Translated by Pete Ferreira
1
The critical engagement with Aristotle through the interpretation of some central texts of the Corpus Aristotelicum is a recurring motif in Heidegger's thought and signals decisive stages of its evolution. According to autobiographical accounts from Heidegger himself, his high school and university years had already been defined by confrontation with the Aristotelian problem of being. It is true that this first approach to Aristotle was filtered through the reading of Brentano (and Braig); but, in spite of the scarcity of available documents, one can still see the influence that the Brentanist interpretation of the Aristotelian doctrine of the 'plurivocity' of being – with its characteristic emphasis on the weight of the analogia entis and its singular attempt at a systematic deduction of categories starting from a διαίρεσις of being – may have had in alerting Heidegger to the problem of the fundamental unified sense that governs the multiplicity of ways of being.
Heidegger first took up his real confrontation with Aristotle during his first period at Freiburg, namely between 1915 and 1923 (with interruption due to war between 1917 and 1919). This confrontation, which develops especially after 1919, culminates with the drafting of a voluminous manuscript (still unpublished), whose basic results were published in the form of an article in Husserl's Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung. Central to that work of interpretation were such Aristotelian texts as the sixth book of Nicomachean Ethics, the third book of De Anima, books I (1-2), VII-IX of Metaphysics and the first book of Physics, which remained Heidegger's primary texts even in his later confrontations with Aristotle.