Plato's "Sophist"

Students and scholars alike can now see for themselves why Heidegger's lectures on the Greeks in the 1920s caused such a stir, and they can judge just what it means to read a Greek text with Heidegger...The English translation is excellent, managing to capture some of the vibrancy of the lectures while maintaining a high degree of accuracy and readability.

N John Ellis. This volume reconstructs Martin Heidegger's lecture course at the University of Marburg in the winter semester 1924ETH25, devoted to an interpretation of Plato (especially his later dialogue, the "Sophist") and Aristotle, especially Book VI of the "Nichomahcan Ethics".

Published for the first time in German in 1992 as volume 19 of "Heidegger's Collected Works", it is one of Heidegger's major texts, because of its intrinsic importance as an interpretation of Aristotle and Plato and also because of its relation to "Being and Time".

Composed at the same time, the lectures and "Being and Times" are complementary works in that both are commentaries on Plato's "Sophist".

The lectures approach Plato through a detailed reading of the "Nichomachean Ethics", providing one of Heidegger's major interpretations of Aristotle. In a line-by-line interpretation of the "Sophist", Heidegger then takes up the relation of Being and non-being, the ontological problematic that forms the key link between Greek philosophy and Heidegger's thought.