Books of essays on Heidegger

The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger. Edited and introduction by Charles B. Guignon, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993.
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In his introduction, the editor offers this description of Ereignis:

Epochs in the history of being are brought about through what Heidegger calls an Ereignis, a word meaning "event" but tied to the idea of "owness" or "appropriation" (eigen), and so suggesting "an event of coming-into-its-own>." If unconcealment results from an event within being and so is not something humans do, it follows that the concealment running through the history of metaphysics is also something that happens within being itself. Concealment inevitably accompanies every emerging-into-presence in this sense: just as the items in a room can become visible only if the lighting that illuminates them itself becomes invisible, so things can become manifest only if this manifesting itself "stays away" or "withdraws." This first-order concealment is unavoidable and innocuous. But it becomes aggravated by a second-order concealment that occurs when the original concealment itself is concealed. That is, insofar as humans are oblivious to the fact that every disclosedness involves concealment, they fall into the illusion of thinking that nothing is hidden, and that everything is totally out front.

P. 18

Michael Zimmerman, in his essay, notes the resonances between Ereignis and Asian thought.

[...L]ater Heidegger's notion of the event of appropriation (Ereignis), which gathers mortals together into the luminous cosmic dance with gods, earth, and sky, bears important similarities to Buddhism's mutual coproduction and Lao Tsu's tao, both of which are regarded as nonanthropocentric. Ereignis, sun-yata, tao: these may be different names for the acausal, spontaneous arising and mutually appropriating play of phenomena. In suggesting that Ereignis "gives" time and being, Heidegger opens himself to the criticism that he is inventing a "metaphysics" of nothingness. Nevertheless, Dogen (1200-53 A.D.), founder of Zen's Soto sect, analyzed the temporality of absolute nothingness in a way that has significant affinities both with early Heidegger's notion of temporality as the "clearing" for presencing and with later Heidegger's notion of the mutually appropriative play of appearances.

P. 259


A Companion To Heidegger. Edited by Hubert L. Dreyfus & Mark A. Wrathall, Oxford, Blackwell, 2005.
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Four of these essays appeared in the earlier Heidegger: A Critical Reader, below, but the rest are new to this volume, and all are generally of an exceptional quality and from the leading contributors in the evolving field of Heidegger scholarship. Heidegger's works continue to be translated and published, and our understanding of his themes is improving. This volume is both the most comprehensive collection of essays on Heidegger to date, and also has the most recent interpretations.


Critical Heidegger Edited by Christopher Macann, London, Routledge, 1996.
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Diacritics volume 19 numbers 3-4 Heidegger: Art and Politics
Edited by Rodolphe Gasché and Anthony Appiah, Baltimore, The John Hopkins University Press, 1989.
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Endings Questions of Memory in Hegel and Heidegger Edited by Rebecca Comay and John McCumber, Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern University Press, 1999.
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From Phenomenology to Thought, Errancy, and Desire Essays in Honor of William J. Richarson, S.J. Edited by Babette E. Babich, Dordrecht, Netherlands, Kluwer, 1995.
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There an excerpt of Parvis Emad on the shift from dasein to Ereignis here.


Heidegger: A Critical Reader. Edited by Hubert L. Dreyfus & Harrison Hall, Oxford, Blackwell, 1992.
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In his essay "Derrida and Heidegger", Charles Spinosa quotes Heidegger on Ereignis in On Time and Being and then remarks:

Once we understand that, by "Ereignis," Heidegger means the tendency to make things show up in the most resonant way, we can see that Heidegger is simply saying here that some time around the fifth century BC, the style of revealing appropriate for craftsmen producing things urged itself upon the early philosophers as a sort of mot juste that they were lucky enough to receive as the most resonating (gathering) account of how things showed up in general. Focusing on terms that articulated this practice seemed to bring people and things into their own, and the West has thought out of this Greek understanding ever since.


Heidegger and Asian Thought. Edited by Graham Parkes, Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1987.
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Reviews: Taylor Carman and Bryan Van Norden
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Heidegger and Foucault Critical Encounters. Edited by Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, Minneaplis, University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
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Heidegger and Modern Philosophy. Edited by Michael Murray, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1978.
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The Wittgenstein piece is from some remarks he made at Moritz Schlick's (the founder of Logical Positivism) on December 30, 1929.

