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This book seeks to contribute to an elucidation of the meaning and possibility of philosophy in the present age by examining the interpretation of Aristotle that is to be found in the work of the twentieth-century German philosopher, Martin Heidegger. The aim, in the most general terms, is to determine the manner in which both a positive appropriation and a critique of Aristotle lie at the very heart of Heidegger's philosophical enterprise from the early 1920s onwards. This enterprise, however, including the interpretation of Aristotle that is central to it, is radicalised and begins to grasp more fully its own historical implications by means of Heidegger's phenomenological reflection on the essence of art in the mid-1930s. Such reflection on the essence of art does not form merely an isolated or special problematic within Heidegger's work, and, in other words, it is not limited to the significance of what philosophers have come to term a "regional ontology' it rather transforms the basic question of philosophy that Heidegger had posed in the 1920s, namely the question of being. The most specific aim of this study, therefore, is to determine exactly how Heidegger's phenomenology of the artwork transforms his earlier interpretation of Aristotle articulated within a questioning of being, and ultimately to show that it is only from the perspective of this transformation that the historical and philosophical import of Heidegger's earlier work, and thus the development of his work as a whole, can be adequately understood.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230625075_1

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