⇒ Libro Parmenides Studies in Continental Thought Martin Heidegger Andre Schuwer Richard Rojcewicz Books

Parmenides Studies in Continental Thought Martin Heidegger Andre Schuwer Richard Rojcewicz Books

Download As PDF : Parmenides Studies in Continental Thought Martin Heidegger Andre Schuwer Richard Rojcewicz Books

Parmenides Studies in Continental Thought Martin Heidegger Andre Schuwer Richard Rojcewicz Books

I bought this book in some ways by mistake, not being familiar with Heidegger beyond an abortive attempt at "Being and Time" some two decades ago. I was more interested in Parmenides than Heidegger, but decided I'd see what he had to say about the mysterious pre-Socratic.

If one is looking for a 'traditional' study of Parmenides, look elsewhere. The book examines a few lines at most, concentrating on the etymology of ancient Greek words and ideas, their translation through Latin to German (and now English . . .) and how this relates to Heidegger's obsession with Dasein.

And I didn't mind a bit. I'll need another work to analyze Parmenides' thought and his poem, but as an introduction to Heidegger this was brilliant - so much so that I've purchased another 7 of the lecture courses. Loving ancient Greek helps in this regard. Although I do question some of Heidegger's interpretations and translations, I do not know how much of this is due to the translation of German to English rather than Greek to German.

I also purchased Yannaras' On the Absence and Unknowability of God: Heidegger and the Areopagite, as I think some of his thought concerning Being is more related to Patristic and Orthodox theology of apophasis than any humanist philosophy I've encountered.

But that's my obsession. How strange to discover I enjoy reading Heidegger!


Tags : Amazon.com: Parmenides (Studies in Continental Thought) (9780253212146): Martin Heidegger, Andre Schuwer, Richard Rojcewicz: Books,Martin Heidegger, Andre Schuwer, Richard Rojcewicz,Parmenides (Studies in Continental Thought),Indiana University Press,0253212146,Classics; Philosophy; Continental,History,History & Surveys - Ancient & Classical,Literary Criticism Ancient & Classical,Non-Fiction,PHILOSOPHY General,PHILOSOPHY History & Surveys Ancient & Classical,Philosophy,ScholarlyGraduate,UNIVERSITY PRESS,United States,Western Europe

Parmenides Studies in Continental Thought Martin Heidegger Andre Schuwer Richard Rojcewicz Books Reviews

A book, like "What is Called Thinking," that will require a complete reconsidering of what the reader understands. The beginning sections of the book -- best considered a meditation, in the sense of Descartes -- are on how to translate 'Aletheia,' which Heidegger gradually makes into a problematic that serves as a lens for his reading of Parmenides. Through that lens, the notion that Western thought goes awry at Aristotle and Plato by asking the wrong first question becomes, to the reader, consuming. This is a book which, like Meditations on First Philosophy, is essential -- and largely unread.
As described however, I don’t think it’s worth $20
This series of lectures was delivered just after the war, after Heidegger's naive brush with brutish politics, and more significantly, it was written after he had completed his in-depth ruminations in Contributions to Philosophy (enowning) and Mindfulness. His perspective was now complete, its formulations fresh and fully formed. The Parmenides lectures thus exhibited the thinker fresh and brimming with the power of his incisiveness and devotion to the inceptual moment.
This book begins with a translation of Parmenides' poem but then launches off into a riff, more like a classical variation on a theme, that teases out the inceptual thinking that these simple words in a poem would hide from the contemporary reader's sensibilities.
Here many of the deep connections between aletheia and lethe, his guiding themes, are presented with lucid power; his connecting of the notions of the gaze, thea (as in "theater) and thea (as in goddess) is striking as an account of the experiencing of the gods. His description of the polis as a gathering and playing forth of determining meaning among the people opens out onto a new vision of our communally shaped meanings. He culminates in an elucidation of the sense of the "open" by contrasting his sense of the term with that of Rilke (in the Eighth Duino Elegy). This rendition of the term flows directly from his expansive opening of the term "be-ing" in his grounding works, mentioned above.
Every page was philosophically thrilling. Anyone who is ready to leap into the potency of thought to revive our human endeavor will value the encounter offered in this book.
This is not always treated as one of Heidegger's core works. It is a series of lectures given in 1942-1943, ostensibly on Parmenides and Heraclitus, but I found it to be a very helpful historical account of key themes in Heidegger's later thought unconcealment, the open, language, and technology.

