Anyone who has read Heidegger at all will know that he sometimes uses the wordphilosophyto name what thinking needs to ‘leap’ beyond – as in the essay ‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,’ where philosophy is named as metaphysics.¹ Philosophy as metaphysics needs to be ‘gotten over’(verwunden).And at other times the wordphilosophynames the richest and most question-worthy matter – as inContributions,where the word is used to name what thinking needs to do when it says or gathers the deep sway of be-ing. In this sense the wordphilosophysays the richness...

Heidegger says that be-ing as enowning(Ereignis)must be ‘correspondingly thought and that meanssaid.’¹ All thinking involves saying – involves language in an essential sense, in the sense that is own to language. In his lectureWhat Is Philosophy?Heidegger says that in Greek thinking what is own to language manifested as lovgo" and that we need to have a dialogue with this Greek experience of language. ‘Why? Because without an adequate mindfulness on language we will never truly know what philosophy is as re-sponding speaking in return,Ent-sprechen> as outlined above, what philosophy is as an eminent way of...

At the end of chapter 1 we came to that place where Da-sein is addressed and is called to respond. Using Heidegger’s words, be-ing speaks to Dasein and Da-sein responds. He also names this dynamic as be-ing’s throwto Da-sein and Da-sein’s throwing-open. Be-ing enowns Da-sein; and Dasein, enowned, throws-open the dynamic. This isthedecisive momentsite opened up and said inContributions.It is the place of de-cision. This is the phenomenological dynamic of the originary enowning, be-ing as enowning.

At the end of chapter 2 we came to that place where saying – as the own/owning of language – is ‘from’...

Indigenous within human thinking is the co-enacting knowing awareness, waiting to be unleashed and released, the affordance of enowning and being-historical thinking. This understanding lies dormant within human thinking, always there, like a hard-shelled walnut, waiting for the gifting that will rouse it anew. The ‘originary way’ lies deep within human thinking – a seed waiting to sprout, relatively undamaged, despite the many layerings of cultural constructs covering it over. Whether it is in a market economy that needs growth and unending progress; an overpopulated humanity that turns fangs in on itself, a move away from the emergence of things to...

Language, speaking, the word, saying.¹ Let me allow these words to provide the context for thinking translation – translating, being ‘translated,’ being transported unto the thought and to what is essential and possible within the ‘own’ language (translationwithinthe language), translating interpretingly from one language to another (translationbetweenlanguages).² Finally, let these leading movements in thinking guide us to the question of translating Heidegger’s text into English – what has been done, what we now know (and perhaps did not always know) could be done, what is now possible.

How do we get ‘near’ language? How do we hear language...

Within the context ofContributions to Philosophy (From Enowning),one of the first things that we can say is that, however the ‘turning’(die Kehre)in Heidegger’s thinking has been read/interpreted up to now, it now calls for a rethinking. What the turning means must be thought to a new level. To begin with, all talk of ‘Heidegger I’ and ‘Heidegger II’ – along with the rather simplistic idea that Heidegger’s thinking moved from ‘Da-sein oriented’to‘being oriented’ (at times creating even more misunderstanding by calling that move a ‘reversal’) – is, once and for all, obsolete.

What is the ‘Heidegger...

Given all the warnings regarding the turning – as enumerated in the previous chapter – given that with the publication ofContributionsin 1989 the old ways of thinking the turning are obsolete, and given that a rethinking of the turning is called for, to a new level – what are the ways thatContributionsshows us? The pathway that I take here is to move through several radical openings that are thought in Contributions, thought within the joining called ‘Leap’(der Sprung ),for it is in this section that these matters come to the fore in a remarkable way. I will...