Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy
Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy

Author: Peter Trawny

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2015-12-29

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 022630373X

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The world-historical antagonist of this narrative, however, has remained hitherto undisclosed: the Jews, or more specifically "world Judaism." As Trawny shows, world Judaism emerges for Heidegger as a racialized, destructive, technological threat to the German homeland, indeed to any homeland. Trawny pinpoints recurrent anti-Semitic themes in the Notebooks, including Heidegger's adoption of crude cultural stereotypes, his assigning of racial reasons to philsophical decisions (even undermining his Jewish teacher, Edmund Husserl), his especially damning endorsement of a Jewish "world conspiracy" (such as that proposed by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion), and his first published remarks on the extermination camps and gas chambers under the troubling aegis of a Jewish "self-annihilation." Trawny concludes with a thoughtful meditation on how Heidegger's achievements might still be valued despite these horrifying facets of his thought.

Heidegger's Black Notebooks
Heidegger's Black Notebooks

Author: Andrew J. Mitchell

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2017-09-05

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 0231544383

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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.

Freedom to Fail
Freedom to Fail

Author: Peter Trawny

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2015-06-24

Total Pages: 66

ISBN-13: 0745695264

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Martin Heidegger is widely regarded as one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth-century, and his seminal text Being and Time is considered one of the most significant texts in contemporary philosophy. Yet his name has also been mired in controversy because of his affiliations with the Nazi regime, his failure to criticize its genocidal politics and his subsequent silence about the holocaust. Now, according to Heidegger's wishes, and to complete the publication of his multi-volume Complete Works, his highly controversial and secret 'Black Notebooks' have been released to the public. These notebooks reveal the extent to which Heidegger's 'personal Nazism' was neither incidental nor opportunistic, but part of his philosophical ethos. So, why would Heidegger, far from destroying them, allow these notebooks, which contain examples of this extreme thinking, to be published? In this revealing new book, Peter Trawny, editor of Heidegger's complete works in German, confronts these questions and, by way of a compelling study of his theoretical work, shows that Heidegger was committed to a conception of freedom that is only beholden to the judgement of the history of being; that is, that to be free means to be free from the prejudices, norms, or mores of one's time. Whoever thinks the truth of being freely exposes themselves to the danger of epochal errancy. For this reason, Heidegger's decision to publish his notebooks, including their anti-Jewish passages, was an exercise of this anarchical freedom. In the course of a wide-ranging discussion of Heidegger's views on truth, ethics, the truth of being, tragedy and his relationship to other figures such as Nietzsche and Schmitt, Trawny provides a compelling argument for why Heidegger wanted the explosive material in his Black Notebooks to be published, whilst also offering an original and provocative interpretation of Heidegger's work.

Heidegger and Nazism
Heidegger and Nazism

Author: Víctor Farías

Publisher: Temple University Press

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 9780877228301

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The first book to document Heidegger's close connections to Nazism-now available to a new generation of students

Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy
Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy

Author: Peter Trawny

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2015-12-29

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 022630387X

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In 2014, the first three volumes of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks—the personal and philosophical notebooks that he kept during the war years—were published in Germany. These notebooks provide the first textual evidence of anti-Semitism in Heidegger’s philosophy, not simply in passing remarks, but as incorporated into his philosophical and political thinking itself. In Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy, Peter Trawny, the editor of those notebooks, offers the first evaluation of Heidegger’s philosophical project in light of the Black Notebooks. While Heidegger’s affiliation with National Socialism is well known, the anti-Semitic dimension of that engagement could not be fully told until now. Trawny traces Heidegger’s development of a grand “narrative” of the history of being, the “being-historical thinking” at the center of Heidegger’s work after Being and Time. Two of the protagonists of this narrative are well known to Heidegger’s readers: the Greeks and the Germans. The world-historical antagonist of this narrative, however, has remained hitherto undisclosed: the Jews, or, more specifically, “world Judaism.” As Trawny shows, world Judaism emerges as a racialized, destructive, and technological threat to the German homeland, indeed, to any homeland whatsoever. Trawny pinpoints recurrent, anti-Semitic themes in the Notebooks, including Heidegger’s adoption of crude cultural stereotypes, his assigning of racial reasons to philosophical decisions (even undermining his Jewish teacher, Edmund Husserl), his endorsement of a Jewish “world conspiracy,” and his first published remarks on the extermination camps and gas chambers (under the troubling aegis of a Jewish “self-annihilation”). Trawny concludes with a thoughtful meditation on how Heidegger’s achievements might still be valued despite these horrifying facets. Unflinching and systematic, this is one of the most important assessments of one of the most important philosophers in our history.

