Force of Imagination
The Sense of the Elemental
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
Force of Imagination
The Sense of the Elemental
John Sallis
A bold and original investigation into how imagination shapes thought and feeling.
"This is a bold new direction for the author, one that he takes in an arresting and convincing manner. . . . a powerful, original approach to what others call 'ecology' but what Sallis shows to be a question of the status of the earth in philosophical thinking at this historical moment." -Edward S. Casey
In this major original work, John Sallis probes the very nature of imagination and reveals how the force of imagination extends into all spheres of human life. While drawing critically on the entire history of philosophy, Sallis's work takes up a vantage point determined by the contemporary deconstruction of the classical opposition between sensible and intelligible. Thus, in reinterrogating the nature of imagination, Force of Imagination carries out a radical turn to the sensible and to the elemental in nature. Liberated from subjectivity, imagination is shown to play a decisive role both in drawing together the moments of our experience of sensible things and in opening experience to the encompassing light, atmosphere, earth, and sky. Set within this elemental expanse, the human sense of time, of self, and of the other proves to be inextricably linked to imagination and to nature. By showing how imagination is formative for the very opening upon things and elements, this work points to the revealing power of poetic imagination and casts a new light on the nature of art.
John Sallis is Liberal Arts Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. His previous books include Being and Logos: Reading the Platonic Dialogues; Shades-Of Painting at the Limit; Stone; Chorology: On Beginning in Plato's Timaeus (all published by Indiana University Press), Crossings: Nietzsche and the Space of Tragedy and Double Truth.
Studies in Continental Thought-John Sallis, editor
Contents
Prolusions
On (Not Simply) Beginning
Remembrance
Duplicity of the Image
Spacing the Image
Tractive Imagination
The Elemental
Temporalities
Proprieties
Poetic Imagination
Ponderings VII–XI
Black Notebooks, 1938–1939
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
Through these broad and sprawling notebooks, Heidegger offers fascinating opinions on Holderlin, Nietzsche, Wagner, Wittgenstein, Pascal, and many others. The importance of the Black Notebooks transcends Heidegger's relationship with National Socialism. These personal notebooks contain reflections on technology, art, Christianity, the history of philosophy, and Heidegger's attempt to move beyond that history into another beginning.
The Origin of the Logic of Symbolic Mathematics
Edmund Husserl and Jacob Klein
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
Burt C. Hopkins presents the first in-depth study of the work of Edmund Husserl and Jacob Klein on the philosophical foundations of the logic of modern symbolic mathematics. Accounts of the philosophical origins of formalized concepts-especially mathematical concepts and the process of mathematical abstraction that generates them-have been paramount to the development of phenomenology. Both Husserl and Klein independently concluded that it is impossible to separate the historical origin of the thought that generates the basic concepts of mathematics from their philosophical meanings. Hopkins explores how Husserl and Klein arrived at their conclusion and its philosophical implications for the modern project of formalizing all knowledge.
The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics
World, Finitude, Solitude
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
First published in German in 1938 as volume 29/30 of Heidegger's collected works, “The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics” includes an extended treatment of the history of metaphysics and an elaboration of a philosophy of life and nature. Heidegger's concepts of organism, animal behavior, and environment are uniquely developed and defined with intensity.
This work, the text of Martin Heidegger's lecture course of 1929/30, is crucial for an understanding of Heidegger's transition from the major work of his early years, “Being and Time”, to his later preoccupations with language, truth, and history. First published in German in 1983 as volume 29/30 of Heidegger's collected works, “The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics” includes an extended treatment of the history of metaphysics and an elaboration of a philosophy of life and nature. Heidegger's concepts of organism, animal behavior, and environment are uniquely developed and defined with intensity.
Gadamer
A Philosophical Portrait
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002), one of the towering figures of contemporary Continental philosophy, is best known for Truth and Method, where he elaborated the concept of "philosophical hermeneutics," a programmatic way to get to what we do when we engage in interpretation. Donatella Di Cesare highlights the central place of Greek philosophy, particularly Plato, in Gadamer's work, brings out differences between his thought and that of Heidegger, and connects him with discussions and debates in pragmatism. This is a sensitive and thoroughly readable philosophical portrait of one of the 20th century's most powerful thinkers.
