Basic Concepts [Paperback]

... an excellent and accessible introduction to the later Heidegger. Choice

Heideggers method is unmistakable in these lectures.... This is thinking that is alive, always green. Review of Metaphysics

This translation... enlarges our historical view of the probing advances in Heideggers thought. International Studies in Philosophy

This clear translation of Martin Heideggers lecture course at the University of Freiburg in the winter semester of 1941, first published in German in 1981 as Grundbegriffe (volume 51 of Heideggers collected works), offers a concise introduction to the new directions of his later thought. In this transition, Heidegger shifts from the problem of the meaning of being to the question of the truth of being.

Translators Foreword
Introduction: The Internal Connection between Ground-Being-Inception
1. Elucidation of the title of the lecture Basic Concepts
Recapitulation
1. Our understnading of basic concepts and our relation to them as an anticipatory knowing
2. The decay of knowing in the present age: The decision in favor of the useful over what we can do without
3. The inception as a decision about what is essential in Western history (in modern times: unconditional will and technology)
4. Practicing the relation to what is thought-worthy by considering the ground
5. The essential admittance of historical man into the inception, into the essence of ground
Part One: Considering the Saying. The Differnce between Beings and Being
First Division: Discussion of the Is , of Beings as a Whole
2. Beings as a whole are actual, possible, necessary
3. Nonconsideration of the essential distinction between being and beings
4. The nondiscoverability of the is
5. The unquestioned character of the is in its grammatical determlƒ*