Engaging Heidegger

One of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger was primarily concerned with the ‘question of Being.’ However, recent scholarship has tended to marginalize the importance of the name of Being in his thought. Through a focused reading of Heidegger's texts, and especially his late and often overlooked Four Seminars (1966-1973), Richard Capobianco counters this trend by redirecting attention to the centrality of the name of Being in Heidegger's lifetime of thought. Capobianco gives special attention to Heidegger's resonant terms Ereignis and Lichtung and reads them as saying and showing the very same fundamental phenomenon named ‘Being itself ’. Written in a clear and approachable manner, the essays in Engaging Heidegger examine Heidegger's thought in view of ancient Greek, medieval, and Eastern thinking, and they draw out the deeply humane character of his ‘meditative thinking.’

Richard Capobianco makes the case that the core matter of Heidegger's lifetime of thought was Being as the temporal emergence of all beings and things.

The holy (Being-as-the-holy) is a distinctive theme in Heidegger’s work that is perhaps well-known to readers, yet not attended to sufficiently in contemporary Heidegger studies. The essays in this volume, authored by an international group of scholars, offer readers an opportunity to consider the many dimensions and possibilities of the notion of “the holy” (das Heilige) in his thinking. The authors in this volume document the multiple texts and contexts of Heidegger’s discussions of the holy, and they offer detailed readings and their own particular interpretations and applications. The chapters, taken together, make a significant contribution not only to Heidegger scholarship but also to our understanding of our fundamental human situation in relation to Being-as-the holy.

In Heidegger’s Being: The Shimmering Unfolding, the eminent Heidegger scholar Richard Capobianco draws on many new texts and sources to highlight in fresh ways the beauty and spiritual resonance of Martin Heidegger’s thinking about Being. As in his earlier books, Capobianco offers a meditative path through Heidegger’s thought. He illuminates major motifs that are overlooked or set aside by most contemporary readings of Heidegger, amplifying these motifs in an original, heartfelt, and eloquent way. The book also offers a series of reflections that bring Heidegger’s thinking into close proximity to other thinkers and poets, including Alfred North Whitehead, C.G. Jung, Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, and Rumi. Heidegger’s Being: The Shimmering Unfolding is intended not only for dedicated students of Heidegger’s work but also for engaged general readers who wish to come to a deeper appreciation of his distinctive vision of Being.

In Heidegger’s Way of Being, the follow-up to his 2010 book, Engaging Heidegger, Richard Capobianco makes the case clearly and compellingly that the core matter of Heidegger’s lifetime of thought was Being as the temporal emergence of all beings and things. Drawing upon a wide variety of texts, many of which have been previously untranslated, Capobianco illuminates the overarching importance of Being as radiant manifestation – “the truth of Being” – and how Heidegger also named and elucidated this fundamental phenomenon as physis (Nature), Aletheia, the primordial Logos, and as Ereignis, Lichtung, and Es gibt. Heidegger’s Way of Being brings back into full view the originality and distinctiveness of Heidegger’s thought and offers an emphatic rejoinder to certain more recent readings, and particularly those that propose a reduction of Being to “sense” or “meaning” and maintain that the core matter is human meaning-making. Capobianco’s vivid and often poetic reflections serve to evoke for readers the very experience of Being – or as he prefers to name it, the Being-way – and to invite us to pause and meditate on the manner of our human way in relation to the Being-way.

Education, Experience and Existence proposes a new way of understanding education that delves beneath the conflict, confusion and compromise that characterize its long history. At the heart of this new understanding is what John Dewey strove to expound: a coherent theory of experience. Dewey’s reputation as a pragmatist is well known, but where experience is concerned pragmatism is only half the story. The other half is phenomenological, as crafted by Martin Heidegger. Encompassing both is Charles Sanders Peirce, whose philosophy draws pragmatism and phenomenology together in an embrace which enables a truly experiential philosophy to emerge. The book approaches the problem of confusion in education and philosophy by beginning with our most basic understandings of existence. Existence as an interaction is the starting point of modern science, and existence as individuality offers an aesthetic origin, attending to existence as a simple unity. In our contemporary world where scientific ways of thinking are privileged, the aesthetic whole is often overlooked, especially in education. Yet both are connected. A coherent theory of experience is therefore a marriage between phenomenology and pragmatism, enabling each to maintain its position by acknowledging how both are required. The book is divided into three main parts: - confusion in philosophy and education - a coherent theory of experience - a coherent theory of education. Quay suggests that education benefits from such a coherent theory of experience by better comprehending its connection to life. More than just knowing, more than just doing, education is about being. This book will be of interest to philosophers, educators and educational philosophers.

The contributions to this volume, written by leading scholars in the field of Heidegger research, offer close readings of Heidegger's texts and provide sound orientation in the field of contemporary Heidegger research. They show how the different trajectories of Heidegger's thought all converge at one point: the question of Being.

As the only full-length treatment in English of spatiality in Martin Heidegger&’s work, this book makes an important contribution to Heidegger studies as well as to research on the history of philosophy. More generally, it advances our understanding of philosophy in terms of its &"exilic&" character, a sense of alterity that becomes apparent when one fully engages the temporality or finitude essential to conceptual determinations. By focusing on Heidegger&’s treatment of the classical difficulty of giving conceptual articulation to spatiality, the author discusses how Heidegger&’s thought is caught up in and enacts the temporality it uncovers in Being and Time and in his later writings. Ultimately, when understood in this manner, thought is an &"exilic&" experience&—a determination of being that in each case comes to pass in a loss of first principles and origins and, simultaneously, as an opening to conceptual figurations yet to come. The discussion engages such main historical figures as Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, and indirectly Husserl, as well as contemporary European and American Continental thought.