Heidegger in Question: The Art of Existing

Robert Bernasconi explores in the context of Heidegger's thought a number of questions of far-reaching concern: what is the role of literary examples within philosophy? Is art dead? What is the relation of art to nature? Is there a place for the idea of a "people" in art and literary theory, and in philosophy? Is the history of philosophy to be written as a narrative? What is the status of ethics within philosophy? What place does philosophy give to praxis? What is the place today of the belief in the nobility of the philosophical life? What is the relation of politics to thought? Reflecting a dominant concern of recent Heidegger scholarship, the focal point of a number of the essays is the relation of Heidegger's own politics to his thought. In addition to this examination of what appears to compromise Heidegger's philosophy, Bernasconi explores its relation to the further possibilities which that thought has opened in the writings of Arendt, Gadamer, Levinas, and Derrida.

Table of Contents:
Preface Acknowledgements Abbreviations of Works by Heidegger Introduction Part I: Ethics and Politics 1.The Fate of the Distinction between Praxis and Poiesis 2.“The Double Concept of Philosophy” and the Place of Ethics in Being and Time 3.Justice and the Twilight Zone of Morality 4.Habermas, Arendt, and Levinas on the Philosopher’s “Error”: Tracking the Diabolical in Heidegger Part II: Art and Literature 5.Literary Attestation in Philosophy: Heidegger’s Footnote on Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” 6.The Greatness of the Work of Art 7.Ne sutor ultra crepidam: Erasmus and Dürer at the Hands of Panofsky and Heidegger 8.“Poet of Poets. Poet of the Germans” Hölderlin and the Dialogue between Poets and Thinkers Part III: History and Historiology 9.Descartes in the History of Being: Another Bad Novel? 10.Bridging the Abyss: Heidegger and Gadamer 11.The Transformation of Language at Another Beginning 12.Deconstruction and the Possibility of Ethics: Reiterating the “Letter on Humanism” Notes I

About the Author :
Robert L. Bernasconi is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. He is well known as a reader of Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas, and for his work on the concept of race. He has also written on the history of philosophy. His books include How to Read Sartre (2007), Heidegger in Question: The Art of Existing (1993) and, co-edited with Simon Critchley, The Cambridge Companion to Levinas (2002).

Review :
""There is a sense that the questions addressed here-concerning ethics, politics, literature, and history—all belong to the same family of questions. Bernasconi worries over the concrete commitments of Heidegger's text and thought, which he takes to be inseparable from Heidegger's radicality." —Research in Phenomenology