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Phenomenology is one of the most pervasive and influential schools of thought in twentieth-century European philosophy. This book provides a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the idea of the imagination in Husserl and Heidegger. The author also locates phenomenology within the broader context of a philosophical world dominated by Kantian thought, arguing that the location of Husserl within the Kantian landscape is essential to an adequate understanding of phenomenology both as an historical event and as a legacy for present and future philosophy. ... Read more

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Phenomenology and the "Theological Turn" brings together the debate over Janicaud's critique of the "theological turn" represented by the works of Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Ricœur, Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-François Courtine, Jean-Louis Chrétien, and Michel Henry. ... Read more

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There is a great deal of current philosophical and scientific interest in emotional feelings. However, many of the feelings that people struggle to express in their everyday lives do not appear on standard lists of emotions. For example, there are feelings of unreality, heightened existence, surreality, familiarity, unfamiliarity, estrangement, strangeness, isolation, emptiness, belonging, being at home in the world, being at one with things, significance, insignificance, and the list goes on. Such feelings might be referred to as 'existential' because they comprise a changeable sense of being part of a world. Existential feelings have not been systematically explored until now, despite the important role that they play in our lives and the devastating effects that disturbances of existential feeling can have in psychiatric illness.

Feelings of Beingis the first ever philosophical account of the nature, role and variety of existential feelings in psychiatric illness and in everyday life. In this book, Matthew Ratcliffe proposes that existential feelings form a distinctive group by virtue of three characteristics: they are bodily feelings, they constitute ways of relating to the world as a whole, and they are responsible for our sense of reality. The book explains how something can be a bodily feeling and, at the same time, a sense of reality and belonging. It then explores the role of changed feeling in psychiatric illness, showing how an account of existential feeling can help us to understand experiential changes that occur in a range of conditions, including depression, circumscribed delusions, depersonalisation and schizophrenia. The book also addresses the contribution made by existential feelings to religious experience and to philosophical thought.

Written in a clear, non-technical style throughout, it will be valuable for philosophers, clinicians, students, and researchers working in a wide range of disciplines. ... Read more

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Wayne Martin traces attempts to develop theories of judgment in British Empiricism, the logical tradition stemming from Kant, nineteenth-century psychologism, recent experimental neuropsychology, and the phenomenological tradition associated with Brentano, Husserl and Heidegger. His reconstruction of vibrant but largely forgotten nineteenth-century debates links Kantian approaches to judgment with twentieth-century phenomenological accounts. He also shows that the psychological, logical and phenomenological dimensions of judgment are not only equally important, but fundamentally interlinked. ... Read more

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This collection of ground-breaking essays considers the many dimensions of prayer: how prayer relates us to the divine; prayer's ability to reveal what is essential about our humanity; the power of prayer to transform human desire and action; and the relation of prayer to cognition. It takes up the meaning of prayer from within a uniquely phenomenological point of view, demonstrating that the phenomenology of prayer is as much about the character and boundaries of phenomenological analysis as it is about the heart of religious life. ... Read more

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The Phenomenology of Prayer
Prayer is important in the Christian life, and this book makes that point in several places, but it appears to be too intense.I appreciated it for the value that it offered. ... Read more

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In this book, Robert Sokolowski argues that being a person means to be involved with truth. He shows that human reason is established by syntactic composition in language, pictures, and actions and that we understand things when they are presented to us through syntax. Sokolowski highlights the role of the spoken word in human reason and examines the bodily and neurological basis for human experience. Drawing on Husserl and Aristotle, as well as Aquinas and Henry James, Sokolowski here employs phenomenology in a highly original way in order to clarify what we are as human agents. ... Read more

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An Excellent Book on a Crucially Important Subject
In Phenomenology of the Human Person, Professor Sokolowski seeks, "philosophically, to clarify what human [beings or] persons are." It seems to me that Sokolowski (and I choose the metaphor carefully) weaves his clarification chiefly out of five major threads. They are: "human language," "the doctrine of mental representations," "speakers," "listeners," and "the human conversation," I propose to comment briefly on each of the five. I begin with the first two.