He doesn't argue for a position here -- he sets out a history. A history of truth, really a history of the corruption of truth. He takes as his starting point Paremenides' poem, and in particular "The Way of Truth", where "truth" is a translation of "aletheia".

Heidegger reconstructs aletheia through an examination of the word's history and its use in Greek literature and philosophy. His high level claim is that truth has undergone a transition and corruption. In the early Greek world, aletheia, more faithfully translated as "unconcealment", inherently reveals and "withdraws" at the same time. Truth isn't the kind of full understanding or mirroring of reality conveyed by the modern conception of truth as "correctness", correspondence between idea or word and reality.

Truth for the Greeks, in Heidegger's account, maintains a kind of autonomy. His treatment here brings together consistent themes in his later thought, in which language and art participate in the revealing of the world to us, granted to us but not exhausted by that revealing. Although not his term, I always find myself coming back to the "autonomy" of reality as something that has been banished by modern thought and technology.

Heidegger in one passage discusses the related notion of the "mysterious", saying that what is mysterious has been reduced to the "unexplained" by modern thought. Modern thought works within a way of understanding that it takes for THE way of understanding. Anything that doesn't yield to it is not inherently mysterious, just not yet explained. What is lost is the acceptance that not everything yields itself to explanation, that the very idea of understanding anything means also leaving behind a mystery, that is, anything that doesn't yield itself to that understanding -- whatever reveals also conceals.

The fatal modern mistake here is to suppose that what is mysterious is just what is currently beyond our knowledge (beyond the current reach of science). It's not that our methods haven't reached what is mysterious because our knowledge just hasn't progressed that far. It is that no matter how far we progress with our methods, precisely because of our methods, the mysterious will remain. Absolute knowledge, full transparency of reality is an illusion, an illusion born of the arrogance to think that reality fully yields itself to our understanding.

You can see here as well the connection between this sense that all can be explained and understood and the attitude of technology, that all is here for our use. Reality, in yielding itself to us, is what it is for us and nothing more. It loses its inherency in losing its mystery.

These are consistent themes through Heidegger's later writing, and the great advantage here is the coherent presentation of them via a history of truth.

In addition to elucidating his own thoughts on technology and the degradation of thinking, there is a great deal here of interest in Heidegger's account of the history of philosophy.

During the second half of the book, Heidegger presents an interpretation of Plato's Myth of Er. He understands the River Lethe in Plato's myth in the light of the contrast between aletheia as unconcealing and lethe (often translated as "forgetfulness") as "withdrawing concealment". If we understand Plato's myth in this way, his "doctrine of recollection" (which Heidegger doesn't discuss directly here) becomes something very different from the pyschological movement through knowing, forgetting, and recalling. The demonstration of recollection in the Meno then would not be understood as a recovering of innate knowledge so much as a demonstration of the dialectic as how what is true reveals itself.

This is an important book to read, I think, if we want to understand Heidegger's later thought. Taking an historical perspective allows us to see those main themes of his later thought from a different angle than some of the later more purely thematic treatments such as The Question Concerning Technology, On the Way to Language, or the Discourse on Thinking.
I bought this book in some ways by mistake, not being familiar with Heidegger beyond an abortive attempt at "Being and Time" some two decades ago. I was more interested in Parmenides than Heidegger, but decided I'd see what he had to say about the mysterious pre-Socratic.

If one is looking for a 'traditional' study of Parmenides, look elsewhere. The book examines a few lines at most, concentrating on the etymology of ancient Greek words and ideas, their translation through Latin to German (and now English . . .) and how this relates to Heidegger's obsession with Dasein.

And I didn't mind a bit. I'll need another work to analyze Parmenides' thought and his poem, but as an introduction to Heidegger this was brilliant - so much so that I've purchased another 7 of the lecture courses. Loving ancient Greek helps in this regard. Although I do question some of Heidegger's interpretations and translations, I do not know how much of this is due to the translation of German to English rather than Greek to German.

I also purchased Yannaras' On the Absence and Unknowability of God Heidegger and the Areopagite, as I think some of his thought concerning Being is more related to Patristic and Orthodox theology of apophasis than any humanist philosophy I've encountered.

But that's my obsession. How strange to discover I enjoy reading Heidegger!