The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude [Library Binding]

Martin Heidegger (Author), William McNeill (Author, Translator), Nicholas Walker (Author, Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 1996 | Series: Studies in Continental Thought

First published in German in 1938 as volume 29/30 of Heidegger's collected works, "The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics" includes an extended treatment of the history of metaphysics and an elaboration of a philosophy of life and nature. Heidegger's concepts of organism, animal behaviour, and environment are uniquely developed and defined with intensity. This work, the text of Martin Heidegger's lecture course of 1929/30, is crucial for an understanding of Heidegger's transition from the major work of his early years, "Being and Time", to his later preoccupations with language, truth, and history.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

In these lectures, which noted German philosopher Heidegger gave in 1929-30 at a turning point in his thought, the aim is to show how Western philosophy went wrong. Heidegger says "Being" was confused with "beings," and philosophers, especially medieval philosophers, made even God into something cozy. But passive acceptance of irrationality is precisely what needs to be understood if we are to grasp the horrors of our time: it is at the heart of the problem that made Heidegger, a sensitive, intelligent man who took up Nazism, an embarrassment to philosophy. And so these lectures are very important. Some of the text is straightforward, but much of it concerns what the translators (not unreasonably) render as "boredom," though it is really about how time intrudes in human affairs. The "boredom" discussion is hard to follow, but it may well be at the back of what Hannah Arendt called the "banality of evil." The translators, Chicago and Oxford academics, write clearly, though the Germanic heaviness of the prose will not endear it to English readers. Primarily for academic collections.?Leslie Armour, Univ. of Ottawa
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"In this text, which is crucial to understanding the transition from Heidegger's earlier to his later thinking, readers will find a helpful overview of Heidegger's conception of metaphysics ... a brilliant phenomenological analysis of boredom ... an investigation of the essence of life and animality ... and an analysis of the structure of the propositional statement ... " -Review of Metaphysics "This authoritative translation is essential to any Heidegger collection." - Choice " . . an important addition to the translations of Heidegger's lecture-courses . . Heidegger's voice can be heard with few of the jolting Germanicisms with which so many translations of Heidegger's texts have been burdened..." --International Philosophical Quarterly "The translators of these lectures have succeeded splendidly in giving readers an intimation of the tensely insistent tone of the original German. Heidegger's concern with a linguistic preconsciousness and with our entrancement before the enigma of existence remains intensely contemporary." --Choice "There is much that is new and valuable in this book, and McNeill and Walker's faithful translation makes it very accessible." --Review of Metaphysics "Whoever thought that Heidegger ... has no surprises left in him had better read this volume. If its rhetoric is 'hard and heavy' its thought is even harder and essentially more daring than Heideggerians ever imagined Heidegger could be." --David Farrell Krell

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Product Details

• Library Binding: 512 pages
• Publisher: Indiana Univ Pr (January 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0253327490
• ISBN-13: 978-0253327499
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,365,461 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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29 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars My candidate for the follow-up to Being and Time, April 13, 2001

By 

Karl Henzy - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (Paperback)

I always see talk of the successor book to Being and Time. Some say the Kantbook, some say Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), etc. Let me propose The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. Because it was originally a lecture course, it is much more accesible than Being and Time, but it really continues the preoccupations of that book. In B&T, anxiety was the mood through which Heidegger discovers revelations of the Being of beings. Here Heidegger pushes on to a new "attunement": boredom. We think of boredom as something about which there is almost nothing to say, and it would be easy to joke about someone going for hundreds of pages on boredom fulfilling his own prophecy, but Heidegger's reflections on boredome as revealing aspects of Being and Time is about as profound as you can get. This is a great book. Maybe because it didn't even appear in German until 1983, it hasn't had as much attention as other works, but anyone interested in Heidegger (which ought to be equivalent to saying anyone interested in philosophy at all) should get to know this work.

