Translators of Heidegger’s interpretations of other thinkers face a challenge: they must contend not only with Heidegger’s distinctive choice of words, but also the terminology of his subject, whether it be Aristotle, Kant, or Schelling. The response by and large has been to focus on Heidegger’s turns of phrase, at the expense of the thinker he interprets. In this paper, I challenge this practice, using Heidegger’s interpretive works on Kant as a test case. If we overlook the terms of the author Heidegger interprets, we miss a major source of Heidegger’s phrasing, and lose the connotations that he invokes by using these terms. Further, such translations reinforce the damaging assumption that Heidegger’s interpretations venture far off-topic. I argue that when Heidegger references Kantian turns of phrase, these terms should be translated to match the standard English translation of Kant, and show how following this method of translation deepens our understanding of Heidegger’s Kant interpretation. In the appendix, I provide two passages exemplifying this method of translation.

Immersive art has been one of biggest trends in the artworld for the past few years. Yet, so far there has been little philosophical discussion on the nature and value of this immersive trend. In this article, I show how Heidegger’s meditations on art can provide a robust assessment of immersive art. On the one hand, immersive art can be taken to culminate in Heidegger’s views on the “machinational” character of modern art, where artworks turn into calculative experience machines, geared to provide “lived experiences” rather than experi­ences of truth. On the other hand, Heidegger’s thought also lends itself to a more positive assessment, where immersive art undermines machination from within and provides experiences of wonder, which are irreducible to and uncontrollable by calculative thinking.

I argue that Heidegger’s methodological breakthrough in the early 1920s, the development of hermeneutic phenomenology, and the structure of Being and Time are the result of Heidegger’s appropriation of Aristotle’s philosophical method in his Physics and Nicomachean Ethics. In part one, I explain the general structure of Aristotle’s method and demonstrate the distinction between scientific and philo­sophical investigations. In part two, I show how formal indication and phenomenological destruction are the product of Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle’s method by demonstrating their affinity in approach, content, and criteria for success. Lastly, in part three, I show how aspects of Being and Time, specifically das Man and the destruction of history, become more intelligible when framed in terms of an Aristotelian investigation into endoxa.

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.