Basic Concepts of Ancient Philosophy

by Martin Heidegger, Richard Rojcewicz (Translator)

The eminent German philosopher’s unique analysis of Ancient Greek philosophy and its relation to his own pioneering work.Basic Concepts of Ancient Philosophy presents a lecture course given by Martin Heidegger in 1926 at the University of Marburg. The book provides Heidegger’s most systematic history of Ancient philosophy beginning with Thales and ending with Aristotle. In this lecture, which coincides with the completion of his most important work, Being and Time, Heidegger is working out a way to sharply differentiate between beings and Being.Richard Rojcewicz’s clear and accurate translation offers English-speaking readers valuable insight into Heidegger’s views on Ancient thought and concepts such as principle, cause, nature, unity, multiplicity, Logos, truth, science, soul, category, and motion.

263 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 22, 2021

About the author

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) was a German philosopher whose work is perhaps most readily associated with phenomenology and existentialism, although his thinking should be identified as part of such philosophical movements only with extreme care and qualification. His ideas have exerted a seminal influence on the development of contemporary European philosophy. They have also had an impact far beyond philosophy, for example in architectural theory (see e.g., Sharr 2007), literary criticism (see e.g., Ziarek 1989), theology (see e.g., Caputo 1993), psychotherapy (see e.g., Binswanger 1943/1964, Guignon 1993) and cognitive science (see e.g., Dreyfus 1992, 2008; Wheeler 2005; Kiverstein and Wheeler forthcoming).

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

As stated by Heidegger at the very beginning, the aim of this course is “a penetrating understanding of the basic scientific concepts, ones which not only have determined-decisively determined-all subsequent philosophy but which have also made possible Western science as a whole and today still provide that science its foundations”. Some of the basic concepts discussed here are: physics, unity/multiplicity, logos, truth, idea, knowledge, science, category, motion, potentiality, energy, life, and soul. For Heidegger there are two types of sciences: (1) the positive and ontic sciences that deal with beings and (2) the critical and ontological science of philosophy that alone deals with Being.

Using Aristotle's Metaphysics as both the source and as the guideline - Heidegger divided the Ancient Greeks and this course into three parts: (1) Milesian philosophers of nature, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Eleatics, Sophists, and Socrates (2) Plato, and finally (3) Aristotle. In the first part, Heidegger traces how the phenomenon of Being showed up for the first time, differentiated from beings, and was more or less explicitly questioned – especially in connection with Aletheia in Parmenides and with Logos in Heraclitus. In the second part dedicated to Plato, Heidegger stays mainly with the dialogues Republic and Theatetus, and shows how the Ideas, the supreme idea of Good, dialectics, and especially the issue of non-beings are connected and eventually took over Being. Finally and at its apex, the question of Being becomes the explicit object of scientific philosophy with Aristotle. However, Aristotle is also the one who fatefully moved the question of Being into the question of the Being of beings (future ontology) and also towards the question of the highest/exemplary being (future theology).

Heidegger delivered this course while he was writing “Being and Time”. It is very satisfying to see how he unearthed, borrowed, and made alive Aristotelian concepts like: present-at-hand, ready-at-hand, presence, production, Dasein, time, science, and similar. On the other hand, Heidegger did not have time to elaborate his notes further after delivering this course - as he usually did with the other courses. As such, there are entire sections where all there are are a few key concepts without any context or proper sentences. Also quite unusual for these courses, some sketches are supplemented at the end with the more elaborated notes as taken by two different students attending this course.

This is also Heidegger's book with the most Ancient Greek terms in it – as there are a lot of pages with >50% Greek words in them. There is a dictionary at the end, however my reading of this book was quite slow and difficult because of this.