On Imposture
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Literary Lies, and Political Fiction
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
Imposture is an abuse of power. It is the act of lying for one's own benefit, of disguising the truth in order to mislead. For Jean-Jacques Rousseau, however, imposture is first and foremost power itself. In On Imposture, French philosopher Serge Margel explores imposture within Rousseau's Discourses, Confessions, and Emile.
For Rousseau, taking power, using it, or abusing it are ultimately one and the same act. Once there's power, and someone grants themselves the means, the right, and the authority to force another's beliefs or actions, there is imposture. According to Rousseau, imposture can be found through human history, society, and culture.
Using a deconstructionist methodin the classic manner of Derrida, On Imposture explores Rousseau's thought concerning imposture and offers a unique analysis of its implications for politics, civil society, literature, and existentialist thought.
Self-Understanding and Lifeworld
Basic Traits of a Phenomenological Hermeneutics
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
What are the foundations of human self-understanding and the value of responsible philosophical questioning? Focusing on Heidegger's early work on facticity, historicity, and the phenomenological hermeneutics of factical-historical life, Hans-Helmuth Gander develops an idea of understanding that reflects our connection with the world and other, and thus invites deep consideration of phenomenology, hermeneutics, and deconstruction. He draws usefully on Husserl's phenomenology and provides grounds for exchange with Descartes, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Foucault. On the way to developing a contemporary hermeneutical philosophy, Gander clarifies the human relation to self in and through conversation with Heidegger's early hermeneutics. Questions about reading and writing then follow as these are the very actions that structure human self-understanding and world understanding.
The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
Articulating the author's journeys and personal experiences in the idiom of contemporary continental thought, Alphonso Lingis launches a devastating critique, pointing up the myopia of Western rationalism. Here Lingis raises issues of undeniable urgency.
Daimon Life
Heidegger and Life-Philosophy
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
Disclosure of Martin Heidegger's complicity with the National Socialist regime in 1933-34 has provoked virulent debate about the relationship between his politics and his philosophy. Did Heidegger's philosophy exhibit a kind of organicism readily transformed into ideological "blood and soil"? Or, rather, did his support of the Nazis betray a fundamental lack of loyalty to living things? David Farrell Krell traces Heidegger's political authoritarianism to his failure to develop a constructive "life-philosophy"-his phobic reactions to other forms of being. Krell details Heidegger's opposition to Lebensphilosophie as expressed in Being and Time, in an important but little-known lecture course on theoretical biology given in 1929-30 called "The Basic Concepts of Metaphysics," and in a recently published key text, Contributions to Philosophy, written in 1936—38. Although Heidegger's attempt to think through the problems of life, sexual reproduction, behavior, environment, and the ecosystem ultimately failed, Krell contends that his methods of thinking nonetheless pose important tasks for our own thought. Drawing on and away from Heidegger, Krell expands on the topics of life, death, sexuality, and spirit as these are treated by Freud, Nietzsche, Derrida, and Irigaray. Daimon Life addresses issues central to contemporary philosophies of politics, gender, ecology, and theoretical biology.
Ponderings II–VI
Black Notebooks, 1931–1938
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
Ponderings II–VI begins the much-anticipated English translation of Martin Heidegger's "Black Notebooks." In a series of small notebooks with black covers, Heidegger confided sundry personal observations and ideas over the course of 40 years. The five notebooks in this volume were written between 1931 and 1938 and thus chronicle Heidegger's year as Rector of the University of Freiburg during the Nazi era. Published in German as volume 94 of the Complete Works, these challenging and fascinating journal entries shed light on Heidegger's philosophical development regarding his central question of what it means to be, but also on his relation to National Socialism and the revolutionary atmosphere of the 1930s in Germany. Readers previously familiar only with excerpts taken out of context may now determine for themselves whether the controversy and censure the "Black Notebooks" have received are deserved or not. This faithful translation by Richard Rojcewicz opens the texts in a way that captures their philosophical and political content while disentangling Heidegger's notoriously difficult language.
Plato's Cratylus
The Comedy of Language
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
Plato's dialogue Cratylus focuses on being and human dependence on words, or the essential truths about the human condition. Arguing that comedy is an essential part of Plato's concept of language, S. Montgomery Ewegen asserts that understanding the comedic is key to an understanding of Plato's deeper philosophical intentions. Ewegen shows how Plato's view of language is bound to comedy through words and how, for Plato, philosophy has much in common with playfulness and the ridiculous. By tying words, language, and our often uneasy relationship with them to comedy, Ewegen frames a new reading of this notable Platonic dialogue.
