Heidegger in Ruins

Heidegger in Ruins PDF Author: Richard Wolin
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300269137
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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Book Description
What does it mean when a radical understanding of National Socialism is inextricably embedded in the work of the twentieth century’s most important philosopher? Martin Heidegger’s sympathies for the conservative revolution and National Socialism have long been well known. As the rector of the University of Freiburg in the early 1930s, he worked hard to reshape the university in accordance with National Socialist policies. He also engaged in an all-out struggle to become the movement’s philosophical preceptor, “to lead the leader.” Yet for years, Heidegger’s defenders have tried to separate his political beliefs from his philosophical doctrines. They argued, in effect, that he was good at philosophy but bad at politics. But with the 2014 publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, it has become clear that he embraced a far more radical vision of the conservative revolution than previously suspected. His dissatisfaction with National Socialism, it turns out, was mainly that it did not go far enough. The notebooks show that far from being separated from Nazism, Heidegger’s philosophy was suffused with it. In this book Richard Wolin explores what the notebooks mean for our understanding of arguably the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, and of his ideas—and why his legacy remains radically compromised.

Heidegger in Ruins

Heidegger in Ruins PDF Author: Richard Wolin
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300269137
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 488

Get Book

Book Description
What does it mean when a radical understanding of National Socialism is inextricably embedded in the work of the twentieth century’s most important philosopher? Martin Heidegger’s sympathies for the conservative revolution and National Socialism have long been well known. As the rector of the University of Freiburg in the early 1930s, he worked hard to reshape the university in accordance with National Socialist policies. He also engaged in an all-out struggle to become the movement’s philosophical preceptor, “to lead the leader.” Yet for years, Heidegger’s defenders have tried to separate his political beliefs from his philosophical doctrines. They argued, in effect, that he was good at philosophy but bad at politics. But with the 2014 publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, it has become clear that he embraced a far more radical vision of the conservative revolution than previously suspected. His dissatisfaction with National Socialism, it turns out, was mainly that it did not go far enough. The notebooks show that far from being separated from Nazism, Heidegger’s philosophy was suffused with it. In this book Richard Wolin explores what the notebooks mean for our understanding of arguably the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, and of his ideas—and why his legacy remains radically compromised.

On Heidegger's Nazism and Philosophy

On Heidegger's Nazism and Philosophy PDF Author: Tom Rockmore
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520208988
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description
American philosopher Tom Rockmore boldly refutes suggestions that German philosopher Martin Heidegger's political stance was accidental or adopted under coercion. Rockmore argues that Heidegger's thought and his Nazism are inseparably intertwined. Combining extensive documentation with philosophical and historical analysis, this book raises profound questions about the social and political responsibility of philosophy.

Decay and Afterlife

Decay and Afterlife PDF Author: Aleksandra Prica
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022681159X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
Covering 800 years of intellectual and literary history, Prica considers the textual forms of ruins. Western ruins have long been understood as objects riddled with temporal contradictions, whether they appear in baroque poetry and drama, Romanticism’s nostalgic view of history, eighteenth-century paintings of classical subjects, or even recent photographic histories of the ruins of postindustrial Detroit. Decay and Afterlife pivots away from our immediate, visual fascination with ruins, focusing instead on the textuality of ruins in works about disintegration and survival. Combining an impressive array of literary, philosophical, and historiographical works both canonical and neglected, and encompassing Latin, Italian, French, German, and English sources, Aleksandra Prica addresses ruins as textual forms, examining them in their extraordinary geographical and temporal breadth, highlighting their variability and reflexivity, and uncovering new lines of aesthetic and intellectual affinity. Through close readings, she traverses eight hundred years of intellectual and literary history, from Seneca and Petrarch to Hegel, Goethe, and Georg Simmel. She tracks European discourses on ruins as they metamorphose over time, identifying surprising resemblances and resonances, ignored contrasts and tensions, as well as the shared apprehensions and ideas that come to light in the excavation of these discourses.

