The Presocratics in the Thought of Martin Heidegger

The Presocratics in the Thought of Martin Heidegger by W. Julian Korab-Karpowicz presents a penetrating and fresh attempt to illuminate some particularly abstruse Heideggerian concepts through an analysis of his reading of the Presocratics. The book is a whole, very well interconnected, and Anaximander, Heraclitus and Parmenides, the three Presocratic thinkers that are primarily discussed by Heidegger, are analysed by the author in depth. The author's aim is twofold. First, after an introductory chapter, Korab-Karpowicz presents a critical assessment of Heidegger's account of Presocratic philosophy. Then, he turns to an interpretation of Heidegger's thought, presenting a new reading of his philosophy of being. In the Introduction, Korab-Karpowicz demonstrates the extent to which Heidegger relies on ancient thought, thus corroborating his own exegetical method of approaching Heidegger through the latter's reading of ancient authors. He argues that the central Heideggerian notion of the ‘forgetting of being’, expressed in the substitution of beings for being as the object of metaphysical inquiry, comprised for Heidegger a ‘gradual falling away from the primordial experience of being’. This lead him to incorporate a historical analysis of the notion of being as a systematic component of Heidegger's metaphysical method, used particularly in the later works. As Korab-Karpowicz convincingly proves, this follows from the fact that the beginning of the ‘slipping away of the distinction between being and beings’ should, according to Heidegger, be traced back to Plato. Consequently, the ‘openness of being’ should be sought in Pre-Platonic or Presocratic thinking.