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PARMENIDES
Reading group
October 2025 - May 2026
The Heidegger and Classical Thought research project resumed its weekly reading group on Wednesday 15th October 2025 working through Martin Heidegger’s lecture course, Parmenides. The text contains lectures delivered at the University of Freiburg during the 1942/43 Winter Semester and was published as Volume 54 of the Gesamtausgabe in 1982. Ten years later in 1992, the text was translated by Andre Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz and published by Indiana University Press.
What is immediately obvious in this text is that it does not intend to undergo a comprehensive and detailed analysis of the fragments of Parmenides, precisely because Heidegger had already produced such an analysis in his lecture course on Anaximander and Parmenides in 1932 (GA35). Parmenides himself assumed an immensely important position in Heidegger’s thinking since at least 1912 and played an increasingly prominent role in the development of Heidegger’s critique of Western philosophy throughout the 1920s. Indeed, it was to some extent through the developing reading of Parmenides that Heidegger was able continually to place into context the significance of his 1927 work, Being and Time, and it was toward the unity of “being” and “thinking” key to Parmenides’ poem that Heidegger sought in the years after Being and Time to return Western thought. All of this converged in the 1932 lecture course. At the same time, Heidegger was in constant dialogue with the major classical philologists of his day, including Karl Reinhardt, Werner Jaeger, Julius Stenzel, Kurt Riezler, and Wolfgang Schadewaldt, through which the question of the destiny of Germany in the context of early Greek thought became determinative for Heidegger’s philosophy.
Heidegger’s course on Parmenides in 1942/43 arrived in the midst of a sustained engagement with early Greek thought during the Second World War, coming between an undelivered lecture course on Anaximander written in the Summer/Autumn of 1942 (GA78) and two lecture courses on Heraclitus delivered in the Summer Semesters of 1943 and 1944 (GA55). While the original title of the lecture course was “Parmenides and Heraclitus”, the editor of Volume 54, Manfred S. Frings, chose to call the volume “Parmenides” in light of the overwhelming focus on Parmenides throughout the course. That being said, while Parmenides stands at the centre of the text, it is the question of Parmenides’ shadow which both grounds and looms over the history of metaphysics that is at stake. As such, there are numerous excursions away from the path of Parmenides, including detailed discussions of Homer, Hesiod, Sophocles, Pindar, and Plato as well as engagements with Kant, Hegel, Schelling, and Nietzsche. At the heart of this text is the question of the political in the context of both the political situation of Germany as the likelihood of defeat in the war increases week by week and what Heidegger calls “the pre-political essence of the Greek polis”.
Summer Symposium
Wednesday 11th June 2025
In May 2025 the Heidegger and Classical Thought research project concluded its fifth annual reading group. The project itself was initiated by Laurence Hemming and Aaron Turner in October 2019 when we hosted a monthly seminar in Senate House, London to discuss Heidegger’s 1924/25 lectures on Plato’s Sophist (GA 19), which was unceremoniously cut short by the coronavirus pandemic. For the 2021/22 academic year we moved things online and began a weekly reading group, which looked at Heidegger’s 1932 lectures on Anaximander and Parmenides (GA 35). In 2022/23 we worked through Heidegger’s 1943/44 lectures on Heraclitus (GA 55) and in 2023/24 we focused on his 1935 lectures on the Introduction to Metaphysics (GA 40). Following the conclusion of this year’s reading of Heidegger’s 1934/35 lectures on the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin (GA 39) we will host a one-day symposium in which our participants have been invited to present papers based on our discussions of these various texts.
Please find below the full programme. If you would like to register for the symposium, please send an email to aaron.turner@knappfoundation.ac.uk and we’ll add you to the mailing list.
Programme
(all times are UK time)
12:00-12:40 – Laurence Hemming (Knapp Foundation / Lancaster University)
Heidegger’s Greek. Is he? How Is Being Greek or German Understood?