Sokolowski discusses human language in terms of names and syntax. As he writes on page 167: names "present a thing as to be thoughtfully unfolded." The thing may be either an individual (proper noun, "John Smith") or a universal (common noun, "human being"), and the unfolding takes place by way of syntax, because syntax is the means we have contrived in order to be able to "say something about something." That is, syntax is the means by which we engage in predication. The doctrine of mental representations comes in two forms. In its "innocent" form, our thinking concerns, not things in the world, but the "copies" or "ideas" of them that, supposedly, we have in our minds. In its radicalized form, which is the form Hume gives it, our thinking concerns, not "copy-ideas," but "fictional ideas" that we first construct in our imagination, and then impose on "the world" conceived as "modern science" conceives it, which is, as composed of nothing but matter or body "moving" in conformity with "natural laws." Hume's contention, then, is that, without these "fictions" (e.g., the fiction of "substantial identity"), we would literally have no "things" about which to think. Hence, Hume would have us regard ourselves as, essentially, constructors and deconstructors of fictions.

Turning now to speakers and listeners, on page 63, Sokolowski cites the psychologist Paul Bloom as arguing against a "widely held theory of how children learn names," according to which, "the child gets used to hearing a particular sound when a particular object appears, and suddenly or gradually the sound becomes the name of the object." But, "according to Bloom," as reported by Sokolowski, "[names] ... are not learned in this way; rather, the child must experience the sound as being used by someone else to name the object." Then, putting Bloom's claim in his own words, Sokolowski remarks: "The child does not just experience the word and the thing; he experiences another person using the word to signify the thing. Without this mediation of another person, sounds would not be taken as words." Picking up the thread of speakers and listeners on page169, Sokolowski observes: "One mind by itself is, effectively, no mind. One mind cannot be actualized as a mind without the stimulus of speech with others." Now, as I understand it, these sentences take what was said on page 63 about the child's acquisition of names, and generalize it to cover how we acquire a mind and learn how to think. That is, just as the child acquires a language through the mediation of others acting as speakers, so we (strange as it sounds) acquire a mind and learn how to think in the same way. That is, mind and thinking are not automatically ours; we have to acquire the one, and learn how to do the other. And the place in which we make the acquisition and do the learning is "the human conversation."

Sokolowski borrows the term "the human conversation" from the British philosopher Michael Oakeshott. Both would, I think, understand the human conversation in some such terms as these. It includes everyone who has ever thought and spoken, on any subject whatever, and who has had his or her thought and speech entered into the record, whether oral or written, where it waits for us to take it up, reflect on it, respond to it, and, by so doing, enter into the conversation ourselves. At the same time, however, Sokolowski sees the end or objective of the human conversation differently from the way Oakeshott sees it. For Oakeshott, the human conversation is an "inconsequent adventure." For Sokolowski it is, in all its departments, aimed at truth. These departments comprise the various ways in which we speak about things, e.g., morally, politically, scientifically, and philosophically. Sokolowski suggests that in each of these departments, we are motivated by a desire for truth; he calls this desire "veracity"; he defines it as "the eros involved with reason"; and, more broadly, he says of it: "[This] desire is" very deep in us, more basic than any particular desire or emotion, more elemental than any particular attempt to find things out, and more fundamental than any act of telling the truth to others. We are made human by it, and it is there in us to be developed well or badly." (p. 21).

The threads of speakers, listeners, and the human conversation converge on page 217, and their convergence results in a philosophical clarification of what human beings or persons are. Sokolowski writes: "The persons recognized as speakers and listeners may be deemed more or less successful in their speaking and listening, but they are engaged in the activity in a way that animals and plants are not ... It is philosophically notable that not all entities in the world can be taken as interlocutors. Some but not all are admissible to this status. Only those who are admissible are characterized as persons."

I end with this piece of dogmatism. Today, we are invited to think of ourselves either "scientifically" as, like everything else in "nature," the behavior of our matter (e.g., neurons); or "humansitically," as the constructors and deconstructors of fictions. Or, finally, we are invited to think of ourselves as (the term is Sokolowski's) "agents of truth." For myself, I prefer the third alternative, mainly because I do not see how I can claim that I deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, just because of what I am--if all I am is neurons or a constructor and deconstructor of fictions.








































