With characteristic lucidity and style, Steiner makes Heidegger's immensely difficult body of work accessible to the general reader. In a new introduction, Steiner addresses language and philosophy and the rise of Nazism. "It would be hard to imagine a better introduction to the work of philosopher Martin Heidegger."—George Kateb, The New Republic

The story of Heidegger's life and philosophy, a quintessentially German story in which good and evil, brilliance and blindness are inextricably entwined and the passions and disasters of a whole century come into play, is told in this brilliant biography.

Heidegger's writings are among the most formidable in recent philosophy. The pivotal concepts of his thought are for many the source of both fascination and frustration. Yet any student of philosophy needs to become acquainted with Heidegger's thought. "Martin Heidegger: Key Concepts" is designed to facilitate this. Each chapter introduces and explains a key Heideggerian concept, or a cluster of closely related concepts. Together, the chapters cover the full range of Heidegger's thought in its early, middle, and later phases.

Here is the essential Heidegger, a most controversial figure. Following a cogent introduction by Manfred Stassen, this collection is divided into three sections: The Man - Politics and Ideology; The Method - Philosophy from Phenomenology to "Thanking"; and The Message - From "Being" to "Beyng." All but one of the translations is a classic rendition. Among the content: "The Jewish Contamination of German Spiritual Life" (1929); "Follow the Fnhrer!" (1934); "The Thinker as Poet" (1947); "The Task of Destructuring of the History of Ontology (1927); "My Way to Phenomenology" (1963); "Being-in-the-World as Being-with and Being a Self: The 'They' (1927); "Care as the Being of Da-sein" (1927); "àPoetically, Man Dwellsà" (1951); "The Question Concerning Technology" (1949); and much more.

Since the publication of Victor Farias's Heidegger and Nazism, the discussion about the political significance of Martin Heidegger's thinking has been distorted. Because of his association with the Third Reich, some have dismissed Heidegger out of hand while others have sought to explain away certain connections. What is often lost in the writing of critics and advocates alike is an honest assessment of Heidegger as a political thinker and a frank interest in understanding his work. Martin Heidegger: Paths Taken, Paths Opened takes Heidegger's philosophy on its own terms and explores the pivotal significance of his phenomenology for political theory. Heidegger opposed, at the deepest level, everything that informs the global, technological civilization that seems to be the fate of humanity. Yet even in the liberal and technologically oriented West we cannot proceed without a confrontation with his thought. In this timely addition to the 20th Century Political Thinkers series, Gregory Bruce Smith shows Heidegger's thought to be an inescapable challenge to our current ethical habits and contemporary political institutions. In this path-breaking work, Smith establishes the centrality of Heidegger's thought, even to those who would claim to be his most ardent critics. Smith also addresses difficult interpretative questions regarding the relationship of Heidegger's early and later work and the status of political ideas with respect to Heidegger's phenomenological project. A work of broad interpretative breadth and keen political insight, Martin Heidegger: Paths Taken, Paths Opened establishes the undeniable importance of Heidegger's thought for the future of the tradition of political philosophy.

A portrait of Martin Heidegger as a man and a philosopher In this biography of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), now available in English, historian Guillaume Payen synthesizes the connections between the German philosopher’s life and work. Critically, but without polemics, he creates a portrait of Heidegger in his time, using all available sources—lectures, letters, and the notorious “black notebooks.” Payen chronicles Heidegger’s “changing destinies”: after the First World War, an uncompromising Catholicism gave way to a vigorous striving for a philosophical revolution—fertile ground for National Socialism. The book reflects a life of light and shadow. Heidegger was a great philosopher and teacher who cultivated friendships and love affairs with Jews but also was an anti-Semitic nationalist who lamented the “Judaization of German intellectual life.&rdquo

In Questioning Martin Heidegger, Martin Heidegger’s “Overcoming Metaphysics” provides the jumping-off point for a wide-ranging critique and deconstruction of Western metaphysics from the Pre-Socratics and Sophists to Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Derrida. Besides questioning Martin Heidegger’s controversial relationship with German National Socialism (Nazism) and the Holocaust, Questioning Martin Heidegger also takes off onto diverse topics like the question of being and the problem of nothingness, the birth of subjectivity and the death of God, and the Kehre and the emergence of a global ecological consciousness. Written in straightforward, jargon-free language, Questioning Martin Heidegger will be stimulating and exciting reading for professional scholars and enthusiastic laypersons, philosophy students and the general public.

The tragedy of totalitarianism, one of the most important turns in the modern philosophy and history of the West undergirds the intellectual relationship between Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt. The rise of totalitarianism caused the disruption of traditional metaphysical and political categories and the necessity of a painstaking forging of new languages for the description of reality. This book argues that Arendt’s answer to Heidegger’s philosophy, intelligible only within the wider context of both thinkers’ struggles with the philosophical tradition of the West, also opens up a new horizon of conceptualizing the relationship between philosophy and education. Paulina Sosnowska develops Arendt's thesis of the broken thread of tradition and situates it in the wider context of Heideggerian philosophy and his entanglement with Nazism, and consequently, questions the traditional relationship between philosophy and education. The final parts of this book return to the problem of dialogue between philosophy, thinking, and university education in times when the political and ethical framework is no longer determined by the continuity of tradition, but the caesura of twentieth-century totalitarianism.

A biographical account of two major thinkers of the twentieth century, a relationship marked as much by estrangement and distance as reunion and friendship. How could Hannah Arendt, a German Jew who fled Germany in 1931, have reconciled with Martin Heidegger, whom she knew had joined and actively participated in the Nazi Party? In this remarkable biography, Antonia Grunenberg tells how the relationship between Arendt and Heidegger embraced both love and thought and made their passions inseparable, both philosophically and romantically. Grunenberg recounts how the history between Arendt and Heidegger is entwined with the history of the twentieth century with its breaks, catastrophes, and crises. Against the violent backdrop of the last century, she details their complicated and often fissured relationship as well as their intense commitments to thinking. “Focuses on a relationship that began when Arendt was a student in the 1920s, was broken between 1933 and 45, and resumed after the war.” —The Chronicle of Higher Education

In a unique parallel analysis, Muhammad Kamal delves into the most controversial subjects of Islamic and Western existential philosophy. He describes the philosophical ‘turn’, ontological difference, becoming, and nothingness in the ontology of Mulla Sadra and Martin Heidegger. Through analysing the ontological enterprises of Sadra and Heidegger, Kamal shows how they both held that Being is the sole reality, and how both stood in opposition to Plato’s metaphysics. Despite hailing from different regions and eras, both Sadra and Heidegger viewed Plato’s philosophy as an established philosophical tradition which led to a state of untruth, or what Heidegger would have called ‘the oblivion of Being’. As Kamal explicates, Heidegger’s opposition to Plato became manifest in his deconstruction of the history of ontology, while Mulla Sadra’s opposition to Plato emerged through his criticism of the Iranian philosopher Suhrawardi’s doctrine of the principality of essence. These new interpretations of being by two philosophers brought new life to both Islamic and Western schools of philosophy and have formed the basis of much of modern ontology, epistemology, and philosophical psychology.