Notes

Acknowledgments

1.Translated by W. J. Richardson, in Thomas Sheehan 1981, 50.

2.Letter to the editor, 1900, New York Times, February 11, sec. 7.

3.Given in a radio interview with the Radio Suisse-Romande, cited by V. Farías 1991, xviin8.

4.I am indebted for much of the above information to the excellent little biography at the start of Jiménez 2021, 150–151.

1. Introducing Heidegger’s Unpublished Seminars on Aristotle from the 1920s

1.Helene Weiss Papers, M0631, Special Collections, University of Stanford Libraries.

2.It must be noted that Heidegger, in private letters to Karl Löwith, expresses utter contempt for his students during this period. After describing his nausea at the corpses he sees sitting around him in a seminar, he writes, “Keine anständige Frage wird gestellt; alles schreibt natürlich drauf los, wenn ich etwas sage; wenn ich selbst Fragen stelle, beginnt ein großes Raten, man sieht an den Gesichtern, daß sie ebenso gut Preisrätsel lösen könnten” (Denker 2017, 73–74). Ironically, that the students contributed nothing and only assiduously wrote down whatever Heidegger said is good for us because it ensures the overall fidelity of the transcripts.

3.Heidegger’s letters to Löwith do not express a high opinion of his student Oskar Becker. In a letter of April 21, 1923, he writes, “Daß Becker meine Vorlesung und auch die Anfängerübungen besucht, bringt ihn noch um einige Stufen mehr in meiner ohnehin dürftigen Achtung herunter” (Denker 2017, 85).

4.The major and more recent book-length studies are the following: D’Angelo 2000; Brogan 2005; Denker 2007; Elliot 2002; McNeill 1996; Minca 2006; Mora 2000; Pantoulias 2015; Sadler 1996; Sommer 2005; Volpi 1984; Weigelt 2002; Yfantis 2009. Escudero 2010 is also worth noting as containing a substantial discussion (224–337). These all make valuable contributions and will be cited where appropriate in the course of this book, but none of them consider the unpublished seminars presented here (and that, of course, is no criticism), nor do they, with the exception of Yfantis, consider all of the currently published courses and seminars. The very misleadingly entitled book by Bowler (2008) cannot be included in the above list because it discusses Aristotle only in a final, short chapter and does not consider any of Heidegger’s detailed readings of Aristotle; Heidegger’s courses and essays on Aristotle already published at the time are not even included in the bibliography. There are also numerous articles on Heidegger and Aristotle, as well as studies focused on specific topics; again, these will be cited where appropriate. None of them consider the material presented here, with the exception of the articles recently published jointly with my edition and translation of the Weiss transcript of the SS1921 seminar on De Anima: De Brasi 2021, Jiménez 2021, and Shiffman 2021. The only earlier article I have been able to find that purports to discuss the unpublished seminars is Hayes 2007. Oddly, however, though Hayes claims to have consulted the Weiss transcript, the reader will find nothing in this article of the content of the seminar as presented here; instead, the ideas Hayes discusses are drawn from published courses.

5.Of the seminars that I will cover, only two are discussed at all by Kisiel: the 1921 seminar on De Anima and the WS1922/23 seminar continued into WS1923. His account is very cursory (amounting to no more than seven pages in total for both seminars) and clearly relies entirely on the Becker transcripts without having consulted the Weiss transcripts.

6.Kisiel not only provides no page references to the transcript he is using, but often does not even make clear which transcript he is following.

7.The set of rules followed in the book for quotations from the Weiss transcripts are as follows: (1) uncertain readings are put in curly brackets {}; (2) illegible words that could not be deciphered are indicated by a question mark surrounded by brackets {?}; (3) square brackets indicate my insertions, e.g., my translations of the Greek, citations of the German words being translated, or words added for clarity; (4) parentheses signify brackets in the original Helene Weiss notes ( ); (5) italic script reproduces underlining in the original notes; (6) obvious spelling errors in the Greek or German are corrected and abbreviations interpreted and expanded.

8.There is an unpublished seminar from WS1925/26 among the Weiss notes that could have been included in the present book because it contains a reading, by Heidegger and his student H.-G. Gadamer (who do not agree), of Aristotle’s account of time in the Physics. It has been left out due to its predominant focus on Hegel’s Logic. For a presentation and analysis of this extraordinary seminar, see Gonzalez 2022.

9.M0631, Box 3, Folder 5, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

10.“Heideggers Aristoteles-Seminare vom Sommersemester 1921 und vom Wintersemester 1922/23 (Nachschriften von Oskar Becker),” eds. Günther Neumann, Alfred Denker, and Holger Zaborowski, in Denker 2007, 9–49.

11.I have provided a facing-page translation, along with the original German, of both the Weiss and Becker transcripts for this seminar to make clear where they converge and where they diverge: see Gonzalez 2021. One other possible source for the seminar that I have not been able to consult is a Mitschrift by Karl Löwith housed in the Deutsches Literature Archiv in Marbach (catalogue number 75.7449). Yet, while the title indicates it to be notes on the SS1921 De anima seminar, the catalogue identifies the figure addressed in the notes as Nietzsche and informs us that the total eleven pages contain notes on three other Übungen. This Mitschrift does not therefore promise much more detail on the SS1921 seminar.

12.M0631, Box 3, Folder 6, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

13.M0631, Box 3, Folder 6, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

14.M0631, Box 3, Folder 6, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

15.Weiss 1942. Weiss’s book, however, only does the preliminary work she judged necessary for such an interpretation of Physics II.4–6 and postpones the interpretation itself to a later study that never appeared.

16.M0631, Box 3, Folder 6, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

17.M0631, Box 3, Folder 5, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries. Incorrectly catalogued with the date “1921.”

18.M0631, Box 2, Folder 7, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

19.M0631, Box 3, Folder 8, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

20.“Physik ist der Boden, auf dem die weiteren ontologischen Forschungen erwachsen; μετὰ τὰ φυσικά nicht zufällig” (GA62, 119).

21.In GA 62, 343–399.

22.De Anima is completely absent from the outline of the projected book: a first part divided into three sections, (1) Nicomachean Ethics VI, (2) Metaphysics A 1 and 2, (3) Physics A-E, and a second part focused on the interpretation of Metaphysics Ζ Η Θ. However, in describing the second part, and specifically Aristotle’s turn to the notions of dunamis and energeia in the interpretation of being, Heidegger notes briefly and in passing that De Anima will need to be “interpreted with regard to its ontological-logical constitution” (GA62, 397). This interpretation, which appears here to have become a footnote to the project, if a substantial one, is never carried out.

23.There are, of course, also important discussions of Aristotle in courses not dedicated to him: for example, the treatment of Aristotle’s interpretation of truth as a determination of being (Metaphysics Θ.10) in the WS1925/26 course Logik: Die Frage nach der Wahreheit (GA21) and the account of Aristotle’s concept of time in the SS1927 Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (GA24). Neither of these discussions replicates what we find in the unpublished seminars.

24.Yfantis 2009, though providing a comprehensive treatment of Heidegger’s published lecture courses on Aristotle, dismisses the importance of the unpublished seminars (17). Yfantis seems to be aware of only two of those mentioned above, SS1921 and WS1922/23 with its SS1923 continuation (15), the two for which Becker’s transcripts had been published; of the Weiss transcripts, Yfantis appears completely unaware. Part of what Yfantis thereby misses is clear when he claims that Heidegger’s interpretation of the central books of the Metaphysics (176) as well as his interpretation of tuchê and automaton (194) have not come down to us: both are found in the unpublished seminars. See also 280 and 356n717.

25.In a subsequent volume I will provide a systematic discussion and critical assessment of Heidegger’s entire Auseinandersetzung with Aristotle in both published and unpublished works. Only there will I attempt to answer at least some of the questions that are raised in the current volume.

2. Accessing the Being of Life

1.On how misleading a designation this is, however, see Kisiel 2011, liv n18. As Kisiel explains, the seminars “for beginners” were simply those seminars taught by Husserl’s assistant, i.e., Heidegger, and many of the students who took them, like Oskar Becker and Karl Löwith, were hardly “beginners.”

2.M0631 Box 3, Folder 5. Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries. References will be to numbered pages of the transcript.

3.Published in Denker 2007, 9–22. References will be to page numbers of the transcript as indicated in this publication.

4.Given that it gives no consideration to the early seminars on De Anima, it is no surprise that Campbell 2012 has nothing to say about animal life, being instead “a study of what Heidegger says about the factical living and speaking of human beings in the world” (11; my emphasis). A more helpful treatment of Heidegger’s account of animal life from the early 1920s to the 1929/30 course, though again compromised by the inability to take into account the early reading of De Anima, is found in Rubio 2010 and Storey 2013.

5.The so-called “Natorp Bericht” given by Heidegger the title “Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles (Anzeige der hermeneutischen Situation)” (in GA62, 345–399).

6.“Mit Absicht wurde in unserer Aufgabe der Wesensbestimmung des Organismus die Frage nach dem Bewegtheitscharakter des Lebendigen als solchen ferngehalten. Daß diese Frage keine beliebige ist und etwas auf dem Wege nachträglicher Nachfügung keineswegs erledigt werden kann, sondern auf das Innerste mit der Frage nach dem Wesen des Lebens verklammert ist” (GA29/30, 387).

7.While I have not myself been able to access a list of participants, Yáñez provides the following list that oddly includes none of the names mentioned in the Weiss transcript, including that of Weiss herself: Karl Löwith, Max Horkheimer, Hans Jonas, Oskar Becker, Günther Stern, Walther Marseille, Hans Reiner, and Afra Geiger (2011, 74).

8.Unless explicitly attributed to Heidegger or another, all translations of Aristotle’s texts are my own.

9.How congenial Heidegger must have found the opening words of De Anima can be guessed from his characterization, in the 1919/20 course Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (GA58), of phenomenology = philosophy of life as the Urwissenschaft (1) possessing a “strictness” (Strenge) that has nothing to do with the “rational exactitude” of the nature sciences (137).

10.On this aspect of Heidegger’s reading, see Jiménez 2021, 157.

11.See Shiffman 2021, 128.

12.Metaphysics Z.4, 1029b13.

13.As the Becker transcript indicates (5), Heidegger is following the edition of Schwegler 1847–48.

14.Natorp 1887. The English reader can consult the summary of Natorp’s proposal in Ross 1924, 181. The Becker transcript on pages 18 and 24 also cites Natorp 1903, 388–399. On the pages indicated Natorp distinguishes between and explicates the two different enquiries he finds in Metaphysics VII.

15.As late as a 1950/51 seminar on the Physics, Heidegger calls this text “the fundamental text of Western metaphysics” (GA83, 477).

16.Interestingly, one of Heidegger’s best known students, Walter Bröcker, will categorically reject Heidegger’s thesis here, though without mentioning Heidegger. He insists that the word “is” does not have different meanings in the different assertions, but rather “Das Wort ‘ist’ bezeichnet in beiden Fällen ein und dasselbe, nämlich dies, daß von einem Gegenstand ein Prädikat gilt, was auch immer das für ein Prädikat sein möge” (1987, 244).

17.They are of course addressed in later chapters (13–15), if only to be rejected as candidates for ousia, but Heidegger does not concern himself with these chapters, presumably considering them superfluous: the formal requirements articulated in the very first chapter should already make clear that neither the universal nor the genus qualify as ousia.

18.On the notion of “formal indication” see the course of the preceding semester, WS1920/21 “Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion,” in GA60, 59–65.

19.The Becker transcript (Becker I, 18) does not explicitly record this change of mind, only noting that Natorp’s thesis “is at first attractive, but not to be retained.” Weiss clearly records not the correction of a mistake on her part, as if she had simply misunderstood Heidegger’s position in the earlier class and then had gone back in the notes to correct it, but an explicit change of mind on Heidegger’s part: “Heidegger hält nicht mehr an Natorps Einteilung des Buches Z fest” (WDA, 8).

20.This charge is particularly clear in the section of Natorp’s Platos Ideenlehre cited above: there Natorp cites the laws of Newton as examples of Platonic Ideas (1903, 390) and describes the seventeenth century as a turning point away from the Aristotelian focus on substances and their qualities toward a more Platonic way of thinking focused on intelligible laws (397).

21.The Becker transcript (Becker I, 20–23) records a return to the interpretation of chapters 1–4 that has no parallel in the Weiss transcript. Since this includes points already made earlier in the Becker transcript itself (see, for example, the same reference to Natorp’s thesis concerning Book VII with the same reference on pages 18 and 24), it is possible that what we have here is a supplemental transcript not labelled as such by Becker (unlike Weiss who, as already noted, herself adds a supplement and labels it as such) and that covers the last class as well as the beginning of this class. Or we could have here Becker’s own expansion of earlier notes. This part of the transcript is cited above where relevant in connection to earlier parts of the seminar.

22.Parts of Animals 640a25–26; Physics 193b8–9, 194b13.

