Wednesday, June 7, 2017

The Fourfold: Reading the Late Heidegger (NDPR review)


Andrew J. Mitchell, The Fourfold: Reading the Late Heidegger, Northwestern University Press, 2015, 372pp., $34.95 (pbk), IBSN 9780810130760.
Reviewed by Gary E. Aylesworth, Eastern Illinois University

In this volume, Andrew J. Mitchell examines the fourfold (das Geviert) as the key to Heidegger's later thinking. This motif is introduced for the first time in the Bremen Lectures of 1949 (which Mitchell translated into English), in reference to the thing as a gathering of earth, sky, mortals and divinities. Mitchell extends this conception of the thing as a gathering of relations to show that the later Heidegger steps beyond his treatment of things in Being and Time, and that he conceives things, not just Dasein, as ecstatically open and exposed to one another in the mirror-play of the world.
For Mitchell's reading, it is crucial to understand the technological essence (das Gestell) as...


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