... Read more

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The task of reinterpretation arises from recognition, within continental philosophy, of a certain abandonment of political philosophy for historicism or a scientistic search for laws. Contemporary debate over the death of the possibility of the subject now focuses on the links among knowledge, virtue and power. As a result, the ancient problem of the institution of the form of the political becomes linked with struggles intrinsic to the task of representation and recognition. The problem now becomes one of understanding the meaning of judgment, autonomy, and consensus in the midst of the fragmentation of the hierarchies that structure the political, and have structured the thinking (from Plato to Hegel) that we identify as metaphysical. Such fragmentation doubtless is the ancient inheritance of democracy, but now without the metaphysical assurance of a transcendental authority, whether resident in nature, community, or the monarch as embodiment of the sacred. Perhaps it is in Foucault's work, more than anywhere else, that the investigation of the complicated modern interface between truth and power, and institution and liberation, occurs. In reinterpreting the political, recognition of ideological forces in the legacy of modernity in its theoretical and institutional forms cannot be escaped--particularly in recognizing the underdetermined character of the subject matter. This collection represents rich examples of such reinterpretations. It begins with rereading the classical figures in continental thought and then takes up current topics in the legacy of political theory. The final section provides analyses and evaluations of Foucault's work. ... Read more

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Basic Concepts of Ancient Philosophy presents a lecture course given by Martin Heidegger in 1926 at the University of Marburg. First published in German as volume 22 of the collected works, the book provides Heidegger's most systematic history of Ancient philosophy beginning with Thales and ending with Aristotle. In this lecture, which coincides with the completion of his most important work, Being and Time, Heidegger is working out a way to sharply differentiate between beings and Being. Richard Rojcewicz's clear and accurate translation offers English-speaking readers valuable insight into Heidegger's views on Ancient thought and concepts such as principle, cause, nature, unity, multiplicity, Logos, truth, science, soul, category, and motion. ... Read more

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out of print--available as public download
careful of the money you spend--this is now free as a .pdf.At least as of this writing. ... Read more

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Outstanding Intro to the Essentials of Phenomenology
Don't let the publication date of this book put you off - it is a very well written introduction to (mainly Husserlian) phenomenology.The basic methods and concepts and terms of phenomenology are explained simply and clearly and also carefully put into the larger context of philosophical history.The authors, Stewart and Mickunas, include brief discussions of Heidegger, existentialists such as Satre, Jaspers, and Berdayev, and include chapters on traditional problems in phenomenology, applied phenomenology, and what they call phenomenology's "ongoing tasks." For a more in-depth intro to phenomenology, see Dermot Moran or Robert Sokolowski's books.

Brilliant book
Exploring Phenomenology is the best work that I have seen on the market for a general introduction to pure and applied phenomenology. I have authored two technical works in phenomenology, and referred to this book time and again for general reference though it is for the general reader. I highly recommend it for everyone. I look forward to additional works by the co-authors for both general and scholarly readers.
Michael Kazanjian
Phenomenology and Education (1998)
Learning Values Lifelong (Forthcoming)

great intro and summary
This is the best text out there for an introduction to Husserl, Heidegger, and the various strands of phenomenology through the first half of the 20th century.Very readable with excellent bibliographies (at least until 1990).Highly recommended for college and graduate students, or anyone interested in continental philosophy. ... Read more

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In "Being and Nothingness", Sartre picks up diverging threads in the phenomenological tradition, weaves them together with ideas from Gestalt and behaviourist psychology, and asks: What is consciousness? What is its relationship to the body, to the external world, and to other minds? Sartre believes that the mind and its states are by-products of introspection, created in the act that purports to discover them. How does this happen? And how are we able to perceive ourselves as persons - physical objects with mental states? "Sartre's Phenomenology" reconstructs Sartre's answers to these crucial questions. On Sartre's view, consciousness originally apprehends itself in terms of what it is consciousness of, that is, as an activity of apprehending the world. David Reisman traces the path from this minimal form of self-consciousness to the perception of oneself as a full-blown person. Similar considerations apply to the perception of others. Reisman describes Sartre's account of the transition from one's original apprehension of another consciousness to the perception of other persons.An understanding of the various levels of self-apprehension and of the apprehension of others allows Reisman to penetrate the key ideas in "Being and Nothingness", and to compare Sartre to analytic philosophers on fundamental questions in the philosophy of mind. ... Read more

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This book presents the remarkable correspondence between Alfred Schutz and Aron Gurwitsch, emigre philosophers influenced by Edmund Husserl, who fled Europe on the eve of World War II and ultimately became seminal figures in the establishment of phenomenology in the United States. Their deep and lasting friendship grew out of their mutual concern with the question of the connections between science and the life-world.

