This Summer Semester 1934 lecture course provides an important step in Heidegger’s attempt to initiate an inquiry into language and to establish its synergy with the question of being. The relation of language to λόγος, on the one hand, and to the truth, on the other, emerge as foremost themes of his hermeneutics. In the process, Heidegger also extends his understanding of resoluteness and its link to responsibility, in a way that casts additional light on his discussions thereof in Being and Time.
The overriding premise of these lectures is the necessity of understanding logic on the basis of language and not vice versa. After rejecting standard arguments for the value of traditional logic, Heidegger states his intention of undermining (erschüttern) it from the ground up. For traditional logic—and any “philosophy of language” oriented to it—tends to regard language as a particular domain of objects, as a mere means of expression, or as secondary to thinking. Heidegger takes the question of language, unhinged from these prejudices, as the “leading question” of logic, one that entails questions of the essence of human beings (including the “decision” who “we” are as a “people”) and of history. In the second and final part, Heidegger argues that “primordial time” is the basis for all these questions. Elaborating the experience of primordial time as the experience of our “vocation” (Bestimmung), Heidegger discusses how a people’s vocation explodes the concept of subject.