Studies in Continental thought

Martin Heidegger{u2019}s 1934{u2013}1935 lectures on Friedrich Hölderlin{u2019}s hymns 2Germania3 and 2The Rhine3 are considered the most significant among Heidegger{u2019}s lectures on Hölderlin. Coming at a crucial time in his career, the text illustrates Heidegger{u2019}s turn toward language, art, and poetry while reflecting his despair at his failure to revolutionize the German university and his hope for a more profound revolution through the German language, guided by Hölderlin{u2019}s poetry. These lectures are important for understanding Heidegger{u2019}s changing relation to politics, his turn toward Nietzsche, his thinking about the German language, and his breakthrough to a new kind of poetic thinking. First published in 1980 as volume 39 of Heidegger{u2019}s Complete Works, this graceful and rigorous English-language translation will be widely discussed in continental philosophy and literary theory.

Intended for students of philosophy and critical theory, this book presents 13 essays by commentators on the work of Levinas and features two previously untranslated essays by Levinas and Derrida

Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), has exerted a profound influence on twentieth-century continental philosophy. This anthology of Levinas's key philosophical texts over a period of more than forty years provides an ideal introduction to his thought and offers insights into his most innovative ideas. Five of the ten essays included here appear in English for the first time. An introduction by Adriaan Peperzak outlines Levinas's philosophical development and the basic themes of his writings. Each essay is accompanied by a brief introduction and notes. This collection is an ideal text for students of philosophy concerned with understanding and assessing the work of this major philosopher.

Basic Concepts, one of the first texts to appear in English from the critical later period of Martin Heidegger's thought, strikes out in new directions. First published in German in 1981 as Grundbegriffe (volume 51 of Martin Heidegger's collected works), it is the text of a lecture course that Heidegger gave at Freiburg in the winter semester of 1941 during the phase of his thinking known as the "turning." In this transition Heidegger shifted his attention from the problem of the meaning of being to the question of the truth of being. The text consists of an introduction and two parts. In the introduction Heidegger explains the meaning of his title as "concepts of ground." Part One, divided into three sections, attempts to thematize the difference between being and beings. The first section takes up the metaphysical, logical, grammatical, and everyday meanings of the verb "to be" and shows their inadequacy. The second section, a strikingly original discussion, examines a series of eight directives for reflecting on being. The third section shifts from being toward man and points to the discord between the two. In Part Two, Heidegger interprets two fragments by Anaximander to recover an "incipient saying of Being" that is poetic rather than metaphysical. In this clear translation by Gary E. Aylesworth, Basic Concepts provides a concise introduction to Heidegger's later thought.

"With the publication of Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), Martin Heidegger's most important work after Being and Time becomes available in English for the first time. Titled in German Beitrage zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), this work, written in 1936-38, was awaited with great expectation long before its publication on the centennial of Heidegger's birth in 1989. In Heidegger's corpus, Contributions stands alone. If Being and Time is perceived as undermining modern metaphysics, Contributions undertakes nothing less than to reshape the very project of thinking. Through Heidegger's unfolding of "being-historical thinking," thinking becomes a dimension of time and space, a way of experiencing the presence of the divine."--BOOK JACKET. "The fugally structured work comprises six "joinings" - "Echo," "Playing-Forth," "Leap," "Grounding," "The Ones to Come," and "The Last God" - and a final section, "Be-ing," which together illuminate what enowns and thus enables thinking."--BOOK JACKET.

In his challenging new book, Charles E. Scott examines the paradox that our ethical and political ideals may perpetuate the very evils they intend to prevent. He takes as his point of departure the question of ethics: that values and their pursuit in the West often perpetuate their own worst enemies. At issue are the dangers in the structures and movements of images, values, and ways of knowing that are most intimately a part of our lives. The ethical and political dimensions we live by are called into question by virtue of their belonging to something excessive to their own identities. When this excess is ignored, we will be inclined to eliminate or dominate those values and political structures that are significantly different from our own. In this encounter with excess, Scott engages the thought of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Levinas on questions of responsibility, transcendence, tragedy, and self-fragmentation. A way of thinking emerges that makes evident the advantages of the nonethical and the nonpolitical for ethical and political life.