23.The Weiss transcript (WDA, 9) has the following in dark ink: οὐ γὰρ - - - - τουτου ὁρισμὸν εἶναι ὁ ἄν λόγῳ τὸ αὐτὸ σημαίνειν ἀλλὰ τινὶ λόγῳ. What Aristotle’s Greek has, however, is the following: ὁρισμὸς δ᾽ἐστὶν οὐκ ἂν ὄνομα λόγῳ ταυτὸ σημαίνῃ. (1030a7–8; A definition is not when a name signifies the same as the account”). Aristotle proceeds to explain that in this case “Iliad” would be a definition since the name signifies the same as the account, which in this case would be the entire poem. Heidegger must have this counter-example in mind in suggesting that we have a definition only when the name signifies the same as a particular kind of account (τινὶ λόγῳ).

24.The transcript here appears to read “Dasbestimmen” instead of “Sinnbestimmen,” but given the context, it must be the latter that is meant, and it is hard to see what the former could mean here.

25.“Διωρίσθαι τὸ ἔμψυχον τοῦ ἀψυχοῦ τῷ ζῆν” (413a21–22).

26.“ὅτι ἐστὶν ἡ ψυχὴ τῶν εἰρημένων τούτων ἀρχὴ καὶ τούτοις ὥρισται, τρεπτικῷ, αἰσθητικῳ, διανοητικῷ, κινήσει” (413b11–12; that the soul is the principle of the [potencies] mentioned and is defined by them: the nutritive, the perceptive, the intellective, and the locomotive).

27.Heidegger makes this point also in the SS1924 course, Die Grundbegriffe der Aristotelischen Philosophie (GA18, 237), and the SS1926 course, Die Grundbegriffe der antiken Philosophie: “Ein Körper bewegt sich immer nur in einer Richtung. Die Pflanze dagegen breitet sich in Wachsen nach allen Seiten gleichmäßig aus” (GA22, 309; this is from the Mörchen Nachschrift, but for the same point less clearly expressed in Heidegger’s own notes, see 185). Heidegger apparently has in mind the following passage from the same chapter he is presently discussing in the SS1921 seminar, i.e., II.2, but which is cited only in the SS1924 course: “Therefore also all plants [τὰ φυόμενα πάντα] appear to live. For they appear to possess in themselves the kind of power and principle through which they assume growth and decay in opposite directions [κατὰ τοὺς ἐναντίους τόπους]. For it is not the case that they grow upwards and not downwards, but similarly in both directions and all [καὶ πάντη]” (413a25–29).

28.Heidegger here refers to 413b2, τὸ δὲ ζῷον διὰ τὴν αἴσθησιν πρώτως, and argues that the πρώτως is to be understand not as “first or beginning with,” but as “most properly.” His point is that this means not “the animal begins with perception” but rather “the animal is properly what it is through perception.” For a defense of Heidegger’s reading on philological grounds, see De Brasi 2021, 143–146.

29.There is no reference here to a particular text of Bergson, but the one Heidegger might have in mind is Bergson 1903. Here Bergson combats the thesis he sees as shared by both idealism and realism, i.e., that “la perception a un intérêt tout spéculatif; elle est connaissance pure” (14); against this Bergson argues that perception is not a type of contemplation but a type of action with deeps roots in the real (62). Bergson says nothing here about the inadequacy of the term “perception,” but this might be what Heidegger himself infers from Bergson’s argument.

30.Written over “Leistungen,” which has been crossed out; written above the line: “Möglichkeit” (possibility).

31.“Dasein is not something at hand that possesses the added characteristic that it can do something, but is primarily being-possible [Möglichsein]. Dasein is in each case that which it can be and how it is its possibility [Möglichkeit]” (SZ, 143; my translation)

32.See the claim of Hans Jonas in The Phenomenon of Life that the term “self” is “unavoidable in any description of the most elementary instance of life” (2001, 82).

33.GA29/30, 343.

34.The word “more closely” [näher] is written above “einzeln,” which has been crossed out.

35.It is in this regard significant that Christopher Shields finds it necessary to translate logos here as “organization” (2016, 29). The Oxford translation by J. A. Smith has in contrast “account.” The point is that both translations are correct. What, then, does this tell us?

36.Becker misses entirely the discussion of De Anima II.5 in this class, though he will pick up on the discussion as it continues in the next class.

37.417b1–2.

38.De Brasi 2021 disagrees with my interpretation of the notes here, claiming that Heidegger in this class is already making the distinction between two opposed kinds of paschein that he will make more explicitly in the next class (146–147). He can interpret the notes in this way by taking the “zugleich” to qualify only the second kind of paschein as sôtêria; this presumably means understanding something like the following: “(2) it is something that has suffered and experienced at the same time; the ὅμοιον remains.” This reading is not impossible, and we do not have in the notes an explicit indication of Heidegger changing his mind between this class and the next, as we have in the case of his position on the Natorp interpretation of Metaphysics VII. Nevertheless, I continue to believe that my reading is the most natural, i.e., that the “zugleich” found at the beginning of (2) qualifies its relation to (1).

39.“πρῶτον μὲν οὖν ὡς τοῦ αὐτοῦ ὄντος τοῦ πάσχειν καὶ τοῦ κινεῖσθαι καὶ τοῦ ἐνεργεῖν λέγομεν. καὶ γὰρ ἐστιν ἡ κίνησις ἐνέργεια τις, ἀτελὴς μέντοι, καθάπερ ἐν ἑτεροῖς εἴρηται” (417a14–17); “First we speak of suffering, being moved and being active as being the same thing. For movement is a sort of energeia, though an incomplete one, as has been said elsewhere.”

40.Reading “Denkendes denkt,” though the reading is uncertain.

41.This emphasis on lambanein also fits with the emphasis on “grasping” we have seen throughout the seminar, specifically, the interpretation of the horismos as a “grasping.” See Shiffman 2021, 134–135, for some critical comments on this aspect of Heidegger’s reading.

42.Jiménez 2021 also makes this objection, appealing specifically to Metaphysics IX.8, where Aristotle also distinguishes between cases like house-building, whose energeia is in the product, and cases like seeing, whose energeia is in the activity itself (165n28).

3. The Being of Human Life from De Anima to the Nicomachean Ethics

1.The Weiss transcript has simply the title “Aristotle Seminar.” The Oskar Becker transcript has the more detailed title Übungen über Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles (Nikomachische Ethik VI; de anima; Metaphysik VII). Strangely, in the list of courses in Richardson 2003, compiled from the Freiburg and Marburg University catalogues and corrected by Heidegger himself, this seminar is not present either for WS1922/23 or SS1923. Instead, we find listed for WS1922/23 (Richardson 2003, 672) a seminar with the title Phänomenologischen Übungen zu Aristoteles, Physik IV und V: a content that most certainly does not correspond to the present seminar. Becker’s notes for WS1922/23 and SS1923 are far inferior to those of Weiss, even more so than in the case of the SS1921 seminar. Several classes are completely missing, specifically those of December 14, June 1, June 28, and July 5. While Becker’s notes are not dated, it is easy to determine through correspondences with the Weiss transcript which notes belong to which class. In the case of the classes for which Becker provides notes, the notes prove extremely incomplete when compared to those of Weiss, sometimes consisting of no more than a few lines for an entire class and skipping over much of the content. In short, it is simply impossible to obtain even a remotely adequate understanding of these seminars from Becker’s notes, while a very full understanding can be obtained from Weiss’s. Only very rarely is something found in Becker’s notes that can add to what we gather from Weiss. In those cases, Becker’s notes will be cited and correspondences between the two sets of notes will be noted where this might be helpful.

2.In a letter to Karl Löwith dated April 21, 1923, Heidegger refers to his decision to continue the Aristotle Übungen two hours a week, “um das vorgesetzte Pensum des Winters zu Ende zu bringen” (Denker 2017, 85).

3.The second class is dated November 9, 1922, a Thursday, and all classes thereafter are held on Thursdays, with the exception of the extra classes Heidegger added on February 9 and February 19 to complete his interpretations. So it is reasonable to assume that the first class was held on Thursday, November 2, 1922.

4.The Becker notes have Heidegger explaining that this is “keine Apologetik des Aristoteles, sondern intendiert ist die Forschung” (Becker II, 3).

5.Becker records the claim somewhat differently: “Leben ist ein Sein, dem es auf sein Sein ankommt” (Becker II, 4).

6.Heidegger significantly makes a point of noting that Paul did not know the concept of logos (WPIA, 3).

7.As Aristotle himself claims, e.g., in the Metaphysics A.1 where bees and any other such genus of living things are said to be phronima and animals who in addition can hear are said to be capable of learning (980b2–5). What is then said to be distinctive of humans is technê and logismos (980b8). In Becker’s notes we in fact read: “φρόνησις vgl. Met. A 1” (Becker II, 4).

8.Cf. the translation and detailed discussion of the Politics passage in the SS1924 course Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie (GA18 2002, 46ff.).

9.With some justification, it should be said, since movement in place will turn out to be impossible without perception, thought, or imagination and therefore impossible without the discriminative faculty.

10.A problem with this reading is that orexis is not one of the capacities of the soul identified as such earlier in De Anima, these being the nutritive, the perceptive, and the intellectual. Thus in a recent account, Ferro 2022 argues that the capacity responsible for animal locomotion is “the conative or desiderative capacity [to orektikon], i.e., a capacity over and above (additional to, besides) those treated in the chapters up to de An. III 9” (307). In Heidegger’s defense, it could be noted that Aristotle does mention orexis in his first discussion of the capacities of the soul, but places it under the perceptive faculty, with the argument that where there is perception there is pain and pleasure and that where there is the latter there is desire (413b22–25). Ferro also makes nothing of, nor even cites, the important claim at De motu animalium (700b23) that Heidegger proceeds to cite.

11.In contrast to Ferro 2022, who takes it to be counterfactual (367) but without noting, as Heidegger does, that at De motu animalium 700b23 Aristotle does assert there to be a form common to thought and desire.

12.In Becker, the point is expressed thus: “Aristoteles ist nicht so radikal, die Einheit ursprünglich zu sehen, er arbeitet schon mit der Trennung; aber er bemüht sich ständig um die Einheit” (Becker II, 10).

13.Becker provides a diagram showing “ποίησις (πρᾶξις)” (with ποίησις on top) as the origin of “κίνησις κατὰ τόπον”, which itself splits into “νοῦς ὄρεξις” (Becker II, 10). Even without the benefit of access to this seminar, Volpi already suggested that Heidegger finds in the unity of orexis and nous the praxis that is the being of Dasein itself (1994, 207–8).

14.It is worth noting here two passages of Γ.9 that Heidegger does not discuss: (1) in one, Aristotle argues that the cause of motion cannot be located in the nutritive part of the soul since in this case even plants would be capable of movement (ἔτι κἂν τὰ φυτὰ κινητικὰ ἦν) (432b17–18), with the implication that this would be absurd; (2) he argues that it also cannot be located in the perceptive part since many animals have perception but remain at rest and incapable of movement throughout their lives (μόνιμα δ᾽ἐστὶ καὶ ἀκίνητα διὰ τέλους) (432b20–21). These passages make clear just how much Heidegger’s interpretation is “reading into” the text.

15.“Das Dasein wiederum ist ontologisch nie so zu bestimmen, daß man es ansetzt als Leben – (ontologisch unbestimmt) und als überdies noch etwas anderes” (SZ 1953, 50). On the contrary, life is accessible only in Dasein and therefore only privatively.

16.Heidegger claims in this context that even to see Kant as an “epistemologist” misses what is best and greatest in him and that it may take thirty years or so before we are in a position to understand him (WPIA, 33). This conviction will of course guide his own intensive reading of Kant in following years.

17.Heidegger cites with approval the thesis of Maier 1900 that the Peri Hermeneias was a very late work and was left unfinished in manuscript form.

18.See the SS1921 seminar Augustinus und der Neuplatonismus (GA60 1995), where we read the following description of Dilthey’s position: “Mit dem Christentum wird die Schranke der antiken Wissenschaft, die sich bloß mit der Abbildung der äußeren Welt befaßte, überwunden: das Seelenleben wird zum wissenschaftlichen Problem” (164). This is a position that Heidegger himself was earlier sympathetic to: in the SS1920 course Phänomenologie der Anschauung und Ausdrucks, Heidegger described himself as seeking “Der Weg zu einer ursprünglichen christlichen—griechentumfreien—Theologie” (GA59 1993, 91). This is why Figal 2007 has described as “surprising” (überraschend) (57) Heidegger’s turn from a phenomenology of life seeking to retrieve early Christian experience against the Greek tradition to a focus on Aristotelian ontology. The missing link is the SS1921 seminar on De Anima: a seminar oddly ignored by Figal, who dates Heidegger’s turn to Aristotle as occurring in WS1921/22 (54), even though Becker’s notes for the seminar are included in the same volume as Figal’s essay.

19.It is worth noting, as an example of the selective and incomplete character of Becker’s notes, that while he records in detail the methodological comments with which the class begins, he leaves out entirely the detailed discussion of De Anima on aisthêsis that follows. His notes continue with the class of January 4.

