Lexington Books
Pages: 350
•
Trim: 6⅜ x 9½
978-0-7391-7168-4 • Hardback • October 2012 • $147.00 • (£113.00)
978-1-4985-1625-9 • Paperback • March 2015 • $64.99 • (£50.00)
William H. F. Altman teaches Latin and World History at E. C. Glass, a public high school in Lynchburg, Virginia.
Chapter 1: Heidegger the Warrior
Chapter 2: Davos and Decline
Chapter 3: Heidegger’s War
Chapter 4: Reading Heidegger’s Being and Time
Chapter 5: Vorlaufende Entschlossenheit
Chapter 6: Being and Time, Section §74
Chapter 7: The Nature of Being and Time
Chapter 8: Hassan Givsan and Heidegger’s World Wars
Chapter 9: War-Guilt
Altman’s historical research illuminates important dimensions of Heidegger’s thought and mentality, and contributes to a richer grasp of the context and meaning of Being and Time.
— Richard Polt, Xavier University
Altman’s scholarship is voluminous, especially regarding material detailing Heidegger’s personal and professional life. . . .It may also be mentioned that throughout this study, Altman introduces incidental references and allusions to a number of other works by Heidegger, the most noteworthy are the Hölderlin Lectures of 1934–35 which Altman reads in ways which support his contention that Heidegger’s prose can readily be connected to themes associated with WWI. For anyone with a special interest in Heidegger’s readings of poetry, whether Greek or German, the discussions and background material pertaining to Hölderlin are valuable and constitute a suggestive interpretive base for determining the import of Heidegger’s many writings on this important poet.
— ID: International Dialogue, A Multidisciplinary Journal of World Affairs
William Altman analyzes Heidegger’s theories in Being and Time against the background of the First World War, on which they depend. This is an important book.
— Tom Rockmore, Duquesne University
Through wide-ranging research combined with meticulous close readings of often overlooked texts, William Altman sheds important new light on Heidegger’s thought and politics in the historical context of interbellum Germany. Altman’s readings will no doubt be controversial, but this book deserves the attention of anyone wanting to make sense of the connections between Heidegger’s philosophy, his place within the generation of the Great War, and his own eventual engagement with National Socialism.
— Gregory Fried, Boston College
In connecting Being and Time with the epideictic genre, and in interpreting it as a funeral oration for the German soldiers fallen during the Great War, William Altman sheds new light on the call for the 'struggle to come' launched by Heidegger in Section 74 of that work, and gives a greater concreteness—martial, so to speak—to the Heideggerian conception of the relation between present, past, and future. It is the anticipation of a Second World War that is already in sight.
— Emmanuel Faye, University of Rouen, France