12:40-13:20 – Lasha Kharazi (Georgian-American University, Tbilisi / Knapp Foundation)
The Untrembling Heart of Ἀλήθεια: Heidegger’s Path to the Other Inception
13:20-14:00 – Michael Fagenblat (Open University of Israel)
Of Dwelling Prophetically: Towards the Hebraic Origin of Heidegger's Secret Spiritual Germany
14:00-14:30 – Break
14:30-15:10 – Ana Rita Figueira (Universidade de Lisboa)
Heilig trauernde: Rethinking Heidegger’s Holy Mourning with Achilles’ Representations in Attic Vase Painting
15:10-15:50 – Aaron Turner (Knapp Foundation / Royal Holloway, University of London)
Der Abbruch des Philosophierens: Heidegger’s “Turn” to Ground
15:50-16:20 – Break
16:20-17:00 – Yuqi Zhang (Lancaster University)
The Way to Seyn: Echoes of Parmenides’s Ways in Heidegger’s Beyng
17:00-17:40 – David Schur (City University of New York)
Preparing, Attempting, Beginning, and Approaching
17:40-18:10 – Break
18:10-18:50 – Alberto Moreiras (Texas A&M University)
Moira: Thinking the Impossible
18:50-19:30 – Antoine Cantin-Brault (Université de Saint-Boniface)
The “counter-striving harmony” of Being and Nothing: A dialogue between Heidegger and Hegel
19:30 – End of symposium
Hölderlin’s Hymns: “Germania” and “The Rhine”
Reading group
October 2024 - May 2025
The Heidegger and Classical Thought research project will resume its weekly reading group in October 2024 when we’ll begin working through Martin Heidegger’s lecture course, Hölderlins Hymnen: “Germanien” und “Der Rhein”. The text contains lectures delivered at the University of Freiburg during the Winter Semester of 1934/35 and was published as Volume 39 of the Gesamtausgabe in 1980. A second slightly revised version was published in 1989. The text was translated by William McNeill and Julia Ireland as Hölderlin’s Hymns: “Germania” and “The Rhine” and was published by Indiana University Press in 2014.
While Heidegger discovered a Reclambändchen of Friedrich Hölderlin’s work in 1908, it wasn’t until the publication of Hölderlin’s Pindar translations and his late hymns by Norbert von Hellingrath in 1914 that the significance of the poet for Germany became clear for Heidegger. As he put it in 1957, “these two works hit us students like an earthquake” (GA 12: 172). In a letter to a friend in March 1933, Heidegger wrote, “we will only discover the new ground of Dasein, and at the same time the calling of the Germans in the history of the West, if we expose ourselves to Being itself in a new way and enowning (Aneignung)”. In another letter to the same friend written in December 1934, midway through delivering these lectures, Heidegger confirms that it is through Hölderlin that such a way and appropriation is possible: “Hölderlin has anticipated the new inceptual need of our historical existence so that it awaits us”. For Heidegger, Hölderlin opened the way to the unity of language that grounds the relation of Dasein and Being through which the destiny of Germany reveals itself.
According to Heidegger, it was Hölderlin, not Nietzsche, who was the first to liberate “the classical” from the neoclassical and humanist interpretations of antiquity, which began with Winckelmann and Goethe. In a lecture delivered in 1929, Heidegger suggested that “we are only now, today, beginning to realise that the whole of linguistics, and thus philology, rests on a fragile foundation”. Shortly thereafter, between 1932 and 1944, Heidegger embarked on a long and sustained engagement with the Greeks, particularly Anaximander, Parmenides, and Heraclitus. For Heidegger, the possibility of understanding the fundamental relationship between Dasein and Being lay in the question of ground itself, out of which the history of Western thought unfolded, which began with these three crucial thinkers.
In 2021/22 the reading group worked through Heidegger’s 1932 lecture course on Anaximander and Parmenides, which focuses on the question of the inception of Western thought, and in 2022/23 we worked through his 1943/44 lecture course on Heraclitus, through whom Heidegger identified the essential ground of language in terms of Greek logos. Having last year (2023/24) worked through Heidegger’s 1935 lectures, Introduction to Metaphysics, where he attends to the problem of questioning of the question of Being itself, it is appropriate now to turn to the 1934/35 lectures on Hölderlin in order to observe the importance of the poet on Heidegger’s conception of both the relation of Being and language underlying the spiritual fate of Germany at this time and the role of Greek thought therein.
This reading group will be of interest not only to readers of Heidegger, but also classicists interested in the fundamental relation of ancient and modern philosophy. Some working knowledge of Greek is advised, as is a willingness to work with German terms. Fluency in either Greek or German is not required.
