Graham responds to my earlier post on Heidegger here. I don’t think it’s as much of a disagreement as he thinks. Basically there seem to be three issues.

– Graham wants a biography for that period, and says that the books I’ve mentioned don’t do the job. I think that’s an entirely fair judgment. I did say Kisiel’s was a “biography of a book” which I’d stick to as an assessment. Personally I’m more interested in the ideas than the person, but I can obviously see the basis for a disagreement or difference of view there. I do know that Alfred Denker was writing a biography of Heidegger which I don’t think is finished yet. Maybe that would be closer to what Graham wants – the Safranski surely didn’t fit the bill.

– I do think the Heidegger of the 1930s has substantial merit as a thinker. I’m not sure I’d say it has more or less than the 1920s, though the work of the 1930s was certainly more productive in terms of what I took from Heidegger. But I’d definitely agree that Being and Time is the most important work, and without it we wouldn’t be reading Heidegger today.

– To my mind the scholarly work on the 1920s is better than that on the 1930s. That’s a judgment call, of course, but I don’t see an equivalent of a Kisiel, van Buren, or even Daniel Dahlstrom’s Heidegger’s Concept of Truth for that later period.

From his website, it does appear Dahlstrom is working on later Heidegger, though not sure if the 1930s counts in that. There are the Kisiel projected books I mentioned before. So it may improve, but my general point was that the 1930s is worthy of attention, and that it hasn’t yet received the kind of quality work that I think the 1920s has.

Perhaps the more general point, and one worth underlining, is that with over eighty years of scholarly work on Heidegger we’ve still yet to exhaust the possibilities his work, life and ideas provide. Within that there is a lot of room for the focus to be on different aspects, timeperiods, etc.