The text of a lecture course that Heidegger gave in 1955-56, takes as its focal point Leibniz's principle: nothing is without reason.

This volume of Heidegger's works presents his important 1924 Marburg lectures that anticipate much of the revolutionary thinking that he subsequently articulated in Being and Time. Here are the seeds of the ideas that would become Heidegger's unique phenomenology. Heidegger interprets Aristotle's Rhetoric and looks closely at the Greek notion of pathos.

What is it that an artist paints in a painting? Working from paintings themselves rather than from philosophical theories, John Sallis shows how, through shades and limits, the painter renders visible the light that confers visibility on things. In his extended examination of three phases in the development of modern painting, Sallis focuses on the work of Claude Monet, Wassily Kandinsky, and Mimmo Paladino - three painters who, each in his own way, carry painting to the limit. Attentive to the ways in which paintings disclose the visibility of the visible order, Shades reveals the excess by which painting is always more than mere depiction or figuration. Reproductions of all the works discussed are included.

Through engaging autobiographical essays and phdtographs, Portraits American Continental Philosophers introduces twenty-two leading conte porary American philosophers whose work falls under, the rubric of “continental philosophy.” These essays trace the personal philosophical journeys and orientations of a remarkable group of men and women, revealing a fascinating array of intellectual inspirations—tales of the lives of saints and mystics, an undergraduate encounter with Hume or Locke, the shock of a racially segregated society, the experience of mirrors reflecting each other to infinity, Martin Heidegger’s probing gaze, the explosion of student unrest in 1968, or a Holocaust survivor’s search for explanations. Taken together, these intimate self-portraits provide a vibrant overview of the multiplicity and depth of continental philosophy in America. Contributors are Debra Bergoften, Robert Bernasconi, John D. Caputto, Edward S. Casey, Bernard Flynn, Thomas R. Flynn, Patrick A. Heelan, Douglas Kellner, Joseph J. Kockelmans, David Farrell Krell, David Michael Levin, Alphonso Lingis, Bernd Magnus, David M. Rasmussen, William J. Richardson

"Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel gave many lectures in logic at Berlin University between 1818 and his untimely death in 1831. Edited posthumously by Hegel's son, Karl, these lectures were published in German in 2001 and now appear in English for the first time. Because they were delivered orally, Lectures on Logic is more approachable and colloquial than much of Hegel's formal philosophy. The lectures provide important insight into Hegel's science of logic, dialectical method, and symbolic logic. Clark Butler's smooth translation helps readers understand the rationality of Hegel's often dark and difficult thought. Readers at all levels will find a mature and particularly clear presentation of Hegel's systematic philosophical vision."--Jacket.

This book, 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 presents 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. Of major interest is Heidegger's brilliant phenomenological description of the mood of boredom, which he describes as a "fundamental attunement" of modern times.

Martin Heidegger's 1942 lecture course interprets Friedrich Holderlin's hymn "The Ister" within the context of Holderlin's poetic and philosophical work, with particular emphasis on Holderlin's dialogue with Greek tragedy. Delivered in summer 1942 at the University of Freiburg, this course was first published in German in 1984 as volume 53 of Heidegger's Collected Works. Revealing for Heidegger's thought of the period are his discussions of the meaning of "the political" and "the national," in which he emphasizes the difficulty, as well as the necessity, of finding "one's own" in and through a dialogue with "the foreign." In this context Heidegger reflects on the nature of translation and interpretation. A detailed reading of the famous chorus from Sophocles' Antigone, known as the "ode to man," is a key feature of the course.

First published in German in 1984 as volume 45 of Martin Heidegger's collected works, this book translates a lecture course he presented at the University of Freiburg in 1937-1938. Heidegger here raises 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 intertwining of 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, Beitrage zur Philosophie, and provide the single best introduction to that complex and crucial text.

