Teaching Heidegger: Learning, Thinking, Being
I am seeking chapter proposals for a proposed book with working title Teaching Heidegger: Learning, Thinking, Being, hopefully to be published by Rowman & Littlefield as part of the New Heidegger Research series, edited by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt. I am looking for chapters by philosophers, educators, and other thinkers/researchers who draw on Heidegger’s thought.
I am continually struck by William Lovitt’s (1977) introductory comments to The Question Concerning Technology:
Heidegger is primarily a teacher. He does not wish to travel alone and then report what he has seen, nor does he wish to go as a guide merely pointing out objects along the road. He wishes the reader to accompany him on the way, to participate with him, and even to begin to build his own way through thinking, and not merely to hear about what it is or should be. (p. xvi, emphasis added)
Many, if not all, of those who engage with Heidegger’s thinking are teachers themselves. We may have traditional or not-so traditional (the online or virtual space comes to mind) classrooms where
we perform or enact our professions as teachers, or through our words and writings we aim to influence (or, teach) future readers of our thinking. To be sure, Heidegger is read and understood as a
philosopher and not as a teacher. Yet, beyond a few manuscripts that can be counted on one hand, the majority of the Gesamtausgabe is populated by lecture notes and transcripts, records of teaching and learning. If we were to posit that teaching exists in a reciprocal relationship alongside our philosophizing, how might this inform both our teaching and our thinking? A step further and more to the point: How does approaching Heidegger’s thinking as teaching impact our own teaching practice and writing?
Suggested Guiding Questions for Submissions
● Who are your most influential teachers? What was their relationship to Heidegger, and to teaching?
● In what ways has Heidegger impacted your teaching?
● How are we to understand Heidegger as an educator during the Nazi period (including the Rectorate)?
● How might we understand Heidegger’s philosophy in light of other educational philosophers (such as Plato, Dewey, or Rousseau)?
● How might the recent publication of additional GA (Gesamtausgabe/Collected Works) volumes inform “teaching” Heidegger? (e.g., to be sure, GA 94-96: The Black Notebooks, but
also GA 79: Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, GA 39: Hölderlin’s Hymn “Germania” and “The Rhine”, and GA 66: Nature History State 1933-1934, to name only a few)
● What becomes available for discussion and reflection when Heidegger’s writings are interpreted as pedagogical record rather than philosophical treatise?