20.The different determinations of aisthêsis Heidegger discusses here are presented in outline, and that means without the detailed reading here of the Aristotelian texts, in the WS1923/24 course, Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung (GA17 1994, 29–30). An important detail missing in the later course is Aristotle’s warning, noted both in this seminar and in SS1921, that alloiôsis and paschein are not the adequate terms for understanding aisthêsis.

21.Strangely, the Becker transcript records what seems to be the opposite of the claim recorded by Weiss: namely, that chapter 5 “belongs to an earlier stage of interpretation” than chapter 4 (Becker II, 21). But I am of course referring to the Becker transcript as edited and published in the Heidegger-Jahrbuch: I wonder if the editors simply misread Becker’s handwritten “höhere” as “frühere”; the two words as written can look quite similar, though I am certain that what is found in the Weiss transcript is “höhere.”

22.Becker refers to Torstrik’s general thesis of two redactions of De Anima (Becker II, 21), but in the Weiss notes Heidegger appears to be referring more specifically to Torstrik’s thesis that there are two versions of Γ.4: Torstrik saw 429a22–27 as an earlier version of 429a18–22. See Torstrik 1862, 89 and 180. In either case, it remains unclear what relevance this has to Heidegger’s interpretation.

23.Such a return is still envisioned in the Natorp Bericht written the previous fall. Speaking of the reading of the Metaphysics projected for the second part of his book on Aristotle (the outline of which makes no mention of De Anima), Heidegger suggests that this reading, and specifically the interpretation of the concepts of dunamis and energeia in Book Θ, will permit a return to De Anima together with the Ethics: “The ‘ethics’ will be placed in this ontological horizon as the explication of beings as being-human, human life, the movement of life. This will be worked out in such a way that first De anima, and indeed on the broad basis of the explication of the ontological region of life as a determinate movedness (interpretation of De motu animalium), is interpreted with regard to its ontological-logical constitution” (GA62, 397).

24.In contrast to the importance Heidegger assigns it, Jaeger’s edition (1957) brackets “πεφυκός” with the suggestion that it should be removed (seclusi).

25.In these first two chapters of the first book of the Metaphysics, Aristotle’s account of sophia and the sophos explicitly takes its orientation from what people say about them.

26.Becker notes that the discussion of this concept began with a presentation by Dr. Henrik Jan Pos (Becker II, 31; see the note of the editors).

27.“So gefaßt ist das τὸ τὶ ἦν εἶναι das Individuelle zum allgemeinen Begriff erhoben, der allgemeine Begriff in Beziehung auf das Individuelle” (Trendelenburg 1828, 469).

28.Cf. Becker II, 33. In the WS1923/24 course, Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung, Heidegger, assuming the analysis here, will simply assert that “in ‘Metaphysik’, Book VII, Kap. 4 (1029b13 sqq.), wo der ὁρισμός analysiert wird, kommt er am weitesten in der Analyse des Unmittelbaren. Diese vorgeschobene Position ist später nicht wieder erreicht worden” (GA17 1994, 24).

29.This thesis that has guided the seminar implicitly and is here stated explicitly as a thesis was presented in the Natorp Bericht written in the Fall of 1922 and thus during the first part of the seminar. There we read: “Das in der Umgangsbewegtheit des Herstellens (ποίησις) Fertiggewordene, zu seinem für eine Gebrauchstendenz verfügbaren Vorhandensein Gekommene, ist das, was ist. Sein besagt Hergestelltsein und, als Hergestelltes, auf eine Umgangstendenz relative Bedeutsames, Verfügbarsein” (GA62 2005, 373). It is this passage that is the starting point of Minca 2006. A chief value of the present seminar, of course unknown to Minca 2006, is that it is only here that we have an attempt to support with a detailed reading of Aristotle’s texts the thesis only asserted in the Natorp Bericht.

30.One will recognize in this passage two of the key terms that will find their way into Heidegger’s account of interpretation in Sein und Zeit: Vorgriff and Vorhabe (see SZ 1953, 150). An important marginal note in the Weiss transcript indicates that these two concepts are not sharply distinguished in Aristotle (WPIA, 72).

31.An indication of the disparity of interpretations can be given by simply citing three recent English translations: “But not, certainly, all of this. For what is intrinsic in this way is not so in the way that pale is to surface, because the being for a surface is not the same as the being for pale. But neither is it the being that is composed of both, namely, the being for a pale surface. Why? Because surface itself is added” (Reeve 2016); “But not everything that a thing is in its own right is what being is for it. For in one way pallor applies to a surface in its own right, but it is not this sort of ‘in its own right’ that is relevant here, since being for a pale thing is not the same as being for a surface. Nor again is it what being is for the compound, i.e., the pale surface, for here it itself is being added on” (Bostock 1994); “but it is not even all of this, for it is not what is in virtue of itself in the way that white is in a surface, because being white is not being a surface. But surely neither is the thing made out of both, being-a-white-surface, what it is to be white, because white itself is attached to it” (Sachs 1999).

32.Jaeger’s edition for Oxford, which differs from Bonitz in significant ways in this passage, was not published until 1957.

33.The title of Husserl’s fourth investigation is “Der Unterschied der selbständigen und unselbständigen Bedeutungen und die Idee der reinen Grammatik” (“On the distinction between independent and non-independent meanings”). In it we read: “Modern grammar thinks it should build exclusively on psychology and other empirical sciences. As against this, we see that the old idea of a universal, or even of an a priori grammar, has unquestionably acquired a foundation and a definite sphere of validity, from our pointing out that there are a priori laws which determine the possible forms of meaning” (2001, 49; translation of 1984, 302).

34.Heidegger understands genos here as Herkunft, not Gattung. There are some very obscure remarks toward the end of the transcript suggesting that theology (Augustine and the Reformation) is indebted to this Aristotelian concept (WPIA, 78).

35.On February 23, 1923, Heidegger writes to Löwith: “Ich habe noch 4 Aristoteles-Stunden eingeschoben—aber fertiggeworden bin ich gerade mit den vorbereitenden Interpretationen” (Denker 2017, 83). This comment suggests both that the present seminar has reached a conclusion in its interpretations (where this required the addition of extra hours) and that these interpretations are only preparatory. This in turn suggests that the continuation in the summer semester will turn to what these interpretations are meant to prepare. Given that the seminar met regularly on Thursdays, the extra hours Heidegger added would have been on Friday, February 9, and Monday, February 19: presumably two hours in each case to reach the total of four.

36.The following passage from the WS1923/24 course Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung is instructive in this regard because it repeats the analysis of the present seminar while restricting it to human life: “Dieses κρίνειν wird nicht nur für die αἴσθησις konstitutiv, sondern auch für die νοήσις. Durch diesen beiden Möglichkeiten wird das Sein des Menschen ausgezeichnet. Der Mensch ist ein solches Seiendes, das in seiner Art die Welt da hat in der Weise des abhebenden Sichzugänglichmachens, das in der Möglichkeit des Sichbewegens (κίνησις κατὰ τόπον) in dieser abgehobenen und artikulierten Art steht” (GA17 1994, 26).

37.The ultimate result is section 15 of Being and Time, in which Heidegger himself claims that we originally encounter nature in the context of human productive activity and only in looking away from this context can we discover and determine it in its pure presence. “Der Wald ist Forst, der Berg Steinbruch, der Fluß Wasserkraft, der Wind ist Wind ‘in den Segeln’. Mit der entdeckten ‘Unwelt’ begegnet die so entdeckte ‘Natur’. Von dessen Seinsart als zuhandener kann abgesehen, sie selbst lediglich in ihrer puren Vorhandenheit entdeckt und bestimmt werden” (SZ 1953, 70; my emphasis). One notes that by the time of Being and Time, Heidegger’s position is that both life and nature can be interpreted only privatively within the context of human praxis identified with poiêsis.

38.Heidegger later acknowledged the danger in Being and Time of misinterpreting phusis as Vorhandenheit (GA94 2014, 241).

4. Phronêsis as Genuine Being of Human Beings in the SS1923 Seminar on Nicomachean Ethics VI

1.A few supplementary notes for the winter seminar are also ascribed to her; we have also seen Helene Weiss use her notes for the SS1921 seminar. Heidegger refers to Bondi in a letter to Karl Löwith of November 22, 1922, and not very flatteringly: he refers to her effort to interpret the first third of the first chapter of Book II of the Physics in only nine little pages (Denker 2017, 73; “Das is alles!”). And this in the context of describing his nausea at the sight of the corpses sitting around him in the seminar!

2.This passage receives the same interpretation in the 1924/25 course on Plato’s Sophist, but there Heidegger explores the interpretation of being in terms of time presupposed by this conception of scientific knowledge (GA19, 32–34).

3.This is especially the case given that the line is also ignored in the discussion of NE VI in the 1924/25 course on Plato’s Sophist, as is also Aristotle’s assertion of a difference of genus between praxis and poiêsis. Indeed, Heidegger can there refer in passing to “ποίησις in the broadest sense that includes also πρᾶξις” (GA19, 157). Becker records none of Heidegger’s interpretation of the crucial text in question. Citing the line in question, Mora 2000 rightly notes that “Heidegger anulla la differenza, ribadita da Aristotele in Eth. Nic.VI 4, 1140a6 . . . tra prassi e poiesi, pensando questi due ambiti come un unico ed indistinto ambito dell’operare” (23).

4.See the same reading in GA19 where again what exists by nature is interpreted as “was sich selbst herstellt” (41).

5.The same interpretation is given in GA19, 44.

6.The central point is to be found in Becker’s notes too, but not as clearly expressed. As Becker has it, phusis differs from technê in that “I have myself while I grow” (Becker II, 47; ich habe mich, indem ich wachse), while the praxis with which phronêsis is concerned also “has itself” (48).

7.The same reading is given in 1924/25: there Heidegger calls the reference to hupolêpsis and doxa an “addendum” (Anhang) and explicitly treats them as forms of alêtheuein (GA19, 21–22).

8.A point he will reiterate in the 1924/25 course: “Vorausdeutend sei gesagt, daß der νοῦς als solcher keine Seinsmöglichkeit des Menschen ist. Sofern aber das menschliche Dasein durch ein ‘Vermeinen’ und Vernehmen charakterisiert ist, ist der νοῦς im menschlichen Dasein doch vorfindlich” (GA19, 59).

9.Becker’s notes unfortunately preserve nothing from this June 1 class. Presumably, he was absent.

10.See also Volpi 1994, 208–9, and McNeill 1996, 115–6. Volpi 1984, 73–6, also gives a helpful account based on Gadamer’s recollection.

11.In contrast, he does address this aspect of the passage in 1924/25 but takes it only to mean that “in φρόνησις the πράκτον has the same kind of being as the ἀληθεύειν itself” (GA19, 49).

12.Becker notes the further point that hexis is a having of a world in which the having and what is had are the same: “d.h. Leben und Welt sind im Grunde dasselbe” (Becker II, 49).

13.The point will receive extensive interpretation in 1924/25 (GA19, 160–163).

14.Becker’s corresponding note is clearly mistaken, whether the mistake is Becker’s own or that of the editors: “Das τέλος der πρᾶξις fällt ab, ist da, ist fertig.—Bei der πρᾶξις ist das τέλος von demselben Seinscharakter wie die πρᾶξις selbst” (Becker II, 53). The first “πρᾶξις” should be “ποίησις.”

15.Here again I suspect a mistake in the transcription of Becker’s notes. What we read in the Heidegger-Jahrbuch (47; 54 of Becker’s notes) is the following: “Am Ende der τέχνη ist das τέλος nicht da (sondern die Schau [?]).” I suspect that what Becker wrote is something like what Weiss wrote: “(sondern der Schuh ist noch nicht da).”

16.What is cited here is the translation of an auditor’s typescript of the address. Heidegger makes the same point with the same example of shoemaking in the 1924/25 Sophist course (GA19, 41–42; see discussion in Minca 2006, 104–5), where he also uses the same example for phronêsis of bringing someone joy through a gift (146). There this example has the additional point of emphasizing the determination of Dasein as Miteinandersein (147).

17.Again in 1924/25, euboulia is described as the Vollzugsart of phronêsis (GA19, 144) and we also read the following claim: “It is as εὐβουλία that φρόνησις is genuinely what it is” (149).

18.Another mistake in Becker, whether Becker’s own or that of the editors: “εὐβουλία: treffen ohne zu suchen . . .” (55). The Greek word here should be εὐτυχία.

19.The contrast between euboulia and the other states to which Aristotle contrasts it receives more detailed discussion in 1924/25 (GA19, 151–4).

20.In 1924/25 Heidegger accordingly identifies “rechte Entschlossenheit” with “Durchsichtigkeit der Handlung” (GA19, 150). On the other hand, he does proceed to define the “correctness” of euboulia as “durchgängige Gerichtetsein auf das ἀγαθόν” (154), without explaining, however, how agathon is to be understood here.

21.Becker’s notes end immediately before this, so that the discussion that takes up the rest of the June 21 class as well as the classes of June 28 and July 5 in their entirety are not covered at all.