Language After Heidegger
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
Working from newly available texts in Heidegger's Complete Works, Krzysztof Ziarek presents Heidegger at his most radical and demonstrates how the thinker's daring use of language is an integral part of his philosophical expression. Ziarek emphasizes the liberating potential of language as an event that discloses being and amplifies Heidegger's call for a transformative approach to poetry, power, and ultimately, philosophy.
Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
Since its original publication in 1929, Martin Heidegger's provocative book on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason has attracted much attention both as an important contribution to twentieth-century Kant scholarship and as a pivotal work in Heidegger's own development after Being and Time. This fifth, enlarged edition includes marginal notations made by Heidegger in his personal copy of the book and four new appendices-Heidegger's post-publication notes on the book, his review of Ernst Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Heidegger's response to reviews by Rudolf Odebrecht and Cassirer, and an essay "On the History of the Philosophical Chair since 1866." The work is significant not only for its illuminating assessment of Kant's thought but also for its elaboration of themes first broached in Being and Time, especially the problem of how Heidegger proposed to enact his destruction of the metaphysical tradition and the role that his reading of Kant would play therein.
Duns Scotus's Doctrine of Categories and Meaning
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
Duns Scotus's Doctrine of Categories and Meaning is a key text for the origins of Martin Heidegger's concept of "facticity." Originally submitted as a postdoctoral thesis in 1915, it focuses on the 13th-century philosopher-theologian John Duns Scotus.
Heidegger first analyzes Scotus's doctrine of categories, then offers a meticulous explanation of the Grammatica Speculativa, a work of medieval grammar now known to be authored by the Modist grammarian Thomas of Erfurt. Taken together, these investigations represent an early foray into Heidegger's lifelong philosophical concerns, "the question of being in the guise of the problem of categories and the question of language in the guise of the doctrine of meaning."
This new and unique translation of one of Heidegger's earliest works offers an important look at his early thinking before the question of being became his central concern and will appeal to readers exploring Heidegger's philosophical development, medieval philosophy, phenomenological interpretations of the history of philosophy, and the philosophy of language.
Politics, Money, and Persuasion
Democracy and Opinion in Plato's Republic
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
In Politics, Money, and Persuasion, distinguished philosopher John Russon offers a new framework for interpreting Plato's The Republic. For Russon, Plato's work is about the distinctive nature of what it is to be a human being and, correspondingly, what is distinctive about the nature of human society. Russon focuses on the realities of our everyday experience to come to profoundly insightful assessments of our human realities: the nature of the city, the nature of knowledge, and the nature of human psychology.
Russon's argument concentrates on the ambivalence of logos, which includes reflections on politics and philosophy and their place in human life, how humans have shaped the environment, our interactions with money, the economy, and the pursuit of the good in social and political systems.
Politics, Money, and Persuasion offers a deeply personal but also practical kind of philosophical reading of Plato's classic text. It emphasizes the tight connection between the life of city and the life of the soul, demonstrating both the crucial role that human cognitive excellence and psychological health play in political and social life.
The World on Edge
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
From one of continental philosophy's most distinctive voices comes a creative contribution to spatial studies, environmental philosophy, and phenomenology. Edward S. Casey identifies how important edges are to us, not only in terms of how we perceive our world, but in our cognitive, artistic, and sociopolitical attentions to it. We live in a world that is constantly on edge, yet edges as such are rarely explored. Casey systematically describes the major and minor edges that configure the human and other-than-human realms, including our everyday experience. He also explores edges in high- stakes situations, such as those that emerge in natural disasters, moments of political and economic upheaval, and encroaching climate change. Casey's work enables a more lucid understanding of the edge-world that is a necessary part of living in a shared global environment.
Nietzsche and Phenomenology
Power, Life, Subjectivity
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
What are the challenges that Nietzsche's philosophy poses for contemporary phenomenology? Elodie Boublil, Christine Daigle, and an international group of scholars take Nietzsche in new directions and shed light on the sources of phenomenological method in Nietzsche, echoes and influences of Nietzsche within modern phenomenology, and connections between Nietzsche, phenomenology, and ethics. Nietzsche and Phenomenology offers a historical and systematic reconsideration of the scope of Nietzsche's thought.
