opponent Luther, who had called upon actual life and its capacity for faith against philosophy. Heidegger wished, in a second and third section, to deal with book Theta of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, discussing its notions of possibility and actuality. In this way the relation in De anima of the transcendental “I” to being could become a new problem.25 Heidegger was in conversation at this time with a friend named Julius Ebbinghaus, who espoused a view contrary to that of his father (an empirical psychologist and adversary of Dilthey). Julius Ebbinghaus continued Dilthey’s work on the young Hegel with works on Hegel’s years at Jena. Heidegger, now at Marburg, wrote to Ebbinghaus on January 4, 1924, about his newfound friend Rudolf Bultmann and then went on to his upcoming lectures: “In the summer semester I read Augustine four hours a week and in winter I will continue with the Hermeneutics of Historical Knowledge.”26
But Heidegger didn’t follow this plan. By going to Marburg in 1923 he had come to a university that had committed itself to the Reformation; theology and philosophy should work in concert. Philosophy was characteristically Neo-Kantian. The Middle Ages were regarded as obscure; for example, Professor Cohen (as Heidegger would claim in his 1926 lecture course) saw Aristotle as a pharmacist, merely pasting labels on what exists. Professor Natorp understood philosophy to be Plato and Kant. So Heidegger sought to discuss anew the definitive philosophical tradition. Accordingly, after his first Marburg lecture course on the origins of modern philosophy27 he gave to his second course of lectures the provocative title “Aristotle: Rhetoric.” When he presented the course, he had altered the title to “Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy” (Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie).28
Aristotle had developed the individual philosophical disciplines—rhetoric and poetics, for example—by differentiating them, while at the same time leaving rhetoric within practical philosophy. (It had to be taught how the Greek orator took a decisive role in the polis.) In the following semester, especially while developing his interpretation of Plato’s Sophist, Heidegger sharpened the opposition between philosophy and rhetoric: the rhetorician can behave like the sophist, able to do business as a representative of any party. Plato cast rhetoric in a bad light.29 By the summer semester of 1925, Heidegger had already presented crucial sections of Being and Time. In the winter semester of 1925–26 Heidegger made a dramatic break with the announced course dealing with Aristotle, moving over to Kant, because Kant would provide a sharper analysis of the problem of time. In the following semesters his presentation of ancient, as well as medieval and contemporary philosophy had a more didactic character. By 1927 the summer semester lecture course aimed to carry forward fragments of Being and Time.
25. See Martin Heidegger, “Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles” [the so-called Natorp-Bericht], Dilthey–Jahrbuch 6 (1989): 235ff.
26. The correspondence between Heidegger and Ebbinghaus is still unpublished. Citations are from a transcript communicated to me by Manfred Baum.
27. Martin Heidegger, Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung, GA 17 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1994).
28. Martin Heidegger, Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie, GA 18 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2002); Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming).