A bold new conception of Heidegger’s project ofDestruktionas a method of interpreting history
For Martin Heidegger, our inherited traditions provide the concepts through which we make our world intelligible. Concepts we can also oppose, disrupt, and even exceed. First, however, if Western philosophy is our inheritance, we must submit it toDestruktion—starting with Aristotle.Heidegger and the Destruction of Aristotle:On How to Read the Traditionpresents a new conception of Heidegger’s “destruction” as a way of reading.
Situated between Nietzschean genealogy and Derridean deconstruction, this method uncovers in Aristotle the most vital originating articulations of the Western tradition and gives us the means to confront it. Sean D. Kirkland argues this is not a rejection of the past but a sophisticated and indeed timely hermeneutic tool—a complex, illuminating, and powerful method for interpreting historical texts at our present moment. Acknowledging the historical Heidegger as a politically compromised and still divisive figure, Kirkland demonstrates that Heideggerian destruction is a method of interpreting history that enables us to reorient and indeed transform its own most troubling legacies.
A bold new conception of Heidegger’s model of
Destrucktionas a method of interpreting history that enables us to reorient and indeed transform its own most troubling legacies.
SEAN D. KIRKLANDis an associate professor of philosophy at DePaul University. He is the author ofThe Ontology of Socratic Questioning in Plato's Early Dialogues, which won the 2013 Book Award fromSymposium.
“This is an astonishing book. Short but to the point, it profoundly challenges ingrained assumptions about Destruktion in Heidegger’s early thought and the role that concept fulfills in fundlăI
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