Description

FCT Project POCI/FIL/60600/2004 - PPCDT/FIL/60600/2004

The present project of investigation / translation of works by M. Heidegger is to continue the one that was initiated with the publication in Portuguese of Holzwege (Translation Award FCT / União latina 2003) and of Der Begriff der Zeit and other minor writings. The present project wishes to concentrate on the work produced by Heidegger during the period of the beginning of the Kehre. These 4 years of writing witness a quite different style of philosophical meditation and a progressive separation from the question of the Fundamental Ontology of Sein und Zeit. The subject of language and idiom, qua originary logos, becomes a central preoccupation, regarded as an axis around which the History of Being (so the Contributions’’ terminology) or its truth, which emerges in the human world and whose political form starts to manifest itself in a powerful way, it is to be articulated in an already ultimate way. The gathering of both themes (language and politics) constitutes one of the vectors for understanding this polemic period of Heidegger’s production. It allows us to find in it a set of worries common both to Heidegger and to other contemporary authors of quite diverse scientific and academic areas. Such is the case of jurist C. Schmitt or linguist L. Weisgerber, both of which are the object of 2 PhD projects by members of this team. Simultaneously, this conjunction of both themes offers a way to access the reception of Existential Philosophy within the Portuguese thought which is also one of the guidelines of this project.

Thus circumscribed, the working plan of the project consists, essentially, of exploring and translating 2 characteristic works of this period. On the one hand, the lessons of 1934, Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der Sprache, in which the question of the essence of language appears for the first time connected to the problem of idiom as phenomenology of a historic people and gives rise to a meditation on the ontophenomenology of language, which is essential for understanding both the Heideggerian corpus and XXth Century philosophy. On the other hand, the “2nd essential work” of Heidegger, the Beiträge zur Philosophie, created and written between 1936 and 1938, but kept unpublished until 1989. Our investigation of these works and their translation are to be articulated with a work of international cooperation already afoot. This international teamwork constitutes a Portuguese initiative with the objective of compiling and publishing a lexicon that includes all the different versions of the Heideggerian terminology in the main Western languages. The relevancy of such a project has been recently confirmed during the Lausanne Colloquium (May 2004) on the Beiträge. In this event the issue of philosophical interpretation and translation became the subject for an interlinguistic reflection within the several circles, ranging from those with a longer tradition and more influential (French and Italian) to those of crescent intensity (English, Ibero-American and slavish).

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