Plato's Laws
Force and Truth in Politics
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
Readers of Plato have often neglected the Laws because of its length and density. In this set of interpretive essays, notable scholars of the Laws from the fields of classics, history, philosophy, and political science offer a collective close reading of the dialogue "book by book" and reflect on the work as a whole. In their introduction, editors Gregory Recco and Eric Sanday explore the connections among the essays and the dramatic and productive exchanges between the contributors. This volume fills a major gap in studies on Plato's dialogues by addressing the cultural and historical context of the Laws and highlighting their importance to contemporary scholarship.
Hannah Arendt and Human Rights
The Predicament of Common Responsibility
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
Hannah Arendt's most important contribution to political thought may be her well-known and often-cited notion of the "right to have rights." In this incisive and wide-ranging book, Peg Birmingham explores the theoretical and social foundations of Arendt's philosophy on human rights. Devoting special consideration to questions and issues surrounding Arendt's ideas of common humanity, human responsibility, and natality, Birmingham formulates a more complex view of how these basic concepts support Arendt's theory of human rights. Birmingham considers Arendt's key philosophical works along with her literary writings, especially those on Walter Benjamin and Franz Kafka, to reveal the extent of Arendt's commitment to humanity even as violence, horror, and pessimism overtook Europe during World War II and its aftermath. This current and lively book makes a significant contribution to philosophy, political science, and European intellectual history.
Heidegger in France
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
Dominique Janicaud claimed that every French intellectual movement-from existentialism to psychoanalysis-was influenced by Martin Heidegger. This translation of Janicaud's landmark work, Heidegger en France, details Heidegger's reception in philosophy and other humanistic and social science disciplines. Interviews with key French thinkers such as Françoise Dastur, Jacques Derrida, Éliane Escoubas, Jean Greisch, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Marion, and Jean-Luc Nancy are included and provide further reflection on Heidegger's relationship to French philosophy. An intellectual undertaking of authoritative scope, this work furnishes a thorough history of the French reception of Heidegger's thought.
Hearing, Sound, and the Auditory in Ancient Greece
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
Hearing, Sound, and the Auditory in Ancient Greece represents the first wide-ranging philosophical study of the role of sound and hearing in the ancient Greek world. Because our modern western culture is a particularly visual one, we can overlook the significance of the auditory which was so central to the Greeks. The fifteen chapters of this edited volume explore "hearing" as being philosophically significant across numerous texts and figures in ancient Greek philosophy.
Through close analysis of the philosophy of such figures as Homer, Heraclitus, Pythagoreans, Sophocles, Empedocles, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Hearing, Sound, and Auditory in Ancient Greece presents new and unique research from philosophers and classicists that aims to redirect us to the ways in which sound, hearing, listening, voice, and even silence shaped and reflected the worldview of ancient Greece.
Hölderlin's Hymn "Remembrance"
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
Martin Heidegger's 1941–1942 lecture course on Friedrich Hölderlin's hymn, "Remembrance," delivered immediately following his confrontation with Nietzsche, lays out a detailed plan for the interpretation of Hölderlin's poetry in which remembrance is a central concern. With its emphasis on the "free use of the national" and the "holy of the fatherland," the course marks an important progression in Heidegger's political thought. In addition to its startlingly innovative analyses of greeting, the festive, and the dream, the text provides Heidegger's fullest elaboration of the structure of commemorative thinking in relationship to time and the possibility of an "other beginning." This English translation by William McNeill and Julia Ireland completes the series of Heidegger's major lecture courses on Hölderlin.
Play as Symbol of the World
And Other Writings
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
Eugen Fink is considered one of the clearest interpreters of phenomenology and was the preferred conversational partner of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. In Play as Symbol of the World, Fink offers an original phenomenology of play as he attempts to understand the world through the experience of play. He affirms the philosophical significance of play, why it is more than idle amusement, and reflects on the movement from "child's play" to "cosmic play." Well-known for its nontechnical, literary style, this skillful translation by Ian Alexander Moore and Christopher Turner invites engagement with Fink's philosophy of play and related writings on sports, festivals, and ancient cult practices.
