The distinctive claim of Appropriating Heidegger is that disagreement about Heidegger’s importance and the sense of his project can itself be made methodologically fruitful once it is gathered, displayed, and argued as a field of presuppositions at work in reading. The volume’s editors stage precisely such a field: they solicit positions whose divergences do not cancel one another, but disclose the stakes of Heideggerian work across questions of the history of being, the technological configuration of our age, ethics as beyond obligation, theology as tacit background, anthropologism and its critique, and the status of Being and Time when read through its second division. The book’s distinctive contribution is to exhibit how appropriation—Zueignung as taking-up and letting-oneself-be-addressed—functions as a philosophical method that binds scholarship to thinking, while obligating each contributor to declare, test, and revise the very conditions by which Heidegger becomes legible.
The editors open by registering the well-known split between so-called analytic and continental styles and immediately reframe it as a contest over institutional recognitions and tacit criteria of philosophical legitimacy rather than a principled taxonomy of doctrines. From that reframing follows the volume’s guiding wager: difference within the Heideggerian constellation is both more decisive and more instructive than the received boundary that sets that constellation over against “analysis.” Diversity of aim, of problem-selection, of historical insistence, and of rhetorical attitude proves essential to the field of “Heideggerians” because the very task of thinking with Heidegger requires an explicit avowal of one’s orientation to the everyday enigma, to the destruction of the history of ontology, and to practice as the site where philosophy tests itself. The editorial essay sharpens this point by specifying the common project—to think the everyday’s enigma in a way that exposes its masked metaphysical underpinnings—while insisting that no single style of repetition, critique, or extension could be normatively prior to others. In this way, the outer frame of the collection is already programmatic: the parts and their internal tensions are means of showing what “appropriating” could mean in a plural, contested present.
The composition sequence enacts that program by first situating Heidegger amid the historical self-understanding of philosophy in the technological age, then probing his theological, phenomenological, and anthropological presuppositions, and finally returning to Being and Time under the pressure of appropriation as re-reading. Part I poses the age-question: What does it mean to think at the end or completion of philosophy’s metaphysical itinerary, when a technological understanding of being saturates intelligibility such that the very need to ask ontological questions seems extinguished? Mark A. Wrathall’s contribution is a methodological fulcrum here. He neither repeats Carnap’s indictment of metaphysics as pseudo-sentential artifice nor seeks to rescue Sätze like “the nothing nothings” by shoehorning them into empiricist canons of meaning.
Instead he reconstructs the dispute in terms of background intelligibility: Carnap’s “elimination” of metaphysics is itself an index of an age in which being is understood technologically, so that analysis can appear as philosophy’s rightful end only because a comprehensive, technoscientific clearing has come to seem unquestionable. Thus, to “overcome” metaphysics is not to jettison it, but to retrieve the historical movement that gave it: the Greek, medieval, modern, and technological modalities of unconcealment that shape what can show up, how, and to what ends. The task then becomes historical in a specific, Heideggerian sense: to distinguish Geschichte—the movement of the clearing—from Historie—the catalog of foreground happenings—and to interpret thinkers not as mere products of milieu but as those who receive and articulate an age’s understanding of being. In this optic, Descartes figures as the inaugurator of a modern stance in which man becomes the relational center of representable beings, “architect” of clarity and distinctness, thereby opening a space for new practices whose intelligibility depends on that centering. Carnap’s project is thus legible as the late consequence of precisely such a background, and analysis itself appears as philosophy’s completion under technological dominance, which is to say: analysis is indexed to an oblivion of background that it neither acknowledges nor can rectify. The only rectification is a historical thinking that loosens the grip of the ordinary by reopening the beginning, showing how what now seems given came to be and could otherwise be.
Wrathall’s argument is exemplary for the volume as a whole because it turns the very charge of metaphysical vacuity into a methodological imperative: since the background is no-thing in the sense of not being a foreground item, one cannot “verify” it by philology alone; one must think it via readings that will look “violent” to historiology precisely because they seek what made the foreground possible. The standard of success is not a ledger of influences but a persuasive grasp of an age’s unity as it informs practice. The consequence for appropriation is twofold. First, fidelity to Heidegger is measured by one’s capacity to receive the address of being and make it articulate within today’s practices; second, disagreement about how to receive that address is constitutive, because the address comes into salience through competing expositions. The collection assumes this consequence, allowing each essay to function as a localized test of a broader thesis: that meaningful philosophical work today must be historical in Heidegger’s sense while remaining argumentative, discriminating, and oriented to problems.
