Four Seminars (Studies in Continental Thought) [Hardcover]

Martin Heidegger (Author), Andrew Mitchell (Translator), Francois Raffoul (Translator)

Book Description

Series: Studies in Continental Thought | Publication Date: December 11, 2003

In Four Seminars, Heidegger reviews the entire trajectory of his thought and offers unique perspectives on fundamental aspects of his work. First published in French in 1976, these seminars were translated into German with Heidegger's approval and reissued in 1986 as part of his Gesamtausgabe, volume 15. Topics considered include the Greek understanding of presence, the ontological difference, the notion of system in German Idealism, the power of naming, the problem of technology, danger, and enowning. Heidegger's engagements with his philosophical forebears—Parmenides, Heraclitus, Kant, and Hegel—continue in surprising dialogues with his contemporaries—Husserl, Marx, and Wittgenstein. While providing important insights into how Heidegger conducted his lectures, these seminars show him in his maturity reflecting back on his philosophical path. An important text for understanding contemporary philosophical debates, Four Seminars provides extraordinarily rich material for students and scholars of Heidegger.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This highly influential collection of four seminars conducted between 1966 and 1973 was first published in French transcription in 1976, the year Heidegger died. Their influence on French philosophy and thinking during the late 1970s and 1980s cannot be exaggerated, for, at the moment when the work of Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, and others was first coming to prominence, it now had access to Heidegger's clearest articulations of his later thinking. Much of deconstruction and poststructuralist thought bears the formative imprint of these seminars. Heidegger himself oversaw their German translation (published in 1977 and again in 1986, in a collected edition), from which this long-awaited English translation by Mitchell and Raffoul has been made. Their brilliant translation will prove indispensable for theory and criticism in English. Heidegger breathes new life into the ancient Greek meaning of presencing, which is the keynote of his call for the abandonment of all modern realisms, idealisms, and materialisms and for a return to an experience of consciousness that sees itself as part of phenomenal presencing, rather than as something separate and detached from the world. On Kant, Marx, and the meaning of technology, these seminars contain some of Heidegger's most thoughtful insights and arguments. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers; lower-level undergraduates through faculty." —N. Lukacher, University of Illinois at Chicago, Choice, July 2004

(N. Lukacher, University of Illinois at Chicago Choice 2004)

About the Author

Andrew Mitchell is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Stanislaus.

François Raffoul is Professor of Philosophy at Louisiana State University.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 144 pages
• Publisher: Indiana University Press (December 11, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0253343631
• ISBN-13: 978-0253343635
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #278,225 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Mainly on philosophical topics, certainly dense, July 23, 2005

By 

Bruce P. Barten (Saint Paul, Minnesota, U.S.A.) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Four Seminars (Studies in Continental Thought) (Hardcover)

FOUR SEMINARS seems rather fragmentary to me. The text was created by a few people who got together on a number of occasions. Things that are numbered have a lot of firsts on a single page, particularly on page 47, where the topology of being is imagined with three aspects:

Three terms which succeed one another and at the same time indicate three steps along the way of thinking: MEANING -- TRUTH -- PLACE . . .
First, truth. . . .
First, what does "meaning" signify? Meaning in BEING AND TIME is defined in terms of a project region, and projection is the accomplishment of Dasein, which means the ek-static instancy in the openness of being. By ek-sisting, Dasein includes meaning. The thinking that proceeds from BEING AND TIME, in that it gives up the word "meaning of being" in favor of "truth of being," henceforth emphasizes the openness of being itself, rather than the openness of Dasein in regard to this openness of being.
This signifies "the turn," in which thinking always more decisively turns to being as being.

The statements above are taken from 23 lines of text. I have omitted a Greek word for place and a German word for instancy. The ek- form of words pops up so frequently that I noticed a Greek instance on page 54:

What for Aristotle was a development [Auseinanderfolge] (the result of an emerging out of; ek-eis), becomes a succession [Aufeinanderfolge] (through the determination of the result as sequential) -- this due to the fact that the first idea is only an "occult quality," brought into disrepute by the Cartesians, though nevertheless rehabilitated in a certain sense by Leibniz.

This book does not have an index or translation of most Greek terms, but glossaries (pp. 113-118) of German-English and English-German correspondence allow those who are sure of a meaning in one language to check for which word this corresponds to in the other translation. The seminars in 1966, 1968, 1969, and 1973 took place in French, and the German translator, Curd Ochwadt, provides an Afterword with a poem by Martin Heidegger in German which is translated in a note on page 112. There is also an Afterword which appeared in COLLECTED EDITION, VOLUME 15 on Heidegger quoting Hegel's "A torn sock is better than a mended one" (p. 98). If this book did have an index, I'm sure it should contain:

Parmenides, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Marx, Pindar, and Descartes for pages 1-9.

Hegel, Holderlin, Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, Aristotle, Descartes, Luther, Galileo, William of Ockham, Husserl, Jean Beaufret, Kant, Heraclitus, Newton, Plato, Marx, Kant, Freud and Meister Eckhart for pages 10-34.

I spent a lot of time contemplating page 32, which contains such gems as:

This lived-body is something like the reach of the human body (last night, the moon was closer than the Louvre).
What "seeing" here means is in question, if one admits, despite a well-established French tradition, that cows never see trains pass by.
When Marx says, "Man produces himself, etc. . . . ," it means: "Man is a factory. Man produces himself as he produces his shoes." But what does "Production" mean for Hegel? By no means that man produces the Absolute. Production is the figure of reflection's accomplishment.

Truly complicated matters on September 6, 1969, include a list of seven questions by Roger Munier concerning technology that had been raised on September 11, 1966, a mere 35 years before a famous catastrophe in New York and at the Pentagon. Fifth question: "Will the rapid spreading of technological things not finally bring about an essential poverty, from which a turning around of the human to the truth of its essence becomes possible, even if by a detour of errancy?" (p. 45). Who knew?