ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The greatest debt of gratitude is owed to Helene Weiss, without whose work of producing, compiling, and collecting student transcripts of Heidegger’s seminars from the 1920s the present book simply would not have been possible. There is a very cruel irony here. In the notorious Der Spiegel interview, published with the title “Only a God can Save Us,” Heidegger called Weiss “one of my oldest and most gifted students” and showed the interviewer a copy of her dissertation on Aristotle, published in Basel in 1942, with its acknowledged debt to Heidegger in the forward and a personal dedication, as evidence of a continued friendship.¹ Unfortunately, there is a clear agenda behind these comments: Heidegger wished to show that his attitude toward his Jewish students after 1933 “remained unchanged.” What he does not explain in laconically observing that “continued study at Freiburg became impossible” for Weiss is why it became impossible. The cause, of course, was National Socialist policies Heidegger supported. More than that, both Weiss’s niece, Miriam Lewin,² and her nephew, Ernst Tugendhat³ (to whom we owe the conservation of the Weiss transcripts in the Special Collections department of Stanford University), have claimed that Heidegger rejected her dissertation because she was Jewish. I have not been able to find any independent confirmation of this nor even of when exactly Weiss left Freiburg: her niece surprisingly says that she left Germany before Hitler came to power. If what the niece and nephew claim is true, this only serves to remind us, to use the words in the title of the volume cited above, that, if Heidegger was a great thinker, he was also a very little man. After being forced to leave Freiburg, Weiss’s life, from the very little that can be surmised (practically nothing can be known about her life and that is itself telling) was a hard one of temporary positions and deprivations, even having to resort at one point, according to her niece, to selling pots and pans door-to-door to make a living. She died in Basel in 1951, still in her early 50s.⁴ That she nevertheless managed to publish not only her dissertation (Weiss 1942), but also a series of articles in scholarly journals still worth reading today (Weiss 1938, 1941a, 1941b, 1948a, 1948b), testifies to her resilience and dedication. I hope that the reader of this book, in following and profiting from the exciting ideas contained in Heidegger’s seminars, never forgets the brilliant young woman whose love of Aristotle and of philosophy made her preserve them for us.

The notes of Helene Weiss would of course not have been accessible to me if they were not housed in the Department of Special Collections of Stanford University. In my several trips to Stanford in doing the research for this book, I benefited from the generous and efficient assistance of the staff of the Department of Special Collections. The department provided a welcoming and comfortable environment for the long hours needed to identify and decipher the notes in the collection.

The following graduate students at the University of Ottawa assisted with the decipherment and transcription of the Weiss notes in their roles as my research assistants: Louis-Phillipe Auger, Shane Fair and Matthew Wood.

I could not have paid my research assistants nor made the several trips I made to Stanford as well the trips to a number of universities and conferences throughout the world to share the results of my research, without the generous financial support provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Without this support neither this book nor many related projects would have been possible.

It would have been hard to find the motivation to pursue such a long project without the interest and encouragement of many colleagues. In some cases they are anonymous: the readers of the initial proposal for SSHRC who offered extremely positive and encouraging evaluations as well as the readers for Indiana University Press whose positive and helpful comments assured me that my time had not been wasted. They also include those who have attended presentations of my findings and have offered not only encouragement, but helpful criticisms and questions. They finally include those who have written on Aristotle and Heidegger and from whose work, cited in the references, I have benefitted. Among these scholars I must make special mention of Franco Volpi. His book on Aristotle and Heidegger (Volpi 1984), written not only without a knowledge of the unpublished seminars discussed here, but even before the publication of the major lecture courses on Aristotle, was so prescient that it remains to this day a necessary starting point for research in this area. I had the pleasure of meeting Franco only once and shortly before his sudden and untimely death in a cycling accident: it turns out that we shared not only a passion for Aristotle and Heidegger, but also a passion for cycling. With the publication of this book I feel Franco’s absence especially acutely because there is no one I more would have wanted to read this book and provide feedback. I wish so much that he were still with us. Now I can only hope that wherever he is has a good library.

While working on the present book, I also lost my first teacher of Heidegger and Ancient Philosophy: my dear friend Michael Gelven. Living very separate lives in different countries, we did not have much contact in the years immediately before his death. Yet his inspiring presence was always felt and continues to be felt. While especially toward the end he was not sufficiently well to follow my work, he set me on the path that eventually led me here. He was the greatest teacher I have ever met, and I am only one of very many whose lives he fundamentally changed and for the better. He also was a great thinker who wrote many books of great originality and independence, books that followed no trend and are not easily categorized: which means, of course, that they have been largely ignored.

Finally, but certainly not least, I must thank the woman who suddenly appeared in my life toward the beginning of this project like a sudden explosion of sunshine in the midst of growing darkness. In one of those strange accidents of life that cannot help but look like destiny in retrospect, I would never have met her thousands of miles away from home if not for the funding I received for this project. This woman, Carolina Araujo, became my wife as I did the research for this book, and I wrote the book in lockdown with her as we both suffered through Covid. Perhaps the normal thing here would be to thank her for her unflagging support. But that’s not it. That says too little. I thank her for making my life a constant adventure, an exciting challenge, an unending succession of unforeseen and wonderful experiences, a wild trip within which the present book was just part of the journey. I thank her for the constant conversation about the topics addressed in this book. I thank her for the work she is doing so that women philosophers today do not suffer the fate of Helene Weiss. I thank her for reading the manuscript of this book and providing helpful feedback. For this, and for so much more that must remain unsaid, I dedicate the book to her.