Contributions to Philosophy (Vom Ereignis)

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by Martin Heidegger,

Translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly

Indiana University Press

Due/Published December 1999, 464 pages, cloth

ISBN 0253336066

Written in 1936-38 and titled Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) in German, this work was awaited with great expectation long before its publication on the centennial of Heidegger's birth in 1989. For Heidegger scholars, this is the work that begins--post Being and Time--to fill out Heidegger's task to reshape the project of thinking itself. The work is comprised of six parts: "Echo," "Playing-Forth," "Leap," "Grounding," "The Ones to Come," and "The Last God," followed by a final section--"Being."

Review

Many scholars of Heidegger consider Contributions to Philosophy second only to Being and Time in terms of defining his work and thought. Heidegger himself wrote that the concept of “enowning,” first developed in Contributions to Philosophy, was after 1935, “the guiding-word of my thinking.” With all this in mind, this first-ever English publication of this work is long overdue. While Being and Time critiques the project of Western metaphysics Contributions to Philosophy reshapes the very project of thinking. The work introduces and deepens such Heideggerian concepts as being, enowning, Dasein, and others.

In addressing the importance of this text, F.-W. von Herrmann, editor of the German edition, writes, “Following the first, fundamental-ontological onset of the question of being in Being and Time, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) is the first, encompassing attempt at a second, be-ing historical, i.e., “more originary” onset and elaboration of the same question, in which the meaning of meaning -- as the truth and the essential sway, i.e., essential swaying of be-ing -- is inquired into and this essential swaying is thought is thought as enowing.”

Also of interest: The recent publication of Heidegger’s lecutures on Kant, Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (Indiana University Press, $35.00)