Martin Heidegger’s Basic Concepts of Ancient Philosophy stands as one of the most decisive documents of his Marburg period, a lecture course delivered in 1926, at the very moment in which the contours of Being and Time had been brought to their sharpest formulation. While that magnum opus provides a radically new analytic of existence and a destruction of the history of ontology, these lectures reveal Heidegger simultaneously at work on what he considered indispensable: a rigorous confrontation with the origin and unfolding of Greek philosophy. To Heidegger, philosophy cannot be divorced from its inception; the Presocratic questioning of physis, the constitution of logos, and the formulation of archē are not simply historical curiosities but remain formative for every later path of thought. What gives this course its unique position is its attempt to present, in a compressed but comprehensive movement, a systematic history of ancient philosophy from Thales through Plato and culminating in Aristotle, but always in a way that remains subordinated to the central problem of the distinction between beings and Being.
The lecture proceeds by taking the so-called “basic concepts” not as timeless definitions or catalogued doctrines, but as living formulations in which the Greeks were compelled to articulate what it means for something to appear, to endure, and to be. Thus, notions such as principle (archē), cause (aitia), nature (physis), and unity and multiplicity are not simply scholastic terms but primal attempts to think Being through beings. In tracing the movement of these concepts from the early Ionian thinkers to the dialectics of Plato and the categorial articulations of Aristotle, Heidegger seeks to disclose how each epoch of Greek philosophy made a decisive step in the unveiling of Being, but also how, with Aristotle, the destiny of metaphysics as the forgetting of Being was essentially sealed. For Heidegger, Thales’ pronouncement that everything is water is not a crude material hypothesis, but an originary attempt to think the grounding of beings as such in a unifying principle. Likewise, Anaximander’s apeiron, Heraclitus’ logos, and Parmenides’ path of aletheia are interpreted not through the lens of later historiography but as radical gestures in which Being itself seeks articulation.
The centrality of the concept of logos is exemplary of Heidegger’s method. The logos does not mean mere “word” or “speech,” nor even “reason” in the post-Cartesian sense, but the gathering principle in which beings come into appearance and are made manifest. In confronting Heraclitus, Heidegger emphasizes the inherent unity of thought and Being, the gathering of opposites in tension, and the primordiality of disclosure. With Parmenides, the insistence that “thinking and Being are the same” becomes for Heidegger not a dogmatic identity statement but an indication that the openness of Being is only through the event of thinking itself. With these early gestures, philosophy is inaugurated as the questioning of Being in its difference from beings, even if this difference is never thematized explicitly in antiquity.
By the time Heidegger reaches Plato, the question of Being has already shifted toward the problem of the idea and the eternal. For Heidegger, Plato’s elevation of the idea is both an immense breakthrough and the beginning of a decisive turning, whereby Being is equated with the constant presence of what is truly real, beyond change and becoming. Truth (aletheia), which for the Presocratics still meant unconcealment, gradually becomes reinterpreted as correctness, the adequation of knowledge to the idea. In this subtle shift, Heidegger discerns the beginning of a trajectory that leads toward the metaphysics of presence, where Being is no longer questioned but presupposed as constant availability.
Aristotle, however, occupies the culminating place in this genealogy. It is with Aristotle that the categorial articulation of Being reaches its most systematic form, with the doctrine of substance (ousia) as the being that always already is, and with the differentiation of causes as the explanatory framework of reality. Aristotle’s Metaphysics, in Heidegger’s reading, represents both the apex of ancient ontology and the decisive step into its oblivion, since Being becomes understood primarily as ousia and hence subordinated to the horizon of beings. Concepts such as dynamis and energeia, motion (kinesis), soul (psyche), and science (epistēmē) are examined not as abstract doctrines but as ways in which the Greeks sought to think the appearing of Being, even while laying the groundwork for its reduction to the categories of presence, actuality, and substance. The Aristotelian distinctions between matter and form, potentiality and actuality, or the divisions of the categories themselves, exemplify the profound systematic clarity with which Being is articulated, but also the point where the initial strangeness of Being gives way to its domestication within metaphysics.
What makes Basic Concepts of Ancient Philosophy of lasting importance is that it provides Heidegger’s most comprehensive and direct engagement with ancient philosophy. Unlike the fragmentary interpretations scattered in Being and Time or in shorter essays, here we see a sustained, lecture-by-lecture unfolding of how the earliest concepts were born, how they transformed in the dialectical encounter of Socratic questioning and Platonic theory, and how they culminated in Aristotelian ontology. The guiding thread throughout is the effort to keep alive the question of Being in its difference from beings, and to show how the very concepts that inaugurated philosophy also contain within themselves the seeds of its forgetfulness. Heidegger thereby performs what he elsewhere calls the “destruction” of the history of ontology: not a negation, but a critical retrieval that allows the originary experiences of the Greeks to speak anew, stripped of later sedimentation and scholastic distortion.
For the reader, this volume presents not only a historical survey but a deepening of Heidegger’s own project. Concepts such as principle, cause, nature, unity, multiplicity, logos, truth, science, soul, category, and motion are disclosed as the originary articulations through which Being was first thought. Richard Rojcewicz’s lucid translation allows English-speaking readers to encounter the peculiar density and precision of Heidegger’s interpretation, where philology is never detached from philosophy, and where the Greek words themselves are made to reveal their living force. The volume thus serves both as an introduction to Heidegger’s historical thinking and as a companion to Being and Time, illuminating the subterranean connection between his analytic of Dasein and his reengagement with the Greeks.
Basic Concepts of Ancient Philosophy is not simply a historical lecture course but a systematic meditation on the beginnings of Western thought. It presents ancient philosophy not as a past stage in the evolution of ideas but as the essential site in which the destiny of metaphysics was decided and in which the question of Being first emerged, only to be progressively concealed. For anyone seeking to understand Heidegger’s thought, this work offers an indispensable window into the way he interprets the Greeks as both the origin and the limit of Western philosophy, and into the way he conceives his own project as a retrieval and transformation of that origin. It is therefore both a critical companion to the canonical history of philosophy and a powerful reminder that the path of thinking always begins with the Greeks, and that the task of philosophy remains the renewal of the question of Being in confrontation with its beginnings.
Simon Gros 
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