Heidegger and the Destruction of Aristotle: On How to Read the Tradition (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy) - Softcover

Sean D. Kirkland (author)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0810146185 ISBN 13: 9780810146181

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 2023

Synopsis

A bold new conception of Heidegger’s project of Destruktion as a method of interpreting history

For Martin Heidegger, our inherited traditions provide the concepts through which we make our world intelligible. Concepts we can also oppose, disrupt, and even exceed. First, however, if Western philosophy is our inheritance, we must submit it to Destruktion―starting with Aristotle. Heidegger and the Destruction of Aristotle: On How to Read the Tradition presents a new conception of Heidegger’s “destruction” as a way of reading.

Situated between Nietzschean genealogy and Derridean deconstruction, this method uncovers in Aristotle the most vital originating articulations of the Western tradition and gives us the means to confront it. Sean D. Kirkland argues this is not a rejection of the past but a sophisticated and indeed timely hermeneutic tool―a complex, illuminating, and powerful method for interpreting historical texts at our present moment. Acknowledging the historical Heidegger as a politically compromised and still divisive figure, Kirkland demonstrates that Heideggerian destruction is a method of interpreting history that enables us to reorient and indeed transform its own most troubling legacies.

About this title

About the Author

Sean D. Kirkland is an associate professor of philosophy at DePaul University. He is the author of The Ontology of Socratic Questioning in Plato's Early Dialogues, which won the 2013 Book Award from Symposium.

Edition details

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0810146185
• ISBN 13: 9780810146181
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 184