Interwoven with philosophical exchange is the two scholars' encounter with the unfamiliar problems of American academic life -- what Gurwitsch called the "passology" of exile. Apart from its brilliant and moving portrait of two distinguished men, the correspondence holds rich significance for current issues in philosophy and the social sciences.

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This anthology of classic essays focuses on the philosophy of Edmund Husserl and the philosophical movement to which his writings gave impetus: phenomenology. Sixty contributions from a wide variety of scholars provide an introduction to phenomenology and existentialist phenomenology. Among the contributors are Frege, Chisholm, Merleau-Ponty, Schmitt, Tillman, Gendlin, Sellars, Linsky, Dreyfus, Ryle, Solomon, Schlick, Ricoeur, Marcel, Heidegger, Sartre, Brentano, Olafson, Camus, and de Beauvoir. ... Read more

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Great Intro to Phenomenology
This is a great collection of essays to bring you up to speed on the historical and philosophical development of phenomenology. It's got foundational material from Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, as well as newer stuff. It's not a contemporary collection, but a great way to introduce yourself to where it all started. ... Read more

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Impressive in both scope and imagination, it uses the example of perception to return the body to the forefront of philosophy for the first time since Plato. ... Read more

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Utterly brilliant
This is an impossible book to review. The magnitude of what Merleau-Ponty takes on and accomplishes in this work is simply astounding. This is truly one of the most brilliant works of philosophy ever written (be sure to check out his other works as well which are equally brilliant!).

Phenomenology of Perception is first and foremost, as the title suggests, a detailed and extremely sophisticated phenomenological analysis of perception. This might seem like a highly technical topic which would only be of interest to specialists working within this very specific field. Nothing could be further from the truth. The implications of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception extend to every single problem and field of philosophy.

Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception is immediately relevant to metaphysics and ontology as his work utterly demolishes the ontology of res extensa and res cogitans which has its origin in Descartes. Much of Continental philosophy is taken up with a critique of the Cartesian subject and this is certainly true of Merleau-Ponty's work as well. Merleau-Ponty's work, however, stands out for its sophistication, as it draws not only on Merleau-Ponty's extremely subtle and sophisticated understanding of the history of philosophy (Descartes, Malebranche, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Scheler, Bergson, etc.) but also on Merleau-Ponty's extensive reading in the Gestalt psychologists, physiologists, bioligists, and neuroscientists who were working and writing on these problems at the time. Of all the phenomenologists Merleau-Ponty had the most sophisticated understanding of the sciences that were relevant to his chosen problem and it shows on every page. In other words, he is not simply aware of what other phenomenologists were saying about perception but about what scientific researchers were saying about perception as well.

Merleau-Ponty's work is directly relevant to the mind-body problem as well. His work utterly demolishes (in my opinion) the notion of the Cartesian theater and the representational theory of perception. Anyone still struggling with these problems who is working within the traditional mind-body paradigm and attempting to work out the relationship between `internal representations' and `external reality' is, in my very humble opinion, wasting their time, and needs to read this book before they waste any more.

Merleau-Ponty's analysis of the genesis of "truth" (illustrated through an analysis of the genesis of geometrical truth) is directly relevant to the problem of the relation between ideality and reality (i.e., the problem of universals); a problem that is as old as philosophy itself going all the way back to Plato and his notion of Forms and the obscure meaning he assigns to the notion of participation. Merleau-Ponty further develops these ideas in The Visible and the Invisible which comes about as close to carrying through Nietzsche's project of "overturning Platonism" as anything I have read. Merleau-Ponty's work and his notion of expressive cognition could also, I think, fruitfully be brought into the whole realism/anti-realism debate on this point. His theories of expressive cognition are directly relevant to the problem of the relation between `conceptual theories' and `preconceptual reality'.

Merleau-Ponty's existential phenomenology also provides a ground for attacking the problems of time and free-will which have plagued philosophers for centuries. These problems cannot be solved, according to Merleau-Ponty, if one begins by adopting a third-person attitude towards them (actually the same can be said for every `philosophical problem' in Merleau-Ponty's opinion). Merleau-Ponty also provides, in the process of elaborating his own position, a nuanced summary and devastating critique of Sartre's notion of freedom as presented in Being and Nothingness in the final chapter of this work. Merleau-Ponty's analysis here will be equally relevant to Marxists who are working on the problems of class consciousness or on the philosophy of history. Merleau-Ponty charts out an interesting position in which the individual is no longer the subject of history while simultaneously avoding the positing of an absolute spirit as the true subject of history a la Hegel. As always Merleau-Ponty's position on this point is extremely subtle and enlightening and seems to me absolutely correct as far as it goes.