I can readily think what Heidegger means by Being and Dread. Man has the impulse to run up against the limits of language. Think, for example, of the astonishment that anything exists. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and there is also no answer to it. Everything which we feel like saying can, a priori, only be nonsense. Nevertheless, we do run up against the limits of language. This running-up against Kierkegaard also recognized and even designated it in a quite similar way (as running-up against Paradox). This running-up against the limits of language is Ethics. I hold that it is truly important that one put an end to all the idle talk about Ethics--whether there be knowledge, whether there be values, whether the Good can be defined, etc. In Ethics one is always making the attempt to say something that does not concern the essence of the matter and never can concern it. It is a priori certain that whatever one might offer as a definition of the Good, it is simply a misunderstanding to think that it corresponds in expression to the authentic matter one actually means (Moore). Yet the tendency represented by the running-up against points to something. St. Augustine already knew this when he said: What, you wretch,so you want to avoid talking nonsense? Talk some nonsense, it makes no difference!

Although it is often said that Wittgenstein did not know the history of philosophy, that he was an engineer that learned logic from Russell and Whitehead, and went on to develop his own philosophy without bothering to read other philosophers, in this passage he refers to three other philosophers one does not associate with the analytical branch of philosophy. One wonders what the others in the Vienna thought of these comments.

In his essay, Otto Pöggeler writes this about Ereignis:

Being, taken as the unavailable and at each time historical destining of Being [Seinsgeschick], reveals itself as its meaning, or in its openness and truth, as the event of appropriation [Ereignis]. "Ereignis' does not mean here, as it still did within the terminology of Being and Time, a certain occurrence or happening, but rather Dasein's complete self-realization in Being, and Being's appropriation [zueignen] to Dasein's authenticity. The word 'Ereignis' cannot be made plural. It determines the meaning of Being itself.
P. 101

Heidegger and Plato Toward Dialogue. Edited by Catalin Partenie and Tom Rockmore, Evanston Illinois, Northwestern University Press, 2005.
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These essays examine Heidegger's interpretation of Plato in his lectures on the dialogs The Sophist, Theaetetus, and The Republic, along with Heidegger's remarks on Plato and his concept of truth, with comparison to Aristotle in several places. The essays by Kisiel, Fritsche, and Rockmore will be of interest to those following the debate on Heidegger's politics.

Reviews: Catherine Zuckert


Heidegger and Practical Philosophy. Edited by François Raffoul and David Pettigrew, Albany, State University of New York Press, 2002.
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Heidegger and Praxis. Edited by Thomas J. Nenon, Memphis, Volume XXVIII Supplement of The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 1990.
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Heidegger and Psychology. Edited by Keith Hoeller, Seattle, Washington, Review of Existential Psychology & Psychiatry, 1988.
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Heidegger and Rhetoric. Edited Daniel M. Gross and Ansgar Kemman, Albany, State University of New York Press, 2005.
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Heidegger's deepest engagement with rhetoric was in his summer semester 1924 class on "Fundamental ideas in Aristotelian philosophy" at Marburg, published as GA 18. The central text used in the course was Aristotle's Rhetoric II. The essays in this book mainly center on that lecture.

In his Introduction Gross argues that this lecture course contains Heidegger's most substantial enagement in political philosophy, and that Heidegger's study of Aristotle's discussion of rhetoric provided him with the insights that lead to Being and Time, but were never discussed explicitly again.

According to Heidegger's reading of Aristotle, Being-with-one-another turns out to be only one way of being among many--living and nonliving, human and nonhuman. The shared ontology of all Being, claims Heidegger, is grounded in the categories of Aristotle's Physics....What we share with things of all sorts is body-in-movement, a movement characterized by pathos. Heidegger sees this as one of Aristotle's most profound insights into the nature of rhetoric: Being-moved--the heart of rhetorical thought--necessarily exceeds the rational psyche because people have bodies of a certain sort. We are there, we grow and decompose, we can be damaged or excited, mobilized or dispersed....Being-moved in a human way is thus a continuous function of physiology and shared minds. What we have here is "embodied philosophy" at its most literal.
P. 13

The interview with Gadamer, and the three essays that follow, explore various aspects of the lecture course, while Kisiel's essay places it in its historical context. Finally, Pöggeler's essay explores the place of rhetoric over Heidegger's entire career.


