Martin Heidegger: Early Works

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) is often described as one of the great philosophers of the 20th century. What is offered here addresses primarily his early work and, even so, only scratches the surface. As with all the great philosophers, there are different schools of thought on how Heidegger’s work should be read, and certain interpretive biases shape this bibliography. First, although Heidegger is perhaps the quintessential Continental philosopher, one of the distinguishing features of more recent work on Heidegger is the emergence of commentators with a background in analytic philosophy, and such “analytic” readings loom large in the present bibliography. A second and related bias is toward literature that is available in English; this bias is related to the first because “analytic” commentary is characteristically written in (or finds itself translated into) English. Although it is important to draw attention to these biases, they also ought not to be overemphasized. One reason is that there is a counter-balancing trend represented here, a trend toward placing Heidegger’s work in its historical context, both by considering his most widely-read work, Being and Time (BT), in relation to his other early writings and by tracing the role played in the emergence of BT by a set of distinctive shaping influences. This approach makes difficult any simple assimilation of Heidegger’s thought to alien traditions that might blind us to what is distinctive in his thought and some of the most interesting recent work combines a broadly analytic temper with this kind of historicist sensitivity. This bibliography divides the literature up into a number of distinct categories; but, as will be apparent, there is a certain artificiality to many of the distinctions in question. Readers should take care to read the paragraph of commentary that accompanies each set of citations, as one will find references to other relevant items listed—for various reasons—under other headings; readers ought not to assume that the topics with fewest citations “of their own” are less intensively discussed or that those citations are the most important for those topics. (The literature in this area is very large and, in constructing this bibliography, assistance has been provided by Taylor Carman, Steven Crowell, Simon Glendinning, Beatrice Han-Pile, Stephen Mulhall, Iain Thomson, Mark Wrathall, and Jonathan Webber.)