Heidegger's Philosophic Pedagogy

Features

Description

Heidegger's Philosophic Pedagogy examines how Martin Heidegger conceives and carries out the task of educating human beings in a life determined by philosophic questioning. Through an exposition of recently published lecture courses that Heidegger delivered in the years 1928-1935, his magnum opus, Being and Time, and other key texts, the author shows that the task of education is central to Heidegger's understanding of philosophy.

A pedagogical intention is essential to Heidegger's discourse in all its forms: lecture course, treatise and public address. It determines the philosopher's relation to students, readers and the public generally and the task of education is here shown to have a broad scope. This book reveals a continuity between Heidegger's efforts to engender a 'living philosophizing' in students and his conception of the role of philosophy in politics, a role that is defined as a form of 'leadership'.

Michael Ehrmantraut's study of the aims, necessity, character, method and limits of Heidegger's philosophic pedagogy thus opens up the political implications of Heidegger's thought as he himself understood them. Review: This book is a rare, genuinely important contribution to the study of Heidegger.

This is so in a number of respects. It treats a subject vital to Heidegger but, until now, neglected (even ignored) by scholars. It provides a way into Heidegger's thought that begins from and remains true to Heidegger's self-understanding. It uncovers Heidegger's original path of thinking, one he never abandoned.

It explains why and how Heidegger was set in motion by the question 'why philosophy?' It shows why and how Heidegger understands that question to be inseparable from the question of the practice of philosophy. And it thereby places the vexed question of the relationship between Heidegger's thought and his politics in its proper context.

In my judgement, Ehrmantraut's book is one of the best introductions to Heidegger's thought as a whole and perhaps the best introduction to his politics. - M. Richard Zinman, University Distinguished Professor of Political Theory, Michigan State University, USA