Heidegger’s Metaphysics: The Overturning of ’Being and Time’

Heidegger’s Metaphysics explores how Heidegger continued the project of Being and Time, developing a new kind of metaphysics through a critique of Kantian transcendental philosophy. Drawing on Heidegger’s published work, lecture courses, drafts, and correspondence from the late 1920s, it reconstructs the philosophical justification for this project, its implications for Heidegger’s phenomenology of time, and his understanding of philosophical concept formation.

Daly proposes that Heidegger’s project neither failed nor remained indebted to a Kantian transcendental framework, and challenges the widespread interpretation of Heidegger as a critic of metaphysics. This work examines a wide range of themes that have been largely neglected in discussions of Heidegger’s work, including a phenomenology of the mythical world (in dialogue with Ernst Cassirer’s work), the origin of religious concepts, the development of a temporality of thrownness, and Heidegger’s critique of Kantian transcendentalism. It finishes by challenging the separation of Heidegger’s philosophy from his politics and asks what we can retrieve from his project today.

Aengus Daly is a Lecturer in Philosophy and a researcher at the Institute for Transcendental Philosophy at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Germany. He has translated numerous articles on 19th and 20th century German philosophy, and on Heidegger, from German and French into English.