On Inception is a translation of Martin Heidegger's ber den Anfang (GA 70). This work belongs to the crucial period, before and during WWII, when Heidegger was at work on a series of treatises that begins with "Contributions to Philosophy" and includes "The Event" and "The History of Beyng." These works are difficult, even hermetic, but represent a crucial development in Heidegger's thinking. On Inception deepens the investigation underway in the other volumes of the series and provides a unique perspective on Heidegger's thinking of Being and of Event. Here, Heidegger asks, with a greater insistence than anywhere else in his work, what it might mean to think of being as event, and not as presence. Event cannot be thought without the sense of a beginning-an inception-and so, Heidegger insists, we must try to think of being as inception, as fundamentally inceptive. On Inception pursues rigorously the difficult and puzzling implications of this speculation. It does not merely extend work already undertaken but also opens doors onto wholly other pathways.

About the Author

Peter Hanly teaches philosophy at Boston College and Emerson College. He is the author of Between Heidegger and Novalis.

Reviews

"Texts such as On Inception are among Heidegger's most difficult, owing in equal parts to the liminal and exacting character of his thinking therein and the experimental vocabulary with which he articulates such thinking. Hanly does a truly admirable job of rendering Heidegger's often abstruse German syntax into elegant English prose, without, however, doing violence to Heidegger's always difficult and sometimes terse manner of expression. Hanly capably threads the needle between fidelity to Heidegger's necessary opacity and a commitment to bringing the German text into comprehensible English."-S. Montgomery Ewegen, author of The Way of the Platonic Socrates

Book Information
ISBN 9780253066848
Author Martin Heidegger
Format Hardback
Page Count 152
Imprint Indiana University Press
Publisher Indiana University Press