18 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars World-Forming and Not Having a World--From Dasein to Animal, August 28, 2001

By 

Robert S. Corrington (Madison, New Jersey United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (Paperback)

These 1929/30 lectures represent a stunning use of phenomenology as it probes into the nature of the philosophical bindingness to nature (as self-arising into presence "ousia"). Philosophy is understood to be the ongoing response to homesickness (as denominated by the poet Novalis). As such a response it is unique in its form of questioning and in the way it receives "answers" from the giving/receding orders of nature and their elusive ground. Philosophy is also infused with an attunement that compels it to return again and again to the questions concerning worldhood, finitude, and solitude; questions that goad it forward and backward simultaneously. The act of philosophy drives us out of our everydayness, "For in it there becomes manifest something essential about all philosophical comprehension, namely that in the philosophical concept, man, and indeed man as a whole is in the grip of an attack--driven out of everydayness and driven back into the ground of things" [Wesentliches alles philosophischen Begreifens, dass der philosophische Begriff ein Angriff ist auf den Menschen und gar auf den Menschen im Ganzen--aufgejagt aus der Alltaglichkeit und zuruckgejagt in den Grund der Dinge]. Boredom, rather than anxiety, is now seen to be the fundamental mood that governs our Dasein (human being in the world). Heidegger unfolds the complex interplay of the modes of boredom and their special ways of illuminating worldhood. Boredom is seen as one of the ways of time's withdrawal into a kind of tarrying that is nowhere and everywhere, but bereft of full worldhood. Animals, while open to their environment [umwelt] do not have a world [welt]. Yet animals live in their own way within a disinhibiting ring that opens them to their release into their species-specific environment. Here Heidegger's descriptions of the animal forms of not-worldness represent a major achievement in helping beings-with-selves become aware of the unique forms of openness of other living beings. As humans we are called to project ourselves into the difference between the various things in being, on the one hand, and the Being of all beings on the other (his reiteration of the ontological difference). This is certainly one of the most important series of lectures in Heidegger's career and the translation is a fair and compelling one. For those who only know "Being and Time" or some of the late essays, this text will come as a surprise because of its masterful and careful phenomenological descriptions of nature and the forms of openness that it contains.

5.0 out of 5 stars Circular reasoning has never been such fun, December 13, 2010

By 

Brendan M. Funnell (Canberra, Australia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (Paperback)

The title of my review comes from the structure of the book itself, in which Heidegger himself says that in philosophy one circles around a question in order to explore it in depth, not go at it head on for a superficial answer.

The book begins with Heidegger doing his standard pulling-apart of the question itself - such as exploring the word "metaphysics" in its original, then subsequent meaning.

For the first half of the book, Heidegger explores the attunement to profound boredom (It is boring for one) he characterizes as the state of modern mankind, which as a fundamental attunement nonetheless serves to reveal Being. The move from various forms of boredom, such as that of waiting at a train station having misread the schedule or attending a party that didn't at first seem boring, to that of profound boredom is actually very interesting.

We then move to the thesis that Man is world-forming, while the animal is poor in world. The animal being does not experience beings as beings, or being qua being.

From there Heidegger moves on to examine the propositional statement, the logos apophantikos, in considerable detail, mainly with reference to Aristotle and Kant. The inner structure of the logos as revealing and concealing truth and falsity (aletheia and pseudos) by a pointing out (apophantikos) that is either pointing to (kataphasis) or pointing away (apophasis), from within the inner structure of synthesis and diairesis, is the real meat of the work, and wonderful even when I disagree with it or need to explore further.

And once this has been accomplished, the reintroduction of world-formation and profound boredom reappear to complete the circle around the question.

Finitude and solitude barely rate an explicit mention - but if one is paying attention they are always there implicitly, particularly in the sections on the logos apophantikos as something that is arrived at in agreement, not in isolation ala Protagoras, in a relation. Being is relational in its inmost essence as Being.

Heidegger also points out his limited concept of logos in Being and Time, where only one aspect was considered.

I found this lecture series much more engaging and readable than Being and Time - and much more accurate and profound to my way of thinking. It has certainly inspired me to read more Heidegger - and Aristotle. Attributing Relativism to Heidegger may be more problematic than I had been led to believe. I would recommend reading Heidegger without the Parisian School in mind.