The Cambridge companion to Heidegger's Being and time

Abstract

When Martin Heidegger's most famous book, Being and Time , was published in 1927, it caused a sensation and brought its author world fame.Like Immanuel Kant who had published his revolutionary work Critique of Pure Reason after a decade of silence, Heidegger had not published anything since his qualifying dissertation on Duns Scotus in 1916.Although Being and Time remained a torso -only a third of the originally planned two-volume work was published -to its readers, it appeared to have sprung from Heidegger's head like the Greek goddess Athena sprung from Zeus' head.Heidegger himself did his best to leave his early beginnings in a shroud of mystery.His early writings were only republished in 1972 and in the original plan of the Collected Edition of his works, the Gesamtausgabe , he excluded his early Freiburg lecture courses from 1919 until 1923.According to Heidegger's selfinterpretation , the story of Being and Time should start with his i rst lecture course of the winter semester 1923-4 at the University of Marburg.But as we know, an author is usually not the best interpreter of his own work.Today the complex story of the genesis of Being and Time has been told in great detail, thanks to the pioneering work of Thomas Sheehan and Theodore Kisiel .They followed Heidegger's trail in archives and unearthed a wealth of new material.The biggest fruit