Heraclitus Seminar (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy) [Paperback]

Martin Heidegger (Author), Eugen Fink (Author), Charles H. Seibert (Translator)

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Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: German

Product Details

• Paperback: 171 pages
• Publisher: Northwestern University Press (January 21, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0810110679
• ISBN-13: 978-0810110670
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #607,302 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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30 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars needless to say, it was all "Greek" to me..., June 3, 2003

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"qualitative_leap" (Malvern, AR United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Heraclitus Seminar (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy) (Paperback)

I must admit from the outset that my familiarity with Heidegger's philosophy, not to mention Fink's (a philosopher I'd never heard of), is not up to par with my fellow commentators (this is a generous assessment in my favor, to say the least--and obvious). That said, this review is not intended to sway Heideggar junkies one way or the other re: purchase, nor will it aid those who know Heraclitus' Fragments backwards and forwards; I am not in a position to do either. I aim to address only those nonspecialists who--like myself--are interested in Heraclitus, and who are considering making a purchase for that reason, and that reason alone.

I ordered "The Heraclitus Seminar", perhaps naively, in order to gain a better understanding of Heraclitus and his Metaphysics--I came away from the ordeal completely dumbfounded. This is partially my own fault--I knew going in that Heidegger makes for difficult reading, and that his precipitous works are, almost without exception, extremely abstruse. As such, his books require great dedication and patience. This, I was prepared for. However, I came to an impasse with the book almost immediately. This resulted from the multitude of passages that were written, within the body of the text, in Attic Greek--with *no* translations. (no kidding)

This one is better left for the later grad students and/or their profs--that is, unless you happen to be an extremely patient novice, who can read Greek without a lexicon, and who has a penchant for Heideggarian analysis of the pre-Socratics.

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Great Intro. to Difficult Thinking, January 9, 2002

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T. Beers (Arlington, Virginia United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Heraclitus Seminar (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy) (Paperback)

Martin Heidegger's special intellectual relationship with the Presocratics is often discussed as if the German philosopher was some sort of romantic originalist or nostalgist. But Heidegger always insisted that the point about going back to Heraclitus, Parmenides and rest was not to recover the specific contents of their thought (or, worse, to wallow in their supposed primitive "purity"), but to recapture the spirit of their efforts to "think the question of Being." You won't find a better presentation of this - or a more candid glimpse of Heidegger as a working philosopher - than in this text. It presents the record of a seminar on Heraclitus conducted by Heidegger and the German scholar Eugen Fink in the late 1960s. Heidegger's discussion of specific Heraclitian texts makes for difficult reading but is, generally speaking, quite lucid. And the dialog with Fink and student participants is eye-opening. (Heidegger's pronouncements are by no means always taken as Gospel!) Most important, in spite of their rather recondite subject matter, these seminar records wonderfully illuminate Heidegger's own philosophical development in the last two decades of his life. Although this book does require familiarity with Heidegger's work and somewhat unique philosophical terminology, as well as familiarity with the history of philosophy generally, I wouldn't call it a text "for specialists only." Unless, of course, all readers of philosophy are specialists! And it does provide a welcome corrective to current "New Age" tendencies to view Heraclitus and the other Presocratics as authors of quasi-religious wisdom manuals. No dumbing-down here; just a tough confrontation with difficult material!

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars I disagree, December 6, 2009

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WB, Zeno - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Heraclitus Seminar (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy) (Paperback)

with T. Beers' otherwise excellent review: this book IS for specialists, and for specialists particularly interested in Heidegger, at that.

For others it's mildly interesting, as might be a reality show (without the vulgarity and banality, of course). But you have to know at least how to read Greek, as citations are not invariably translated (although the majority is), and only the first time they appear. Since the book has several misspellings in Greek (i.e., "Hesisdos" for "Hesiodos" in p. 43; unfortunately, as I didn't plan to write a review, I didn't take note of the pages where the others are located when I was reading the book, so I can't correct them here), this is a forbidding difficulty for nonspecialists.

The reality show (unfortunately deprived of its philological content, as we are informed in page 105, Note 1 to the text) consists of Fink, Heidegger and the seminar's participants reasoning aloud, as unselfconsciously as two teachers can before their pupils and viceversa (to top it, Fink had also been Heidegger's pupil a generation before), about the interpretation of "hen" (the one) and "ta panta" (all there is, the totality, the Universe, etc.), basing themselves on every surviving Heraclitean fragment where those words/concepts are explicitly or implicitly mentioned. The interpretations are, for me, sometimes too farfetched. They are tainted with Heidegger's very original and sometimes (to me) constrained views on the Greeks generally, and the Presocratics particularly (although during at least his early years H. admired Aristotle the most, see for example Brogan's "H. & Aristotle"), and also with his unsupported metaphysical belief that they had found another, more meaningful, way of looking at/understanding/intuiting reality. Always for me, the most interesting new thing I found is that H.'s "Unverborgenheit" is in the text rendered as "nonconcealment" instead of "unconcealment" as is customary. I don't think the Master would have approved.

A book for Heideggerians. One amongst very many indeed, as the totality of his written and spoken output is being slowly but surely published.