Heidegger and The Greeks Interpretive Essays. Edited by Drew A. Hyland and John Panteleimon Manoussakis, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2006.
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At one time, not so long ago, studying Greek philosophers had become a deadly dull affair. What the Greeks had done was important to the foundations and the story of philsophy, yet long ago. It was, of course, important to tell and learn this history, but the important stuff lay ahead of the Greeks, with the thinkers that had built on the work their works, through succeeding generations, to the end of the path, to where the present day philosphers were clearing new paths. The problem was that contemporary philosophers weren't making much headway. They had come to a place where they spoke specialized languages to themselves, discussing matters divorced from real concerns for thinking beings and the world they lived. And the Greek history was just something to be repeated to the next generation, so that they might understand the map that lead to the place philsophy was at. Then along came Heidegger, who began to ask anew the questions the Greeks had asked themselves, thinking through those questions again, yet in a new way, knowing the map of where philosophy had reached, and folding the insights that gave back into the questions the Greeks had asked. Asking the questions in a new ways. Ways that revealed new forks in the ancient paths; new paths to think through. Paths that lead to new places for philosophy to think, and be relevant and exciting again.

This collection carries on the reexamination of the Greeks' thinking that was started by Heidegger, and has been carried on by original thinkers in books such as Heidegger and Plato, The Pre-Socratics after Heidegger, and many other essays scattered through the vast secondary that has followed the new paths pointed and hinted at in Heidegger's thinking. Drew A. Hyland looks for the ontological difference in the Greek beginning. Claudia Baracchi looks for the positive and negative turns, from affirmation to oblivion, and back. Walter Brogan teases out how correctness and creativity work together and differently, pulling in different directions, and complementing each other, both disclosing truth. Peter Warnek looks into how strangeness guides the work of translation, teasing out differences and bringing thinkers together. Günter Figal examines Heidegger on Aristotle on how speaking gathers differences together to say something new. William Richardson traces revelation from the Greeks through Heidegger to Lacan. Dennis Schmidt reads the Greeks on death, and what the anxiety around it reveals about the body's role. Francisco Gonzalez critically follows Heidegger reading of Aristotle's Ethics in the 1924 lecture course, possibly the most discussed lectures that remains to be translated. Gregory Fried discusses the tensions between seeking and holding knowledge via the allegory of the cave. Finally, John Sallis, also reads that allegory, and how different paths lead from it.


Heidegger and The Quest For Truth. Edited by Manfred A. Frings, Chicago, Quandrangle Books, 1968.
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In his essay Paul Ricoeur writes about Heidegger's response in the Letter on Humanism to Jean Beaufret's question about the possible relationship between ontology and ethics.

[T]he essence of fundamental activity, for Heidegger, is not to be practical or effective, but to "fulfill"--that is, "to unfold something into the fullness of its Being." "Fundamental thinking," says Heidegger, "fulfills the relation of Being to the essence of man"; it lets Being "be." In other words, in fundamental thinking the Ereignis, the "ev-ent," the dynamic emergence of Being maintains the initiative. It is an activity of the homo humanus, and activity that transcends the "merely human," a thinking of Being, in which the genitive "of Being" is at once both "subjective" and "objective." Fundamental thinking is an activity that has no "results," no "effects," it produces nothing within the context of ontic efficacity. In Heidegger's own words: "Fundamental thought is sufficient unto its own essence, insofar as it is." Consequently, fundamental thinking does not provide us with any rules or directions for our practical life; it does not present us with any norms for moral action.

P. 91

Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus - Volume 1. Edited by Mark Wrathall and Jeff Malpas, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2000
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Part I: Philosophy and Authenticity Part II: Modernity, Self and the World
Part III: Heideggerian Encounters
Part IV: Responses


Heidegger, Coping, and Cognitive Science: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus - Volume 2 . Edited by Mark Wrathall and Jeff Malpas, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2000
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Part I: Coping and Intenionality
Part II: Computers and Cognitive Science
Part III: "Applied Heidegger"
Part IV: Responses
Reviews: Svend Brinkmann


Heidegger, Education, and Modernity. Edited by Michael A. Peters, Lanham, Maryland, Rowman & Littlefield, 2002
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Heidegger Reexamined has its own page.


Heidegger Studies Vol. 21 (2005) On Technicity, and Venturing the Leap: Questions Concerning the Godly, the Emotional and the Political. Edited by Parvis Emad, Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Kenneth Maly, Pascal David, and Paola-Ludovika Coriando. Berlin, Germany, Duncker & Humblot, 2005
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The first paper, Virginia Lyle Jennings's "Heidegger's Critique of Rilke: On the Venture and the Leap", uses the affinities to Rilke's concept of the venture as opening into Heidegger's leap into being. A leap described in the Contributions as a venture. Heidegger contrasts the security of the subject-object relation with Da-sein be-ing where "the human is ventured as watchman over that which is most worthy of questioning" (GA 65, p.161). To Heidegger an originary creativity was hidden at the beginning of metaphysics, "The result is this: creativity will be replaced at the start with activity. The ways and ventures of former creativity will be set up in the immensity of machination" (GA 65, p.29). To return to this original venturesome creativity, a thinker must make a leap.