22.This chapter and its discussion of what Heidegger will characterize as different modes of sharing our world with others is absent from the analysis of NE VI in the 1924/25 course.

23.Earlier in the class there is a passing mention of the conclusion of the reading of De Anima: that krinein (like that involved in sunesis) as well as kinein are the fundamental characteristics of the being of human beings (WC, 21).

24.It has always been a point of contention whether the comparison of “health producing health” applies to phronêsis or only to sophia. The reason is that the sentence at 1144a3–5 begins with the plural (“they produce,” ποιοῦσι, not as . . . but as . . .), but ends with only the claim that sophia produces happiness in this way. Heidegger appears to see what is said here as applying to both and this is confirmed in the next class both by his account of the poiein of phronêsis and by his critique of Jaeger for defending a purely instrumental conception of phronêsis (which would make it more comparable to medicine): see below. In the 1924/25 course, however, he explicitly defends the reading that only sophia is compared with health while phronêsis is compared to the art of healing (GA19, 170). This might be because there the focus of Heidegger’s reading is the difference between sophia and phronêsis and Aristotle’s claim that the former is superior.

25.Thus, when Aristotle first uses the example of health in this chapter, he says that we are not any more healthy for knowing the things that are healthy and then clarifies: “to the extent that we are speaking of health not in terms of being produced but as what arises from a state” (1143b26; ὅσα μὴ τῷ ποιεῖν ἀλλὰ τῷ ἀπὸ τῆς ἕξεως εἶναι λέγεται). Oddly, Heidegger in commenting on this sentence ignores the μὴ and asks: “What does the ποιεῖν of φρόνησις look like concretely?” (WC, 24).

26.In the 1924/25 course Heidegger interprets 1144a6 as meaning “not through results, but simply through the fact that I live in this θεωρεῖν” (GA19, 169).

27.“ἡ δὲ ἕξις τῷ ὄμματι τούτῳ γίνεται τῆς ψύχης οὐκ ἄνευ ἀρετῆς” (1144a29–30).

28.As Michael Woods notes, in NE 10 “the divine element is tentatively identified ‘with intelligence’ (nous), whereas here the divine element is distinguished from intelligence” (1982, 170).

29.There is also reference to a passage as corrupt where the term “ἐνθουσιασμόν” is found (line 33). But again, from the transcript nothing can be made out concerning what is meant here.

5. The Praxis of Human Life Revealed as Care

1.As was noted at the start of chapter 2, with regard to the SS1921 seminar also listed as “for beginners,” this designation is misleading. See note 1 of that chapter.

2.Chapters 1 to 7 in most modern editions and translations.

3.Sections 10 and 12 (GA18, 65–79, 91–101).

4.The seminar met mostly on Saturdays, but with exceptions. The classes recorded in the notes are Saturday, June 2; Saturday, June 9; Monday, June 18; Saturday June 23; Wednesday, June 27; and Saturday, July 7. If the first class was itself held on a Saturday and predated Heidegger’s letter to Löwith on May 8, it would need to be dated May 5. What is odd is that this leaves an entire month between the first and second class. The notes do seem to begin with the first class since the reading they record is chapter 1 of Book I, starting with the very first lines. The class dated June 2 then turns to chapter 2. So we are left with this puzzle of the long interval between the first class and the second. In the other summer seminar examined in the last chapter, we saw a similar interval between the first class (May 5) and the third class (June 1), but in that case there was a second class held between the two on May 17. It is such a class in the middle of May that is missing in the present seminar.

5.The parallel discussion of the first line in the SS1924 course puts the emphasis on technê as the term that includes the others. “Τέχνη gehört zu dem Sinn des Besorgens: ‘Ich besorge etwas’” (GA18, 69).

6.“Ἀγαθόν ist nichts objektiv Herumschwirrendes, sondern ein Wie des Daseins selbst” (GA18, 69); “Das ἀγαθόν ist πέρας oder τέλος, ‘Ende’ im Sinne des Eine-Fertigkeit-Ausmachens” (79).

7.Second Pythian Ode, line 72: γένοι᾽ οἷος ἐσσὶ μαθών. Heidegger may in both cases also have in mind Nietzsche’s adoption of the command in the Gay Science 270: “Was sagt dein Gewissen? ‘Du sollst der werden, der du bist.’” Both Heidegger and Nietzsche leave out the μαθών (learning).

8.In citing, in the SS1924 course, Aristotle’s enunciation of the same principle at Metaphysics 1029b3–5, Heidegger describes it as “der eigentliche Gegenstoß gegen die platonische Philosophie” (GA18, 37).

9.Aristotle in this context uses the example of the difference in a racecourse between the course from the judges to the limits and the course back (1095b1). In an addendum to the notes on this class, we are told that the judges are in this case the archê from which we should begin since it is they who give us a direction and point the way, as every archê should (WNE, 7).

10.1095b25–26: τἀγαθὸν δὲ οἰκεῖον τι καὶ δυσαφαίρετον εἶναι μαντευόμεθα.

11.In the SS1924 course he comments simply: “Von Aristoteles is sonst über die Analogie nichts überliefert“ (GA18, 307).

12.Cf. GA18, 39, 82–83, 85, 88.

13.The importance of this text for Heidegger is made clear in his insistence, recorded in the notes, that Book Δ was written by Aristotle himself and not a pupil (WNE, 18).

14.Heidegger is suggesting removing the sentence: “τούτου δὲ τὸ μὲν ὡς ἐπιπειθὲς λόγῳ, τὸ δ᾽ὡς ἔχον καὶ διανοούμενον” (1098a4–5). In the Susemihl edition that Heidegger is using (1880), this sentence is in square brackets with the note “secludenda esse ci. Grantius, secl. Rassovius.”

15.Accordingly, in the SS1924 course he interprets the phrase at 1098a10–11 as meaning “daß ἔργον genommen wird in seiner eigensten Seinsmöglichkeit, nämlich als sich vollziehend in der ἀρετή, als wirklich da” (GA18, 100).

6. Aristotle’s Opposition between Natural and Accidental Being and Its Consequences for the Understanding of Time

1.Noting that we find in the Natorp Bericht the project and the outlines of a reading of Books I and II of the Physics, Minca laments that “Nirgends hat aber Heidegger eine ausführliche Interpretation dieser Texte gegeben” (2006, 217). Now we see that he in fact did so, in the SS1922 course for Book I and the unpublished seminar of WS1923/24 for Book II.

2.Even when he turns again to Physics II in a seminar of SS1951, the focus is exclusively on the first chapter (GA83; “Übungen im Lesen: Aristoteles Physik B 1, Γ 1–3”).

3.On Bondi, see chapter 4.

4.As one early reviewer stated, quite maliciously, “She writes an introduction to an introduction to Physics, B 4–6” (Heinemann 1946, 185).

5.This text from Physics I receives a more detailed but parallel discussion in the Sophist course of the following year: GA19, 78–90. See Minca 2006, 142–146, on this later reading.

6.In the SS1951 seminar, Heidegger credits phenomenology with the ability to distinguish of which Aristotle speaks here, even if phenomenology was not radical enough (GA83, 536; see also 543–547).

7.In notes dated to 1930/31 and published in GA91, we find again the endorsement of Teichmüller’s thesis that endelecheia and entelecheia are the same word and that the former first offers the correct interpretation of the latter (21–23; though Heidegger here also claims Teichmüller’s reading of Aristotle to be insufficient on other grounds). Significantly, in the 1939 essay on Physics II, Heidegger’s discussion of 193b7–8 no longer suggests any connection between entelecheia and endeleches, instead offering the etymology of en telei echein and thus defending the meaning of “possessing in the end,” though still understanding telos solely in terms of “being-complete” (WB, 354). This is presumably because he there insists that the notion of Dauer does not play a central role in the Greek conception of being: speaking of the notion of the aidion, Heidegger claims that “die Hinsicht nach der hier gedacht wird, is nicht die ‘Dauer,’ sondern die Anwesung” (339).

8.A comparison with the interpretation of 1939 is revealing. Before turning to the passage, Heidegger insists that if nature is a Sich-Selbst-Herstellen, this is not to be understood in the sense of a Sich-Selbst-Machen. “Herstellen” is here interpreted by Heidegger as “anwesen lassen” and poiêsis and phusis are claimed to be different forms of “herstellen” as thus understood; a claim that appears to deny any priority to poiêsis (358–359). When it comes to interpreting 193b12–18 (WB, 361–362), Heidegger emphasizes the difference between the art of healing and nature, concluding, “The renewed attempt to clarify the essence of phusis through a correspondence with technê shatters precisely now in every conceivable way. And this means: we must grasp the essence of phusis entirely from itself and we should not infringe on the astonishment of phusis as hodos phuseôs eis phusin with overhasty correspondences and explications” (362; my translation). The contrast with the present seminar is striking; it is as if Heidegger were criticizing his younger self for having been overhasty.

9.An extensive discussion of the notion of sterêsis in this passage is to be found in the 1939 essay (WB, 364–367); Heidegger there even uses the same example of wine vinegar.

10.Heidegger also suggests that this passage belonged to a separate book entitled “Of What Is Said in How Many Ways” (τῶν περὶ ποσαχῶς λεγόμενων), which, according to Jaeger, is the original form taken by our present Metaphysics Δ. See Jaeger’s note in his Oxford edition of the Metaphysics (1957, 86).

11.The same thesis is still held in a seminar of SS1951, though with the important qualification we have already seen him make in the 1939 essay, that is, that poiêsis is not “making”: “Die vier αἰτίαι sind gewonnen im Hinblick auf die Ποίησις, aber Ποίησις nicht als ‘Machen’ im Sinne von Anfertigen, sondern in dem ganz weiten Sinn von ‘Hervorbringen’” (GA83, 502). When in the same seminar he reiterates his more general thesis that Aristotle interprets phusis from the perspective of poiêsis, he insists that the latter must be interpreted in a very broad sense (506; “Herstellung,” “Hervorbringung”). See also Die Frage nach der Technik, in GA7, 12.

12.In a review of Helene Weiss’s book on Aristotle, Fritz Kaufmann, himself a student of Heidegger during this period who refers in the review to his own notes on Heidegger’s seminars, gives an admirably clear and succinct statement of what I believe is Heidegger’s critique here: “Aristotle recognizes the historical significance of the accidental without making it the true object of philosophical and scientific cognition. The accidental is not an outgrowth of a thing’s inner nature even though it may mold a thing’s face and determine the role it is to play in personal and interpersonal life. Aristotle cannot but abstract from these personal and historical traits; they are not carried over into his ultimate vision of the universal and sempiternal” (Kaufmann 1946, 165).

13.Unfortunately, it has not been possible to determine what this refers to since no known seminar of Heidegger in the summer of 1924 studies this text. It is possible that it was studied in a seminar listed by Kisiel (1993, 472) for SS1924 with the title “The High Scholastics and Aristotle (Thomas, On Being and Essence; Cajetan, on the Analogy of Names).” But Kisiel himself says nothing about the content of this seminar, no notes for it are to be found among the papers of Helene Weiss, and it is also not listed in the catalogue of Heidegger’s Nachlass in the DLA in Marbach. Another possibility is that Heidegger intended to treat the text in the lecture course Die Grundbegriffe der Aristotelischen Philosophie (GA18), but never got to it.

14.For a reading of the chapter that opposes such a thesis, see Gonzalez 2020, especially, 162–164.

15.See 1072b3.

16.Immediately following this note there is reference to the “last chapter” of De Anima. It is impossible to make any sense of this reference as this last chapter has nothing to do with erôs or movement, but concerns instead the necessity of touch for animal life.

17.The notes end with the list of several titles for Duns Scotus, though they make it by no means easy to determine which specific texts are being referred to. I simply reproduce the list here: “Scotus Opus Oxoniense / Sentences Commentary I / D. 1. 30 Distincio / ut reportata Paris / De rerum principio” (WP, 20). It is possible that one reference here is to Distinction 30 of the Reportata Parisiensia, which addresses only one question: “Utrum relatio nova creaturae ad Deum, necessario coexigat relationem novam Dei ad creaturam?” (Duns Scotus 1894, 370).

7. The Conception of Eternal Being in Aristotle’s Metaphysics IX and Its Legacy in Obstructing the Understanding of Human Life

1.H.-G. Gadamer and Jakob Klein were apparently also in the seminar, because Heidegger complains to Karl Löwith in a letter of March 27, 1925, that both of them left him in the lurch [wurde ich . . . im Stich gelassen] in the seminar (Denker 2017, 123). But their names do not appear anywhere in the Weiss transcripts.

2.See the editor’s afterword for GA19, 654.

3.In Kisiel 2011, 228.

4.Two works cited are Grabmann 1909–1911; and Migne 1841–1865, a collection of ecclesiastical writers going up to Pope Innocent III and thus the 1100s.

5.See section twenty-two of the SS1925 course, “The History of the Concept of Time” (GA20).

