Identity and Difference consists of English translations and the original German versions of two little-known lectures given in 1957 by Martin Heidegger, "The Principle of Identity" and "The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics." Both lectures discuss the difficult problem of the nature of identity in the history of metaphysics. A helpful introduction and a list of references are also provided by the translator, Joan Stambaugh.

This volume explores facets of Nietzsche relatively untouched by the majority of the vast literature on him. Stambaugh concentrates on his ideas on art and creativity in general, regarding these realms of human endeavor as not limited to aesthetics in the narrower sense, but as constitutive of life itself. She also explores a much neglected side of Nietzsche's thought, a dimension that is poetic and mystical. Drawing mainly from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche's most enigmatic and profound work, Stambaugh interprets Nietzsche's ultimate affirmation of life out of his experience of...

Gathering and interpreting material that is not readily available elsewhere, this book discusses the thought of the Japanese Buddhist philosophers Dogen, Hisamatsu, and Nishitani. Stambaugh develops ideas about the self culminating in the concept of the Formless Self as formulated by Hisamatsu in his book The Fullness of Nothingness and the essay "The Characteristics of Oriental Nothingness," and further explicated by Nishitani in his book Religion and Nothingness. These works show that Oriental nothingness has nothing to do with the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western concept of...