Heidegger is perhaps the most influential, yet least readily understood, philosopher of the last century. Mark A. Wrathall unpacks Heidegger's dense prose and guides the reader through Heidegger's early concern with the nature of human existence and his later preoccupation with the threat that technology poses to our ability to live worthwhile lives. Wrathall pays particular attention to Heidegger's revolutionary analysis of human existence as inextricably shaped by a shared world. This leads to an exploration of his views on the banality of public life and the possibility of authentic anticipation of death as a response to that banality. Wrathall reviews Heidegger's scandalous involvement with National Socialism, situating it in the context of his views about the movement of world history. He also explains Heidegger's important accounts of truth, art and language. Extracts are taken from Heidegger's magnum opus, Being and Time, as well as a variety of his best-known essays and lectures.

The 'How to Read' series is an introduction to some of the most influential and challenging writers in history, exploring the minds and philosophies of those who have shaped our intellectual and political landscape.

Heidegger is a classic introduction to Heidegger's notoriously difficult work. Truly accessible, it combines clarity of exposition with an authoritative handling of the subject-matter. Richard Polt has written a work that will become the standard text for students looking to understand one of the century's greatest minds.

Heidegger Explained is a clear and thorough summary of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). It gives a fascinating explanation of all stages of Heidegger’s life and career, and shows his entire philosophy to emerge from one simple but profound insight. Many philosophers believe that Heidegger was the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century. His influence has long been felt not just in philosophy, but also in such fields as art, architecture, and literary studies. Yet the great difficulty of Heidegger’s terminology has often scared away interested readers lacking an academic background in philosophy. Author Graham Harman shows that Heidegger is actually one of the simplest and clearest of thinkers. All the diverse topics of his writings, and all the lengthy analyses he gives of past philosophers, boil down to a single powerful idea: being is not presence. In any human relation with the world, our thinking and even our acting do not fully exhaust the world. Something more always withdraws from our grasp. Neither being itself nor individual beings are ever fully “present-at-hand,” in Heidegger’s terminology. This single insight allows Heidegger to revolutionize the phenomenology of his teacher Edmund Husserl. The method of Husserl was to focus entirely on how things present themselves to us as phenomena in consciousness. Heidegger understood that the things are always partly hidden from consciousness, living a secret life of their own. Human beings are not lucid scientific observers staring at the world and describing it, but instead are thrown into a world where light is always mixed with shadow. For Heidegger, the entire history of philosophy has reduced being to some sort of presence, whether by defining it as atoms, consciousness, perfect forms, the will to power, or even God. In this way, past philosophers have all chosen one specific kind of privileged being to represent being itself. Yet this is impossible, since being always partly withdraws from any attempt to define it. For this reason, philosophy needs to make a new beginning, one that would be just as great as the first beginning in ancient Greece. The book ends by shedding new light on Heidegger’s concept of the fourfold, which is so notoriously difficult that most commentators avoid it altogether.

Heidegger scholars consider the philosopher's recently published notebooks, including the issues of Heidegger's Nazism and anti-Semitism. For more than forty years, the philosopher Martin Heidegger logged ideas and opinions in a series of notebooks, known as the “Black Notebooks” after the black oilcloth booklets into which he first transcribed his thoughts. In 2014, the notebooks from 1931 to 1941 were published, sparking immediate controversy. It has long been acknowledged that Heidegger was an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazi Party in the early 1930s. But the notebooks contain a number of anti-Semitic passages—often referring to the stereotype of “World-Jewry”—written even after Heidegger became disenchanted with the Nazis themselves. Reactions from the scholarly community have ranged from dismissal of the significance of these passages to claims that the anti-Semitism in them contaminates all of Heidegger's work. This volume offers the first collection of responses by Heidegger scholars to the publication of the notebooks. In essays commissioned especially for the book, the contributors offer a wide range of views, addressing not only the issues of anti-Semitism and Nazism but also the broader questions that the notebooks raise. Contributors Babette Babich, Andrew Bowie, Steven Crowell, Fred Dallmayr, Donatella Di Cesare, Michael Fagenblat, Ingo Farin, Gregory Fried, Jean Grondin, Karsten Harries, Laurence Paul Hemming, Jeff Malpas, Thomas Rohkrämer, Tracy B. Strong, Peter Trawny, Daniela Vallega-Neu, Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Nancy A. Weston, Holger Zaborowski

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.’

The Blackwell Companion to Heidegger is a complete guide to the work and thought of Martin Heidegger, one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Considers the most important elements of Heidegger’s intellectual biography, including his notorious involvement with National Socialism Provides a systematic and comprehensive exploration of Heidegger’s work One of the few books on Heidegger to cover his later work as well as Being and Time Includes key critical responses to Heidegger’s philosophy Contributors include many of the leading interpreters of, and commentators on, the work of Heidegger

An “excellent translation” of an essential text by the author of Being and Time, in which he continues his pioneering work in phenomenology (Times Literary Supplement, UK). A lecture course that Martin Heidegger gave in 1927, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology continues and extends explorations begun in Being and Time. In this text, Heidegger provides the general outline of his thinking about the fundamental problems of philosophy, which he treats by means of phenomenology, and which he defines and explains as the basic problem of ontology. “For all students and scholars, Basic Problems will provide the “missing link” between Husserl and Heidegger, between phenomenology and Being and Time.” —Teaching Philosophy

A new translation of Martin Heidegger's major work "What is Metaphysics?", originally published in 1929. This edition contains a new afterword by the Translator, a timeline of Heidegger's life and works, a philosophic index of core Heideggerian concepts and a guide for terminology across 19th and 20th century Existentialists. This translation is designed for readability and accessibility to Heidegger's enigmatic and dense philosophy. Complex and specific philosophic terms are translated as literally as possible and academic footnotes have been removed to ensure easy reading. This edition contains his last introduction to the third edition Heidegger published a Foreword consisting of his letter to Ernst Jünger on his sixtieth birthday (where he muses on What is Metaphysics decades later) and his Afterword and Epilogue, which he published years after the original. This classic treatise begins by questioning the nature of metaphysics, pondering its fundamental principles and the nature of its inquiry into being. The paper critically examines the concept of being, not only in its existence, but in its essence and truth. This leads to an examination of the role of metaphysics in understanding the nature of reality and existence. The text deals with the idea of being as it is perceived within metaphysical thought, where being is often illuminated only in relation to itself, leaving other aspects of its essence unexplored. This approach highlights the limitations of metaphysical thought in fully comprehending the essence of being, suggesting a kind of inherent blindness within metaphysical philosophy to certain aspects of reality. Heidegger comments extensively on the relationship between metaphysics and the concept of nothingness, or 'the nothing', as a crucial aspect of understanding being. It discusses how metaphysics, in its traditional form, tends to overlook the significance of nothing in its quest to define and understand being. This oversight is presented as a critical gap in metaphysical thought, as it fails to recognize the integral role that nothingness plays in the broader context of existence and reality. The discussion extends to the implications of this oversight, suggesting that a deeper understanding of metaphysics requires a reevaluation of the role and significance of nothingness within philosophical discourse. This aspect of the paper reflects a profound challenge to conventional metaphysical doctrines, urging a rethinking of fundamental philosophical concepts in order to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of the nature of being and existence.