This essay contributes to research on, and develops a critique of, the later Heidegger’s conception of the relationship between modernity and a future beyond or after the modern age. It is argued that Heidegger does not engage in a reactionary rejection of modernity, since he is methodologically opposed to pure negation. Rather, as the example of his reading of Van Gogh demonstrates, Heidegger uses suggestive poetic hints from modern culture to transcend modernity from within into a “postmodern” and ontologically pluralistic future. The author argues, however, that a more livable, plausible, and politically hopeful response to, and reformation of, the modern age is found in Gadamer’s work. Gadamerian hermeneutics permits a rehabilitation of modern culture and thought (for example, the tradition of humanism) by charitably and sensitively disclosing overlooked insights and resources that enable us to continue living within, without moving beyond, the modern age.

Historizing is the way Dasein takes up possibilities and roles to project itself into the future. It is why we experience continuity throughout our lives, and it is the basis for historicality – our sense of a more general continuity of “history.” In Being and Time, Heidegger identifies both inauthentic and authentic modes of historizing that give rise, respectively, to inauthentic and authentic modes of histori­cality. He focuses on historizing at the individual level but gestures at a communal form of historizing. In this paper, I develop the concept of co-historizing in both its authentic and inauthentic modes. I argue that Heidegger’s unarticulated concept of inauthentic co-historizing is what necessitated the planned (but unfinished) second half of Being and Time – the “phenomenological destruction of the history of ontology.” I consider what it means to take responsibility for our destiny as a people and specifically as a community of philosophers.

Ethics usually focuses on actions, with thinking or unthinking only having significance insofar as they lead to good or bad behavior. Heidegger and Levinas, however, argue that thinking in certain ways, or not thinking in general, is ethical or unethical on its own rather than just by having good or bad consequences. Heidegger’s early work makes unthinking conformity (regardless of to what) an important part of inauthenticity, while his later work turns the thinking of being into our central “ethical” task, intentionally blurring the distinction between thinking and acting. Levinas makes thinking about humans in a certain way – namely as thinkable, as fitting into and exhausted by comprehensible categories – itself an act of conceptual violence, regardless of what deeds follow from it. We conclude with Kierkegaard who criticized humanity’s tendency to sleepwalk through their own lives, only waking up by confronting something unthinkable. This thought can be seen as a common source for both Heidegger and Levinas, as well as a way to keep the two in a continuously off-balance strife with each other.

Martin Heidegger wrote one and only one preface for a scholarly work on his thinking, and it was for William J. Richardson’s study Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, first published in 1963. Ever since, both Heidegger’s Preface and Richardson’s groundbreaking book have played an important role in Heidegger scholarship. Much has been discussed about these texts over the decades, but what has not been available to students and scholars up to this point is Richardson’s original comments and questions to Heidegger that led to the famous Preface. These are published here for the first time both in the German original and in our English translation. In our commentary we 1) discuss how Heidegger’s Preface came about, 2) explain the source and status of the materials published here, and 3) pair selected passages from Richardson’s text with Heidegger’s reply in his Preface to highlight the consonance of their thinking.

Heidegger and Epicurus seem to be separated by a great divide. Where Epicurus seeks ataraxia by minimizing anxiety and our concern with death, Heidegger describes how anxiety and death are factored into authentic living. But looks can be deceiving. A close study of Heidegger’s critique of das Man reveals a distinctly Epicurean line of thinking. His account of curiosity, in particular, parallels Epicurus’s own criticism of normal life as being mired in unnatural/empty desires due to an unconscious fear of death. Despite this similarity, Heidegger’s interest in ontological anxiety, i.e., homelessness, contrasts deeply with Epicurus’s goal of mental tranquility. Yet this difference is overcome, in part, in Heidegger’s turn to peaceful dwelling as an expression of authentic Being-in-the-world. Indeed, Heidegger’s account of the fourfold as the essence of dwelling can be seen as an Epicurean four-part cure to suffering (tetrapharmakos), bringing Heidegger into dialogue with the tradition of philosophical therapy.

I examine a passage from Heidegger’s 1922 overview of a proposed book on Aristotle wherein he addresses the importance of Aristotle’s treatment of accidental (sumbebēkos) causes in the Physics II.4–6. My analysis shows that this passage plays a key role within the account of Aristotle’s ontology presented in the overview insofar as it allows Heidegger to open up a new way of reading Aristotle, one that both diagnoses and pushes through the inheritance of being understood as technē in order to retrieve originary insights about the movement of factical human life, world, and care. Rather than subordinate tuchē and automaton (chance) to the four “real” causes they would remain merely incidental to or derivative of, Heidegger asks that we recognize the priority of praxis, whose archē unfolds as care toward and within a world of accidents.

