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WOLIN, Richard. Heidegger's Children: Hannah Arendt, Karl Lowith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marco se. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. xvi + 276 pp. Cloth, $29.95-There seems to be a general consensus that the most important Continental philosopher of the twentieth century was Martin Heidegger. Even Etienne Gilson spoke of him as one of only two real philosophers of his lifetime (the other being Henri Bergson). Despite the general acknowledgment of his philosophical brilliance, Heidegger remains a highly controversial figure in the history of thought largely on account of his infamous involvement with Nazism. In recent years Richard Wolin has gone to great lengths to document and examine Heidegger's troubling politics and legacy. Wolin claims that Heidegger's Children is his final offering on Heidegger and his flawed politics; it follows upon his books The Politics of Being (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980) and The Heidegger Controversy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993).
Heidegger's Children builds a case against Heidegger by examining four of his most accomplished students and detailing the way in which they dealt with their mentor's Nazism while still reflecting his influence in their own thought. What makes the story poignant is the fact that the four students of Heidegger that Wolin examines were all Jewish, although fully assimilated and largely secularized Jews (Jonas being the only exception). Thus, in addition to being a "reception history" (judging a thinker by the manner in which his thought is appropriated by his followers), Wolin also studies the "anxiety of influence" of Heidegger upon his Jewish students whom naturally felt betrayed by Heidegger's support of the Third Reich.
One chapter is dedicated to each student and, to some extent, the individual chapters stand alone from the work as a...