6.The actual reference given is 71b30–33, but this is clearly a mistake. We have seen Heidegger refer to Aristotle’s distinction between what is better known to us and what is better known in itself in the seminar of 1923/24, though there the reference is to the distinction as made in Physics I where, however, it is the general determination (such as “father” or “mother”) that is said to be better known to us. The apparent contradiction here is addressed and resolved by Heidegger in the Sophist course (GA19, 86–90), though there he cites Topics VI, 4, rather than the Posterior Analytics, for the view seemingly at odds with the Physics passage. For discussion, see Minca 2006, 142–146.

7.For Plotinus, time (χρόνος) is “the life of the soul in its changing motion from one way of living to another” (Enneads 3.7.11.44; ψυχῆς ἐν κινήσει μεταβατικῇ ἐξ ἄλλου εἰς ἄλλον βίον ζωὴν) and the world moves in time only because it moves in soul (3.7.11.33–35). In short, world-time is derived from, indeed is nothing other than, soul-time. But even more significantly in the present context, the aion, of which time is only an image for Plotinus, though characterizing the being of the intellect and the intelligibles beyond soul, is itself life, though life that is unextended and that does not move from one thing to another, always remaining in the same, all at once (3.7.3.16–19; ζωὴν μένουσαν ἐν τῷ αὐτῷ . . . ἅμα τὰ πάντα, καὶ οὐ νῦν μὲν ἕτερα, αὖθις δ᾽ἕτερα). Furthermore, this unmoving life in which the aion is found cannot help but recall the distinction we have seen Aristotle make between energeia and kinêsis at Metaphysics Θ.6, even if Plotinus elsewhere critiques the exact way in which Aristotle makes this distinction (see 6.1.16).

8.See the 1927 course Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie where Praesenz (translated by Hofstadter as Praesens, confusingly, given the distinction on which Heidegger insists here) is introduced as a phenomenon more original than the now and as that upon which die Gegenwart is projected (GA24, 434–436). In the SS1925 course on the “History of the Concept of Time” the term “Praesenz” is used to refer to the peculiar presence of the surrounding world (GA20, 252). On the connection between time and space, see section seventy of Being and Time.

9.Commentary on the Sentences II, d. 1, qu. 1, a. 5.

10.Though the reference is not given in the notes, it is Book III, chap. 1.

11.See, for example, Makin 2006, 30.

12.The contrast with Heidegger’s reading of Metaphysics Θ in the SS1931 course (GA33) could not be sharper. There he minimizes the break between chapters 1–5 and chapter 6 (see 49–56), ignores chapter 6 entirely, and can limit his reading to only the first three chapters because he now sees chapter 3 as the crux of the treatise: complaining that its importance is usually minimized (159; as by Heidegger himself in the current seminar!), he proposes “to develop the whole entirely from the text of chapter 3” (167). There will be some further discussion of this contrast in chapter 10 of the present book.

13.For a detailed discussion and critique of the fairly widespread view shared with Heidegger that the dative dunamei itself signals a shift to an ontological sense of dunamis, see Anagnostopoulos 2011 and Gonzalez 2019a, 155–160.

14.“What I claim to be really [ὄντως εἶναι] is everything, of whatever sort, that is in a state of possessing a power [κεκτημένον δύναμιν] for by nature either acting upon anything else or being acted upon even in the smallest way by the most insignificant thing, and even if only once altogether. For I posit that the defining mark is to be delimited [ὅρον ὁρίζειν] thus: that beings are nothing other than power” (Sophist 247d8–e4; my translation).

15.There is unusually at this point a reference to a student intervention. Gerhard Krüger is reported to have claimed that number is constituted through counting, to which Heidegger is recorded as having responded: “That is not only unmathematical, but also completely unphilosophical!” (WMA, 52)

16.Heidegger cites this text to the same purpose in the course Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie, GA18, 289–290.

17.Heidegger gave a couple of lectures on Luther on February 14 and 24, 1924 (thus, before the present seminar), at Marburg in Rudolf Bultmann’s theological seminar on “Paul’s ethics.” A translation of the protocol can be found in Kisiel 2011, 183–191. Heidegger’s focus is on Luther’s interpretation of sin as a mode of being of humans. Heidegger notes Luther’s appeal to concrete experience and emphasizes the opposition to the perspective of both Scholasticism and Greek ontology. On the importance of Luther for Heidegger in his critique of Greek ontology, an importance confirmed by the present seminar that was completely unknown by all of the following authors, see especially: van Buren 1994a, 1994b; Sommer 2005; and Sadler 1996, 15–17, 150–156, the latter even claiming that Heidegger’s turn to Aristotle, as inspired by Luther, was motivated by a need to “know thy enemy” (17).

18.For my own challenge to these assumptions, see especially Gonzalez (forthcoming).

19.At this point it is suggested that the students now seek to understand Thomas’s De ente et essentia, ch. 6. But the relevance is not apparent as this chapter concerns the relation between essences and accidents.

20.This thesis predates the present seminar by many years. Already in notes from 1918/19 for a course on medieval mysticism that was never delivered, we read that “Already in the strongly natural-scientific, naturalistic theoretical metaphysics of being of Aristotle . . . , which is renewed in medieval Scholasticism, the predominance of the theoretical is already potentially present, so that Scholasticism, within the totality of the Medieval Christian world of experience, severely endangered precisely the immediacy of religious life, and forgot religion in favour of theology and dogma” (GA60, 314; translated by Fritsch and Gosetti-Ferenci, 238). Though here mysticism is identified as a counter-movement, elsewhere in the notes we read: “In Luther an original form of religiosity—one that is also not found in the mystics—breaks out” (GA60, 310; translated 236).

21.See Luther’s notorious claim that “the whole Aristotle is to theology as darkness is to light” (Luther 1958–86, 12). This claim is cited by Heidegger himself in his lecture on Luther, cited above (Kisiel 2011, 187). But there is another side to Luther’s relation to Aristotle that Heidegger must have been aware of and that perhaps motivated his own turn to Aristotle: van Buren 1994a in particular shows how “Luther defends the ‘true Aristotle’ against Scholastic misinterpretations” (169) and that he does so in much the same way Heidegger does. Indeed, van Buren cites a passage in which Luther writes: “human being is always in privation, always in becoming and potentiality. . . . Aristotle philosophizes about such matters, and he does it well, but he is not understood in this sense” (quoted in van Buren 1994a, 169). This could be Heidegger speaking in this seminar or others.

8. Aristotle’s Ontology of Motion and the Being of Human Life as Absolute Motion

1.The lack of access to this seminar represents a major lacuna in the account in Mora 2000 of the important role the Physics played both in Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle and in his own thought.

2.In the afterword, Mark Michalski claims that the protocols “fully covered the course of the seminar [den Verlauf des Seminars vollständig abdeckten]” (GA83, 667). They do not.

3.The pages of the notes are not numbered, but they total thirty-one pages and in citing the notes I will cite the number the page should have.

4.What Mora says of Heidegger’s reading in 1931 is true earlier as well: Aristotle’s Physics “non va più intesa come filosofia della natura, non studia le condizioni a priori di essa, non é scienza teoretica parziale che esamina l’essere in divenire, ma assume il ruolo conduttore di scienza dell’essere in quanto essere tout court, esaurisce nel suo studio la totalitá dell’essere, diviene cioè a pieno titolo ontologia, che in sé racchiude tutto l’essere” (2000, 35). If Mora claims that this is not true of Heidegger’s reading of the Physics during the period of Being and Time and that he then interprets the Physics traditionally as an ontology of nature (see 219–220), this is refuted by the 1928 seminar where the approach to the Physics is perfectly described by the cited words.

5.Interestingly, Heidegger does not make this distinction in his discussion of the same passage in SS1924; see GA18, 311–12.

6.The distinction between energeia and entelecheia is especially emphatic in the SS1924 interpretation; see GA18, 296. Minca 2006 simply follows Heidegger in this (231–232), suggesting, wrongly, that being incomplete is a characteristic of energeia itself (232).

7.We thus have a transitional stage here from the 1924/25 seminar to the 1931 seminar (GA33) where Heidegger will not make this distinction between chapters 1–5 and chapter 6 and therefore will be able to confine his ontological reading of dunamis and energeia to the first three chapters of the treatise.

8.The definition at Sophist 247e1–2 does not explicitly include the concept of koinônia but Heidegger adds it in citing the definition, presumably because he sees it as implied by the notions of acting upon and being acted upon.

9.Heidegger indeed in the course of the class will shift to speaking of Wirklichkeit instead of Anwesenheit: both the Wirklichkeit of what is present-at-hand and the Wirklichkeit that is motion (see GA83, 246). Recall that he connects this term to the verb wirken and thereby understands by it not “reality” but something like “the state of being-at-work.”

10.Significantly, while in his SS1924 reading Heidegger notes that “Als Holz da sein und verwendbar sein für . . . ist nicht dasselbe” (GA18, 314), he does not there problematize this and certainly does not see there any possible “breach in ancient ontology.”

11.This point is also expressed clearly in Heidegger’s own notes: “Die ἐντελέχεια des ὑποκείμενον nur Grenzfall der ἐντελέχεια des δυνατόν. Was heißt hier Grenzfall? Warum dieser scheinbar das Erste? ‘Ruhe,’ Ansetzen beim Festen!” (GA83, 7).

12.This suggestion is explicit in Heidegger’s own notes: “Ἐντελέχεια: [die] Fertigkeit (Zukunft) eines Hergangs (Gewesenheit) in sich enthalten (Gegenwart)—Zeitlichkeit” (GA83, 4).

13.Cf. GA18, 319–320.

14.Simplicius 1882, 430ff.

15.Though providing, of course, only a circular definition that defines motion in terms of motion, as Heidegger notes in SS1924 (GA18, 318).

16.In his own notes Heidegger writes: “Ἐνέργεια demnach nicht Fertigkeit, sondern Vorhandenheit, Antreffbarkeit” (GA83, 13).

17.In SS1924 Heidegger therefore claims that Aristotle is speaking more carefully when he uses the word energeia rather than entelecheia (Sich-in-seinem-Ende-Halten) in defining the being of motion (GA18, 321). However, he also notes there that there is a sense in which the dunamei on as such achieves its end or completeness in motion: “Das In-der-Möglichkeit-sein kommt in dem In-Arbeit-Sein zu seinem Ende, ist dann eigentlich was es ist, nämlich Seinkönnen” (321).

18.In his own notes, Heidegger does emphatically assert that energeia in the definition cannot mean “actus, Bewegtheit” (GA83, 12, 13).

19.This point is also found in Heidegger’s notes: GA83, 13.

20.“Auf sich beruhen lassen” is a colloquial expression in German that unfortunately does not have a similarly colloquial equivalent in English.

21.The same point is made in Heidegger’s notes: GA83, 15.

22.But the turn to Θ.10 could also be motivated by the earlier question of the relation between “self-announcing” and “being-in-itself,” as the following note by Heidegger could suggest: “Mit anderen Worten: Zum Seienden gehört Bekundlichekit seines Seins. Mit welchem Recht sagen wir das? Weil ‘Sein an sich’ durch Wahrheit bestimmt ist. Sein an sich gibt sich nur, es ist nicht und nie” (GA83, 21).

23.Observing that our transcendental dependence on world is the condition for what is in-dependent announcing itself as such, Heidegger writes, as the last word of his notes: “Freiheit!”

24.For further interpretation and discussion of this claim, see Gonzalez 2018b.

25.The problematic assumption is captured in the following analysis by Minca 2006, 192: “Bei der ποίησις liegt dieses ἔργον daneben (παρά), bei der πρᾶξις ist das ἔργον im Sein des Menschen selbst, als Handlung—aber trotzdem sind das ἔργον und die πρᾶξις Resultate.” A praxis is not a result in the way a house is; which means that it arguably has neither the being of what is “finished” nor the temporality signified exclusively by the perfect tense.

26.It is clearly this surprise that motivated Burnyeat 2008 to attempt to show that the passage in Θ.6 did not originally belong there but was written for some ethical context. For a detailed refutation of Burnyeat’s argument that thus defends the ontological significance and place of the passage, see Gonzalez 2019a.

9. The Principle of Non-Contradiction Grounded in Human Being in Aristotle’s Metaphysics Γ (IV)

1.M0631, box 3, folder 8, Helene Weiss Papers.

2.In GA29/30, 533. Among the seminar participants, Heidegger singles out for mention, in addition to Eugen Fink, Oskar Becker and Käte Oltmanns. The notes of Helene Weiss attribute the protocol of one class to Oltmanns and also preserve notes on Oltmanns’s presentation at the end of the seminar. As Käte Bröcker-Oltmanns, she would go on to edit two volumes of Heidegger’s courses from the 1920s for the Gesamtausgabe, one with her husband Walter Bröcker (vol. 61) and one alone (vol. 63). The first protocol is attributed to Otto Friedrich Bollnow who, along with Eugen Fink, accompanied Heidegger to Davos and was given the important task, along with another student, of transcribing the exchange with Cassirer. See Gordon 2010, 105–109, as well as Bollnow’s own recollections in Neske 1977, 25–29.

