There have been two prominent ways of thinking about the relationship between phenomenology and naturalism: the first and more traditional way, in continuity with Husserl’s critique of psychologism, exhibits the incompatibility of phenomenology with all forms of naturalism and positivism; the second and more recent interpretive strategy attempts to naturalize phenomenology and make it consistent with current scientific accounts of consciousness and intentionality. In this paper I argue that despite the fact that Heidegger followed the first path and remained critical of naturalism and positivism throughout his career, there are important moments in the late twenties where his project of a phenomenological ontology is challenged by problems pertaining to naturalism. I show how the question of determining the essence of life and animality as well as the overturning of ontology into metontology offer significant methodological hurdles for Heidegger’s fundamental ontology.

In this paper, I explore a number of basic themes surrounding the issue of the last god in Heidegger’s Beiträge. I first examine the significance Heidegger attaches to “questioning” in this regard. Questioning, I suggest, is the ground upon which the preparation for the Ereignis of the last god (“grounding”) is to be exercised. Heidegger sees himself working on the path to a futural thinking (the inceptual thinking), one in which metaphysics would be left behind, but we can see that this task that Heidegger sets before thinking, once taken place, corresponds to a supreme historical moment for the West, namely the other beginning as the passing-by of the last god. Thinking becomes essential only in orienting itself towards such historical possibility. This unique moment of the last god (“passing-by”) grounds its hinting presence that attunes/determines the historical world of the other beginning. I discuss in detail the implications of this perspective laid out in the Beiträge.

In the 1930s, Martin Heidegger began what would become a lifelong engagement with the work of Ernst Jünger. Part of Heidegger’s interest in Jünger was a result of Jünger’s Nietzsche-inspired cultural diagnosis; in Heidegger’s words, Jünger “makes all previous writings about Nietzsche inessential.” On the other hand, Heidegger was critical of what he deemed Jünger’s “bedazzlement” before the thought of Nietzsche. In this essay, I explore the sources of Heidegger’s interest and his criticism of Jünger’s work. To do this, I focus on elements of their correspondence, but mainly on Jünger’s essay “Über die Linie” of 1950 and Heidegger’s response, “Über ‘die Linie’” of 1955. In so doing, I hope to uncover their shared concern for the fate of Europe at the hands of a nihilism of which World War II was, to them, but an expression.

Heidegger often asserted that Germany, as “the land of poets and thinkers,” has a central world-historical role to play in any possible recovery from the technological nihilism of the modern epoch. And yet, on numerous occasions, Heidegger also demonstrated a serious interest in dialogue with the East Asian traditions of Daoism and Zen Buddhism. How are Heidegger’s entrenched ethnocentrism and his interest in East-West dialogue related? While neither can be wholly confined to one or another period in his thought, this article shows how, in the late 1930s, Heidegger begins to recover from the most ethnocentric period of his thought, and how he starts thinking of his reflections on the Western history of being as a preparation for what he came to call “the inevitable dialogue with the East Asian world.”