Heidegger's Polemos

Heidegger's Polemos

Author: Gregory Fried

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2008-10-01

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 0300133278

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Gregory Fried offers in this book a careful investigation of Martin Heidegger’s understanding of politics. Disturbing issues surround Heidegger’s commitment to National Socialism, his disdain for liberal democracy, and his rejection of the Enlightenment. Fried confronts these issues, focusing not on the historical debate over Heidegger’s personal involvement with Nazism, but on whether and how the formulation of Heidegger’s ontology relates to his political thinking as expressed in his philosophical works. The inquiry begins with Heidegger’s interpretation of Heraclitus, particularly the term polemos (“war,” or, in Heidegger’s usage, “confrontation”). Fried contends that Heidegger invests polemos with broad ontological significance and that his appropriation of the word provides important insights into major strands of his thinking—his conception of the human being, understanding of truth, and interpretation of history—as well as the meaning of the so-called turn in his thought. Although Fried finds that Heidegger’s politics are continuous with his thought, he also argues that Heidegger’s work raises important questions about contemporary identity politics. Fried also shows that many postmodernists, despite attempts to distance themselves from Heidegger, fail to avoid some of the same political pitfalls his thinking entailed.


Towards a Polemical Ethics

Towards a Polemical Ethics

Author: Gregory Fried

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-04-07

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1786610027

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Martin Heidegger held Plato responsible for inaugurating the slow slide of the West into nihilism and the apocalyptic crisis of modernity. In this book, Gregory Fried defends Plato against Heidegger’s critiques. While taking seriously Heidegger’s analysis of human finitude and historicity, Fried argues that Heidegger neglects the transcending ideals that necessarily guide human life as situated in time and place. That neglect results in Heidegger’s disastrous politics, unhinged from a practical reason grounded in the philosophical search from a truth that transcends historical contingency. Thinking both with and against Heidegger, Fried shows how Plato’s skeptical idealism provides an ethics that captures both the situatedness of finite human existence and the need for transcendent ideals. The result is a novel way of understanding politics and ethical life that Fried calls a polemical ethics, which mediates between finitude and transcendence by engaging in constructive confrontation with both traditions and other persons. The contradiction between the founding ideals of the United States and its actual history of racism and slavery provides an occasion to discuss polemical ethics in practice.


The Cambridge Heidegger Lexicon

The Cambridge Heidegger Lexicon

Author: Mark A. Wrathall

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-06-03

Total Pages: 1605

ISBN-13: 1108640834

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Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) was one of the most original thinkers of the twentieth century. His work has profoundly influenced philosophers including Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Hannah Arendt, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, Richard Rorty, Hubert Dreyfus, Stanley Cavell, Emmanuel Levinas, Alain Badiou, and Gilles Deleuze. His accounts of human existence and being and his critique of technology have inspired theorists in fields as diverse as theology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, political science, and the humanities. This Lexicon provides a comprehensive and accessible guide to Heidegger's notoriously obscure vocabulary. Each entry clearly and concisely defines a key term and explores in depth the meaning of each concept, explaining how it fits into Heidegger's broader philosophical project. With over 220 entries written by the world's leading Heidegger experts, this landmark volume will be indispensable for any student or scholar of Heidegger's work.


Being and Truth

Being and Truth

Author: Martin Heidegger

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2010-09-06

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 0253004659

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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’s Politics of Enframing

Heidegger’s Politics of Enframing

Author: Javier Cardoza-Kon

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2018-05-17

Total Pages: 158

ISBN-13: 1350052582

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Heidegger's Politics of Enframing examines the controversial political choices made by Heidegger, the one-time Nazi party member, and articulates a direct connection between his troubling political decisions and his late thoughts on technology. This book looks at the evolution of Heidegger's understanding of human politics, viewed through the lens of his ontological articulations from the early 1930's to the end of his life, with a deep focus on the role that Nietzsche plays in Heidegger's understanding of technology and the technological. The key question within Heidegger's thoughts on technology is whether Heidegger is proposing a sense of responsibility, and therefore an ethics, in his notion of a technological “saving power.” Cardoza-Kon develops an understanding of what the political ramifications of this are, and what can we take from Heidegger's thought today.


