Heidegger: The Critique of Logic

Since his inaugural lecture at Freiburg in 1929 in which Heidegger delivered his most celebrated salvo against logic, he has frequently been portrayed as an anti-logician, a classic example of the obscurity resultant upon a rejection of the discipline of logic, a champion of the irrational, and a variety of similar things. Because many of Heidegger''s statements on logic are polemical in tone, there has been no little misunderstanding of his position in regard to logic, and a great deal of distortion of it. All too frequently the position which is attacked as Heidegger''s is a barely recognizable caricature of it. Heidegger has, from the very beginning of his career, written and said much on logic. Strangely enough, in view of all that he has said, his critique of logic has not been singled out as the subject of any of the longer, more detailed studies on the various aspects of his thought.