Derrida and Our Animal Others
Derrida's Final Seminar, "The Beast and the Sovereign"
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
Jacques Derrida's final seminars were devoted to animal life and political sovereignty-the connection being that animals slavishly adhere to the law while kings and gods tower above it and that this relationship reveals much about humanity in the West. David Farrell Krell offers a detailed account of these seminars, placing them in the context of Derrida's late work and his critique of Heidegger. Krell focuses his discussion on questions such as death, language, and animality. He concludes that Heidegger and Derrida share a commitment to finding new ways of speaking and thinking about human and animal life.
Sites of Exposure
Art, Politics, and the Nature of Experience
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
John Russon draws from a broad range of art and literature to show how philosophy speaks to the most basic and important questions in our everyday lives. In Sites of Exposure, Russon grapples with how personal experiences such as growing up and confronting death combine with broader issues such as political oppression, economic exploitation, and the destruction of the natural environment to make life meaningful. His is cutting-edge philosophical work, illuminated by original and rigorous thinking that relies on cross-cultural communication and engagement with the richness of human cultural history. These probing interpretations of the nature of phenomenology, the philosophy of art, history, and politics, are appropriate for students and scholars of philosophy at all levels.
Ponderings XII–XV
Black Notebooks, 1939–1941
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
Ponderings XII–XV is third in a series of four "Black Notebooks" which Martin Heidegger composed in the early years of World War II. As always with Heidegger, the thoughts expressed here are not superficial reflections on current events, but instead penetrate deeply into them in order to contemplate their historical importance. Throughout his ponderings, Heidegger meditates on the call for an antidote to the rampant technological attitude which views all things with a dismissive consumer mentality. Although this volume caused quite a scandal when originally published in German due to references to World-Judaism, English readers with access to the full text can now judge for themselves what Heidegger means in his use of that term. In style, this notebook is less aphoristic and more sustained than the previous ones, but remains probing, challenging, and fascinating.
Remembering
A Phenomenological Study
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
Remembering
A Phenomenological Study
Second Edition
Edward S. Casey
A pioneering investigation of the multiple ways of remembering and the difference that memory makes in our daily lives.
A Choice Outstanding Academic Book
"An excellent book that provides an in-depth phenomenological and philosophical study of memory." -Choice
". . . a stunning revelation of the pervasiveness of memory in our lives." -Contemporary Psychology
"[Remembering] presents a study of remembering that is fondly attentive to its rich diversity, its intricacy of structure and detail, and its wide-ranging efficacy in our everyday, life-world experience. . . . genuinely pioneering, it ranges far beyond what established traditions in philosophy and psychology have generally taken the functions and especially the limits of memory to be." -The Humanistic Psychologist
Edward S. Casey provides a thorough description of the varieties of human memory, including recognizing and reminding, reminiscing and commemorating, body memory and place memory. The preface to the new edition extends the scope of the original text to include issues of collective memory, forgetting, and traumatic memory, and aligns this book with Casey's newest work on place and space. This ambitious study demonstrates that nothing in our lives is unaffected by remembering.
Studies in Continental Thought-John Sallis, general editor
Contents
Preface to the Second Edition
Introduction Remembering Forgotten: The Amnesia of Anamnesis
Part One: Keeping Memory in Mind
First Forays
Eidetic Features
Remembering as Intentional: Act Phase
Remembering as Intentional: Object Phase
Part Two: Mnemonic Modes
Prologue
Reminding
Reminiscing
Recognizing
Coda
Part Three: Pursuing Memory beyond Mind
Prologue
Body Memory
Place Memory
Commemoration
Coda
Part Four: Remembering Re-membered
The Thick Autonomy of Memory
Freedom in Remembering
On the Deities of Samothrace
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
In 1815, F. W. J. Schelling presented a lecture titled "On the Deities of Samothrace" to the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. The lecture offered a startlingly original reading of the ancient Greek mystery religion on the island of Samothrace. It would be the last book Schelling himself published, and it is the key to his influential Philosophy of Mythology.
Now, for the first time in English, this critical edition contains the entirety of Schelling's original text, including the lecture itself, Schelling's afterword, and all his extensive philosophical and philological endnotes. It also offers copious explanatory notes, photographs and maps of the site, and three interpretive essays by the editors and translators elucidating Schelling's text for contemporary readers.
On the Deities of Samothrace is one of Schelling's most original and exciting works. It is a signature text in Schelling's thought and in the philosophy of religion generally.
