Francesco Guercio - Böcker

Nietzsche praised Kant for having "annihilated Socratism," for exhibiting all ideals as essentially unattainable, and for having exposed himself to the despair of truth--all essential traits Nietzsche claimed for his own thinking. At the same time, the existentialist philosopher remained highly critical of Kant. This volume of Reiner Schurmann's lectures unpacks Nietzsche's ambivalence towards Kant, in particular positioning Nietzsche's claim to have brought an end to German idealism against the backdrop of the Kantian transcendental-critical tradition. Rather than simply compare the two philosophers, Schurmann's lectures help us to understand the consequences Nietzsche derived from Kantian concepts, as well as the wider horizon within which Nietzsche's ideas arose and can best be shown to apply. According to Schurmann's trenchant reading: if Nietzsche was indeed "fatal" to Western philosophy, as he claimed, he was so in large part because of the Kantian transcendental thinking from which he inherited the very elements and tools of his criticism.

Through the lenses of Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, this edited volume traces the development of the relation between the will and the law as self-given. Modern Philosophies of the Will explores a variety of topics including: the ontological turn in philosophy of the will; the will’s playful character and the problem of teleology; the will as principle of morality as discussed by Kant, of life­forms as discussed by Nietzsche, and of technology as discussed by Heidegger; the formal identity of legislation; and transgression of the law. This volume traces three strategies in the development of the philosophy of will from Kant to Heidegger, through rationality and irrationality of the will, the ontological turn, and law.

In Being and Time, Heidegger announced the “Task of Destroying the History of Ontology” in order to free what had remained “unthought” in Western metaphysics. The unpublished part of that work was to be titled “Basic Features of a Phenomenological Destruction of the History of Ontology. According to the Guiding Thread of the Problem of Temporality.” This latest work in the Reiner Schürmann Selected Writings and Lecture Notes series aims to carry out Heidegger’s plan. The destruction, or, as it is later called, the deconstruction of metaphysics, has a negative side—the peeling off, or the archeology, of metaphysical history by means of the guiding thread of the question of Being—and a positive side—“retrieval” of the original experience of Being in ancient Greek philosophy.  “The destruction has no other intent than to win back the original experience of metaphysics through a deconstruction of those conceptions which have become current and empty.” The purpose of taking to pieces the fabric of Western metaphysics is to show how at each important stage “the question of the meaning of Being has not only remained unattended to or inadequately raised, but that it has become quite forgotten in spite of all our interest in 'metaphysics'.”