character of πέρας. Whence the Greek abhorrence for ἄπειρον: with the regressus ad infinitum, one is no longer among beings. Their sense of being comes from a very concrete experience, of a world overarched by the sky, self-enclosed and in itself complete. It is in the world of limits that the true autochthony of the concept is to be found, when one resolves to speak radically with this world, to question it and investigate it with resoluteness. The language of definition is such a speaking, in addressing being in its finish and regarding that completeness as present. But it is not the "surface," slurred speech of the everyday, of the child who calls all men "father," clearly an inarticulate speech which knows no ὁρίζειν.
There is accordingly far more to ὁρισμός than just the technical affair of logical definition with which we began (cf. likewise WS 1921-22 on defining philosophy). It is an affair of human Dasein which bears directly upon the very limits of its being in the world, its being there. For the limits defining this very human "there," endowed with the capacity of λέγειν, also define the native soil out of which it develops its conceptuality. The remainder of the course is therefore devoted, not so much to the Parmenidean Dasein infecting the double sense of Aristotle's οὐσία as presentness and completeness, but more to Aristotle's understanding of the human Dasein in its πέρας, which in its first approximation is called ἀγαθόν. Heidegger joins this Aristotelian gloss with his own developing insights into the limits (and so the scope) of human Dasein, pursuing a conversation, as it were, between his own "hermeneutics of facticity" and the Aristotelian texts in a mutual impregnation and fructification designed to get at the "things themselves."
We thus find a very constructive Heidegger, who joins his issue with Aristotle's, in this last-ditch effort "to get the Aristotle book out once and for all." We are at the parting of the ways between two Daseins, where the Aristotle book is about to ripen into the first drafts of BT. As such, SS 1924 provides us with perhaps our best glimpse into how that book on Aristotle might have looked. All signs indicate that it would have been a remarkable book. From all indications, it would have been even more difficult than BT, in view of the staggering depth, detail, and density of this Greek-German dialogue with the original texts of Aristotelian opus, in a frenetic intensity that must have overwhelmed the students of this course. Heidegger provides no advance outline for the course, but wends his way selectively through the Aristotelian corpus, working with strategically chosen texts as foci for his plunge into the specifics of an analysis of Greek-German Dasein. Fortunately for the students (and us), however, he pauses at certain critical junctures to clarify the overall movement of the course from each new vantage. In hindsight, we thus recognize the circular and so "repetitious" movement between being and human being familiar to us from BT. And yet, how