The Life of Understanding
A Contemporary Hermeneutics
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
In Gadamer's hermeneutics, interpretation is inseparable from the broader concern of making one's way in life. In this book, James Risser builds on this insight about the juxtaposition of human living and the act of understanding by tracing hermeneutics back to the basic experience of philosophy as defined by Plato. For Risser, Plato provides resources for new directions in hermeneutics and new possibilities for "the life of understanding" and "the understanding of life." Risser places Gadamer in dialogue with Plato, with the issue of memory as a conceptual focus. He develops themes pertaining to hermeneutics such as retrieval as a matter of convalescence, exile as a venture into the foreign, formation with respect to oneself and to life with others, the experience of language in hermeneutics, and the relationship between speaking and writing.
The Lives of Things
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
In The Lives of Things, Charles E. Scott reconsiders our relationships with ordinary, everyday things and our capacity to engage them in their particularity. He takes up the Greek notion of phusis, or physicality, as a way to point out limitations in refined and commonplace views of nature and the body as well as a device to highlight the often-overlooked lives of things that people encounter. Scott explores questions of unity, purpose, coherence, universality, and experiences of wonder and astonishment in connection with scientific fact and knowledge. He develops these themes with lightness and wit, ultimately articulating a new interpretation of the appearances of things that are beyond the reach of language and thought.
The Rigor of a Certain Inhumanity
Toward a Wider Suffrage
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
Focusing on the idea of universal suffrage, John Llewelyn accepts the challenge of Derrida's later thought to renew his focus on the ethical, political, and religious dimensions of what makes us uniquely human. Llewelyn builds this concern on issues of representation, language, meaning, and logic with reflections on the phenomenological figures who informed Derrida's concept of deconstruction. By entering into dialogue with these philosophical traditions, Llewelyn demonstrates the range and depth of his own original thinking. The Rigor of a Certain Inhumanity is a rich and passionate, playful, and perceptive work of philosophical analysis.
Bremen and Freiburg Lectures
Insight Into That Which Is and Basic Principles of Thinking
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
This volume consists of two lecture series given by Heidegger in the 1940s and 1950s. The lectures given in Bremen constitute the first public lectures Heidegger delivered after World War II, when he was officially banned from teaching. Here, Heidegger openly resumes thinking that deeply engaged him with Hölderlin's poetry and themes developed in his earlier works. In the Freiburg lectures Heidegger ponders thought itself and freely engages with the German idealists and Greek thinkers who had provoked him in the past. Andrew J. Mitchell's translation allows English-speaking readers to explore important connections with Heidegger's earlier works on language, logic, and reality.
Hölderlin's Hymn "Remembrance"
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
Martin Heidegger's 1941—1942 lecture course on Friedrich Hölderlin's hymn, "Remembrance," delivered immediately following his confrontation with Nietzsche, lays out a detailed plan for the interpretation of Hölderlin's poetry in which remembrance is a central concern. With its emphasis on the "free use of the national" and the "holy of the fatherland," the course marks an important progression in Heidegger's political thought. In addition to its startlingly innovative analyses of greeting, the festive, and the dream, the text provides Heidegger's fullest elaboration of the structure of commemorative thinking in relationship to time and the possibility of an "other beginning." This English translation by William McNeill and Julia Ireland completes the series of Heidegger's major lecture courses on Hölderlin.
The Return of Nature
Coming As If from Nowhere
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
John Sallis dismantles the traditional conception of nature in this book of imagination and the cosmos. In the thought of Emerson, Hegel, and Schelling, Sallis discerns the seeds of an understanding of nature that goes against the modern technological assault on natural things and opens a space for a revitalized approach to the world. He identifies two fundamental reorientations that philosophical thought is called on to address today: the turn to the elemental in nature and the turn from nature to the cosmos at large. He traces the elusive course of the imagination, as if coming from nowhere, and describes the way in which it bears on the relation of humans to nature. Sallis's account demonstrates that a renewal of our understanding of nature is one of the prime imperatives we demand from philosophy today.
Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger
History of a Love
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
How could Hannah Arendt, a German Jew who fled Germany in 1931, have reconciled with Martin Heidegger, whom she knew had joined and actively participated in the Nazi Party? In this remarkable biography, Antonia Grunenberg tells how the relationship between Arendt and Heidegger embraced both love and thought and made their passions inseparable, both philosophically and romantically. Grunenberg recounts how the history between Arendt and Heidegger is entwined with the history of the twentieth century with its breaks, catastrophes, and crises. Against the violent backdrop of the last century, she details their complicated and often fissured relationship as well as their intense commitments to thinking.
