Heidegger and the Contradiction of Being


Book Description

This book offers a clear, analytic, and innovative interpretation of Heidegger’s late work. This period of Heidegger’s philosophy remains largely unexplored by analytic philosophers, who consider it filled with inconsistencies and paradoxical ideas, particularly concerning the notions of Being and nothingness. This book takes seriously the claim that the late Heidegger endorses dialetheism – namely the position according to which some contradictions are true – and shows that the idea that Being is both an entity and not an entity is neither incoherent nor logically trivial. The author achieves this by presenting and defending the idea that reality has an inconsistent structure. In doing so, he takes one of the most discussed topics in current analytic metaphysics, grounding theory, into a completely unexplored area. Additionally, in order to make sense of Heidegger’s concept of nothingness, the author introduces an original axiomatic mereological system that, having a paraconsistent logic as a base logic, can tolerate inconsistencies without falling into logical triviality. This is the first book to set forth a complete and detailed discussion of the late Heidegger in the framework of analytic metaphysics. It will be of interest to Heidegger scholars and analytic philosophers working on theories of grounding, mereology, dialetheism, and paraconsistent logic.







The Principle of Reason


Book Description

The Principle of Reason, the text of an important and influential lecture course that Martin Heidegger gave in 1955–56, takes as its focal point Leibniz's principle: nothing is without reason. Heidegger shows here that the principle of reason is in fact a principle of being. Much of his discussion is aimed at bringing his readers to the "leap of thinking," which enables them to grasp the principle of reason as a principle of being. This text presents Heidegger's most extensive reflection on the notion of history and its essence, the Geschick of being, which is considered on of the most important developments in Heidegger's later thought. One of Heidegger's most artfully composed texts, it also contains important discussions of language, translation, reason, objectivity, and technology as well as remarkable readings of Leibniz, Kant, Aristotle, and Goethe, among others.




Logic


Book Description

Heidegger’s radical thinking on the meaning of truth in a “clear and comprehensive critical edition” (Philosophy in Review). Martin Heidegger’s 1925–26 lectures on truth and time provided much of the basis for his momentous work, Being and Time. Not published until 1976—three months before Heidegger’s death—as volume 21 of his Complete Works, it is nonetheless central to Heidegger’s overall project of reinterpreting Western thought in terms of time and truth. The text shows the degree to which Aristotle underlies Heidegger’s hermeneutical theory of meaning. It also contains Heidegger’s first published critique of Husserl and takes major steps toward establishing the temporal bases of logic and truth. Thomas Sheehan’s elegant and insightful translation offers English-speaking readers access to this fundamental text for the first time.




Being and Truth


Book Description

A “well-crafted and careful rendering of an important and demanding volume” covering the philosopher’s views on language, life, and politics (Andrew Mitchell, Emory University). 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, 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.




Heidegger: The Critique of Logic


Book Description

Since his inaugural lecture at Freiburg in 1929 in which Heidegger delivered his most celebrated salvo against logic, he has frequently been portrayed as an anti-logician, a classic example of the obscurity resultant upon a rejection of the discipline of logic, a champion of the irrational, and a variety of similar things. Because many of Heidegger's statements on logic are polemical in tone, there has been no little misunderstanding of his position in regard to logic, and a great deal of distortion of it. All too frequently the position which is attacked as Heidegger's is a barely recognizable caricature of it. Heidegger has, from the very beginning of his career, written and said much on logic. Strangely enough, in view of all that he has said, his critique of logic has not been singled out as the subject of any of the longer, more detailed studies on the various aspects of his thought.




Heidegger on Logic


Book Description

Does adherence to the principles of logic commit us to a particular way of viewing the world? Or are there ways of being – ways of behaving in the world, including ways of thinking, feeling, and speaking – that ground the normative constraints that logic imposes? Does the fact that assertions, the traditional elements of logic, are typically made about beings present a problem for metaphysical (or post-metaphysical) prospects of making assertions meaningfully about being? Does thinking about being (as opposed to beings) accordingly require revising or restricting logic's reach – and, if so, how is this possible? Or is there something precious about the very idea of thinking the limits of thinking? Contemporary scholars have become increasing sensitive to how Heidegger, much like Wittgenstein, instructively poses such questions. Heidegger on Logic is a collection of new essays by leading scholars who critically ponder the efficacy of his responses to them.




The Question Concerning the Thing


Book Description

A complete English translation of an important work from a crucial period in Heidegger’s overall intellectual trajectory.




Heidegger on Being and Acting


Book Description

..". elegant and provocative... Exhibit[s] a subtle mastery of Heidegger's works." -- Review of Metaphysics ..". splendidly precise study of Heidegger... to be recommended not only to Heidegger scholars but also to those interested in the question of what philosophical thinking has as its task in the modern technological world." -- Religious Studies Review ..". indispensable to understanding the later Heidegger." -- Choice




Making Sense of Heidegger


Book Description

Making Sense of Heidegger presents a radically new reading of Heidegger’s notoriously difficult oeuvre. Clearly written and rigorously grounded in the whole of Heidegger’s writings, Thomas Sheehan’s latest book argues for the strict unity of Heidegger’s thought on the basis of three theses: that his work was phenomenological from beginning to the end; that “being” refers to the meaningful presence of things in the world of human concerns; and that what makes such intelligibility possible is the existential structure of human being as the thrown-open or appropriated “clearing.” Sheehan offers a compelling alternative to the classical paradigm that has dominated Heidegger research over the last half-century, as well as a valuable retranslation of the key terms in Heidegger's lexicon. This important book opens a new path in Heidegger research that will stimulate dialogue not only within Heidegger studies but also with philosophers outside the phenomenological tradition and scholars in theology, literary criticism, and existential psychiatry.