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This is the most famous version of the Introduction (Einleitung) to a book on Aristotle that Heidegger was planning to write under the title, “Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles,” ever since he taught his course of WS 1921–1922 under that title (the course itself therefore being the first version of the Einleitung, evident from its major themes like “What is Philosophy?” and “The Basic Categories of Life”: see the table of contents of GA61). The circumstances of its genesis are tied directly to the academic
The typescript of this introduction (by way of the above subtitle) to a projected book on interpreting Aristotle (with the above title) was first discovered in 1989 in its entirety, i.e., with both the introduction and the supplementary overview of the book, in the Göttingen archive of Josef König by Hans-Ulrich Lessing, who edited it for publication in the very same year: Martin Heidegger, “Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles (Anzeige der hermeneutischen Situation),” Dilthey-Jahrbuch 6 (1989), 235–69, with an editor’s postscript, 270–74. The first English translation followed shortly thereafter: Martin Heidegger, “Phenomenological Interpretations with Respect to Aristotle: Indication of the Hermeneutical Situation,” Man and World 25 (1992), 358–93, with a translator’s preface by Michael Baur, 355–57. The editors wish to thank Frithjof Rodi, editor of the Dilthey-Jahrbuch, for initial permission to proceed with this project, Kluwer Academic Publishers for permission to republish a portion of the translation in Man and World in this volume, and the translator Michael Baur for his cooperation in the early stages of this project. His translation of the “Aristotle-Introduction” (358–76) has been edited especially for this volume by Theodore Kisiel, who has also provided a distilled summary of the overview (377–93) of the projected book. The published translation has been modified by the editor in an attempt to make its tortuous prose more readable, and divided into subsections to make its latent structure more apparent. Unique to this more readable rendition of the “Aristotle-Introduction” is the addition of Heidegger’s 1923 marginal comments to his copy of the 1922 typescript, which serve to supplement the three footnotes that first appeared with the text sent to Paul Natorp in Marburg and Georg Misch in Göttingen in support of Heidegger’s candidacy for positions at these universities.