Heidegger's Black Notebooks

Heidegger's Black Notebooks PDF Author: Andrew J. Mitchell
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231544383
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
From the 1930s through the 1970s, the philosopher Martin Heidegger kept a running series of private writings, the so-called Black Notebooks. The recent publication of the Black Notebooks volumes from the war years have sparked international controversy. While Heidegger’s engagement with National Socialism was well known, the Black Notebooks showed for the first time that this anti-Semitism was not merely a personal resentment. They contain not just anti-Semitic remarks, they show Heidegger incorporating basic tropes of anti-Semitism into his philosophical thinking. In them, Heidegger tried to assign a philosophical significance to anti-Semitism, with “the Jew” or “world Judaism” cast as antagonist in his project. How, then, are we to engage with a philosophy that, no matter how significant, seems contaminated by anti-Semitism? This book brings together an international group of scholars from a variety of disciplines to discuss the ramifications of the Black Notebooks for philosophy and the humanities at large. Bettina Bergo, Robert Bernasconi, Martin Gessmann, Sander Gilman, Peter E. Gordon, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Michael Marder, Eduardo Mendieta, Richard Polt, Tom Rockmore, Peter Trawny, and Slavoj Žižek discuss issues including anti-Semitism in the Black Notebooks and Heidegger’s thought more broadly, such as German conceptions of Jews and Judaism, Heidegger’s notions of metaphysics, and anti-Semitism’s entanglement with Heidegger’s views on modernity and technology, grappling with material as provocative as it is deplorable. In contrast to both those who seek to exonerate Heidegger and those who simply condemn him, and rather than an all-or-nothing view of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism, they urge careful reading and rereading of his work to turn Heideggerian thought against itself. These measured and thoughtful responses to one of the major scandals in the history of philosophy unflinchingly take up the tangled and contested legacy of Heideggerian thought.

Heidegger's Children

Heidegger's Children PDF Author: Richard Wolin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069116861X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
Martin Heidegger is perhaps the twentieth century's greatest philosopher, and his work stimulated much that is original and compelling in modern thought. A seductive classroom presence, he attracted Germany's brightest young intellects during the 1920s. Many were Jews, who ultimately would have to reconcile their philosophical and, often, personal commitments to Heidegger with his nefarious political views. In 1933, Heidegger cast his lot with National Socialism. He squelched the careers of Jewish students and denounced fellow professors whom he considered insufficiently radical. For years, he signed letters and opened lectures with ''Heil Hitler!'' He paid dues to the Nazi party until the bitter end. Equally problematic for his former students were his sordid efforts to make existential thought serviceable to Nazi ends and his failure to ever renounce these actions. This book explores how four of Heidegger's most influential Jewish students came to grips with his Nazi association and how it affected their thinking. Hannah Arendt, who was Heidegger's lover as well as his student, went on to become one of the century's greatest political thinkers. Karl Löwith returned to Germany in 1953 and quickly became one of its leading philosophers. Hans Jonas grew famous as Germany's premier philosopher of environmentalism. Herbert Marcuse gained celebrity as a Frankfurt School intellectual and mentor to the New Left. Why did these brilliant minds fail to see what was in Heidegger's heart and Germany's future? How would they, after the war, reappraise Germany's intellectual traditions? Could they salvage aspects of Heidegger's thought? Would their philosophy reflect or completely reject their early studies? Could these Heideggerians forgive, or even try to understand, the betrayal of the man they so admired? Heidegger's Children locates these paradoxes in the wider cruel irony that European Jews experienced their greatest calamity immediately following their fullest assimilation. And it finds in their responses answers to questions about the nature of existential disillusionment and the juncture between politics and ideas.