Da-sein's leaping is a self-throwing of creative Da-sein, but Heidegger does not want to portray Da-sein as the author of its own being. The creative thinker does not figure out what Da-sein's task is; rather, the thinker experiences Da-sein's throwness. It only appears that hte leap into being is executed by Dasein. In fact, being cannot be determined by thinking. The leap, rather, first allows Dasein to exist as the clearing. Being is not created by a "subject;" rather, Da-sein, as the overcoming of all subjectivity, springs from out of the essence of being. In this way the leap is not willed by Dasein. Heidegger's venture is associated with a will which is not grounded in a subject, bt which stands in the space (the Da) into which being project itself[.] P. 31

Thomas Kalary's "Hermeneutics Phenomenology and Related Questions" essay is a review of six books. One, Friedrish-Wilhelm v. Hermann's Hermeneutik und Reflexion is a study of both Husserl's reflective phenomenology and Heidegger's hermeneutic phenomenology. This book uses their books as primary sources, concentrating on the KNS lectures, the first lecture course at Marburg and section 8 of B&T in Heidegger's case. The appearance of Ereignis in KNS is examined in some detail:

The importance of von Herrmann's elucidation of the distinction between lived-experience as "a process" and "a making ones own" (Er-eignis) as used by Heidegger in the KNS lecture-course cannot be over-emphasized particularly in today's context where the number of "Heidegger Scholars" is on the increase who see the Heideggerian usage of Ereignis from the thirties onwards as a return to the Ereignis of the KNS lecture-course. ... Ereignis...is a concept that determines the essential structure of lived-experience, it is not what is usually called "event." The essential character of lived-experience is that I experience it as my own in that I myself make it my own which is possible when the lived-experience comes to pass according to its ownmost. Until now lived-experience was only a theme of the reflective objectification which concealed this character of "making ones own." Only the a-theoretical, hermeneutic understanding gains an access to this character of lived-experience. The "-eignis" has the meaning of "own" and "ownmost" but not the meaning of "the ownhood." Heidegger refers to what is ownmost to life and lived-experience with the word "eignis." Lived-experiences are Er-eignisse. The "Er-" of "Er-eignis" is the same as the "Er-" of "Er-lebnis," meaning originary, inceptual. The originary life as lived-experience is Er-eignis because it lives from out of its own. I unfold my lived-experiences from out of what is life's own. This is nothing but what Heidegger later calls existence as the being of Dasein. This early concept of Ereignis in the sense of what is ownmost to life and lived-experience has to be differentiated from the being-historical concept of Ereignis that Heidegger introduces in the thirties. There, in the being-historical thinking, Er-eignis stands for the belonging-together of en-owning throwing-forth of being and the en-owned projecting-open of Dasein. In being-historical thinking "eignis" means so much as "ownhood." From out of the enowning throwing forth, the being of man as enowned projecting open becomes the ownhood of the enowning truth of being. Thus it amounts to a great misinterpretation to assume that the being-historical thinking takes off from the "Er-eignis-concept" of KNS. P. 138


Heidegger toward the Turn Essays on the Work of the 1930s. Edited by James Risser, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1999.
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After discussing Heidegger's lecture on the origin of the work of art Françoise Dastur concludes with Ereignis.

[F]or Heidegger, the work of art does not connect matter and spirit as seperated domains, but initiates the conflict of world and earth, i.e., opens the free play (Spielraum) into which human existence becomes possible--what Heidegger calls the There. The difficulty for us in trying not to think the duality of world and earth as a new form of the ancient metaphysical duality of matter and spirit. The difference between these two dualities is a mere difference in temporality: metaphysics was and remains metaphysics of presence, but the thinking to come should be the thinking of the becoming or happening of truth, i.e., of the Ereignis.


