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In the decades since Martin Heidegger's death, many of his early writings--notes and talks, essays and reviews--have made it into print, but in such scattershot fashion and erratic translation as to mitigate their usefulness for understanding the development, direction, and ultimate shape of his work. This timely collection, edited by two preeminent Heidegger scholars, brings together in English translation the most philosophical of Heidegger's earliest occasional writings from 1910 to the end of 1927. These important philosophical documents fill out the context in which the early Heidegger wrote his major works and provide the background against which they appeared.

Accompanied by incisive commentary, these pieces from Heidegger's student days, his early Freiburg period, and the time of his Marburg lecture courses will contribute substantially to rethinking the making and meaning of Being and Time. The contents are of a depth and quality that make this volume the collection for those interested in Heidegger's work prior to his masterwork. The book will also serve those concerned with Heidegger's relation to such figures as Aristotle, Dilthey, Husserl, Jaspers, and Löwith, as well as scholars whose interests are more topically centered on questions of history, logic, religion, and truth. Important in their own right, these pieces will also prove particularly useful to students of Heidegger's thought and of twentieth-century philosophy in general.

Being and God argues that defensible philosophical theorization concerning the topic “God” is both possible and necessary within the framework of an adequate systematic philosophy—which must include a theory of Being—but is not possible in the absence of such a framework. The book provides critiques of philosophical approaches to this topic that have not relied on such frameworks; targets include the most important and influential treatments presented by historical, contemporary analytic, and contemporary continental philosophers. The book also further develops the systematic framework presented in Puntel’s Structure and Being (2008), extending a line of argumentation to show that the absolutely necessary dimension of Being is, when more fully explicated, appropriately named “God.”

This book brings a central figure of the early German Romantic movement—the poet and philosopher Novalis—into dialogue with the work of Martin Heidegger. Looking beyond the question of direct influence, the book demonstrates that Novalis and Heidegger pursued complementary endeavors as thinkers of relation. Implicitly operative in their thinking, Peter Hanly argues, is an excavation of the Greek conception of harmonia found in the fragments of the pre-Socratic thinker Heraclitus. This is a conception that understands harmony not as concordance but as primal dissonance. It is this experience of harmonia, Hanly proposes, that allows both Novalis and Heidegger to think relation in terms of dynamic and contradictory energies of separation and convergence. Between Heidegger and Novalis thus is a study of the “in-between,” associated in Novalis with energies of fertility and productivity and in Heidegger with energies of agonistic difference.
 
An entirely new approach to both Novalis and Heidegger, this book will interest scholars and students engaged with continental philosophy and the legacy of German Romanticism.  
 

In a provactive work that brings new tools to the history of philosophy, Karen S. Feldman offers an elegant account of how philosophical language appears to produce the very thing it claims to describe. She demonstrates that conscience can only be described and understood through tropes and figures of langugae. If description in literal terms is impossible, as Binding Words convincingly argues, perhaps there is no such thing. But if the word "conscience" has no tangible referent, then how can conscience be constructed as binding? Does our conscience move us to do things, or is this yet another figure of speech?

Hobbes's Leviathan, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, and Heidegger's Being and Time dramatize conscience's relation to language and knowledge, morality and duty, and ontology. Feldman investigates how, within these works, conscience is described as binding upon us while at the same time asking how texts themselves may be read as binding.