Persuasion, Reflection, Judgment
Ancillae Vitae
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
As one of the most respected voices of Continental philosophy today, Rodolphe Gasché pulls together Aristotle's conception of rhetoric, Martin Heidegger's debate with theory, and Hannah Arendt's conception of judgment in a single work on the centrality of these themes as fundamental to human flourishing in public and political life. Gasché's readings address the distinctively human space of the public square and the actions that occur there, and his valorization of persuasion, reflection, and judgment reveals new insight into how the philosophical tradition distinguishes thinking from other faculties of the human mind.
Four Seminars
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
In Four Seminars, Heidegger reviews the entire trajectory of his thought and offers unique perspectives on fundamental aspects of his work. First published in French in 1976, these seminars were translated into German with Heidegger's approval and reissued in 1986 as part of his Gesamtausgabe, volume 15. Topics considered include the Greek understanding of presence, the ontological difference, the notion of system in German Idealism, the power of naming, the problem of technology, danger, and the event. Heidegger's engagements with his philosophical forebears-Parmenides, Heraclitus, Kant, and Hegel-continue in surprising dialogues with his contemporaries-Husserl, Marx, and Wittgenstein. While providing important insights into how Heidegger conducted his lectures, these seminars show him in his maturity reflecting back on his philosophical path. An important text for understanding contemporary philosophical debates, Four Seminars provides extraordinarily rich material for students and scholars of Heidegger.
Derrida and the Inheritance of Democracy
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
Derrida and the Inheritance of Democracy provides a theoretically rich and accessible account of Derrida's political philosophy. Demonstrating the key role inheritance plays in Derrida's thinking, Samir Haddad develops a general theory of inheritance and shows how it is essential to democratic action. He transforms Derrida's well-known idea of "democracy to come" into active engagement with democratic traditions. Haddad focuses on issues such as hospitality, justice, normativity, violence, friendship, birth, and the nature of democracy as he reads these deeply political writings.
Gadamer and the Transmission of History
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
Observing that humans often deal with the past in problematic ways, Jerome Veith looks to philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer and his hermeneutics to clarify these conceptions of history and to present ways to come to terms with them. Veith fully engages Truth and Method as well as Gadamer's entire work and relationships with other German philosophers, especially Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger in this endeavor. Veith considers questions about language, ethics, cosmopolitanism, patriotism, self-identity, and the status of the humanities in the academy in this very readable application of Gadamer's philosophical practice.
The Beginning of Western Philosophy
Interpretation of Anaximander and Parmenides
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
Volume 35 of Heidegger's Complete Works comprises a lecture course given at the University of Freiburg in 1932, five years after the publication of Being and Time. During this period, Heidegger was at the height of his creative powers, which are on full display in this clear and imaginative text. In it, Heidegger leads his students in a close reading of two of the earliest philosophical source documents, fragments by Greek thinkers Anaximander and Parmenides. Heidegger develops their common theme of Being and non-being and shows that the question of Being is indeed the origin of Western philosophy. His engagement with these Greek texts is as much of a return to beginnings as it is a potential reawakening of philosophical wonder and inquiry in the present.
Light Traces
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
What is the effect of light as it measures the seasons? How does light leave different traces on the terrain-on a Pacific Island, in the Aegean Sea, high in the Alps, or in the forest? John Sallis considers the expansiveness of nature and the range of human vision in essays about the effect of light and luminosity on place. Sallis writes movingly of nature and the elements, employing an enormous range of philosophical, geographical, and historical knowledge. Paintings and drawings by Alejandro A. Vallega illuminate the text, accentuating the interaction between light and environment.
Ontology - The Hermeneutics of Facticity
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
First published in 1988 as volume 63 of his Collected Works, Ontology-The Hermeneutics of Facticity is the text of Heidegger's lecture course at the University of Freiburg during the summer of 1923. In these lectures, Heidegger reviews and makes critical appropriations of the hermeneutic tradition from Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine to Schleiermacher and Dilthey in order to reformulate the question of being on the basis of facticity and the everyday world. Specific themes deal with the history of ontology, the development of phenomenology and its relation to Hegelian dialectic, traditional theological and philosophical concepts of man, the present situation of philosophy, and the influences of Aristotle, Luther, Kierkegaard, and Husserl on Heidegger's thinking. Students of Heidegger will find initial breakthroughs in his unique elaboration of the meaning of human experience and the "question of being," which received mature expression in Being and Time.