Heidegger
Heidegger

Author: Peter Trawny

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2019-01-15

Total Pages: 151

ISBN-13: 1509521798

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Martin Heidegger is one of the most influential figures of twentieth-century philosophy but his reputation was tainted by his associations with Nazism. The posthumous publication of the Black Notebooks, which reveal the shocking extent of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism, has only cast further doubt on his work. Now more than ever, a new introduction to Heidegger is needed to reassess his work and legacy. This book by the world-leading Heidegger scholar Peter Trawny is the first introduction to take into account the new material made available by the explosive publication of the Black Notebooks. Seeking neither to condemn nor excuse Heidegger’s views, Trawny directly confronts and elucidates the most problematic aspects of his thought. At the same time, he provides a comprehensive survey of Heidegger’s development, from his early writings on phenomenology and his magnum opus, Being and Time, to his later writings on poetry and technology. Trawny captures the extraordinary significance and breadth of fifty years of philosophical production, all against the backdrop of the tumultuous events of the twentieth century. This concise introduction will be required reading for the many students and scholars in philosophy and critical theory who study Heidegger, and it will be of great interest to general readers who want to know more about one of the major figures of contemporary philosophy.

Heidegger and His Jewish Reception
Heidegger and His Jewish Reception

Author: Daniel M. Herskowitz

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-10-08

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 1108840469

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Examines the rich and persistent Jewish engagement with one of the most important and controversial modern philosophers, Martin Heidegger.

Ponderings II–VI
Ponderings II–VI

Author: Martin Heidegger

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2016-05-02

Total Pages: 399

ISBN-13: 0253020743

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Ponderings II–VI begins the much-anticipated English translation of Martin Heidegger's "Black Notebooks." In a series of small notebooks with black covers, Heidegger confided sundry personal observations and ideas over the course of 40 years. The five notebooks in this volume were written between 1931 and 1938 and thus chronicle Heidegger's year as Rector of the University of Freiburg during the Nazi era. Published in German as volume 94 of the Complete Works, these challenging and fascinating journal entries shed light on Heidegger's philosophical development regarding his central question of what it means to be, but also on his relation to National Socialism and the revolutionary atmosphere of the 1930s in Germany. Readers previously familiar only with excerpts taken out of context may now determine for themselves whether the controversy and censure the "Black Notebooks" have received are deserved or not. This faithful translation by Richard Rojcewicz opens the texts in a way that captures their philosophical and political content while disentangling Heidegger's notoriously difficult language.

Heidegger's Roots
Heidegger's Roots

Author: Charles R. Bambach

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 9780801472664

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There is a gap in the literature for an investigation of the shared themes between Heidegger's thought and that of the ideologists of National Socialism. The author reads Heidegger's writings from 1933-45 in historical context, showing his engagement with the National Socialists.

Of Spirit
Of Spirit

Author: Jacques Derrida

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 152

ISBN-13: 9780226143194

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"I shall speak of ghost, of flame, and of ashes." These are the first words of Jacques Derrida's lecture on Heidegger. It is again a question of Nazism—of what remains to be thought through of Nazism in general and of Heidegger's Nazism in particular. It is also "politics of spirit" which at the time people thought—they still want to today—to oppose to the inhuman. "Derrida's ruminations should intrigue anyone interested in Post-Structuralism. . . . . This study of Heidegger is a fine example of how Derrida can make readers of philosophical texts notice difficult problems in almost imperceptible details of those texts."—David Hoy, London Review of Books "Will a more important book on Heidegger appear in our time? No, not unless Derrida continues to think and write in his spirit. . . . Let there be no mistake: this is not merely a brilliant book on Heidegger, it is thinking in the grand style."—David Farrell Krell, Research in Phenomenology "The analysis of Heidegger is brilliant, provocative, elusive."—Peter C. Hodgson, Religious Studies Review