Abstract
There has been extensive scholarly debate surrounding Heidegger’s self-described “turn” (Kehre) from the phenomenology of Being and Time (1927) to his later work, and broad disagreement about exactly what the turn was and when it occurred. On some accounts, it had already taken place by 1930, at which point Heidegger no longer believed that fundamental ontology opened the way to a general consideration of the meaning of being as such. According to Heidegger himself, by contrast, the turn was not a change in his own philosophical views at all, but an impersonal event of some larger significance in the history of thought. Accounts of the shift from the “early” to the “later” Heidegger have as a result never fully managed to disentangle two distinct issues: his abandonment of the project announced and commenced in Being and Time on the one hand, and the his critique of metaphysics on the other.
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Notes
- 1.
Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 5th ed., R. Taft, trans. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 1.
- 2.
“What Is Metaphysics?” D. F. Krell, trans. Pathmarks, W. McNeill, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 82.
- 3.
The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, W. McNeill and N. Walker, trans. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 1.
- 4.
Introduction to Metaphysics, 2nd ed., G. Fried and R. Polt, trans. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 19 [13] (translation modified).
- 5.
Consider, by contrast, Markus Gabriel, who denies the coherence of the very idea of a totality of entities, hence its existence. See his Fields of Sense: A New Realist Ontology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015) and Why the World Does Not Exist, G. S. Moss, trans. (Cambridge: Polity, 2015). For a critical review of Fields of Sense, see my “Gabriel’s Metaphysics of Sense,” The Harvard Review of Philosophy, vol. 23 (2016): 53–9.
- 6.
See my Heidegger’s Analytic: Interpretation, Discourse, and Authenticity in “Being and Time” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), Chapter 4.
- 7.
What Is Called Thinking? J. Glenn Gray, trans. (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 8. What Heidegger meant by this emerges more clearly much later in the text when he says, “Science does not think in the sense in which thinkers think” (134).
- 8.
Also, unlike in 1929, Heidegger in 1943 insists that metaphysics is essentially historical: “Metaphysics of the history of this truth,” namely the truth about entities (232). Heidegger (as far as I know) first refers to the history of being in the 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics (EM 70). There is no suggestion in “What Is Metaphysics?” that being itself might have a history.
- 9.
The most famous among them is his attempt to explain away the obviously jingoistic reference to “the inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism as a supposedly dispassionate comment on the growth of modern technology (EM 152).
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Carman, T. (2022). Heidegger’s Disavowal of Metaphysics. In: Rogove, J., D’Oriano, P. (eds) Heidegger and his Anglo-American Reception. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 119. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05817-2_6
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