The Phenomenology of Religious Life
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
The Phenomenology of Religious Life presents the text of Heidegger's important 1920—21 lectures on religion. The volume consists of the famous lecture course Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion, a course on Augustine and Neoplatonism, and notes for a course on The Philosophical Foundations of Medieval Mysticism that was never delivered. Heidegger's engagements with Aristotle, St. Paul, Augustine, and Luther give readers a sense of what phenomenology would come to mean in the mature expression of his thought. Heidegger reveals an impressive display of theological knowledge, protecting Christian life experience from Greek philosophy and defending Paul against Nietzsche.
Plato on the Limits of Human Life
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
By focusing on the immortal character of the soul in key Platonic dialogues, Sara Brill shows how Plato thought of the soul as remarkably flexible, complex, and indicative of the inner workings of political life and institutions. As she explores the character of the soul, Brill reveals the corrective function that law and myth serve. If the soul is limitless, she claims, then the city must serve a regulatory or prosthetic function and prop up good political institutions against the threat of the soul's excess. Brill's sensitivity to dramatic elements and discursive strategies in Plato's dialogues illuminates the intimate connection between city and soul.
Interpretation of Nietzsche's Second Untimely Meditation
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
Martin Heidegger's Nietzsche's Second Untimely Meditation presents crucial elements for understanding Heidegger's thinking from 1936 to 1940. Heidegger offers a radically different reading of a text that he had read decades earlier, showing how his relationship with Nietzche's has changed, as well as how his understandings of the differences between animals and humans, temporality and history, and the Western philosophical tradition developed. With his new reading, Heidegger delineates three Nietzschean modes of history, which should be understood as grounded in the structure of temporality or historicity and also offers a metaphysical determination of life and the essence of humankind. Ullrich Hasse and Mark Sinclair offer a clear and accessible translation despite the fragmentary and disjointed quality of the original lecture notes that comprise this text.
Being and Truth
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
In these lectures, delivered in 1933-1934 while he was Rector of the University of Freiburg and an active supporter of the National Socialist regime, Martin Heidegger addresses the history of metaphysics and the notion of truth from Heraclitus to Hegel. First published in German in 2001, these two lecture courses offer a sustained encounter with Heidegger's thinking during a period when he attempted to give expression to his highest ambitions for a philosophy engaged with politics and the world. While the lectures are strongly nationalistic and celebrate the revolutionary spirit of the time, they also attack theories of racial supremacy in an attempt to stake out a distinctively Heideggerian understanding of what it means to be a people. This careful translation offers valuable insight into Heidegger's views on language, truth, animality, and life, as well as his political thought and activity.
Plato's Animals
Gadflies, Horses, Swans, and Other Philosophical Beasts
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
Plato's Animals examines the crucial role played by animal images, metaphors, allusions, and analogies in Plato's dialogues. These fourteen lively essays demonstrate that the gadflies, snakes, stingrays, swans, dogs, horses, and other animals that populate Plato's work are not just rhetorical embellishments. Animals are central to Plato's understanding of the hierarchy between animals, humans, and gods and are crucial to his ideas about education, sexuality, politics, aesthetics, the afterlife, the nature of the soul, and philosophy itself. The volume includes a comprehensive annotated index to Plato's bestiary in both Greek and English.
Basic Questions of Philosophy
Selected "Problems" of "Logic"
Part of the Studies in Continental Thought series
First published in German in 1984 as volume 45 of Martin Heidegger's collected works, this book is the first English translation of a lecture course he presented at the University of Freiburg in 1937—1938. Heidegger's task here is to reassert the question of the essence of truth, not as a "problem" or as a matter of "logic," but precisely as a genuine philosophical question, in fact the one basic question of philosophy. Thus, this course is about the essence of truth and the essence of philosophy. On both sides Heidegger draws extensively upon the ancient Greeks, on their understanding of truth as aletheia and their determination of the beginning of philosophy as the disposition of wonder. In addition, these lectures were presented at the time that Heidegger was composing his second magnum opus, Beiträge zur Philosophie, and provide the single best introduction to that complex and crucial text.