- Paperback: 496 pages
- Publisher: Harvard University Press; New edition edition (14 Oct 1999)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0674387104
- ISBN-13: 978-0674387102
- Product Dimensions: 23.3 x 16.1 x 3.1 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 524,716 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
| |||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Plus, get an extra £5 Gift Certificate when you trade in books worth £10 or more before June 30, 2012. Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details. |
Product details |
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
Rudiger Safranski's evenhanded study, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, is equally successful at illustrating its subject's pettiness and at displaying the vast power of his imagination. It is the first comprehensive biography of the man, and supersedes both Victor Farias's Heidegger and Nazism and Hugo Ott's Martin Heidegger: A Political Life. It reports many facts that these books did not, and it offers a detailed account of Heidegger's intellectual development--relating his twists and turns, with great skill and remarkable concision, to German intellectual and political life in the first half of this century. -- Richard Rorty New York Times Book Review [A] thoughtful, sensitive and sympathetic biography. -- Ray Monk Times Literary Supplement A superb work of synthesis, the book places Heidegger's thought and life in the volatile context of 20th-century German and European politics and philosophy...Although Safranski sees Heidegger as a towering figure in 20th-century philosophy, this is a "warts and all" biography. The author leaves no doubt about Heidegger's self-centeredness, his intellectual arrogance, and his convenient lapses of memory about his role in the Nazi years. But the book's primary merit is a superb explication of Heidegger's thought, its antecedents, and its place in the context of his political and philosophical times. For an English-speaking audience, Safranski's treatment is easily the best introduction to Heidegger's complex philosophy...This [is] an important book, highly recommended for anyone interested in the history of 20th-century Continental philosophy and Martin Heidegger's place in it. -- Dietrich Orlow Boston Sunday Globe This biography of Martin Heidegger is an impressive achievement, and English-speaking readers are fortunate that it is now available to them...Martin Heidegger is the first comprehensive biography of one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. It offers a detailed view of Heidegger's intellectual development provided by no previous book, and it gives new information on his involvement with the Nazis. Given the importance of Heidegger's thought for many celebrated left-wing thinkers, including Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault,Safranski's careful consideration of the relation between Heidegger's right-wing politics and his thought can help readers struggle with the much-debated question of whether the contemporary leftists of the postmodern movement are really cultural reactionaries in disguise...Safranski's biography is both the most authoritative and the most approachable of the recent Heidegger books. -- Carl L. Bankston III Magill's Literary Annual
Review
This biography of Martin Heidegger is an impressive achievement, and English-speaking readers are fortunate that it is now available to them..."Martin Heidegger" is the first comprehensive biography of one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. It offers a detailed view of Heidegger's intellectual development provided by no previous book, and it gives new information on his involvement with the Nazis. Given the importance of Heidegger's thought for many celebrated left-wing thinkers, including Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, Safranski's careful consideration of the relation between Heidegger's right-wing politics and his thought can help readers struggle with the much-debated question of whether the contemporary leftists of the postmodern movement are really cultural reactionaries in disguise...Safranski's biography is both the most authoritative and the most approachable of the recent Heidegger books.--Carl L. Bankston III "Magill's Literary Annual "
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This is an excellent and dispassionate biography of Heidegger's career. This is mainly an intellectual biography with a minimum of personal detail presented. Safranski does a superb job of explicating Heidegger's thought and provides concise, insightful summaries of Heidegger's intellectual milieu. Heidegger emerges as a man of remarkable talent and ambition. His goal was nothing less than a reformulation of philosophy on radically new bases. He set out to destroy the metaphysics of Kant, Descartes, Aristotle and saw himself as the equal of Plato. He succeeded to a great extent though at the cost of greatly narrowing the scope of philosophic inquiry and as Safranski demonstrates, he did not produce positive results in the sense of the metaphysics of his chosen targets. Safranski deals very well with Heidegger's notorious period of enthusiasm for Nazism. He demonstrates that Heidegger's often fervent support for Hitler grew directly from Heidegger's philosophical preoccupations of the late 20s and early 30s. Safranski shows as well that Heidegger dropped Nazism because the Nazis were insufficiently revolutionary for Heidegger. Heidegger made no more forays into public life but spent the remainder of his career as a philosophical oracle. This biography is more than a good introduction to Heidegger's thought, it is a real contribution to the intellectual history of the 20th century.
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Safranski's book makes an excellent case for the idea of an intellectual biography. It demonstrates that something material is left out when we consider a thinker's work entirely outside the life and context that produced it. For instance, Safranski's account allows one to discern the peculiarly performative aspect of this philosophy. Heidegger is revealed as a thinker who early on was quite conscious both of his great ambitions and of precisely what--in the feverish intellectual climate of the Weimar republic--was needed to fulfill them. Thus the overwhelming success of Being and Time upon its publication can be appreciated as not only a philosophic achievement, but also as a coup of intellectual self-promotion.
Another virtue of the work is the detached, and at times bemused distance Safranski adopts toward his subject. Given the gravity of the issues at stake, one might object that detachment is hardly called for; yet Safranski's relative coolness permits the damning facts to speak for themselves with that much more force. And none does so more loudly than the matter-of-fact, almost inevitable way in which Heidegger embraced National Socialism. Behind the grotesque intellectual irresponsibility of someone who must have known better we can make out--disturbingly--only a diffuse, tepid banality.
In order for this shock to hit home, Safranski must of course first convince us of Heidegger's genius, and he does not disappoint here. The chapter on Being and Time alone makes the book worth buying. Unlike other English-language expositions--especially some highly sympathetic ones--the work never produces the disagreable feeling that Heidegger's words are being "translated" for our consumption. Instead they are allowed to retain that degree of opacity which is probably so essential to their influence and evocativeness. Yet the quality of Safranski's overall exposition is such that, at those times when he chides his subject for hyperbole or obscurantism, one never feels that he i! s motivated by the impatience of Heidegger's usual no-nonsense, positivist critics.
The name Heidegger has apparently always generated strong feelings. Safranski's relatively detached approach ("balanced" is not quite the word I would use) has as one of its beneficial effects a subtle kind of displacement. It allows us to see that it is ultimately not Heidegger that is most at stake, but the nature of philosophy itself. Heidegger's thought freed from its historical and political entanglements may well be less objectionable, but also much less interesting in terms of the (ultimately philosophical) aporias they pose for his chosen discipline.
F. Gonzalez
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Safranski has achieved something almost unique: this is a balanced biography which does not seek to exonerate or condemn, which does not spare the rod when necessary, and which does not shirk the huge burden of history and circumstance which prevails upon all of us. Heidegger, the greatest and most controversial thinker of our century, certainly does not emerge in a better light, but his life is made all the clearer in this magnificent and detailed work.
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
