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    introduction to Heidegger

gary e. davis
  December 2021
   


This page introduces readers to Heidegger’s preferred work, while keeping clear the difference between that and my own interests. I want to provide a reliable resource on Heidegger for new readers. New items for introductory readers are listed at the Facebook/Heidegger page for awhile. Today, Dec. 16, occasioned a posting by me that might be a good first point: “engaged being.”

The last item below, “readings...,” links to a sequenced list of primary works by Heidegger available in English (and there as PDFs online). It doesn’t intend to be comprehensive, not even nearly so. I’m choosing work that is more important for a beginning reader (in Heidegger’s view, I believe)—or for a reader who might be steered away from dwelling with Heidegger due to others’ egregious misreading (in my view, of course). I’m a voice of Heidegger-in-English who’s been venturing since 1971 to embody what he wants to enable.

In any case, I can be useful among other engaged scholars who may be genuinely useful. Click “Heidegger studies” above for more sections of discussions.

As the Facebook Page notes: All good mentors want to see you go your ownmost way. Heidegger is the mentor in mind, not me. But of course I want to be useful.

   
  July 2014 real Martin
      He easily played. He was easily wholly with “you.”
 
  August 2015 paths and heights
      Heidegger’s path in Messkirch is allegorical of his career, perhaps.
 
  May 2014 about beginning again (in reverence)
      This links to a short video of Heidegger near the end of his life, with my discussion and link to a PDF of the English translation of his lecture “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” which I’ll discuss someday.
 
  March 2017 on “the experience of thinking”
     

He’s rigorous with his choice of conceptual commentary on his forgettable little poem (imagistic verse). He intimated near the end of his life, 1973, that something singular about his thinking is here (1947). I think there’s much to gain by dwelling with his conceptual commentary.

 
  June 2014 her constellating
      She’s everything: what poets are for, originary Opening, the regioning of that which regions...
 
  May 2014 things of Appropriating
      My posting links to a PDF of “The Thing.”
 
  December 2020 about Contributions to Philosophy
      This introduces F.-W. von Herrmann’s definitive introduction to Contributions to Philosophy: from enowning
 
  April 2016 the role of Considerations notebooks in his ways
      This introduces F.-W. von Herrmann’s discussion of the Considerations.
 
  October 2013 Heidegger’s letter to W. J. Richardson, 1962
      As the translators of Sein und Zeit were finishing up, 1962, and William J. Richardson was writing a book that would become a milestone of early English scholarship on Heidegger, he sent Richardson a letter, which has become famous in Heidegger scholarship, about his entire path of thinking,
 
  September 2013 Heidegger’s early philosophy
      This links to a review of a book about Being and Time by wonderful Ted Kisiel—with introductory commentary from me. This is less about Being and Time than about the sensibility of a great scholar of Heidegger.
 
  March 2017 readings by Heidegger in English
      Now that so much of his supplementary work is coming into translation, it’s easy to not know that the work which he considered most important was available in English before he died. The readings here don’t include Being and Time because he intended, late in life, that B&T should be read in light of his later introductory work, but should be appreciated as an experimental work—an innovating of leading literature and terminology of 1920s German academia. Being and Time was an event of appropriation.
   

 

 

 
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