Heidegger's Metaphysics

Heidegger and Metaphysics explores how Heidegger continued the project of Being and Time, developing a new kind of metaphysics through a critique of Kantian transcendental philosophy. Drawing on Heidegger’s published and unpublished work in the late 1920s, including lecture courses, drafts, and correspondence, it reconstructs the philosophical and phenomenological justification for this project, its implications for Heidegger’s phenomenology of time, his account of philosophical concept formation, and his relationship to transcendental philosophy.

Daly proposes that Heidegger’s project neither failed nor remained indebted to a Kantian transcendental framework, and refutes the widespread interpretation of Heidegger as a critic of metaphysics. It examines a wide range of themes that have been largely neglected in discussions of Heidegger’s work, including a phenomenology of the mythical world (in dialogue with Ernst Cassirer’s work), the origin of religious concepts, the development of a temporality of thrownness, and Heidegger’s critique of Kantian transcendentalism for its inability to think how nature or history are originally given. It finishes by challenging the separation of Heidegger’s philosophy from his politics and asks what we can retrieve from his project today.