On the Question Concerning the Determination of the Matter for Thinking

Abstract

Translators’ note: On October 30, 1965, in Amriswil, on the occasion of a celebration for the Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger, Heidegger gave a talk titled “Das Ende des Denkens in der Gestalt der Philosophie” (“The End of Thinking in the Form of Philosophy”). In a somewhat expanded version, this address was fi rst published in Japan (translated into Japanese by Kōichi Tsujimura) in December 1968 by Chikumashobō Press, Tokyo, with a new title “Zur Frage nach der Bestimmung der Sache des Denkens” (“On the Question Concerning the Determination of the Matter for Thinking”). For the 1968 Japanese edition, Heidegger added a brief foreword that was not published in Germany until 1989 in Japan und Heidegger, ed. Hartmut Buch ner (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke Verlag), 230–1. The German text of the expanded version of the talk, excluding the foreword, was edited by Hermann Heidegger and fi rst published in Europe in 1984 as Zur Frage nach der Bestimmung der Sache des Denkens by Erker-Verlag, St. Gallen, Switzerland. In 2000, this same text appeared in the Gesamtausgabe, Bd. 16, edited by Hermann Heidegger (Vittorio Klostermann Verlag), 620–33. Our translation follows the original Erker-Verlag edition (© Erker-Verlag, Franz Larese und Jürg Janett, Gallusstrasse 32, CH-9000 St. Gallen/Schweiz). We are most grateful to Erker-Verlag for granting us the translation rights. The present text, hitherto untranslated into English, is an important statement of Heidegger’s thinking in the 1960s and is closely related to his 1964 lecture “Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denkens” (“The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking”), which appears in English translation in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993).