So this book is not simply a work written for specialists working in the phenomenology of perception. This work should be read by anyone who is seriously interested in philosophy. I should say that this work will prove extremely difficult, perhaps even unintelligible, for someone without a fairly firm grounding in phenomenology. You should know at least something about Husserl and Heidegger, and what they were up to, before tackling this work. If you already have a basic understanding of phenomenology than you should be set and there is simply no excuse for ignoring this work. Merleau-Ponty belongs among the ranks of Husserl and Heidegger and in my opinion often surpasses them.

P.S. A number of reviewers have pointed to the existence of typos and other typographical errors in the text. There are quite a few typos in the text but there was never a time when any of them got in the way of understanding what was being said. So do not let a few typos stand in your way. It would be a shame to let such minor problems stand in the way of reading one of the most brilliant and important works of philosophy ever written!

P.S.S. For anyone who is interested in helpful secondaries on Merleau-Ponty which will make the reading of this work more intelligible here is a list of the works I have found helpful. It is incomplete but should be a start: Merleau Ponty's Philosophy by Lawrence Hass, Merleau-Ponty's Ontology by M.C. Dillon, The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty by Gary Madison, and The Being of the Phenomenon by Renaud Barbaras. All of these books are truly excellent and I have listed them (roughly) in ascending order of difficulty. If you can make your way through those works with some degree of understanding (particularly the Barbaras which can be a challenge) you'll be in good shape. Good luck!

-Brian

awesome quality and an awesome, yet challenging read.
Great quality.
Also, The topic is very intriguing and thought provoking...
Very dense text, but very worth the challenge.

Excellent condition, speedy delivery
The book shipped to Toronto Canada within a a week an a half. It is in excellent condition and as described. Thanks a million!!!

Do NOT buy this edition
This is a great work of philosophy that I highly recommend. However, do not by any means buy this Routledge edition.The pages of my copy began to fall out the first day I started reading it.I don't know why Routlege would release classics that are so poorly manufactured that the glue binding can't even hold up to a *single* reading.Total scam.

Phenomenology of Perception- Brilliant, timely, everyone should read.
This book is a beautiful bridge for those who still adhere to the cartesian gap theory. seating the phenomenal experience of man in and through 'body'...Merleau-Ponty opens the narrow lens of 'mental' perception to include 'the human'.An important work for our evolutionary reach forward. ... Read more

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Essays on phenomenological encounters with the world. ... Read more

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Greatest book ...EVER
What can I say? This is one of the greatest books of any genre that I've read. Peter Steeves is a brilliant writer as well as thinker, and this book exemplifies those qualities. Unlike many philosophers, he writes clearly and elegantly, and discusses phenomenology in a way that anyone can understand by using personal examples. Steeves realizes that the most important thing is to apply philosophy to everyday life, and one wishes more academics would take this to heart. Overall, an excellent book that is thoughtful and engagingly written. "Lost Dog" the "Mars" were my favorites. A must-read!! ... Read more

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perfect service
I could get this book very quickly.It's very new.thank you so much!

Seeking after the meaning of our life
The life-world is a field of action. But action is not praxis. Acton should get meanings. Today, the life-world is faced with split.People are becoming one-sided. Schutz and Luckmann's research gave us a guide,they analied the sturcture of everydaylife, told us how to balance different aspects of our life. We'll know how to esteblish the meaning in the future. Shuguang,Yin. ... Read more

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The question is, what constitutes truth in religion? Represented here is the whole spectrum of phenomenology--transcendental, existential, hermeneutic, ethical, and deconstructive--presented by some of the most respected names in the philosophy of religion today: Louis Dupre, Merold Westphal, and Edward Farley. Here is also engagement with a wide variety of twentieth-century thinkers such as Husserl, Scheler, and Heidegger; Ricoeur, Gadamer, and Derrida; Freud, van der Leeuw, and Eliade; and Rosenzweig, Tillich, and Schillebeeks. ... Read more

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The title Advancing Phenomenology is purposely ambiguous. On the one hand, these essays document the progress that phenomenology as an ongoing and vibrant movement has made in the period of about a century since its inception. They illustrate the advance of phenomenology both in terms of the range of topics represented in this volume and in terms of the disciplinary and geographical diversity of the scholars who have contributed to it. The topics range from scholarly appropriations of past achievements in phenomenology, to concrete phenomenological investigations into ethics and environmental philosophy, as well as phenomenological reflections on the foundations of disciplines outside philosophy such as psychology, history, the social sciences, and archeology.

