This highly influential collection of four seminars conducted between 1966 and 1973 was first published in French transcription in 1976, the year Heidegger died. Their influence on French philosophy and thinking during the late 1970s and 1980s cannot be exaggerated, for, at the moment when the work of Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, and others was first coming to prominence, it now had access to Heidegger's clearest articulations of his later thinking. Much of deconstruction and poststructuralist thought bears the formative imprint of these seminars. Heidegger himself oversaw their German translation (published in 1977 and again in 1986, in a collected edition), from which this long-awaited English translation by Mitchell and Raffoul has been made. Their brilliant translation will prove indispensable for theory and criticism in English. Heidegger breathes new life into the ancient Greek meaning of presencing, which is the keynote of his call for the abandonment of all modern realisms, idealisms, and materialisms and for a return to an experience of consciousness that sees itself as part of phenomenal presencing, rather than as something separate and detached from the world. On Kant, Marx, and the meaning of technology, these seminars contain some of Heidegger's most thoughtful insights and arguments. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers; lower-level undergraduates through faculty.
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Overall Four Seminars is essentially a glimpse into Heidegger's way of working with students. Its pages recount his effortless command of the sweep of the history of Western philosophy from Anaximander to Husserl and Wittgenstein, his modesty about the accomplishments of Being and Time fifty years after writing the book, his conviction about the fundamental philosophical importance of phenomenological method . . . . Genuine teaching, then, is the demonstration of listening and thinking, not the presentation of content.26.1 2005
* Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal *
[This] brilliant translation will prove indispensable for theory and criticism in English. . . . On Kant, Marx, and the meaning of technology, these seminars contain some of Heidegger's most thoughtful insights and arguments. . . . Highly recommended.
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