In Broken Hegemonies, the late distinguished philosopher Reiner Schürmann offers a radical rethinking of the history of Western philosophy from the Greeks through Heidegger. Schürmann interprets the history of Western thought and action as a series of eras governed by the rise and fall of certain dominating philosophical ideas that contained the seeds of their own destruction. These eras coincided with their dominant languages: Greek, Latin, and vernacular tongues. Analyzing philosophical texts from Parmenides, Plotinus, and Cicero, through Augustine, Meister Eckhardt, and Kant, to Heidegger, Schürmann traces the arguments by which these ideas gained hegemony and by which their credibility was ultimately demolished. Recognizing the failure of ultimate norms, Broken Hegemonies questions how humanity today is to think and act in the absence of principles. (Source: [Project MUSE](

The text of Martin Heidegger's 1927-28 university lecture course on Emmanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason presents a close interpretive reading of the first two parts of this masterpiece of modern philosophy. In this course Heidegger continues the task he enunciated in Being and Time as the problem of dismantling the history of ontology, using temporality as a clue. Within this context the relation between philosophy, ontology, and fundamental ontology is shown to be rooted in the genesis of the modern mathematical sciences. Heidegger demonstrates that objectification of beings as beings is inseparable from knowledge a priori, the central problem of Kant's Critique. He concludes that objectification rests on the productive power of imagination, a process that involves temporality as the basic constitution of humans as beings. This is an essential work for students of Heidegger, Kant, modern philosophy, and contemporary phenomenology.

"Introduction to Phenomenological Research, volume 17 of Martin Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe, contains his first lectures given at Marburg in the winter semester of 1923-1924. In these lectures, Heidegger introduces the notion of phenomenology by tracing it back to Aristotle's treatments of phainomenon and logos. This extensive commentary on Aristotle is an important addition to Heidegger's ongoing interpretations which accompany his thinking during the period leading up to Being and Time. Additionally, these lectures develop critical differences between Heidegger's phenomenology and that of Descartes and Husserl and elaborate questions of facticity, everydayness, and flight from existence that are central in his later work. Here, Heidegger dismantles the history of ontology and charts a new course for phenomenology by defining and distinguishing his own methods."--Jacket.

Heidegger's lecture course at the University of Marburg in the summer of 1925, an early version of Being and Time (1927), offers a unique glimpse into the motivations that prompted the writing of this great philosopher's master work and the presuppositions that gave shape to it. The book embarks upon a provisional description of what Heidegger calls "Dasein," the field in which both being and time become manifest. Heidegger analyzes Dasein in its everydayness in a deepening sequence of terms: being-in-the-world, worldhood, and care as the being of Dasein. The course ends by sketching the themes of death and conscience and their relevance to an ontology that makes the phenomenon of time central. Theodore Kisiel's outstanding translation premits English-speaking readers to appreciate the central importance of this text in the development of Heidegger's thought.

"Prompted by the unification of Europe in 1992 and by recent events in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, Jacques Derrida begins this compelling essay on contemporary world politics with the issue of European identity. What, he asks, is Europe? How has Europe traditionally been defined and how is the current world situation changing that definition? Might the prospects of a New Europe demand not only a new definition of European identity but also a new way of thinking identity itself?" "Like a navigator, Derrida sets out from a Europe that has always defined itself as the capital of culture, the headland of thought, in whose name and for whose benefit exploration of other lands, other peoples, and other ways of thinking has been carried out. If such Eurocentric biases are not to be repeated, Derrida warns, the question of Europe must be asked in a new way; it must be asked by recalling another heading. Not only is it necessary for Europe to be responsible for the other, but its own identity is actually constituted by the other. Rejecting the easy or programmatic solutions of Euruocentrism or anti-Eurocentrism, of total unification or complete dispersion, Derrida argues for the necessity of working with and from the Enlightenment values of liberal democracy while at the same time recalling that these values do not themselves ensure respect for the other." "Navigating in and through texts of Marx, Husserl, and especially Valery, Derrida seeks a redefinition of European identity that includes respect both for difference and for universal values. The Other Heading appeals eloquently for a sustained effort at thinking through the complexity along with the multiple dangers and opportunities of the contemporary world situation without resorting to easy or hasty solutions."--BOOK JACKET.