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.

In the Logic of Being: Realism, Truth, and Time, the influential philosopher Paul M. Livingston explores and illuminates truth, time, and their relationship by employing methods from both Continental and analytic philosophy.

Writing deliberately in a nontechnical style so as to make his book accessible to readers who are not professional philosophers, Michael Gelven here offers an extended meditative essay on the nature and meaning of truth. He approaches this subject directly, rather than through a critique of what others have said about it, and takes off from the realization that truth has a wider meaning than that which can be found in the analysis of true sentences, which is the focus of traditional epistemology. Pursuing philosophical inquiry as a voyage of discovery, the book begins with ordinary questions about the worth and meaning of truth. A fundamental distinction is drawn between the "true" (as in a true proposition) and "truth" as essence, that which we confront as the ultimate terminus of our questioning--for example, between the true definition of mother as a female parent and truth as what we understand being a mother to mean, as one who sacrifices her own interests and safety for her child. The analysis then proceeds to examine the four ways in which we confront truth--through affirmation, acceptance, acknowledgment, and submission--and the existential modes of experience in which these confrontations are embodied: pleasure, fate, guilt, and beauty. Each of these four confrontations has consequences for how we understand the world in which we dwell. Thus the book concludes with interpretation of the world as our home, our history, our tribunal, and ultimately that which lures or beckons us to confront ourselves. Plato, Kant, and Heidegger are the primary sources of philosophical inspiration for Gelven, but he eschews textual exegesis and academic debate in favor of engaging the reader as co-explorer in the discovery of what it means for each of us to be in truth.

The number of open and controversial questions in contemporary Heidegger research continues to be a source of scholarly dialogue. There are important questions that concern the development, as it were, of his thought and the differences and similarities between his early main work Being and Time and his later so-called being-historical thought, the thinking of the event, or appropriation, of Being. There are questions that focus on his relation to important figures in the history of ideas such as the pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, the German idealists, and Nietzsche. Other questions focus on his biography, on his rectorate and on his relation to politics in general and to National Socialism in particular or on his influence on subsequent philosophers. The contributions to this volume, written by leading scholars in the field of Heidegger research, address many of these questions in close readings of Heidegger’s texts and thus provide sound orientation in the field of contemporary Heidegger research. They show how the different trajectories of Heidegger’s thought—his early interest in the meaning of Being and in Dasein, his discussion of, and involvement with, politics, his understanding of art, poetry, and technology, his concept of truth and the idea of a history of Being—all converge at one point: the question of Being. It thus becomes clear that, all differences notwithstanding, Heidegger followed one very consistent path of thinking.

Heidegger&’s thinking has an underlying unity, this book argues, and has cogency for seemingly diverse domains of modern culture: philosophy and religion, aesthetics and literary criticism, intellectual history and social theory. &“The theme of mortality&—finite human existence&—pervades Heidegger&’s thought,&” in the author&’s words, &“before, during, and after his magnum opus, Being and Times, published in 1927.&” This theme is manifested in Heidegger&’s work not &“as funereal melodramatics or as despair and destructive nihilism&” but rather &“as a thinking within anxiety.&” & Four major subthemes in Heidegger&’s thinking are explored in the book&’s four parts: the fundamental ontology developed in Being and Time; the &“lighting and clearing&” of Being, understood as &“unconcealment&”; the history of philosophy&—with emphasis on Heraclitus, Hegel, and Nietzsche&—interpreted as the &“destiny&” of Being; and the poetics of Being, explicated as the &“fundamental experience&” of mortality. & Neither an introduction nor a survey, this book is a close reading of a wide range of Heidegger&’s books, lectures, and articles&—including extensive material not yet translated into English&—informed by the author&’s conversations with Heidegger in 1974&–76. Each of the four subthemes is treated critically. The aim of the book is to push its interrogations of Heidegger&’s thought as far as possible, in order to help the reader toward an independent assessment of his work and to encourage novel, radically conceived approaches to traditional philosophical problems.

Heidegger’s radical thinking on the meaning of truth in a “clear and comprehensive critical edition” (Philosophy in Review). Martin Heidegger’s 1925–26 lectures on truth and time provided much of the basis for his momentous work, Being and Time. Not published until 1976—three months before Heidegger’s death—as volume 21 of his Complete Works, it is nonetheless central to Heidegger’s overall project of reinterpreting Western thought in terms of time and truth. The text shows the degree to which Aristotle underlies Heidegger’s hermeneutical theory of meaning. It also contains Heidegger’s first published critique of Husserl and takes major steps toward establishing the temporal bases of logic and truth. Thomas Sheehan’s elegant and insightful translation offers English-speaking readers access to this fundamental text for the first time.

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.