3.In the Black Notebooks, Heidegger refers to a treatise of his on the principle of non-contradiction (GA94, 47) and a note by the editor tells us that this text would be published in Gesamtausgabe 91. However, what has been published in GA91 is not a treatise, but drafts for the lecture.

4.As noted by the editor, the cover of the lecture notes published in GA80.1 has written upon it, after the title, “vgl. W.S. 28/29.” Furthermore, the editor suggests that the incompleteness of the notes might be due to Heidegger having also used material from the 1928/29 seminar for the lecture (GA80.1, 553). This was before the publication of the fuller drafts in GA91; however, even these drafts in their treatment of Aristotle’s discussion of the principle in Metaphysics Γ are clearly indebted to the more detailed and extensive treatment in the seminar.

5.The book Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, which though published in 1929, according to Heidegger originated in its essentials in a course of 1927/28, contains some passing discussion of the principle of non-contradiction that closely parallels that in the 1928/29 seminar (GA3, 184, 194–195). In contrast, this discussion is not to be found in the 1927/28 course itself, now published as Phänomenologische Interpretation von Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft (GA25). This suggests that this discussion was new in the 1928/29 seminar and was worked into the Kant book at that time. Kant’s account of the principle of non-contradiction is also discussed in the later course of 1935/36 published as Die Frage nach dem Ding (FD), but in a way that largely summarizes Kant’s position without raising the critical question raised in 1928/29; see 134–136 and GA41, 174–177. None of these texts contain an interpretation of Metaphysics Γ.

6.In a recently published seminar from 1944 we find some discussion of Book Γ and a raising of the question of how the principle of non-contradiction fits into this ontological context. But the focus is on the first two chapters, in which the “category” problem now receives the most attention, after which the discussion turns to Book Z (see GA83, 394ff.). The most closely parallel discussion is to be found in the SS1933 course Die Grundfrage der Philosophie to be discussed below (GA36/37), but that too contains no exegesis of the relevant chapters of Metaphysics Γ.

7.Inaugural Dissertation, “De Mundi Sensibilis atque Intelligibilis Forma et Principiis,” 14, 5: “Tantum vero abest, ut quis umquam temporis conceptum adhuc rationis ope aliunde deducat et explicit, ut potius ipsum principium contradictionis eundem praemittat ac sibi condicionis loco substernat. A enim et non A non repugnant, nisi simul (h. e. tempore eodem) cogitata de eodem, post se autem (diversis temporibus) eidem competere possunt”; “So far from its being possible to deduce and explain the concept of time from some other source by force of reason, it is presupposed by the very principle of contradiction, it underlies it by way of condition. For a and not-a are not repugnant unless thought of the same thing simultaneously, that is, at the same time; they may belong to the same thing after each other, at different times” (translation taken from Eckoff 1894).

8.This thesis is taken up again in Die Frage nach dem Ding: “Die Unterscheidung gliedert die Urteile nach der möglichen Verschiedenheit des Bestimmungsgrundes der Wahrheit der Subjekt-Prädikat-Beziehung. Liegt der Bestimmungsgrund im Begriff als solchem, dann ist das Urteil analytisch; liegt er im Gegenstand selbst, dann ist das Urteil synthetisch” (FD, 129).

9.As Heidegger asks in Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, explaining Kant’s step back from the transcendental imagination, “Wird der ‘Kritik der reinen Vernunft’ nicht durch sie selbst das Thema entzogen, wenn reine Vernunft zur transzendentalen Einbildungskraft umschlägt? Führt die Grundlegung nicht vor einen Abgrund?” (GA3, 167–168).

10.See Kant 1998, 154. Heidegger draws attention to the same “correction” in Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (GA3, 161).

11.As Heidegger notes in Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, what is happening here is that the understanding is assuming the role of being the origin for all synthesis (GA3, 163).

12.Über eine Entdeckung nach der alle neue Kritik der reinen Vernunft durch eine ältere entbehrlich gemacht werden soll [Streitschrift gegen Eberhard] (1790).

13.This critique of Kant is of course pursued later by Heidegger. See Phänomenologische Interpretation von Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft (GA25, 272–282) and Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik, especially 126–203. In his lecture at Davos, “Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft und die Aufgabe einer Grundlegung der Metaphysik,” Heidegger, after maintaining that the imagination is in Kant the root of both the sensibility and the understanding, asserts, “The point of departure in reason has been broken asunder. With that Kant himself, through his radicalism, was brought to the brink of a position from which he had to shrink back. It implies destruction of the former foundation of Western metaphysics (spirit, logos, reason). It demands a radical, renewed unveiling of the grounds for the possibility of metaphysics as natural disposition of human beings, i.e., a metaphysics of Dasein directed at the possibility of metaphysics as such” (GA3, 273; translated by Richard Taft). It is precisely in search of this that Heidegger in the present seminar turns to Aristotle’s Metaphysics Γ.

14.Letter to M. Herz, May 11, 1781, in Kant 1922, 269.

15.Διὸ καὶ τοῦ ὄντος ὅσα εἴδη θεωρῆσαι μιᾶς ἐσὶν ἐπιστήμης τῷ γένει, τά τε εἴδη τῶν εἰδῶν. Heidegger notes that Alexander of Aphrodisias reads ᾗ ὄν after τοῦ ὄντος.

16.Οὐχ οἷον τε δὲ τῶν ὄντων οὔτε τὸ ἓν οὔτε τὸ ὂν εἶναι γένος.

17.Heidegger notes the different text proposed by Ross: τὸ αὐτὸ εἱς ἄνθρωπος καὶ ἄνθρωπός καὶ ὤν ἄνθρωπος καὶ ἄνθρωπος. But he appears to prefer the other reading as presenting an argument (he even calls it a syllogism) for the sameness of being and unity.

18.A translation of chapter 3 by Heidegger can be found in GA91, 263–265.

19.Yet what is surprising is that Heidegger makes no mention of the qualifications Aristotle claims are necessary but that he leaves unspecified: “(καὶ ὅσα ἄλλα προσδιορισαίμεθ᾽ἄν, ἔστω προσδιωρισμένα πρὸς τὰς λογικὰς δυσχερείας)” (1005b20–22; see also 26–27).

20.Tricot comments: “De la fin du chapitre précédent et du début du présent chapitre, il résulte que, suivant Aristote, l’impossibilité logique d’affirmer et de nier en même temps le prédicat du sujet, se fonde sur l’impossibilité ontologique de la coexistence des contraires (3, 1005 b 4)” (Tricot 1933, 197n2).

21.Heidegger is not alone in this. Tricot asserts: “Le principe de contradiction est, avant tout, une loi ontologique, et, d’une manière dérivée seulemement, une loi de l’esprit” (Tricot 1933, 196n1). Yet the contrary position is held by Bonitz who, wishing to minimize the importance of the passages in which the principle is formulated as an ontological one, seeks the “true formulation” in what is a misreading (as Ross 1924 notes, 1:278) of 1010b19–30: “Aristotelis ad veram principii contradictionis formulam accedit, in quo nimirum non rei ac temporis, sed notionis ponenda est identitas” (Bonitz 1849, 207). He is thereby clearly trying to read back into Aristotle the Kantian formulation of the principle.

22.The protocols for the 1944 seminar on Metaphysics Γ and Ζ end by questioning the translation of antiphasis as “Widerspruch,” making the following observation: “What is at issue here is not ‘language,’ not ‘logic’ in the modern sense. But it is no more useful to suggest that the principle of non-contradiction is to be understood ontologically. The genuine difficulty lies in seeing what is dealt with here in a Greek way” (GA83, 470).

23.A translations of chapter 4 by Heidegger can be found in GA91, 265–268.

24.See also EM, 143: “Die alte Streitfrage, ob der Satz vom Widerspruch bei Aristoteles eine ‘ontologische’ oder eine ‘logische’ Bedeutung habe, ist falsch gestellt, weil es für Aristoteles weder ‘Ontologie’ noch ‘Logik’ gibt. Beides ensteht erst auf dem Boden der aristotelischen Philosophie. Der Satz vom Widerspruch hat vielmehr ‘ontologische’ Bedeutung, weil er ein Grundsatz des Logos, ein ‘logischer’ Satz ist.” In his notes for the 1932 lecture on the principle, Heidegger makes a distinction between understanding the principle as “logical” in the sense of concerning logos (which is his own understanding) and understanding the principle as “logical” in the traditional sense of a “Denkgesetz” (GA80.1, 519–520; see also GA91, 300).

25.The key point here is expressed succinctly in the following note: “Rückweisung auf den Menschen—qua Dasein—nicht formal: daß er sich selbst widerspricht, einen Fehler macht, sondern: sich selbst nicht versteht, nicht demnach ist, was er gerade sein will—Dasein!” (GA91, 281).

26.This is a position also defended later in Die Frage nach dem Ding: “Der positiv gebrauchte Satz vom Widerspruch ist der Satz der Identität” (FD, 136; GA41, 177). On the other hand, in the notes published for the 1932 lecture, Heidegger appears to deny the equivalence: “Und dieser [der Satz vom Widerspruch] ist keineswegs gleichzusetzen dem Satz der Identität. Denn in A=A liegt nicht A≠ nicht A. Das ‘Nicht’—muß selbst eigens erwiesen sein im Wesen” (GA91, 320).

27.“Das Einssein und Selbigsein eines jeden ὄν mit sich selbst wird dort [i.e., Metaphysics Γ.3, 1005b9ff.] bezeichent als der festeste, unerschütterliche Grund und Boden, auf dem alles διαλέγεσθαι und damit das Dasein des Menschen überhaupt beruht,” (Weiss 1942, 26; my translation).

28.Cf. Tricot: “Peu importe que le sujet (homme, par exemple) ait une seule signification ou plusieurs, pourvu que, dans ce dernier cas, ces significations soient nettement déterminées et exprimées par des noms distincts” (Tricot 1933, 201n2).

29.For a helpful discussion of the sense of συνώνομα here, see Cassin and Narcy 1989, 197–99.

30.Cassin and Narcy speak here of a distinction between “l’unité de signification” and “l’unité d’attribution” (1989, 196).

31.This chapter addresses the argument of Protagoras, but also that of Anaxagoras and Democritus. Anaxagoras assumes that because what is cannot come out of what is not, when we see something become X it must have already been X, i.e., at the same time that it was not-X. Aristotle’s reply is the distinction between potentiality and actuality: a thing is potentially both contraries while not being actually both at the same time. We see here that the principle of non-contradiction also presupposes this ontological distinction. But this is not something Heidegger draws attention to in the seminar. The chapter could also be characterized as Aristotle’s version of the arguments against flux and relativism in the Theaetetus (a dialogue that is indeed alluded to at 1010b11–14).

32.The protocol is attributed as usual, but the name is hard to make out as it appears abbreviated: something like “Kurt kfp.”

33.In the recently published notes for the 1932 lecture we read: “Gilt der Satz nur praktisch, indem er sagt: Sei konsequent! Bleibe dir selbst treu! Allerdings—nur hat diese Praxis einen wesentlich tieferen Grund in der Möglichkeit der Existenz (Dasein)” (GA91, 310).

34.The explanation of this neglect appears to be that Heidegger’s focus in the lecture is on the principle’s status as a principle, and not on its content. The lecture is structured according to the following questions: (1) the content of the principle; (2) the place for treating of the principle; (3) the status of the principle; (4) the role of the principle; (5) its character as a principle; and (6) the discovery of the principle (GA91, 192–196, 219–22). Describing the different positions that have been taken on these questions historically, Heidegger reviews the discussion in Metaphysics Γ to shows that Aristotle cannot be pinned down to any of them (212–213, 243–244), thereby suggesting that Aristotle is addressing and grounding the principle at a deeper level than the subsequent tradition. While it might seem that the first question outlined deals with the content, what it actually addresses are the differences in formulation. Heidegger in this context notes briefly that Kant leaves out the temporal qualification “zugleich,” but he does not treat this as a substantive problem and, in turning to the discussion in Metaphysics Γ, he makes nothing of the “hama.”

35.“Dieses Verhalten zu Anwesendem im Sinne des Dahabens eines Anwesenden, das sich im Jetzt ausspricht, nennen wir das Gegenwärtigen von etwas” (GA24, 367). There appears to be a certain ambiguity in Heidegger’s use of the term Gegenwärtigen in Sein und Zeit. On the one hand, the term signifies the “inauthentic present” in contrast to the authentic present for which he chooses the term Augenblick (SZ, 338). Gegenwärtigen is then identified with the temporality of “falling” (Verfallen) in the mode of curiosity (Neugier) (346–349). Gegenwärtigen in this sense is seen as closing off the past and the future (347). This is presumably also how the term is understood when Heidegger later claims, “Die These, daß alle Erkenntnis auf ‘Anschauung’ abzweckt, hat den zeitlichen Sinn: alles Erkennen ist Gegenwärtigen. Ob jede Wissenschaft und ob gar philosophische Erkenntnis auf ein Gegenwärtigen zielt, bleibe hier noch unentschieden” (363n1). We have here what could be called a narrowing of the temporality of Dasein into a mere making-present, into a mere seeing of what is present. On the other hand, however, Heidegger also uses the term Gegenwärtigen as a more general term that encompasses both the authentic and the inauthentic present; see 408–412. This use is most explicit in Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie: “Das Gegenwärtigen, sei es eigentliches im Sinne des Augenblicks oder uneigentliches, entwirft das, was es gegenwärtigt, dasjenige was möglicherwiese in und für eine Gegenwart begegnen kann, auf so etwas wie Praesenz” (GA24, 435). Whether the temporality given expression in the ἅμα would be for Heidegger the authentic or inauthentic form of Gegenwärtigen is hard to say.

