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HEIDEGGER, Martin. Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning). Translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. xlv + 369 pp. Cloth, $39.95-Announced by its translators as "Heidegger's second major work" (pp. xiv, xli) after Being and Time, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning [Ereignis]) was written in the years 1936-8. The text appeared in German only in 1989, however, to mark the centenary of Heidegger's birth. Although the translators are at pains to assure the reader that Heidegger's musings are not notes or aphorisms (pp. xvi, xliii), in many cases the entries are clearly drafts or rough sketches.
The text consists of eight parts, termed "joinings (Fugungen)" (p. xiv) or junctures, comprising 281 numbered sections of varying length. The related parts are headed "Preview (Vorspiel)" (68 pp.), "Echo (Anklang)" (40 pp.), "Playing-Forth (Zuspiel)" (33 pp.), "Leap (Sprung)" (42 pp.), "Grounding (Grundung)" (67 pp.), "The Ones to Come (Die Zukunfligen)" (5 pp.), "The Last God (Der letzte Gott)" (9 pp.), and "Be-ing (Seyn)" (61 pp.). (Interestingly enough, in 1933 the Marxist feminist Rosa Mayreder had published a novel called Der letzte Gott, in which man is identified as the last of the gods). With its many repetitions, the text often takes on an incantatory quality.
What are we to make of this work? The translators claim that Contributions "is a groundbreaking work of thinking" (p. xix) which "opens up a horizon hitherto inaccessible to thinking" (p. xlii). More specifically, by means of it, they claim, a certain kind of thinking, called inceptual thinking,...