The first session will take place on Wednesday 16th October 2024, 16:00 – 17:30 (UK time), and sessions will proceed weekly from then on (every Wednesday at the same time). To indicate your interest in participating in the reading group, please email aaron.turner@knappfoundation.ac.uk for more details.
introduction to metaphysics
Reading group
October 2023 - May 2024
The Heidegger and Classical Thought Research Project will resume its weekly reading group in October 2023, studying Martin Heidegger’s lecture course, Einführung in die Metaphysik (Introduction to Metaphysics) for this academic year. This is one of the first places where Heidegger brings Heraclitus and Parmenides into a direct relation with each other, and where a provisional understanding of what will become the thinking of das Ereignis is made clear.
The text contains lectures delivered at the University of Freiburg in the Summer Semester of 1935. The material was revised by Heidegger and published simultaneously alongside the seventh edition of Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) in 1953, not without lingering controversy. In the ‘Preface’ to the seventh edition Heidegger suggests that for an elucidation of the “question of being” posed in Sein und Zeit “the reader may refer to my Einführung in die Metaphysik”. The Gesamtausgabe (Collected Works) edition of the German text (edited by Petra Jaeger) appeared in 1983 (GA40). The 1953 text was translated by Ralph Manheim in 1959 (the first full-scale translation of a work of Heidegger’s into English) and then by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt in 2000, who revised and expanded their translation in 2014 to follow the Gesamtausgabe edition. Although the actual textual content is largely identical with the 1953 edition, there is an an additional apparatus in the Gesamtausgabe version. Ordinarily we will work from the Gesamtausgabe edition and the 2014 translation, although keeping the earlier versions in view.
In 2021/22, the Heidegger and Classical Thought reading group worked through Heidegger’s 1932 lecture course on Anaximander and Parmenides (GA35). Last year (2022/23), we read through his 1943/44 lectures on Heraclitus (GA55). Introduction to Metaphysics represents a pivotal moment in Heidegger’s thinking, in which his interpretations of the early Greek thinkers has yet again a revolutionary impact on his interrogation of the question of being. This lecture course is something of a melting-pot— further manifesting Heidegger’s prolonged engagement with the classical philologists of his day (he was particularly close to Karl Reinhardt at this time). We find a radical new reading of Heraclitus and the Greek notion of logos, and much evidence of the engagement with Friedrich Hölderlin, as well as preparation for what will become his confrontation with Friedrich Nietzsche, and, ultimately, the ground of the possibility of a redescription the ontological difference (between das Sein and das Seiende) in das Ereignis (where Dasein and das Seyn are brought into an entirely new identity).
Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics is a hugely important text for the understanding of both the development of Heidegger’s engagement with Plato and the early Greek thinkers, and the evolution of his thinking about the question of being itself.
This reading group will be of interest not only to readers of Heidegger, but also classicists interested in the fundamental relation of ancient and modern philosophy. The meetings are open to all Master’s level and PhD students, and faculty-level teachers anywhere with an interest in Classical Studies, Philosophy, and any related disciplines. Some working knowledge of Greek is advised, as is a willingness to work with German terms. Fluency in either Greek or German is not required.
The first session will take place on Wednesday 18th October 2023, 16:00 – 17:30 (UK time), and sessions will proceed weekly from then on (every Wednesday at the same time). To indicate your interest in participating in the reading group, please email aaron.turner@knappfoundation.ac.uk for more details.
The leap into the inception: Das Seyn and Da-sein.
unfolding the significance of the "beyng-historical" treatises
Online Conference
April 10th 2024
Programme
(All times are UK time)
Session 1 (Chair: Alberto Moreiras)
12.55-13.00 — Welcoming speech (Lasha Kharazi)
13:00-13:45 — (Keynote #1) Laurence Hemming (University of Lancaster): Pre-eminent Presence: Understanding Heidegger’s Withdrawal of Being from the Common View
13:45-14:15 — Marco Cavazza (Ca' Foscari University of Venice): The Evolution of Time-space from Beiträge to Zum-Ereignis-Denken
14:15-14:45 — Shohei Kobayashi (Waseda University): Touching the Inception through the Word: Deepening of the Beyng-Historical Thinking with Language
14:45-15:15 — Break
Session 2 (Chair: Lasha Kharazi)
15:15-16:00 — (Keynote #2) Peter Trawny (University of Wuppertal): Of Poets and Thinkers. Heidegger's Thinking between 1936 and 1945.