Heidegger's Heritage Revista Portuguesa da Filosofia, Tomo LIX Fasciculo 4, Braga, 2003.
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The Sheehan piece is also entitled "Ten Theses on Heidegger". The ten are:
1. Das Sein = das "ist"
2. For Heidegger die Sache selbst is not Sein but that which makes possible the phenomenological occurrence of Sein.
3. die Sache selbst = die Welt, die Lichtung, das Da, etc.
4. Welt/Lichtung/Da occurs only with and as Da-sein, our apriori opened-ness.
5. Thus, in one formulation die Sache selbst is the apriori (= always already) opened-ness of the open-that-we-are, which makes possible all takings-as and attributions of "is."
6. Heidegger sholarship should abandon the word "Sein" as a marker for die Sache selbst.
7. What brings about Welt/Lichtung/Da is human finitude - the hidden, withdrawn lack that generates the open.
8. What Heidegger calls Seinsvergessenheit is the forgottenness not of Sein but what makes possible Sein and Seinsverständnis.
9. The intrinsically hidden lack/finitude that is responsible for the apriori opened-ness of the open guarantees both the groundlessness and the in-principle unlimitedness of our ability to take-things-as -- for example, in theoretical-scientific knowing.
10. The in-principle unlimitedness of takings-as and occurrences-of-being likewise makes possible unlimited technology.
Glossary
die Sache selbst: the things themselves
Seinsvergessenheit: the forgetfulness of being
Seinsverständnis: the comprehension of the being

Hermeneutics and Praxis. Edited by Robert Hollinger, Notre Dame, Indiana, University of Notre Dame Press, 1985.
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Kisiel's begins his essay by recalling the origins of hermeneutics and ties that term to Ereignis in his first paragraph:
[I]t was Heidegger who went even further and suggested that man's existence in the aporia of Being is hermeneutical through and through. Although his hermeneutic of existence is still linked with the phenomenological "method" of explicating the implicit structure of existence, this procedure itself is to be traced back and rooted in the more spontaneous process of human existence as a unique voyage of discovery which envelops all the minor revelations and major epiphanies of the meaning of existence. In Heidegger's terms, Dasein, human existence in its situation, stands in the "event of unconcealment," and accordingly understands. It is in this "event" then, that the heart of the matter of the hermeneutical is to be found.


A House Divided Comparing Anlytic and Continental Philosophy. Edited by C. G. Prado, New York, Humanity Books, 2003.
Essays by Richard Rorty, Barry Allen, Babette E. Babich, David Cerbone, Sharyn Clough, Jonathan Kaplan, Richard Matthews, C. G. Prado, Bjorn Torgrim Ramberg, Mike Sandbothe, Barry Stocker, and Edward Witherspoon.
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Reviews: Samuel Wheeler


The Later Heidegger and Theology. Edited by James M. Robinson and John B. Cobb, Jr., New York, Harper & Row, 1963.
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Martin Heidegger and the Question of Literature. Edited by William V. Spanos, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1999.
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In his essay Hofstadter explains the translation of as enownment.
If we were to give the most literal possible translation of das Ereignis it would have to consist of en-, -own-, and -ment: enownment. Enownment is the letting-be-own-to-one-another of whatever is granted belonging-together. It is the letting be married of any two or more -- Being and time, Being and man, earth and world, earth and sky and mortals and divinities (the fourfold), bridge and river, automobile and speedway, buying and selling commodities, management and lobor -- which can only be by means of belonging to one another. Enownment is not their belonging to one another, but what lets their belonging be. Sein is not Seiendheit.
P. 29
Glossary
Seiendheit: beingness
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The Path of Archaic Thinking Unfolding the Work of John Sallis. Edited by Kenneth Maly, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1995.
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The Pre-Socratics After Heidegger. Edited by David C. Jacobs, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1999.
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Reading Heidegger: Commemorations. Edited by John Sallis, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1993.
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Françoise Dastur's essay has this to say about Ereignis:
Ereignis is not one event among others, as the ordinary meaning of the word suggests, but is used by Heidegger as singulare tantum (ID 29) to name the happening of lightening. It is the happening of the disclosing of beings, i.e., the coming of beings to there own (Eigen), or proper manifestation. But this Er-eigen, this propriation, is not a process that takes place by itself but requires man's participation. Propriation is therefore to be understood, according to the true etymology of the word Ereignis that does not refer to eigen (own) but to Auge (eye), as the calling look of Being toward man: Ereignis er-aügt den Menschen--Ereignis calls man by looking at him. This being-called-and-looked-at constitutes the true specificity of humanity in relation to animality: man no longer needs to comprehend Being in a transcendental way; he is now needed by Ereignis for the propriation of beings.
P. 364
Glossary
ID: Identity and Difference
singulare tantum: unique word
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Thinking About Being Aspects of Heidegger's Thought. Edited by Robert W. Shahan and J. N. Mohanty, Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1984.
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Created 1995/5/26
Last updated 2008/10/28
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