36.A similar response is given by one of Heidegger’s students, Walter Bröcker, who suggests that the qualification “at the same time” applies to the movement of the word and therefore does not require that the object of our speaking be itself in movement or in time: “Wenn aber das ‘zugleich’ im Satze des Widerspruchs die Bewegung des Wortes betrifft, und nicht das Worüber des Sprechens als physisch Bewegtes, so schränkt es den Satz garnicht auf in der Zeit Seiendes ein” (Bröcker 1987, 180).

37.“Das ‘zugleich’ drückt vielmehr denjenigen Zeitcharakter aus, der ursprünglich als vorgängige ‘Rekognition’ (‘Vor-bildung’) zu aller Identifizierung als solcher gehört. Diese leigt aber sowohl der Möglichkeit als auch der Unmöglichkeit des Widerspruchs fundierend zugrunde” (GA3, 195; my translation).

38.I am referring to the lecture “Der Satz der Identität” from the lecture series Grundsätze des Denkens (GA79; see especially 125). Significant in this context is also a remark from a 1937/38 seminar, Die Metaphysischen Grundstellungen des Abendländischen Denkens (Metaphysik): claiming that “the collapse of identity into the ‘logical’ (truth as correctness)” can be fully measured only when the original determination of on (hen) is understood as grounded in the “permanence and presence of what arises as unconcealed [Beständigkeit und Anwesenheit des Unverborgenen Aufgehenden].” Heidegger then continues, “It is in this context that the question concerning the metaphysical significance of the principle of contradiction belongs. So far ‘identity’ remained a sacrifice of the ‘logical’ and categorial interpretation, rather than seeing the time-space character and raising the question concerning its own truth” (GA88, 50). If the principle of non-contradiction came to solidify the collapse of “identity” into the “logical” by itself receiving a purely logical interpretation, the seminar of 1928/29 shows how a different interpretation of the principle can take us back to the “identity” described here as having a temporal/spatial character, that is, as grounded, we can add, in the temporality and the “Da” of Dasein and the interpretation of being in terms of presence. As noted in the main text, the hama indispensable to the principle indeed appears to have a temporal/spatial sense. Recall that Heidegger raised the problem of the relation between time and space in the 1924–25 seminar of medieval ontology. Of course, it is possible that by the end of the 1930s Heidegger came to see his earlier attempt to arrive at a meta-metaphysical conception of identity through the interpretation of the metaphysical principle of non-contradiction as a failure for the same reason he came to see his Kant interpretation as a failure: “Der Versuch, den die Schrift ‘Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik’ übernimmt, auf ‘historischem’ Wege einen ganz anderen Anfang der Seynsgeschichte zu erläutern und verständlich zu machen, muß notwendig scheitern” (Besinnung, GA66, 88). See Vigo 2018, esp. 120, 123, and 129–130.

39.For further discussion of Heidegger’s interpretation of the principle of non-contradiction in texts not focused on Metaphysics Γ, see Gonzalez 2019b, 181–183.

10. Critical Questions Raised by Heidegger’s Unpublished Seminars on Aristotle and the Future of the Aristotle/Heidegger Auseinandersetzung

1.Compare A. Kosman’s claim that for Aristotle “an understanding of being in general has its roots in an understanding of living being” (2013, 121).

2.According to Patočka, Aristotle’s physics is “cette philosophie du mouvement la plus ambitieuse qu’ait connue l’histoire de la pensée” (2011, 213). See also Spaak 2017, who observes that what modern physics bypasses and Aristotle perceives is that motion is also, in addition to and even prior to an external relation, an internal principle by which beings tend toward accomplishing something in the world (4).

3.“Il n’y a donc pas chez Aristote de refus de principe de la mathématisation (pour autant qu’elle ne prétende pas saisir l’essence du mouvement) ; simplement, ne tenant pas à prévoir et à maîtriser le mouvement, mais plutôt à l’expliquer et à le comprendre dans son sens, il ne s’y intéresse pas. Le propos de la science et de la philosophie n’est aucunement pour lui d’agir sur la réalité, de la dominer, de la transformer, mais plutôt—comme pour toute la philosophie grecque—d’agir sur et de transformer son propre rapport au tout du réel, son rapport au monde ; c’est la prise de conscience, la réflexion, l’explicitation de ce rapport” (Patočka 2011, 211).

4.Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle’s definition of time in the Physics, for which we have to turn to texts outside the unpublished seminars presented here, can itself also be challenged: see Chernyakov 2002 (who sees “the concept of ἐνέργεια and its internal form” as providing the essential clue for Aristotle’s theory of time in the Physics; 17, 42–77), Yfantis 2009, especially 448n900, and Gonzalez 2008, 2022, and forthcoming.

5.Sadler 1996 shows how severely limited our understanding of the relation between Heidegger and Aristotle is condemned to be without consideration of both the unpublished seminars presented here and the courses and seminars published since the publication of Sadler’s book. One will find in Sadler’s book nothing about Heidegger’s initial search for an ontology of life in Aristotle, nothing about Heidegger’s interpretations and appropriations of Aristotle’s account of motion in the Physics, nothing about Heidegger’s interpretations and appropriations of the notions of dunamis and energeia, nothing about Heidegger’s discovery in Aristotle of forms of temporality distinct from the “natural time” of the Physics. As a result, Sadler describes Heidegger’s relation to Aristotle as primarily negative and critical, missing practically all that is positive in Heidegger’s reading: “positive” both in the sense of contributing to a better understanding of Aristotle and in the sense of contributing to Heidegger’s own philosophical project. Sadler could hardly have been expected to consider texts to which he had no access at the time. However, it is worth noting that Walter A. Brogan’s book, though focusing almost entirely on the course and the essay from the 1930s already available to Sadler, discusses in detail Heidegger’s positive assessment of the account of movement and the non-categorial sense of being as dunamis and energeia in Aristotle, even claiming, “The central topic that pervades Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle, and the one above all others that demonstrates his knowledge and insight, is the topic of kinêsis” (Brogan 2005, 189). The unpublished seminars confirm this assessment while also greatly adding to our understanding of Heidegger’s interpretation and appropriation of the concepts of kinêsis, dunamis, and energeia and showing that the guiding concern here is with the movement of life as such and then with the movement of human life. Another study that gives a positive account of Heidegger’s reading and appropriation of Aristotle, Weigelt 2002, focuses on Heidegger’s interpretation of logos as itself a kinêsis and specifically a movement belonging to life: it too therefore could have found much important material in the unpublished seminars.

6.While stating so aptly that “il pensiero heideggeriano rapprasenta un punto denso della presenza di Aristotele nel nostro secolo” (2010, 144), Volpi goes on to make too much of an opposition between Heidegger’s philosophical appropriation of Aristotle’s texts and our “historical-philological compulsion” (145). Heidegger’s close reading of the texts in the unpublished seminars and his constant appeal to both historical context and philological correctness show that, while his reading is indeed more than an attempt to reconstruct what Aristotle actually said and thought, he would never defend an unhistorical and philologically untenable interpretation on the grounds that it is philosophically fruitful. But Volpi concludes with a characterization of the exigency to be found in Heidegger’s confrontation with Aristotle that does not oppose the philosophical to the historical, the exigency “di una ripresa e di un’appropriazione produttiva del patrimonio aristotelico in grado di discernerne attualitá e storicitá” (152).

7.An extreme example of this approach is France-Lanord 2011. France-Lanord repeatedly dismisses any critique of Heidegger’s readings of Plato and Aristotle as miscomprehension, specifically, as a failure to appreciate that Heidegger is not a historian of philosophy (see e.g., 86n2).

8.For a recent example of this “biological turn” in the reading of Aristotle, one that makes the biological works central to his thought, see Connell 2021. See especially in this volume Charlotte Witt, “Aristotle’s Biological Metaphysics.” A. Kosman also speaks of “Aristotle’s biological ontology” (2013, 120) and “Aristotle’s biological metaphysics” (121). I myself have tried to show how Aristotle’s ontology is guided by the phenomenon of life in Gonzalez 2020. Helene Weiss herself (1948a) further pursued the question of Aristotle’s account of life in dialogue with the work of the biologist Jakob von Uexküll.

9.On this objection, see Yfantis 2009, 352.

10.On Sadler’s account, Heidegger charges Aristotle with an “ousiological reduction.” Though Sadler recognizes that Heidegger, even in the limited texts at Sadler’s disposal, wavers on this point, sometimes insisting that the concepts of dunamis and energeia should not be assimilated to categorial being, Sadler still sees Heidegger as overall committed to the charge of an “ousiological reduction,” a charge with which Sadler himself appears to agree (see Sadler 1996, 48–49). In contrast, Brogan emphasizes Heidegger’s insistence in the 1931 course on Metaphysics Θ that the other senses of being not be reduced to categorial being (2005, 114–124).

11.Helene Weiss clearly made Heidegger’s teaching on this point her own since in her book she characterizes energeia as a motion but a complete one because fulfilling the Greek conception of being as presence: “Die Energeia stellt die höchste Art des Bewegtseins dar, weil die volle und vollendete Anwesenheit den höchsten Sinn von Sein, wie die Griechen es verstehen, erfüllt” (1942, 103). She therefore interprets the distinction in Metaphysics Θ.6 as one between kinêsis atelês and teleia kinêsis (103; see also 145), even though the latter phrase is never used by Aristotle himself and would be considered by him to be a contradiction in terms. In contrast, the following claim by A. Kosman can be cited in critique of Heidegger and Weiss: “It is wrong to suppose that the former concepts of dunamis and energeia—of ability and activity—are conceptually dependent upon the latter concept of change or motion. . . . For motion is defined by Aristotle in terms of a concept of energeia as activity, independent of and prior to that of motion” (2013, 70). See also Patočka 2011: “Ἐνέργεια—activité, acte, actualité—est un terme qui chapeaute et le mouvement et le repos, et le changement et la stabilité. . . . L’activité, l’actualité est donc plus large que le mouvement” (173).

12.In this Heidegger is followed by his most sympathetic interpreters. Spaak notes, quite bluntly, “or comme nous le savons, Heidegger et Patocka n’entendent pas reconnaître à la théologie aristotélicienne du premier moteur la moindre pertinence ontologique” (2017, 209). D’Angelo 2000, in a book of 437 pages, never once discusses the pure energeia of the unmoved mover. A central thesis defended throughout the book is furthermore clearly incompatible with Aristotle’s characterization of the unmoved mover: namely, the thesis that energeia is always energeia of a dunamis that preserves this dunamis as such. Thus, D’Angelo insists that if Aristotle argues against the Megarians for the distinction between dunamis and energeia, he still allows that they are one in the exercise of a capacity, i.e., that energeia does not exclude dunamis but includes it (373–374). D’Angelo’s central argument, avowedly influenced by Heidegger (see, e.g., 423), is this unity of dunamis and energeia, which means both that there is dunamis present in every energeia and energeia present in every dunamis. Consider the following sentence: “Nello ἐνέργειν non c’è pertanto un passagio della potenza all’atto (cosí come c’é invece nella κίνησις), bensí una potenza in atto e un atto in potenza che consentono uno svolgimento dell’attività in cui la pausa non è il fine” (414). As this passage already indicates, energeia and dunamis are separate for D’Angelo only in motion or production (since, for example, what has been built cannot continue to be built) (418). A dunamis is always already in act without need of being actualized and is therefore in itself perfect (see 397); an energeia is always still potential and therefore continuous. But how is such a thesis compatible with Aristotle’s account of the unmoved mover? The latter’s activity cannot be the exercise of a capacity in which the capacity remains as such since such a capacity would imply the possibility of not-acting (1071b13–14; ἐνδέχεται γὰρ τὸ δύναμιν ἔχον μὴ ἐνέργειν). As necessarily eternal, uninterrupted and uninterruptible activity, the energeia of the unmoved mover must exclude all dunamis. And is an account of energeia acceptable when it can make no sense of what is for Aristotle the highest and purest instance of energeia? One might seek support for D’Angelo’s thesis in a passage where Aristotle raises the aporia that dunamis might seem prior to energeia since what is capable need not be active while “it appears that everything active is capable” (1071b23; δοκεῖ γὰρ τὸ μὲν ἐνεργοῦν πᾶν δύνασθαι”). But with the “appears” (δοκεῖ) Aristotle is careful not to commit himself to this assumption of the aporia, and with good reason since it seems in conflict with the explicit argument that what is eternally active cannot dunamin echein. Christopher Long, in a book inspired, like D’Angelo’s, by Heidegger’s reading (2011), has the merit of confronting the problem of the unmoved mover head on, but finds himself compelled to attribute dunamis to the unmoved mover. He suggests that while the ousia of the unmoved mover cannot be dunamis, this does not require that the unmoved mover be without dunamis (236). Not only, however, is no explanation given of what it would mean to have a dunamis when one’s very being excludes dunamis, but Aristotle’s own argument infers that the unmoved mover’s being is not dunamis from the fact that as the unmoved mover it cannot possess the dunamis to move the universe (since a dunamis need not be exercised and the eternality of motion would thus be undermined) (1071b17–20).

