What is Heidegger the Thinker Of?

Raising on October 17, 2012 in Paris the question: “What is Heidegger the thinker of?”, I began a dialogue with Prof. Thomas Sheehan from Stanford University, who asked on 9 October 2013 in Lancaster: “What, after all, was Heidegger about?”. This question takes on a new relevance as the publication of Heidegger’s collected works enters into its final phase. At this juncture, the most important task would seem to be to gain a vantage point from which we can return to all of Heidegger’s texts, in order to understand precisely what question each one of them is asking. In other words, we need to be asking what question it was that the German thinker spent his whole life trying to respond to. For what we do know is that the answer to that question, despite that fact that his earliest commentators and indeed most contemporary heideggerians all seem to think so, cannot simply be to say: “Being”. The aim of my residency at Stanford is, first, the deepening of this dialogue with Prof. Sheehan, because if we share the same question, our attempts to answer it diverge and, secondly, the writing of a book on my own answer. To my mind, the question of philosophy itself is what held Heidegger in suspense from the beginning to the end. By “the question of philosophy itself”, I am implying at once the question traditionally posed by the history of philosophy – the question of Being –, as well as the question that philosophy has always remained – the question of what philosophy is as such.