Parmenides (1942-43)
The Heidegger and Classical Thought research project, organised by Aaron Turner and Laurence Hemming, will resume its weekly reading group on Wednesday 15th October 2025 when we’ll begin working through Martin Heidegger’s lecture course, Parmenides. The text contains lectures delivered at the University of Freiburg during the 1942/43 Winter Semester and was published as Volume 54 of the Gesamtausgabe in 1982. Ten years later in 1992, the text was translated by Andre Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz and published by Indiana University Press.
What is immediately obvious in this text is that it does not intend to undergo a comprehensive and detailed analysis of the fragments of Parmenides, precisely because Heidegger had already produced such an analysis in his lecture course on Anaximander and Parmenides in 1932 (GA35). Parmenides himself assumed an immensely important position in Heidegger’s thinking since at least 1912 and played an increasingly prominent role in the development of Heidegger’s critique of Western philosophy throughout the 1920s. Indeed, it was to some extent through the developing reading of Parmenides that Heidegger was able continually to place into context the significance of his 1927 work, Being and Time, and it was toward the unity of “being” and “thinking” key to Parmenides’ poem that Heidegger sought in the years after Being and Time to return Western thought. All of this converged in the 1932 lecture course. At the same time, Heidegger was in constant dialogue with the major classical philologists of his day, including Karl Reinhardt, Werner Jaeger, Julius Stenzel, Kurt Riezler, and Wolfgang Schadewaldt, through which the question of the destiny of Germany in the context of early Greek thought became determinative for Heidegger’s philosophy.
Heidegger’s course on Parmenides in 1942/43 arrived in the midst of a sustained engagement with early Greek thought during the Second World War, coming between an undelivered lecture course on Anaximander written in the Summer/Autumn of 1942 (GA78) and two lecture courses on Heraclitus delivered in the Summer Semesters of 1943 and 1944 (GA55). While the original title of the lecture course was “Parmenides and Heraclitus”, the editor of Volume 54, Manfred S. Frings, chose to call the volume “Parmenides” in light of the overwhelming focus on Parmenides throughout the course. That being said, while Parmenides stands at the centre of the text, it is the question of Parmenides’ shadow which both grounds and looms over the history of metaphysics that is at stake. As such, there are numerous excursions away from the path of Parmenides, including detailed discussions of Homer, Hesiod, Sophocles, Pindar, and Plato as well as engagements with Kant, Hegel, Schelling, and Nietzsche. What so often stands at the heart of this text is the question of the political in the sense of both the political situation of Germany as the likelihood of defeat in the war increases week by week and what Heidegger calls “the pre-political essence of the Greek polis”.
This reading group will be of interest not only to readers of Heidegger, but also classicists interested in the fundamental relation of ancient and modern philosophy and the question of the political therein. Some working knowledge of Greek is advised, as is a willingness to work with German terms, though fluency in either Greek or German is not required.
The first session will take place on Wednesday 15th October 2025, 16:00 – 17:30 (UK time), and sessions will proceed weekly from then on (every Wednesday at the same time). To indicate your interest in participating in the reading group, please email aaron.turner@knappfoundation.ac.uk for more details.