The interdisciplinary aspect is guaranteed by contributors coming both from philosophy departments and from a number disciplines outside of philosophy such as sociology, psychology, and archeology; and they come from all around the world – from North America, from Western and Eastern Europe, from Latin America, and from several different countries in Asia. Together, these essays testify to the breadth and geographical reach of phenomenology at the beginning of the 20^th Century.

The papers in this volume provide good evidence of the seriousness and fruitfulness of current research in phenomenology today.

Customer Reviews (2)

Outstanding theoretical resolutions of body/mind problems
Warning, based on my experience with this book. After a first quick reading, I labored over the conclusion and came away very dissatisfied. While the "Conclusion" is an accurate synopsis of the book, unless you have already integrated the terms of Toadvine's conception of Merleau-Ponty's argument, you may find yourself wondering, as I did:
a)If Toadvine's intention is to persuade readers that M-P offers a more adequate ontology than that derived from either realism or constructivism, are we left only with compounded paradoxes and are those really an advance in our thinking?
b)As he is unable to locate within M-P any suggestions of practical consequences for environmental policies or more general ethical principles, is this discussion anything more than cheerleading for ontology?

Rereading carefully the preceding chapters changed my mind. Toadvine is honestly modest about any results. He affirms that M-P offers new terms for understanding the relation of nature and human nature. Those new terms appear to this reader to be distinctions without a difference, which seems to be exactly the point that M-P makes for the nature/human nature condition. M-P's phrase is, "the non-difference that is not an identity." If you can imagine explanations for such a unity-in-difference, that is what you will find here.

The undeniable value of this work is its selection of material from M-P's long struggle to explore human perception. Toadvine locates the selected material in M-P's developing thought and the philosophical ethos in which he labored.

While Toadvine expressly denies that aestheticism can adequately identify M-P's ideas, the passages that recite M-P's response to post-impressionist art sing with a significance that is unforgettable The promise is that nature does its own singing and that human nature's singing is of the same song in a different key.

Perhaps my enthusiasm derives, also, from knowing before reading this study that Heidegger is legitimately criticized for lacking any developed philosophy of nature. Added to that is the view of some phenomenologists that M-P moved in H's direction as his work matured. Consequently the promise of a philosophy of nature by M-P would seem to be a confluence of two of the 20th Century's outstanding philosophers, where their laborsmight even be complementary if not serendipitous.

Yet if their distinctions do not provoke any differences, at least none that can be claimed to be "richer in contingencies" as H promised, I can only hope I am being taught rather than teased. I know of no one who is a better teacher than those two giants.

So far I can see very promising possibilities for issues that until M-P led to cul-de-sacs. Only time will tell.

important book
This is the first comprehensive study of Merleau-Ponty's concept of nature. And the study is done with an eye toward environmental problems. It's a great book. ... Read more

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The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy is a major interpretive study of Heidegger's complex relationship to medieval philosophy. S. J. McGrath's contribution is historical and biographical as well as philosophical, examining how the enthusiastic defender of the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition became the great destroyer of metaphysical theology.

This book provides an informative and comprehensive examination of Heidegger's changing approach to medieval sources--from the seminary studies of Bonaventure to the famous phenomenological destructions of medieval ontology. McGrath argues that the mid-point of this development, and the high point of Heidegger's reading of medieval philosophy, is the widely neglected habilitation thesis on Scotus and speculative grammar. He shows that this neo-Kantian retrieval of phenomenological moments in the metaphysics of Scotus and Thomas of Erfurt marks the beginning of a turn from metaphysics to existential phenomenology. McGrath's careful hermeneutical reconstruction of this complex trajectory uncovers the roots of Heidegger's critique of ontotheology in a Luther-inspired defection from his largely Scholastic formation.

In the end McGrath argues that Heidegger fails to do justice to the spirit of medieval philosophy. The book sheds new light on a long-debated question of the early Heidegger's theological significance. Far from a neutral phenomenology, Heidegger's masterwork, Being and Time, is shown to be a philosophically questionable overturning of the medieval theological paradigm. ... Read more