Martin Heidegger and National Socialism; Questions and Answers

xl, [2], 319, [5] pages. Notes on Text. Notes on Contributors. A Selective Bibliography on Heidegger and Politics. Appendices. Index. Introduction by Karsten Harries. Martin Heidegger (26 September 1889 - 26 May 1976) was a German philosopher and a seminal thinker in the Continental tradition and philosophical hermeneutics. According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, he is "widely acknowledged to be one of the most original and important philosophers of the 20th century". Heidegger is best known for his contributions to phenomenology and existentialism. His first and best known book, Being and Time (1927) is one of the central philosophical works of the 20th century. In the first division of the work, Heidegger attempted to turn away from "ontic" questions about beings to ontological questions about Being, and recover the most fundamental philosophical question: the question of Being, of what it means for something to be. For Heidegger thinking is thinking about things originally discovered in our everyday practical engagements. The consequence of this is that our capacity to think cannot be the most central quality of our being because thinking is a reflecting upon this more original way of discovering the world. In the second division, Heidegger argues that human being is even more fundamentally structured by its Temporality, or its concern with, and relationship to time, existing as a structurally open "possibility-for-being." Heidegger is a controversial figure, largely for his affiliation with Nazism, as Rector of the University of Freiburg, before his resignation in April 1934, for which he neither apologized nor publicly expressed regret. Derived from Publisher's Weekly review: Martin Heidegger, acclaimed by some as the spiritual father of existentialism and of postmodernism, was a Nazi. Swept up in the mass enthusiasm for Hitler in 1933, he soon voiced opposition to the fuhrer but stayed in the party until 1945 and thereafter remained silent on Auschwitz. Victor Farias dealt a blow to the German philosopher's reputation with his 1987 book Heidegger and Nazism. Now comes a collection of essays, interviews and comments in defense of Heidegger, edited by Neske, the philosopher's long-time German publisher, and Kettering, who teaches philosophy in Mainz. Included are Heidegger's 1966 interview with Der Speigel (published posthumously in 1976); his tight-lipped TV interview of 1969; his retrospective apology when seeking reinstatement to a university post in 1945; and defenses of Heidegger by Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, colleagues and pupils. From Wikipedia: Philosopher Martin Heidegger joined the Nazi Party (NSDAP) on May 1, 1933, ten days after being elected Rector of the University of Freiburg. A year later, in April 1934, he resigned the Rectorship and stopped taking part in Nazi Party meetings, but remained a member of the Nazi Party until its dismantling at the end of World War II. The denazification hearings immediately after World War II led to Heidegger's dismissal from Freiburg, banning him from teaching. In 1949, after several years of investigation, the French military finally classified Heidegger as a Mitläufer or "Nazi follower". The teaching ban was lifted in 1951 and Heidegger was granted emeritus status in 1953, but he was never allowed to resume his philosophy chair. Heidegger's involvement with National Socialism, his attitude towards Jews and his near-total silence about the Holocaust in his writing and teaching after 1945 are highly controversial. The Black Notebooks, written between 1931 and 1941, contain several anti-semitic statements. After 1945, Heidegger never published anything about the Holocaust or the extermination camps, and made one sole verbal mention of them, in 1949, whose meaning is disputed among scholars. Heidegger never apologized for anything and is only known to have expressed regret once, privately, when he described his rectorship and the related political engagement.…