I elucidate Heidegger’s understanding of the “place-being” of the “question of being.” My premises are: 1) Heidegger’s “question of being” can be appropriately made sense of as the “question of language.” 2) The “question of language” requires a topological approach that looks into the link between the place-nature of language and the open-bounded essence of human existence. First, I explain the topological underpinnings of Heidegger’s later thought of being as the clearing and language; second, I examine Sheehan’s phenomenological reading of Heidegger by focusing on the relationship between alētheia and appropriation (Ereignis). In the first section, I explain the correlation between place and language within the context of the “question of being” and display how understanding the former is crucial in having a more complete perspective for the latter. In the second section, I examine Sheehan’s acknowledgment of Heidegger’s idea of place (topos) in his understanding of the nature of human existence in relation to Ereignis, while criticizing the “metaphorical” reading of the “placebeing” of the clearing.

This article focuses on Heidegger’s engagement with the distinction between form and matter in the 1935 essay “The Origin of the Work of Art.” This distinction is articulated by Aristotle in the context of production (of useful equipment), which is taken to be finished once a certain matter (potentiality) is subjected to a certain form or shape (actuality). Insofar as Aristotle takes actuality to have primacy over potentiality, he is unable to think material potentiality as such (save in the paradoxical idea of “prime matter”). Against the Aristotelian thinking of hylomorphism, however, Heidegger takes art as an instance of the reversal of the traditional relationship between form and matter. By appealing to artworks, Heidegger shows an excess of material potentiality over form and function, which he calls “earth.”

Among the many words Heidegger explores in order to elucidate his primary matter for thought, one would not likely expect Schmerz (“pain”) to play a prominent role. And yet, in a selection of notes recently published in a limited German edition under the title Uber den Schmerz (On Pain), Heidegger goes so far as to claim that pain is beyng itself. In this paper I analyze Heidegger’s ontological treatment of pain and his etymology of its Greek counterpart, asking whether he does not ultimately anesthetize his readers to pain’s most rending effects.

Heidegger’s key word Ereignis is frequently translated as “event,” “event of being,” or “event of appropriation.” No ordinary event in the realm of beings, it is an event in which the meaning of being is recognized in difference from beings. In the history of philosophy, this insight into being set in motion the inception of a philosophical discourse within which we are still thinking. Inspired and guided by his philosophy of history, Heidegger hoped our own reflections on being could likewise appropriate and set in motion preparations for another inception, another experience and understanding of what it means for something to be. Whereas, for the early Greek philosophers, their insight was an experience of awe and wonder, and perhaps also dread, for us of today that insight can set in motion a more “inward” turn, a process that puts in question who we are as human beings and who we want to become, and stirs us to acknowledge our responsibility for being in response to a time when being is under assault.

The discovery of a 1932 typewriter apparently signed by Heidegger raises questions about its authenticity and purpose, and prompts us to reconsider the validity of Heidegger’s portrayal of typewriters as devices that alienate writing from the hand and exemplify the modern oblivion of being.

A leitmotif of Being and Time is the attempt to reverse the classical priority of actuality over possibility: instead of understanding the possible in terms of the actual – as “arising out of the actual and returning to it” – Heidegger insists on grasping possibility as the primordial notion. Nowhere is it more evident than in his complex treatment of death and dying. Death is exactly that possibility which offers nothing actual in terms of which to grasp it; death only is in our ever being-toward it. I focus on Heidegger’s characterization of being-toward-death as rooted in, and a concretion of, Dasein’s being-toward-itself. This approach yields an interpretation of the notorious “possibility of impossibility” formulation that is diametrically opposed to the so-called “world-collapse” interpretations. I then explore why, and in what sense, Dasein’s being-toward-itself needs a concretion and draw conclusions about the organization of Being and Time as whole.

One of Heidegger’s main targets of criticism in History of the Concept of Time is Husserl’s theory of intentionality. This criticism, however, has roots in Heidegger’s earliest thinking over the course of his student years and pertains to what Ernst Tugendhat called the problem of encounter as such. In this article I present how the critical appropriation of Rickert’s and Lask’s ideas shaped a unique interpretation of the subject’s existence in the early stages of Heidegger’s career, contributing to the (dis)solution of the encounter problem and anticipating an independent version of phenomenology more than a decade before the publication of Being and Time. These alternative sources of influence illuminate Heidegger’s own path, which is significantly different from Husserl’s from the very start. In particular, I show in the article how Heidegger’s critical appropriation of Neo-Kantian sources allows him already during the 1910s to see the derivative status of the theoretical subject-object dichotomy and to realize the need to investigate living subjectivity in its embeddedness in the world.