Heidegger has often been seen as having no moral philosophy and a political philosophy that can only support fascism. Sonia Sikka's book challenges this view, arguing instead that Heidegger should be considered a qualified moral realist, and that his insights on cultural identity and cross-cultural interaction are not invalidated by his support for Nazism. Sikka explores the ramifications of Heidegger's moral and political thought for topics including free will and responsibility, the status of humanity within the design of nature, the relation between the individual and culture, the rights of peoples to political self-determination, the idea of race and the problem of racism, historical relativism, the subjectivity of values, and the nature of justice. Her discussion highlights aspects of Heidegger's thought that are still relevant for modern debates, while also addressing its limitations as reflected in his political affiliations and sympathies.

This book is a balanced and incisive analysis of Heidegger's ethical, cultural and political thought, arguing that his work remains relevant to modern debates.

Martin Heidegger's ties to Nazism have tarnished his stature as one of the towering figures of twentieth-century philosophy. The publication of the Black Notebooks in 2014, which revealed the full extent of Heidegger's anti-Semitism and enduring sympathy for National Socialism, only inflamed the controversy. Richard Wolin's The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger has played a seminal role in the international debate over the consequences of Heidegger's Nazism. In this edition, the author provides a new preface addressing the effect of the Black Notebooks on our understanding of the relationship between politics and philosophy in Heidegger's work. Building on his pathbreaking interpretation of the philosopher's political thought, Wolin demonstrates that philosophy and politics cannot be disentangled in Heidegger's oeuvre. Völkisch ideological themes suffuse even his most sublime philosophical treatises. Therefore, despite Heidegger's profundity as a thinker, his critique of civilization is saturated with disturbing anti-democratic and anti-Semitic leitmotifs and claims.

This book traces Heidegger's influence on a variety of political movements to fundamental ambiguities in his understanding of everydayness and nihilism.

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.

Despite Heidegger's identifying his own thought with 'ethics' in the most original sense, his understanding of ethics has been criticised both for its supposed ignorance of the role of the other human being and for its relation to politics. This book contends that, in fact, it is Heidegger's own notion of 'being-with' -his rethinking of intersubjectivity- which demonstrates precisely what is wrong with his early work and demands that the place of ethics be rethought. Heidegger and the Place of Ethics shows how this rethinking occurs in Heidegger's own laterwork. In particular, the crossing out of the earlier work in the turn to the later allows us to think 'being-with' as essential to a Heideggerian ethics and to rethink the relationship between ethics and politics which previously issued in Heidegger's engagement with Nazism. This rethinking of ethics and politics in light of the originality of 'being-with' brings us before a hitherto unnoticed proximity between Heidegger's later work and the Lacanian political thought of Slavoj Žižek among others; it thereby opens up the possibility of a politically progressive Heideggerianism, and many unexpected encounters with thinkers generally considered to be separated from Heidegger by an abyss.

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.