Heidegger and the Political

Heidegger and the Political

Author: Miguel de Beistegui

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2002-09-11

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 1134791240

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Recent studies of Heidegger's involvement with National Socialism have often presented Heidegger's philosophy as a forerunner to his political involvement. This has occured often to the detriment of the highly complex nature of Heidegger's relation to the political. Heidegger and the Political redresses this imbalance and is one of the first books to critically assess Heidegger's relation to politics and his conception of the political. Miguel de Beistegui shows how we must question why the political is so often displaced in Heidegger's writings rather than read the political into Heidegger. Exploring Heidegger's ontology where politics takes place after a forgetting of Being and his wish to think a site more originary and primordial than politics, Heidegger and the Political considers what some of Heidegger's key motifs - his emphasis on lost origins, his discussions of Holderlin's poetry, his writing on technology and the ancient Greek polis - may tell us about Heidegger's relation to the political. Miguel de Beistegui also engages with the very risks implicit in Heidegger's denial of the political and how this opens up the question of the risk of thinking itself. Heidegger and the Political is essential reading for students of philosophy and politics and all those interested in the question of the political today.


Confronting Heidegger

Confronting Heidegger

Author: Gregory Fried

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2019-10-22

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1786611929

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The question of the relation of Martin Heidegger’s thought to politics has been a subject of controversy since the 1930s, when he became an advocate of the National Socialist regime in Germany. This volume addresses this question in a unique format, as a dialogue among leading Heidegger scholars. That dialogue begins with an exchange between Gregory Fried and Emmanuel Faye about Faye’s contention that Heidegger’s work represents nothing short of “the introduction of Nazism into philosophy.” At stake are issues such as what Heidegger himself understood Nazism to be, whether a thinker’s life and actions define the meaning of his work, the enduring threat of fascism, and the nature of rationality and philosophy itself. Richard Polt, Matthew Sharpe, Dieter Thomä, William Altman, and Sidonie Kellerer join the conversation, with responses from Fried and Faye.


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.


Heidegger’s Politics of Enframing

Heidegger’s Politics of Enframing

Author: Javier Cardoza-Kon

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2018-05-17

Total Pages: 157

ISBN-13: 1350052604

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Heidegger's Politics of Enframing examines the controversial political choices made by Heidegger, the one-time Nazi party member, and articulates a direct connection between his troubling political decisions and his late thoughts on technology. This book looks at the evolution of Heidegger's understanding of human politics, viewed through the lens of his ontological articulations from the early 1930's to the end of his life, with a deep focus on the role that Nietzsche plays in Heidegger's understanding of technology and the technological. The key question within Heidegger's thoughts on technology is whether Heidegger is proposing a sense of responsibility, and therefore an ethics, in his notion of a technological “saving power.” Cardoza-Kon develops an understanding of what the political ramifications of this are, and what can we take from Heidegger's thought today.


Heidegger, the Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935

Heidegger, the Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935

Author: Editions Albin Michel

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2009-01-01

Total Pages: 466

ISBN-13: 0300120869

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In the most comprehensive examination to date of Heidegger’s Nazism, Emmanuel Faye draws on previously unavailable materials to paint a damning picture of Nazism’s influence on the philosopher’s thought and politics. In this provocative book, Faye uses excerpts from unpublished seminars to show that Heidegger’s philosophical writings are fatally compromised by an adherence to National Socialist ideas. In other documents, Faye finds expressions of racism and exterminatory anti-Semitism. Faye disputes the view of Heidegger as a na�ve, temporarily disoriented academician and instead shows him to have been a self-appointed “spiritual guide” for Nazism whose intentionality was clear. Contrary to what some have written, Heidegger’s Nazism became even more radical after 1935, as Faye demonstrates. He revisits Heidegger’s masterwork, Being and Time, and concludes that in it Heidegger does not present a philosophy of individual existence but rather a doctrine of radical self-sacrifice, where individualization is allowed only for the purpose of heroism in warfare. Faye’s book was highly controversial when originally published in France in 2005. Now available in Michael B. Smith’s fluid English translation, it is bound to awaken controversy in the English-speaking world.