My review of Eugen Fink, Play as Symbol of the World and Other Writings has been published at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.

Eugen Fink (1905-1975) is not sufficiently well known in the Anglophone world, in part because of the lack of translations of his work. He is perhaps generally understood through two texts which have been translated — his continuation of Edmund Husserl’s work in the Sixth Cartesian Meditation and his co-taught Heraclitus Seminar with Martin Heidegger. As one of Husserl’s assistants, his work was initially seen as a continuation of his ideas; and towards the end of his career the Heidegger relation tends to dominate readings. Ronald Bruzina’s Edmund Husserl & Eugen Fink: Beginnings and Ends in Phenomenology 1928-1938 (Yale University Press, 2004) is an excellent guide to his philosophical apprenticeship. Yet Fink was a significant thinker in his own right, with a number of important works on phenomenology, metaphysics, Nietzsche, the world, death and education published in his lifetime. Of these, only the Nietzsche book was previously available in English. Since his death a number of other volumes have appeared, some based on his lecture courses. His Gesamtausgabe or collected edition, under the general editorship of Stephan Grätzel, Cathrin Nielsen and Hans Rainer Sepp, has been underway since 2006, with five volumes published to date.

One of those volumes is the text translated here… [more]