1

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
centurys most noteworthy, innovative, and controversial philosophers. Heideggers groundbreaking 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.
Heideggers 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 Heideggers 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 Heideggers 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 Heideggers 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 epistemological
traditions 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 Husserls phenomenological method but by the existential and lifephilosophical 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 Heideggers developing

3
project of a hermeneutics of factical life, which would foreshadow many of the concerns and
strategies of Being and Time. The task is to articulate life in its questionability even more
primordially than life-philosophy itself did (GA 60, 50). This radicalization of life surpasses
even Dilthey, who inspired the task of articulating lifeand the historical, immanent, and
already meaningful categories of lifefrom out of itself, by realizing Husserls demand of
returning to the things themselves and phenomenologically allow each phenomenon to show
itself from itself.
In this context, Heidegger formulates two objections to life-philosophy that would
motivate the modification of his thinking through a sustained engagement with the philosophical
tradition, in particular Aristotle and Kant in the mid-1920s. First, existential and life-philosophy
is absorbed in the life that it should clarify. Consequently, it is a tautology, like the botany of
plants, which cannot articulate the categorial character of the life of which it is an expression
(GA 21, 216), much less its ontological character (SZ, 46). Second, life-philosophy was
insufficient to address historical lifes basic disquiet (Unruhe, GA 60, 30-54), i.e., the inner
tendency of life toward its ruination (GA 61, 2). Life is encountered not only in the self-certainty
and security of the vulgar life-philosopher but as dispersion and self-ruination (GA 61, 103). The
basic motility of life is indicated then in the alienation of this disquiet (GA 61, 93). Care
(Sorge) emerges as a defining practicalas care for ones daily bread (GA 61, 90)and
communicativeas a vox media (GA 62, 357)lived category of human existence.
In the lectures-courses of the mid-1920s and Being and Time, Heidegger
developed an analytic of Dasein in which Dasein (being-there) was defined as the site of an
understanding of being. This focus on an entity that we are ourselves each time are led some
like Husserl -- to accuse Heidegger of developing a philosophical anthropology, and risking a

4
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). That
essence 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).

5
Therein lies the turn, from a thinking centered on Daseins 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 of
Being." (GA 9, 325/ BW, 231).
In this later stage of his work, Heideggers 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 Andrew Mitchells essay on The Bremen Lectures, which he
1

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

6
recently translated into English2), 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 Daseincentered 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 Heideggers 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 here of 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: Indiana
U. Press, 2012).

7
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 of
these 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 differenceespecially in the period from 1927 to 1936, which is taken to be the crux
of this workwas 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 of 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

8
"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 philosophical
movements and major contemporary continental thinkers, in Reception and Influence (13
essays). The seven essays in the first section, Life and Contexts, examine Heideggers 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
Heideggers 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 Heideggers intellectual life,
beginning with Theodore Kisiel, who reworks the very notion of biography in terms of

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Heideggers 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] facticityunderstood in the literal sense of the
word: ones own [eigene] facticitythat is, the facticity of ones 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 Heideggers
development 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
intuitionhermeneutic intuition (die hermeneutische Intuition, GA 56/57, 117/TDP, 98).
Moran also identifies Heideggers 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 Heideggers magnum opus, Being and Time.
The essay by Thomas Sheehan focuses on the scope and significance of the turn (die
Kehre) in Heideggers work. Beginning with the claim that Heideggers 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 Heideggers main
concern. Rather, Heideggers ultimate purpose was to move beyond such meaningfulness to
the X that makes it possible. Sheehans contention is that the turn includes at least three
distinct but interrelated sense: the first, and primary, sense of the turn refers to what Heidegger
calls 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 1930s,
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 selfunderstanding 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 Heideggers thinking of
the people and the question who are we? in the thirties. The thirties are marked, according to
Polt, by Heideggers 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 Heideggers thought during these years. Polt

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insists on the fact that Heideggers 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 Heideggers relation to Nietzsche and his troubled
involvement with National-Socialism. He contends that Heideggers metaphysical concern was
uppermost in his treatment of Nietzsches relation to Darwinism and biologism and that when
it came to readings of Nietzsche, Heideggers 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 Heideggers later thought and work. She considers Heideggers
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

12
emerged in Heideggers 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 Heideggers
private thoughts, his relation to his contemporaries, and his own work. Giving an overview of
Heideggers 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, JeanPaul Sartre, Ernst Tugendhat); scholars in the humanities (Kurt Bauch, Beda Allemann, Emil
Staiger); 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). Heideggers
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 Heideggers 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 Heideggers 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 Heideggers
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 (Peter
Gordon), 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, Heideggers 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. Heideggers relation to medieval thought
and the scholastic tradition is closely tied up with his relation to Christianity, and to that extent
was determinative of Heideggers 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 Heideggers early lecture courses with the later
3

In a session from August 31st 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 Kants 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 Heideggers relation to Kant could shed light on the so-called
turn in his thinking. Two essays on Heideggers relation to German Idealism, with its main
figures, Hegel and Schelling (Peter Trawny) and Nietzsche (Ullrich Haase) follow, giving a
unique perspective on Heideggers treatment of post-Kantian and 19th Century philosophy, and
their role in his understanding of the history of being. Eric S. Nelson shows the importance of
Heideggers 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 Heideggers relation to Neo-Kantianism and considers the key
themes of Kantian and neo-Kantian philosophy that left their mark on Heideggers 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 Gadamers
exposition of philosophical hermeneutics with Heideggers 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
Marcuses appraisal of Heideggers thought, and confronts their conception of technology.

Part III. Key Writings

The third section offers ten essays bearing on Heideggers 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 Heideggers 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 Heideggers 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

16
who attended them, Schufreider argues that Heideggers 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 Heideggers
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 Heideggers 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 inceptual
thinking (CP1, 24) and the reservedness evoked by Heidegger. The experimental character
of Heideggers scripturality is also stressed. William McNeill provides an account of
Heideggers relation to and dialogue with Hlderlin, and explains the importance of Heideggers
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
Heideggers 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,

17
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
Heideggers work. They perform this task in different ways, some by clarifying key notions in
Heideggers corpus: Dasein (Franois Raffoul), Ereignis (Daniela Vallega-Neu), the Fourfold
(Andrew Mitchell), technology (Hans Ruin), Truth (Dan Dahlstrom), the Nothing (Gregory
Schufreider), birth and death (Anne OByrne), Onto-theology (Iain Thomson), or by confronting
Heideggers thought to the thematic of the body for instance (Kevin Aho).
Other essays engage Heideggers 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 Heideggers thinking by presenting
Heideggers key technical notions as well as his transformation of our understanding of a widerange 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 Heideggers
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 Heideggers early works (Levinas was the first one to have
introduced Heidegger in France); Sartres 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; Heideggers 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 Heideggers Destruktion in the thought of Jacques Derrida and deconstruction,
a work pursue further by Derridas students Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe.4
A number of essays explore Heideggers 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 Adornos 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 Heideggers work in Asian Philosophy (Bret Davis) and Latin American philosophy
(Alejandro Vallega). Other essays attempt to measure Heideggers impact on philosophical
movements such as environmental philosophy (Patricia Glazebrook), on Heidegger and the

On that reception of Heideggers thought in France, in addition to Dominque Janicauds opus

magum, 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 Heideggers work, a work still to be discovered as it never ceased to confront the
mystery and wonder of being.