13.This case is well made by Yfantis 2009, 354–355. Especially important is the observation that “Bezüglich der Begriffe‚ Potentialität (δύναμις), ‘Aktualität’ (ἐνέργεια) und ‘Vollendung’ (ἐντελέχεια) ist wohl die Annahme plausibler, daß diese Begriffe primär aus der Erforschung der Lebensphänomene gewonnen werden” (355). See also Patočka 2011: “Qu’on me comprenne bien: je ne pretends pas que l’artificialisme ne joue aucun role chez Aristote. Mais la raison en est que notre expérience courante des choses et avec les choses a à faire avant tout et de façon prépondérante avec des choses fabriquées, avec des πράγματα. Pour Aristote cependant, la question de la φύσις est bien plus importante et plus fondamentale” (429); “Reste que, par son concept de φύσις, Aristote est un philosophe qui s’oppose éminemment et par principe à toute vision du devenir du point de vue du ‘faire’ ou de la fabrication, qui est donc l’adversaire de tout artificialisme” (430–431). Le Blond 1973, 306–372, while noting the importance of “les schèmes de l’industrie” for Aristotle’s causes and principles, sees “les schèmes biologiques” as at least equally as important (he also adds “les schèmes du language”). We saw Heidegger himself in the SS1921 seminar insist on the biological perspective as the determinative one for Aristotle’s ontology; but this later gives way to the view that the productive model alone is determinative. Minca 2006, the title of whose book on Heidegger’s interpretations of Aristotelian philosophy could not be better chosen, that is, Poiesis, while rightly recognizing that the thesis that Aristotle understood being as Hergestelltsein is central to Heidegger’s interpretations, leaves the thesis completely unquestioned, as if it were a self-evidence; and this despite citing Le Blond at one point (215n3).

14.Spaak argues against the common view that Heidegger reverses the priority of energeia to dunamis in Aristotle (2017, 205–222). But it is important to note that the energeia Heidegger prioritizes over dunamis is on Spaak’s reading understood as “coming into presence”, that is, kinêsis. See also D’Angelo 2000, 146. In contrast, Escudero seems to miss completely the central importance of the notion of energeia in Heidegger’s appropriation of Aristotle, wrongly suggesting that Heidegger equates the notion with the actuality of the product and with immobility (2010, 280, 311).

15.For a detailed defense of this critique of Heidegger that focuses on the SS1924 course on the basic concepts of Aristotelian philosophy, see Gonzalez 2006a. For less of a critique that nevertheless draws attention to the differences between Aristotle and Heidegger here, see Rese 2007.

16.Minca 2006 writes, “Ein Versuch, von Aristoteles aus (aber mit Heideggers Augen) auf Heidegger selbst zu schauen, hat wenig Chancen zum Erfolg” (37). That of course depends on the result one is looking for. What considering Heidegger from the perspective of Aristotle can provide is precisely what is completely lacking in Minca’s book: the opportunity Heidegger’s confrontation with Aristotle creates for raising critical questions not only about Aristotle’s thought but about Heidegger’s thought as well. The contrasting approach of Pantoulias 2015 is in my view the correct one: “Das seine Arbeit, in deren Titel Heidegger und Aristoteles erscheinen, die Ontologie gerade im Ausgang von Heidegger zu erschließen versucht, ist vielleicht keine Überraschung. Dieses bedeutet aber nicht, dass das hier zu entwickelnde Ontologieverständnis sich allein auf Heideggers Auffassung beschränken muss, oder dass Heideggers Interpretation der aristotelischen Philosophie als die einzige oder die beste betrachtet wird” (12; my emphasis).

17.The corresponding importance of Aristotle’s Physics for Heidegger’s own thought is the central topic of Mora 2000 and is noted by Escudero 2010 (309), even without knowledge in both cases of the unpublished seminars. As the latter puts it, “la teoría aristotélica de la kinêsis se transforma en una analítica del Dasein” (313).

18.On this point, see Yfantis 2009, 481–482.

19.The unpublished seminars only further support Bernasconi’s observation that “Heidegger focuses explicitly on praxis only rarely and his sights are clearly set on poiesis. Furthermore, this is not always the broad conception of poiesis which includes praxis” (“The Fate of the Distinction between Praxis and Poiesis,” in Bernasconi 1993, 12).

20.Hans Jonas speaks of “the well-known and always known fact that there is much secularized Christianity in Heidegger’s thought” (2001, 241). See especially Yfantis, who notes that for Heidegger “Die ursprüngliche christliche Existenz sei durch die griechische Philosophie ‘verunstaltet,’ so dass eine grundsätzliche Auseinandersetzung mit dieser unternommen werden müsse“ (2009, 70; see also 487). Yfantis also notes the important role played by Luther (72–75, 87), though he does not pursue this influence, whereas it is a focus of Sommer 2005. Sommer at one point even characterizes Being and Time as the transposition of the fundamental experiences of the New Testament in elevating them to the level of the concept (268) and therefore as containing the very essence of the Evangel. See also Sadler 1996, 15–17, 150–56.

21.This argument has been made by Taminiaux, but without the texts to support it! See Taminiaux 1987, 150–151.

22.The important study of McNeill 1996 shows what Heidegger’s notion of the Augenblick owes to the sight of phronêsis in Aristotle. But one thing that the unpublished seminars show (though this is already apparent in the SS1924 course on the Basic Concepts of Aristotelian philosophy [GA18]) is the extent to which Heidegger’s reading of the Nicomachean Ethics is grounded in a certain reading of the Physics. In this case, the temporality of phronêsis must be understood in relation to the temporality of what occurs neither always nor for the most part as this is discussed in the central chapters of Physics II.

23.On the specific problem of Heidegger’s interpretation of life as such, see Krell 1992, Derrida’s last seminar (Derrida 2011), Beinsteiner 2017 and Andersson 2017. Spaak makes the important following observation: “Dans les termes de l’ontologie phénoménologique, il faut dire que l’existence ne recouvre pas la vie, que la vie chez l’homme (au sens biologique) est une possibilité fondée de l’existence, et non l’existence une possibilité de la vie” (129).

24.In the Parmenides course of 1942/43, life remains for Heidegger a riddle (das Rätsel alles Lebendigen) (GA54, 237).

25.See also the account of the organism on pages 79–80, couched in Aristotelian terms without mention of Aristotle.

26.On Heidegger’s transformation of Aristotle’s teleology into “Sein zum Ende” and then “Sein zum Tode,” see especially Jollivet 2007, 147–148.

27.Relevant here is Hans Jonas’s critique that for Dasein on Heidegger’s analysis in Being and Time “there is no present to dwell in, only the crisis between past and future, the pointed moment between, balanced on the razor’s edge of decision which thrusts ahead” (2001, 231); he speaks in this context of Heidegger’s “breathless dynamism” (231).

28.Commenting on Being and Time, with no knowledge of the seminars examined here, Jacques Derrida made the following insightful observation: “Je crois que le problème de la Bewegtheit comme non-Bewegung était le problème le plus important aux yeux de Heidegger lui-même” (Derrida 2013, 307). On the distinction between Bewegung and Bewegtheit, see Escudero 2010, 310–11.

29.Aubry 2006 sees in Aristotle’s ontology what Heidegger apparently does not see: “une ontologie qui ne réduit l’être ni à la puissance, ni à la presence” (15). Kosman rightly claims that to reject the functional equivalence of energeia and entelecheia (as we have seen Heidegger do in the seminars of the 1920s) is “to suppose that the only interesting contrast to the kinetic is the static, whereas Aristotle’s project is precisely to reveal as a more apposite contrast that between the kinetic and the perfectly energetic” (2013, 176). Kosman summarizes as follows the import of his study, whose title is The Activity of Being: “In thus identifying substance as the activity of a subject’s being what it is, this story reveals with clarity the ontological centrality of activity. It thus shows how misleading are depictions of Aristotle’s ontology of substance as an ontology of things, of inert and static entities—depictions that often accompany a contrast, explicit or implicit, with theories thought to privilege a more active and dynamic view of being” (239). One could argue that Heidegger is too caught in the opposition between an ontology of static entities and a dynamic view of being to see the third option Aristotle offers and that Kosman and others have attempted to articulate. Spaak follows Heidegger to the extent of attributing the equivocity between a dynamic and static conception of energeia to Aristotle himself (2017, 30). Sommer’s book is also faithful to Heidegger in remaining caught between an opposition between a supposed Greek ontology of presence and a conception of human life as a movement whose end is nothing but this movement (2005, 174) and which is therefore always in movement, inherently imperfect, always characterized by negation and deprivation: the Christian conception of human life (175).

30.See Taminiaux 1987, Volpi 1994, and Escudero 2010, 279–295. After arguing that Heidegger’s inauthenticity/authenticity distinction is a retrieval of Aristotle’s poiêsis/praxis distinction, Taminiaux in the concluding part of the paper asks, “Is πρᾶξις, as it is retrieved by Heidegger in fundamental ontology, (as the free transcendence of the Dasein), recognized and described by him for what it is, or is it described as it is described in order to provide a basis for the unambiguous science of being, that is, for the achievement of metaphysics? Or, in other words, is Heidegger’s retrieval a radicalization of Aristotle’s teaching or a combination of radicalization and obliteration?” (157). He goes on to give us reasons for concluding the latter. Volpi acknowledges that “the Heideggerian ontologizing of praxis in each of its determinations necessarily leads to fundamental alterations and displacements” (205), but he does not explore these alterations and displacements, as Escudero in contrast does. See also Pantoulias 2015, 205–206, and Mora 2000, 23.

31.For discussion and critique, see Gonzalez 2006b. D’Angelo 2000 mostly follows Heidegger here (see 122, 434), but also raises some critical questions; see 414, 427.

32.Given what we have seen to be Heidegger’s subordination of praxis to poiêsis from at least 1922, I cannot agree with Mora 2000 that the 1931 seminar represents a transition from “un’interpretazione prassistica” of Aristotle’s philosophy to “un’interpretazione produttistica” (22–24); however, given the complete neglect of Metaphysics Θ.6 in 1931 and of the Nicomachean Ethics as a whole in Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle after the 1920s, it is fair to say that the notion of praxis is only further eclipsed in the later reading.

33.See Spaak 2017, 169–170, and Yfantis who, however, wrongly suggests that Heidegger here rejects (whereas he only qualifies) his earlier identification of phusis with “Sich-Selbst-Herstellen” (2009, 241n467, 503–504). Yfantis does acknowledge on page 504 that Heidegger continues using the same language.

34.There exist notes by the Romanian phenomenologist Alexandru Dragomir for a seminar on Metaphysics Θ from the winter of 1942/43. The notes cover only the class of January 14, 1943, which is dedicated to chapter 10 (Dragomir 2004). Protocols for a seminar of this date appear in the old typed catalogue of Heidegger’s Nachlass in the DLA, Marbach (75.7160), though not in the digital online catalogue: the description suggests that the whole seminar was devoted only to Θ. 10.

35.In the 1939 essay, Heidegger simply ignores the “or some” (ἢ ἔνια) in his discussion of the passage despite including it in his translation: see WB, 314 (“Daß alles von der φύσις her Seiende in Bewegung sein bzw. Ruhe, das ist nach Aristoteles offenkundig”).

36.For an interpretation of the evolution of Heidegger’s views on this topic, see Gonzalez 2018c. On the “dynamizing” of energeia, see D’Angelo 2000, passages cited in note above and especially 278–279.

37.Though see also the 1939 essay, 330–331.

38.Heidegger already gave a reading of Metaphysics Θ.10 in the 1925/26 course Logik: Die Frage nach der Wahrheit (GA21, 70ff.). One finds there the same central thesis one finds here: that truth as unconcealedness is the primary sense of being for Aristotle because being for Aristotle means presence.

39.“Als diese Anwesensstätte des Anwesenden zeigt sich die Unverborgenheit als Grundzug des Anwesens selbst” (596; see also 600).

40.“Die Bewegung is ein gewisses ‘vollendet,’ aber nicht schlechthin, sondern von etwas, was in sich angelegt ist auf . . . (also, z. B. grün, angelegt auf gelb). Das Herauskommen aus der Anlage ist die Bewegung” (662).