Introduction to Metaphysics has been one of Martin Heidegger s

most widely read works, second perhaps only to Being and Time , and has been in any case one of

his more controversial work. Fried explains how Introduction to Metaphysics occupies a

transitional position in Heidegger s path, between the fundamental ontology and the analytic of

Dasein in Being and Time and the efforts in Contributions to Philosophy (1936-38), a volume

considered in another entry by Peter Trawny. Trawny insists on the style of such work,

referring to the will and the style of thinking (CP1, 15), as well as the style of inceptualthinking (CP1, 24) and the reservedness evoked by Heidegger. The experimental character

of Heidegger s scripturality is also stressed. William McNeill provides an account of

Heidegger s relation to and dialogue with Hlderlin, and explains the importance of Heidegger s

Hlderlin lectures and their place in his path of thinking. McNeill considers the first Hlderlin

Lecture Course, i.e., The Hymns Germania and The Rhine (1934-35), the Lectures on

Remembrance (1941-42), and the last Hlderlin Lecture Course: The Ister (1942).

Andrew J. Mitchell provides crucial context for the writing of the Letter on Humanism.

He argues and demonstrates that at the heart of the essay is a profound thinking of the

interrelation between the human, being, and language. This essay is followed by another text

from Andrew J. Mitchell, on the 1949 Bremen Lectures (a volume that he himself has recently

translated into English), lectures that he considers to be a third, decisive milestone along

Heidegger s path of thought, alongside the early Being and Time (1927), and the mid-period

Contributions to Philosophy (1936-38). In the last essay of this Part III, Lee Braver reflects on

what distinguishes what is known as the later Heidegger. In addition to the question of style,


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Lee Braver suggests that Heidegger has added some new motifs from his early works, such as

artworks and technology, for example, and what he calls things, which are very different from

objects.

Part IV. Themes and Topics

The fifteen essays of the fourth section focus on key notions and themes found in

Heidegger s work. They perform this task in different ways, some by clarifying key notions in

Heidegger s corpus: Dasein (Franois Raffoul), Ereignis (Daniela Vallega-Neu), the Fourfold

(Andrew Mitchell), technology (Hans Ruin), Truth (Dan Dahlstrom), the Nothing (GregorySchufreider) , birth and death (Anne O Byrne), Onto-theology (Iain Thomson), or by confronting

Heidegger s thought to the thematic of the body for instance (Kevin Aho).

Other essays engage Heidegger s relation to various disciplines or domains of theory or

practice: Heidegger and Science (Patricia Glazebrook), Heidegger and Art (Andrew Bowie),

Heidegger and Ethics (Franois Raffoul), Heidegger and Space (John Russon and Kristen

Jacobson), Heidegger, Religion and theology (Ben Vedder), and Heidegger and Language (John

McCumber). The essays in this section serve to illuminate Heidegger s thinking by presenting

Heidegger s key technical notions as well as his transformation of our understanding of a wide-

range of domains and thematics (language, science, art, technology, space, etc).

Part V. Reception and Influence

The fifth section includes thirteen essays that investigate the influence of Heidegger s

thought on various thinkers and contemporary philosophical movements. Heidegger has had a

major impact on contemporary philosophy. Just to mention the French example, one can list


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Levinas first commentaries on Heidegger s early works (Levinas was the first one to have

introduced Heidegger in France); Sartre s magisterial (mis)appropriation of the key moments and

vocabulary of Being and Time in Being and Nothingness ; the fame, after the war, of

existentialism and the celebrated Letter on Humanism addressed to Jean Beaufret, a key figure

in the French reception of Heidegger; Heidegger s visit in France in the mid-fifties at the Cerisy

meeting and his encounter with Lacan, his lecture at Aix-en-Provence in 1958; the seminars held

in the sixties in France, in Provence at the Thor, near the house of Ren Char, finally the

reappropriation of Heidegger s Destruktion in the thought of Jacques Derrida and deconstruction,

a work pursue further by Derrida s students Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe.4

A number of essays explore Heidegger s relation to these individual French thinkers,

whether Wayne Froman on Merleau-Ponty, Jill Stauffer on Emmanuel Levinas, Robert

Bernasconi on Jean-Paul Sartre, Franois Raffoul on Jacques Derrida, Leonard Lawlor and Janae

Sholtz on Gilles Deleuze, or also Leonard Lawlor on Foucault. These essays, through synthetic

analyses and in minute details, indeed shed a unique light on the way in which Heidegger has

had a major influence on 20th century French philosophy. Beyond the French case, other essays

focus on Adorno s relation to and Heidegger (Ian Macdonald), on the reception of Heidegger in

the Anglo-American philosophical world (Leslie MacAvoy), and on the oft-neglected reception

of Heidegger s work in Asian Philosophy (Bret Davis) and Latin American philosophy

(Alejandro Vallega). Other essays attempt to measure Heidegger s impact on philosophical

movements such as environmental philosophy (Patricia Glazebrook), on Heidegger and the

4 On that reception of Heideggers thought in France, in addition to Dominque Janicauds opusmagum, see French Interpretations of Heidegger , eds D. Pettigrew and F. Raffoul (Albany, NY:SUNY Press, 2008).


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question of gender, via a discussion of Sophocles Antigone and its retrieval in Hegel and

Heidegger (Tina Chanter), Heidegger and Post-Cartesian Psychoanalysis (Robert D. Stolorow).

In the time since Heidegger passed away on May 26, 1976, his thought and life have

continued to inspire philosophical reflection and argumentation as well as controversy and

polemic. Out hope is that this volume, with its 58 contributions from leading international

Heidegger scholars from the UK, the US, Germany and France offering the widest and detailed

scope of analysis, will serve as one of the most comprehensive guides available to approach and

explore Heidegger s work, a work still to be discovered as it never ceased to confront the

mystery and wonder of being.

Documents

Introduction Heidegger Companion