Philosophy Department's 2024/25 Speaker Series is happy to have Dr. Iain Thomson come for a talk April 4, 2025. Iain is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico. His areas of research are 19th and 20th Century Continental philosophy, esp. Heidegger. Thomson teaches courses on existentialism as well as contemporary continental philosophy, focusing on figures such as Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida, or on issues like the philosophical significance of death, technology, and nihilism. Levinas, and Derrida, or on issues like the philosophical significance of death, technology, and nihilism.

Iain is the Philosophy Graduate Student Association's (PGSA) choice of our AY25 Colloquium Series. 

 

Title: "Why did Heidegger later say that “Nietzsche broke me [Nietzsche hat mich kaputt gemacht]”?  Re-reading Heidegger’s Nietzsche “Alter-cation [Aus-einander-setzung]”

Abstract: What makes Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche so influential, controversial, and important?  Why did Heidegger think of Nietzsche as “a name for an age of the world”—indeed, for our late-modern, “atomic age” of technological “enframing”?  What made his reading of Nietzsche so formative for a whole generation of continental philosophers, from Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze to Irigaray, Marcuse, and Baudrillard?  Why, conversely, do many analytic Nietzsche scholars reject Heidegger’s reading out of hand, thereby downplaying the importance to Nietzsche of such topics as the will to power and eternal recurrence, along with the murderous eugenic vision developed in his late notebooks?  This chapter will seek to clarify a few central aspects of with Heidegger’s complex and sustained hermeneutic “alter-cation [Aus-einander-setzung]” with Nietzsche.  Our goal will be to understand why Heidegger eventually concludes both, on the one hand, that Nietzsche is “the most important philosopher since Hegel,” albeit as “the last metaphysician” and “the highest fulfillment of Western nihilism,” and also, on the other hand, that Nietzsche is one of “the most futural ones,” an enduringly important, proto-postmodern thinker who (along with the poet Hölderlin and the painter Van Gogh) helps inaugurate a more meaningful “other beginning” beyond the nihilistic ontotheological epochs of Western metaphysics.