Change in the Instant: Heidegger’s 1930-31 Seminar on Plato’s Parmenides

Prof. dr. Francisco Gonzalez
University of Ottawa

Date: Thursday, April 18th, 15:15-17:00
Venue: Kromme Nieuwegracht 80, room 1.06 (Ravesteijnzaal), Utrecht

Abstract:
The importance of Plato for Martin Heidegger’s interpretation of the history of metaphysics is now well known and documented. However, what is arguably his most insightful and radical interpretation of a Platonic dialogue, as well as most momentous in its consequences for this history, i.e., a 1930-31 seminar on the Parmenides, remains largely unknown and for two reasons. First, while Heidegger’s notes for the seminar were published in 2012 as part of the Gesamtausgabe (vol. 83), they are brief, cryptic and cover barely half the seminar. We know this because a detailed transcript of the entire seminar is preserved in the Marcuse Archive in Frankfurt am Main, a transcript ignored by the editor of GA83 and not previously explored in significant detail. The seminar is also not known because of Heidegger’s puzzling silence elsewhere about its findings (which undermine his narrative about the history of metaphysics). The present paper seeks to reconstruct the argument of the seminar both for its value as a comprehensive reading of the Parmenides that shows the special role played by the ‘third’ hypothesis in the deductions of the second half and for the light it sheds on Heidegger’s unfinished Auseinandersetzung with Plato.

For more on prof. dr. Gonzalez, see:
https://uniweb.uottawa.ca/?lang=en#/members/498