Heidegger's Crisis

Heidegger's Crisis PDF Author: Hans D. Sluga
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674387120
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
Philosophy and politics make uneasy bedfellows. Nowhere has this been more true than in Nazi Germany, where the pursuit of truth and the will to power became fatally entangled. Though Martin Heidegger's Nazi past is well known and much debated, less is understood about the role of philosophy - and other philosophers - in the rise and development of National Socialism.

Engaging Heidegger

Engaging Heidegger PDF Author: Richard Capobianco
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442698594
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
One of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger was primarily concerned with the ‘question of Being.’ However, recent scholarship has tended to marginalize the importance of the name of Being in his thought. Through a focused reading of Heidegger's texts, and especially his late and often overlooked Four Seminars (1966-1973), Richard Capobianco counters this trend by redirecting attention to the centrality of the name of Being in Heidegger's lifetime of thought. Capobianco gives special attention to Heidegger's resonant terms Ereignis and Lichtung and reads them as saying and showing the very same fundamental phenomenon named ‘Being itself ’. Written in a clear and approachable manner, the essays in Engaging Heidegger examine Heidegger's thought in view of ancient Greek, medieval, and Eastern thinking, and they draw out the deeply humane character of his ‘meditative thinking.’

Heidegger and the Jews

Heidegger and the Jews PDF Author: Donatella Di Cesare
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509503862
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Philosophers have long struggled to reconcile Martin Heidegger's involvement in Nazism with his status as one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century. The recent publication of his Black Notebooks has reignited fierce debate on the subject. These thousand-odd pages of jotted observations profoundly challenge our image of the quiet philosopher's exile in the Black Forest, revealing the shocking extent of his anti-Semitism for the first time. For much of the philosophical community, the Black Notebooks have been either used to discredit Heidegger or seen as a bibliographical detail irrelevant to his thought. Yet, in this new book, renowned philosopher Donatella Di Cesare argues that Heidegger's "metaphysical anti-Semitism" was a central part of his philosophical project. Within the context of the Nuremberg race laws, Heidegger felt compelled to define Jewishness and its relationship to his concept of Being. Di Cesare shows that Heidegger saw the Jews as the agents of a modernity that had disfigured the spirit of the West. In a deeply disturbing extrapolation, he presented the Holocaust as both a means for the purification of Being and the Jews' own "self-destruction": a process of death on an industrialized scale that was the logical conclusion of the acceleration in technology they themselves had brought about. Situating Heidegger's anti-Semitism firmly within the context of his thought, this groundbreaking work will be essential reading for students and scholars of philosophy and history as well as the many readers interested in Heidegger's life, work, and legacy.

Heidegger in Ruins

Heidegger in Ruins PDF Author: Richard Wolin
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300233183
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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Book Description
What does it mean when a radical understanding of National Socialism is inextricably embedded in the work of the twentieth century's most important philosopher? Martin Heidegger's sympathies for the conservative revolution and National Socialism have long been well known. As the rector of the University of Freiburg in the early 1930s, he worked hard to reshape the university in accordance with National Socialist policies. He also engaged in an all-out struggle to become the movement's philosophical preceptor, "to lead the leader." Yet for years, Heidegger's defenders have tried to separate his political beliefs from his philosophical doctrines. They argued, in effect, that he was good at philosophy but bad at politics. But with the 2014 publication of Heidegger's Black Notebooks, it has become clear that he embraced a far more radical vision of the conservative revolution than previously suspected. His dissatisfaction with National Socialism, it turns out, was mainly that it did not go far enough. The notebooks show that far from being separated from Nazism, Heidegger's philosophy was suffused with it. In this book Richard Wolin explores what the notebooks mean for our understanding of arguably the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, and of his ideas--and why his legacy remains radically compromised.

Critical Heidegger

Critical Heidegger PDF Author: Christopher E. Macann
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415129497
Category : Philosophy, German
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Critical Heidegger presents a selection of the best works on Martin Heidegger from a number of key commentators. These new and classic essays provide an essential guide to current European reception of his work.