Heidegger’s History of the Concept of Time (a precursor to “Being and Time”)

Welcome everyone to the next series that Philip and David are hosting starting Monday April 8!

This time around we will be doing a book by Heidegger called History of the Concept of Time. This book was written right before Heidegger wrote Being and Time (his Magnum Opus). The sad but unavoidable fact is that both of the English translations of Being and Time are so deeply flawed that it is virtually impossible to reconstruct Heidegger's early philosophy by reading one of these English translations.

Fortunately the English translation of History of the Concept of Time is of a VERY high quality. Also, even in German History of the Concept of Time is a much more clearly written book than Being and Time. If a good translation of Being and Time ever appears, Philip and David will certainly do a meetup on it. But for now, reading History of the Concept of Time is the best way for the English reader to access Heidegger's early philosophy.

This meetup will start out as a live read. We will read each and every paragraph together until we have gotten roughly 40 pages into the book. Once we have gotten a basic sense of what early Heidegger is all about, we will switch the meetup to a pre-read. When we are in the pre-read phase, participants will be expected to read the assigned reading in advance, and pick paragraphs that they especially want to focus on. In the meetup we will read out loud the paragraphs that the participants selected and we will talk about these paragraphs after we read them out loud.

Philip and David will be happy to recommend good quality secondary sources on Heidegger to anyone who asks.

Here is a description of the book:

• Heidegger's lecture course at the University of Marburg in the summer of 1925, an early version of Being and Time (1927), offers a unique glimpse into the motivations that prompted the writing of this great philosopher's master work and the presuppositions that gave shape to it. The book embarks upon a provisional description of what Heidegger calls "Dasein," the field in which both being and time become manifest. Heidegger analyzes Dasein in its everydayness in a deepening sequence of terms: being-in-the-world, worldhood, and care as the being of Dasein. The course ends by sketching the themes of death and conscience and their relevance to an ontology that makes the phenomenon of time central. Theodore Kisiel's outstanding translation permits English-speaking readers to appreciate the central importance of this text in the development of Heidegger's thought.

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Philip and David feel that it is important to be clear up front about how the topic of Heidegger's racist politics will be dealt with in this meetup. Throughout his life (starting as a very young man) Heidegger was drawn to far right wing, nationalist, racist views which any reasonable person should find loathsome. Yet when it comes to thinking about the way the world is and what it means to be a human in that world, Heidegger is arguably the most important philosopher of the twentieth century. Some meetups rule out any discussion of Heidegger's politics, even though this is a core aspect of Heidegger's way of thinking. This meetup will not do that. In this meetup, we will make room for discussion of how Heidegger's politics may relate to his ideas on ontology and being human. Also, it will be possible in this meetup to consider whether Heidegger's ideas on ontology and being human shaped his politics. These questions will certainly not be the main focus of the meetup (far from it). But these questions will not be ignored either.