The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy

Cover

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Title Page, Copyright Page

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pp. i-iv

CONTENTS

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pp. vii-

Preface

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pp. ix-xx

After Nietzsche, after the Holocaust, after modernity, can philosophy still ask about God? In the following work, I dare to suggest that not only can philosophy presume to ask about God, it must ask about God. Philosophy must lift the censure placed upon it by the main currents of twentieth-century thought. ...

1. Heidegger and the Medieval Theological Paradigm

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pp. 1-24

Like a great oak tree that has colonized a grove by driving roots deep into subterranean springs not reached by lesser trees, Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit has dominated the twentieth century by feeding off traditions that lesser philosophical works cannot access. Not only a forgotten Aristotle, but also Martin Luther...

2. Heidegger’s Religious-Philosophical Itinerarium

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pp. 25-59

Heidegger began his career at Freiburg University in 1915 as an interpreter of the Catholic Middle Ages and as, to all appearances, a devout Roman Catholic: former seminarian and son of the sexton in Meßkirch. As his views on facticity and historicity developed, he became increasingly critical of “the system of Catholicism.” ...

3. The Phenomenology of the Early Heidegger

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pp. 60-87

The early Heidegger’s circuitous path, from the Habilitationsschrift to Sein und Zeit ultimately moves in a single direction. The question that drives the Daseinanalytic of Sein und Zeit—the question of the being of time—first surfaces in Heidegger’s 1915 Scotus research. It reappears in the 1917-19 mysticism research, the remarks on Luther, the 1920-21 religion...

4. Duns Scotus

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pp. 88-119

The influence of Scotus on Heidegger, while long a subject of general speculation, has not yet received a careful study. Heidegger’s debt to Scotus manifests itself on the opening page of Sein und Zeit. Heidegger asks about the meaning of being, that is, to what essence (logos) does the word “being” refer (SZ 2/1). He assumes a single meaning of being, a univocatio entis...

5. Mysticism

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pp. 120-150

“The most extreme sharpness and depth of thought belong to genuine and great mysticism,” Heidegger wrote in 1955.¹The insight came to him far earlier. Joseph Sauer’s course in the history of medieval mysticism, which Heidegger took in 1910–11, was the beginning of a lifelong interest in Meister Eckhart.² In the Habilitationsschrift, Heidegger spoke...

6. Luther

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pp. 151-184

The year 1917 was a turning point for Heidegger. Prior to 1917, he never openly questioned the Roman Catholic/Scholastic appropriation of philosophical methods into theology. After 1917, Heidegger began to regard Scholasticism as the site of the hegemony of theoretical speculative-aesthetic concepts in Christianity and the consequent...

7. Primal Christianity

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pp. 185-207

In the light of the early Freiburg lectures, it is hard to deny Rudolf Bultmann’s claim that a direct relationship exists between the Daseinanalytic and early Christianity.¹ Heidegger and Bultmann, a specialist on the New Testament at Marburg University, worked closely together during Heidegger’s Marburg years. Heidegger participated in Bultmann’s...

8. The Effort to Overcome Scholasticism

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pp. 208-242

Heidegger’s later critique of onto-theology is rooted in his earliest efforts to de-Christianize metaphysics. It is no longer disputable that he was directly inspired by Luther’s de-Hellenization of Christianity. Luther attempted to purify Christian theology of Greek metaphysics by dismantling the Aristotelian-Scholastic superstructure that had grown up...

9. Being-Before-God in the Middle Ages

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pp. 243-255

Scholasticism did not leave the Jewish-Christian sense of history as it found it nor did it annul it. It sublated the early Christian understanding of time, fusing it with Hellenistic theoretical structures into a distinctively new way of being Christian. Greco-Roman “circular thinking” (the emphasis on the eternity of form) and Jewish-Christian historical...

Selected Bibliography

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pp. 257-266

Index

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pp. 267-268