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SUMMARY OF A SEMINAR

What a model as such is and how its function for thinking is to be understood can only be thought from an essential interpretation of language.

Thus the discussions following were concerned with language, more precisely with the relation existing between so-called common speech and the language of thought. Speaking about ontic models presupposes that language in principle has an ontic character, so that thinking finds itself in the situation of having to use ontic models for what it wishes to say ontologically, since it can only make something evident through words.

Even apart from the fact that language is not only ontic, but from the outset ontic-ontological, we can ask whether there cannot be a language of thinking which expresses the simplicity of language in such a way that the language of thinking precisely brings to view the limitations of metaphysical language. But about this one cannot talk. The question is decided by success or failure of such Saying. Finally, common language is not the only metaphysical one. Rather, our interpretation of common speech, bound to Greek ontology, also speaks a metaphysical language. But man's relation to language could transform itself analogously to the change of the relation to Being.

At the end of the session, a letter of Heidegger's was read which has been published as the preface to Richardson's book Heidegger: From Phenomenology to Thought. (Through Phenomenology to Thought, The Hague). This letter chiefly answers two questions:

1. the first stimulus that determined his thinking, and

2. the question of the turn.

It cleared up the relations at stake in the text being discussed which underlies the path from Being and Time to "Time and Being," and from there to Appropriation.

The sixth and last session concerned at first some questions raised, which had to do with the meaning that lies in the words "transformation," "transmutation," when the fullness of the transformation of Being is spoken about. Transformation, transmutation is, on the one hand, predicated within metaphysics about metaphysics. Then the


On Time and Being (GA 14) by Martin Heidegger