16:00-16:30 — Erik Kuravsky (University of Erfurt): Aporetic Truth and the Question of the Questioner
16:30-17:15 — (Keynote #3) Richard Polt (Xavier University): On Beginning Über den Anfang
17:15-17:45 — Break
Session 3 (Chair: Aaron Turner)
17:45-18:15 — Elena Bartolini (University of Milano-Bicocca): Überwindung der Metaphysik: A Confrontation between Heidegger and Severino
18:15-18.45 — Lasha Kharazi (Georgian-American University): The Stillness of the Simple. The Quietening Silence of Beyng-Historical Thinking
18:45-19:15 — Closing discussion
19.15 — End of conference
Heraclitus
The inception of occidental thinking and
Logic: Heraclitus' Doctrine of the logos
Reading group
October 2022 - May 2023
The reading group for the academic year 2022-2023 proposes to study Martin Heidegger’s lecture courses on Heraclitus delivered in 1943 and 1944 at the University of Freiburg. The two texts, The Inception of Occidental Thinking and Heraclitus’ Doctrine of the Logos, constitute Volume 55 of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe. Having been originally published in 1979 (three years after Heidegger’s death), the first English translation of these texts, by Julia Goesser Assaiante and S. Montgomery Ewegen, was published in 2018. The reading group will take place entirely on Zoom over the Autumn and Winter semesters of 2022/23, beginning in October.
Martin Heidegger identified in the fragments of Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Parmenides an extraordinary importance for both the beginning and the end of philosophy. Parmenides arguably had the greatest influence on Heidegger, occupying his thoughts from the very outset of his career, but the significance of Anaximander to Heidegger’s interpretation of Parmenides and the genuine beginning of philosophy came to prominence in the early 1930s. While Heraclitus appears frequently in Heidegger’s early work, it wasn’t until the mid-1930s that Heidegger began to recognise the paramount place of Heraclitus within this triumvirate of early Greek thinkers. From 1934, Heidegger began to find in the fragments of Heraclitus a corroboration and substantiation of his own thinking on both the inception of Western thought and the nature of language.
Heidegger’s two lecture courses on Heraclitus in 1943-44 represent his most sustained engagement with the Greek thinker. His reading of Heraclitus is as audacious as it is controversial, and his interpretation of logos as ‘that which gathers what-is into presencing and lets it lie before us in it’ remains highly tendentious, with Heidegger even suggesting that Heraclitus’ contemporaries would have felt alienated by such a notion. But Heidegger’s own thinking about the relation of language and being relies heavily on this engagement with Heraclitus, and where such thinking predominated throughout the 1930s, it is brought to fundamental clarity in the present text.
On the Essence of Truth: Martin Heidegger and die Kehre (The Turn)
Reading group and online workshop
May - September 2022
Martin Heidegger’s 1930 lecture Vom Wesen der Wahrheit (On the Essence of Truth) has long been recognised as a decisive event, both in the development of Heidegger’s own work, and the development of how to interpret him. It was first delivered on Bastille Day, the 14th July, 1930, in Karlsruhe. William Richardson SJ, still today a towering influence in the Anglophone study of Heidegger, described the lecture as a “breakthrough”: “Here (1930), Heidegger II emerges out of Heidegger I”. Richardson immediately sounds a note of caution with his bold claim: “how new is the new?” With that caution in mind, it is for an evaluation and careful qualification of that claim that this series is directed, in the light of the vastly richer resources available now available from Heidegger’s writings. If there is a “Heidegger I” and a “Heidegger II”, they are not as Richardson suggested, a point that Heidegger had teasingly made in his Vorwort to Richardson’s master-work. Nor, in 1962, could anyone but Heidegger himself have understood the very division that Heidegger held to himself so tightly. The division emerges out of an understanding of what Heidegger named with the archaism das Seyn: more precisely, Wahrheit des Seyns (“truth of beyng”), and perhaps most originally, das Anwesen, “presencing”.
