Heidegger and Practical Philosophy (Suny Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy) [Paperback]

Francois Raffoul (Author), David Pettigrew (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 21, 2002 | Series: SUNY Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy

Leading scholars address the ethical and practical dimensions of Heidegger's thought.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Heidegger has often been reproached for his alleged neglect of practical issues, specifically his inability to propose or articulate an ethics or politics. This book investigates the extent to which Heidegger's thought can be read as a crucial resource for practical philosophy and the articulation of an ethos for our time. Leading scholars from around the world offer a sustained and intensive focus on Heidegger's thought of praxis, working through such motifs as freedom, the possibility of ethics, the political, responsibility, community, nihilism, technology and the contemporary ethos, among others. Ultimately, this volume reveals the practical senses of ontology, and the ontological senses of praxis by exhibiting the practicality of Being itself. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

About the Author

François Raffoul is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Louisiana State University and the author of Heidegger and the Subject. David Pettigrew is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Southern Connecticut State University. Together they have translated Jean-Luc Nancy's and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's The Title of the Letter: A Reading of Lacan and Juan-David Nasio's Five Lessons on the Psychoanalytic Theory of Jacques Lacan, both published by SUNY Press, and Françoise Dastur's Heidegger and the Question of Time. They have also coedited Disseminating Lacan, also published by SUNY Press. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 392 pages
• Publisher: State University of New York Press (March 21, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0791453448
• ISBN-13: 978-0791453445
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,112,577 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A good assessment of Heidegger studies, June 14, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Heidegger and Practical Philosophy (Suny Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy) (Paperback)

Almost 15 years after the so-called Heidegger affair, Raffoul and Pettigrew's book shows that Heidegger studies is alive and well within the states, even in the once dreaded area of Heidegger's politics. To save some words here, let's quickly review some of the best and worst essays in the book. John Sallis, as always, does a professional job of elucidating Heidegger, but, as usual, there are no surprises in his reading. Other essays better at providing new insights into Heidegger and Practical philosophy are written by Nancy, Birmingham, Jacerme, Raffoul, Wood, and Richardson. Brogan's essay would have been much better had he bothered to cite Jean-Luc Nancy's work on Being-with and finitude, whose work he is obviously repeating from such works as The Inoperative Community and his book on Freedom. Otherwise, Brogran does an admirable job of rehearsing the themes of community and being-with and extending them to the Beitrage of the late 30's. However, it did make me uncomfortable that Brogan so religiously follows Heidegger's political thought at that time, given that he was likely writing those notebooks with a Nazi lapel on his suit jacket. One can always read an author otherwise and certainly not every text needs to read Heidegger as a Nazi, which is just a means of not having to confront his thought, but it would have helped Brogan's essay to at least mark out, say, the distinction between Heidegger's ontological views at the time, which might be helpful, and his less than glorious ontic views on the German Volk. Dastur's essay takes up perhaps the most difficult part of Being and Time, the sections relating to the so-called conscience. Just having an essay that could lay out what is at stake in these chapters would have been helpful. Dastur does this and pulls us farther into showing how Heidegger, contra Levinas, has a 'workable' notion of alterity already in BT. The worst essays are by Kisiel, Schmidt and Scott, probably the best known scholars in the book. While the latter are just pompous attempts at good writing - one imagines they thought they were rather clever writing with a glass of wine in one hand - Kisiel shows that he has long since given up thought - as Heidegger himself viewed it - on the alter of some Heideggerian theology. He rehearses a number of Heidegger's public communiques on the notions of the political up to an including the Nazi period, but leaves little room to think, say, the relation between these writings and what Heidegger included in his so-called philophical work. My only gripe with the text is that one can easily target the book as evidence of the hermetic seal surrounding Heidegger scholars from the outside world. Excempting Birmingham and Nancy's texts, you would never get the indication that anyone was writing from a modern standpoint. As evidence of this would be the overuse of references to Heideggerian Greek, but no discussion of latter-day practical problems. If indeed this is a work on 'practical philosophy' - even given the way in which we must reread, after Heidegger, the link between theoria and praxis - it would have been helpful to see what Heidegger gives us beyond more theory. For Nancy, Dastur, Birmingham, and a few others, we see how re-reading Heidegger, perhaps in new ways, gives us very interesting accounts of ethics, politics etc. For the others, it seems, there is less concern over the praxis of our own historical epoch than that of the Greeks.

5 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Fiat Lux!, June 8, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Heidegger and Practical Philosophy (Suny Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy) (Paperback)

I had eagerly anticipated the publication of this book, but ultimately found it disappointing. Most disappointing is the sheer obscurity of what purports to be a collection of essays "elucidating" Heidegger's thought on crucial issues like politics, ethics, society, and technology. What this book does show is that Heidegger does have important things to say about these issues; what it fails to accomplish is to provide anything like a meaningful explanation of his ideas. The only exceptions to this trend in this collection are the essays by Kisiel and Sheehan, both of whom are justly praised scholars of Heidegger who have labored long and hard to make his thought understandable and engaging. The other essays simply pile on neo-logisms, needless hyphenations, half-baked arguments by analogy and explanations that wind up leaving a reader more confused than Heidegger himself ever could.

The sad fact is that this book is typical of the majority of Anglophone Heidegger scholarship, which, on the whole, does little to elucidate the work of one of the twentieth century's most controversial and exciting thinkers. My advise to scholars of Heidegger: "Fiat lux!"