Ereignis Interviews

Iain Thomson

For Heidegger, metaphysics is not the abstruse concern of philosophers isolated in their ivory towers; metaphysics structures our very sense of reality. Metaphysics is "the history that we are," as Heidegger puts it. As this suggests, our sense of reality changes over time. I explain this view in terms of what I call "ontological holism." Put simply: Everything is, so when we change our sense of what-is, we change our sense of everything.

Richard Polt

So my working hypothesis is that in all of his thought, Heidegger is trying to understand unique events of unfamiliarity as the basis of both familiarity and theoretical truth -- and this understanding is not supposed to be just another theory, but is supposed to be attuned to the uniqueness of the primal event, thinking "from" this event, as the Contributions put it.

Allen Scult

I would say that juxtaposing Heidegger with Jewish hermeneutics in the way that I do discloses Heidegger’s way of reading the ancient Greeks as the organon of his philosophy. Remembering Heidegger's principle that philosophy is philosophizing, I would say that philosophizing for Heidegger is grounded in a way of reading the ancients as what amounts to a sacred text.

Miles Groth

Grasping the meaning of Existenz makes the translation of Dasein possible and useful as a way of giving expression to Heidegger’s way of thinking in English. Until the Heidegger translation industry is in different hands, I worry that the misunderstandings of 1929-1949 will continue for another fifty years.