Project Leads: Laurence Hemming and Aaron Turner
The beginning of western philosophy: Interpretation of anaximander and parmenides
Reading group
October 2021 - April 2022
Heidegger’s thought is often divided into ‘early Heidegger’ and ‘later Heidegger’. The transitional phase, questionably defined as a Kehre (‘turn’ or ‘reversal’) in his thinking, has often been traced to his work in the 1930s. Heidegger himself conceived of this Kehre as an Ergänzung (‘fulfilment’) of the schema he announced (but did not complete) in the pages of Being and Time.
The reading group examined some little-understood aspects of the underpinnings of Being and Time, especially Heidegger’s reading of Parmenides, the sources of Greek philosophy, and Heidegger's radical redescriptions of history and historicality to indicate how the Kehre unfolds in Heidegger’s thought, and the extent to which, from the outset, it was driven by a reading of Aristotle and Plato that relied on examining them in the light of the Greeks who preceded them.
Project Leads: Laurence Hemming and Aaron Turner
Plato's sophist
Reading group
June 2019 - February 2020
In the early 1920s rumours circulated through German academia about a philosopher, a “hidden king of thought” who was “making the classics live again”. Students – many later became leading thinkers – flocked to him. Before the publication of Being and Time in 1927, it was his courses that made Heidegger famous, laying out and developing his ideas, and of all his seminars, Plato’s Sophist is the most celebrated. Attended by Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, Herbert Marcuse and others, this seminar at the University of Marburg in the winter of 1924–25 explored both Plato and Aristotle by reading the figure of the Sophist: crudely, by studying the ‘opposite’ of a philosopher, the seminar aimed to uncover the task of philosophy.
The Sophist lectures are unusual because they encompass not only Heidegger’s reading of Plato, but, in the first third of the text, also his reading of Aristotle. The first section of Plato’s Sophist (§§4–35) is a preparatory reading of several themes in Aristotle’s Physics and Nicomachean Ethics, with references to the Metaphysics. The two most important of these is the consideration of ἀλήθεια (truth) and ἀληθεύειν (speaking truly) and τόπος (place) and θέσις (position) in the overall determination of σοφία (wisdom) in Aristotle’s thought. More important will be to select specific, often quite short, passages to examine in very close detail, providing a passageway for understanding the earlier Heidegger’s general orientation on classical texts, and a springboard for the later Heidegger’s discussion of “metaphysics” as the origin of “philosophy”, and of “thinking” as a “new beginning” of an “original inception” that preceded Aristotle and Plato, with grounds in Thales, Anaximander, Heraclitus and Parmenides, and the poets.
Project Leads: Laurence Hemming and Aaron Turner
Heidegger and the classics
International Workshop
November 8th 2018
Martin Heidegger remains a controversial figure not just in the history of western philosophy but in just about every school of thought that his philosophy pervades. He is widely regarded, along with Wittgenstein, as one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century and the limit of his influence, encompassing the likes of Gadamer, Foucault, Arendt, Koselleck, Derrida, and Sartre, is beyond measure.
The source of Heidegger’s controversy, notwithstanding his political views and allegiances, is the radical nature of his appropriation and reformulation of practically every major philosophical development since antiquity. He conceived of his project as the overcoming of metaphysics that was initiated by Plato, advanced through Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, and brought to completion by Nietzsche. In doing so, he upturned nearly 2,500 years of western thought in order to turn philosophy back to what he conceived to be its fundamental, yet forgotten, question: the question of Being.
In the Classics, Heidegger is largely ignored. This is perhaps somewhat puzzling given the extent to which the evolution of Classical scholarship over the past century has been grounded in precisely those conceptual developments – hermeneutics, experientialism, intertextuality, narratology, and postmodernism – that Heidegger has, to some degree or another, influenced. It is the purpose of this workshop to assess the nature and legitimacy of Heidegger’s broad exclusion from Classical discourse and to determine how, if at all, his philosophy might be reconciled with modern studies of the ancient world.
Participants
Babette Babich (Fordham University)
Andrew Benjamin (Kingston University)
Emanuela Bianchi (NYU)
Sara Brill (Fairfield University)
William Fitzgerald (Kings College London)
Katherine Fleming (Queen Mary, University of London)
Simon Goldhill (University of Cambridge)
Laurence Hemming (Lancaster University)
Ahuvia Kahane (Trinity College Dublin)
Miriam Leonard (UCL)
Denis McManus (University of Southampton)
Thomas Sheehan (Stanford University)
Project Lead: Aaron Turner