First published in German in 1995, volume 77 of Heidegger's Complete Works consists of three imaginary conversations written as World War II was coming to an end. Composed at a crucial moment in history and in Heidegger's own thinking, these conversations present meditations on science and technology; the devastation of nature, the war, and evil; and the possibility of release from representational thinking into a more authentic relation with being and the world. The first conversation involves a scientist, a scholar, and a guide walking together on a country path; the second takes place...

Philosophers are accustomed to thinking about human existence as finite and deathbound. Anne O'Byrne focuses instead on birth as a way to make sense of being alive. Building on the work of Heidegger, Dilthey, Arendt, and Nancy, O'Byrne discusses how the world becomes ours and how meaning emerges from our relations to generations past and to come. Themes such as creation, time, inheritance, birth and action, embodiment, biological determinism, and cloning anchor this sensitive and powerful analysis. O'Byrne's thinking advances and deepens important discussions at the intersections of...

First published in 1990 as the second part of volume 50 of Heidegger's Complete Works, Introduction to Philosophy presents Heidegger's final lecture course given at the University of Freiburg in 1944 before he was drafted into the German army. While the lecture is incomplete, Heidegger provides a clear and provocative discussion of the relation between philosophy and poetry by analyzing Nietzsche's poetry. Here, Heidegger explores themes such as the home and homelessness, the age of technology, globalization, postmodernity, the philosophy of poetry and language, aesthetics, and the role of...

Burt C. Hopkins presents the first in-depth study of the work of Edmund Husserl and Jacob Klein on the philosophical foundations of the logic of modern symbolic mathematics. Accounts of the philosophical origins of formalized concepts--especially mathematical concepts and the process of mathematical abstraction that generates them--have been paramount to the development of phenomenology. Both Husserl and Klein independently concluded that it is impossible to separate the historical origin of the thought that generates the basic concepts of mathematics from their philosophical meanings....

In Gadamer's hermeneutics, interpretation is inseparable from the broader concern of making one's way in life. In this book, James Risser builds on this insight about the juxtaposition of human living and the act of understanding by tracing hermeneutics back to the basic experience of philosophy as defined by Plato. For Risser, Plato provides resources for new directions in hermeneutics and new possibilities for "the life of understanding" and "the understanding of life." Risser places Gadamer in dialogue with Plato, with the issue of memory as a conceptual focus. He develops themes...

This volume consists of two lecture series given by Heidegger in the 1940s and 1950s. The lectures given in Bremen constitute the first public lectures Heidegger delivered after World War II, when he was officially banned from teaching. Here, Heidegger openly resumes thinking that deeply engaged him with Holderlin's poetry and themes developed in his earlier works. In the Freiburg lectures Heidegger ponders thought itself and freely engages with the German idealists and Greek thinkers who had provoked him in the past. Andrew J. Mitchell's translation allows English-speaking readers to...

The Shakespearean image of a tempest and its aftermath forms the beginning as well as a major guiding thread of Logic of Imagination. Moving beyond the horizons of his earlier work, Force of Imagination, John Sallis sets out to unsettle the traditional conception of logic, to mark its limits, and, beyond these limits, to launch another, exorbitant logic--a logic of imagination. Drawing on a vast range of sources, including Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud, as well as developments in modern logic and modern mathematics, Sallis shows how a logic of imagination can disclose...

Martin Heidegger's The Event offers his most substantial self-critique of his Contributions to Philosophy: Of the Event and articulates what he means by the event itself. Richard Rojcewicz's elegant translation offers the English-speaking reader intimate contact with one of the most basic Heideggerian concepts. This book lays out how the event is to be understood and ties it closely to looking, showing, self-manifestation, and the self-unveiling of the gods. The Event (Complete Works, volume 71) is part of a series of Heidegger's private writings in response to Contributions.

Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002), one of the towering figures of contemporary Continental philosophy, is best known for Truth and Method, where he elaborated the concept of "philosophical hermeneutics," a programmatic way to get to what we do when we engage in interpretation. Donatella Di Cesare highlights the central place of Greek philosophy, particularly Plato, in Gadamer's work, brings out differences between his thought and that of Heidegger, and connects him with discussions and debates in pragmatism. This is a sensitive and thoroughly readable philosophical portrait of one of the 20th...

By focusing on the immortal character of the soul in key Platonic dialogues, Sara Brill shows how Plato thought of the soul as remarkably flexible, complex, and indicative of the inner workings of political life and institutions. As she explores the character of the soul, Brill reveals the corrective function that law and myth serve. If the soul is limitless, she claims, then the city must serve a regulatory or prosthetic function and prop up good political institutions against the threat of the soul's excess. Brill's sensitivity to dramatic elements and discursive strategies in Plato's...