Against this background, Stanley Cavell’s juxtaposition of Heidegger and Thoreau operates as the volume’s initial displacement of a German center of gravity. The call to dwell in what is one’s own—so often read through Hölderlin—becomes legible in an American key as a work of “finding the day,” of learning the measure in which the ordinary speaks our claim. Cavell’s essay thereby shows that the shift from the foreignness of inherited canons to the self-relation of a people is itself historically polyglot; it can occur on Walden’s ground as much as in the Black Forest. That polyglossia is already an argument about the background: the clearing that makes the everyday speak is not confined to any nation’s idiom; the idiom, when alive, articulates an answerability that can be taught anew. In this way, the composition sequence leverages Cavell to broaden the horizon opened by Wrathall’s methodological insistence.
Robert Bernasconi recalibrates the project in a different register by asking how Heidegger’s confrontation with race science—and his own statements about race and history in the 1930s—should enter any responsible appropriation. The point is neither exculpation nor summary condemnation. Bernasconi insists that the newly available sources require a substantive revision of the received narrative that opposes “spiritual peoplehood” to “biological racism.” The record contains, for example, remarks about “the Negro” having no history, and a corresponding conclusion that “only a historical people is truly a people,” which entwine Heidegger’s vocabulary of historicity with familiar European tropes and thus implicate central categories rather than incidental errors. That Heidegger later characterized his Nietzsche lectures as a “confrontation with National Socialism” does not purge the texts of these disfiguring gestures; rather, it discloses a complex weave in which attacks on biologism coexist with judgments that silently reinscribe a hierarchy of reflection. This is precisely the sort of mutual reflection on guiding presuppositions the editors promised: appropriation here means making explicit what one’s conceptual instruments carry along with them when they are mobilized to resist racism. The philosophical stake is exacting: to ask whether the category of a “historical people” as bearer of being can be purified of exclusions it helped to license, and to determine what a non-exclusionary account of historicity would entail.
Albert Borgmann moves the field again by treating ethics beyond duty in relation to Heidegger’s analysis of the modern technological world. The terminological marker is supererogation—the domain of excess relative to obligation. Borgmann notes that Being and Time is ethically charged in its idiom of authenticity, resoluteness, anxiety, finitude, even if its author disclaimed ethics as a philosophical subdiscipline; later, in “Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger’s explicit disavowals coexist with a chastened acknowledgment that our political catastrophes require attention to conduct. From Borgmann’s vantage, mainstream ethics is overwhelmingly juridical—concerned with minimal blameworthiness—and thus ill-equipped to speak about the practices needed in an epoch that has enclosed beings in the availability of resource. Here the editorial frame’s emphasis on practice becomes crucial: the epochal shift determines what counts as excellence and thus as ethos. If virtues are moral skills rooted in a world’s specific structures of possibility, then courage, generosity, and restraint must be rethought under conditions of dematerialization, refinement, and the saturation of everyday life by devices. Borgmann’s wager is that a Heideggerian sense of world-disclosure can guide the identification of norms beyond duty that answer to our condition—norms that would compose a counter-posture to availability without falling back into programmatic moralism. The argument turns on the claim that technology is not simply a human project; it is a historical dispensation that involves us while exceeding volition, which means that any “saving power” must arise from within the very structures it contests, by re-patterning our inhabitation of them.
The book’s second part turns the lens upon Heidegger’s own background. John D. Caputo interrogates the theological sediments that structure Heidegger’s path of thought, staging the thesis that a return to the Greeks cohabits in Heidegger with an unavowed entanglement with biblical motifs. The upshot is delicate: a hard line between philosophy and religion cannot be maintained at precisely the points where decision, call, and promise become operative in Heidegger’s lexicon. The conceptual grammar of Anrede and Ereignis bears traces of a scriptural economy of address and gift, and to draw that out is not to reduce Heidegger to theology but to name the sources of a certain hopefulness in his later texts. Françoise Dastur then revisits the long-contested charge of anthropologism: rather than a capitulation to anthropology, Being and Time’s analysis of Dasein is a necessary passage within an ontological itinerary that later overcomes itself through the fourfold’s eignende Spiegel-Spiel, the appropriating mirror-play of earth, sky, mortals, and divinities. In each case the contributors honor the book’s method: they bring to expression the presuppositions that must be in place for Heidegger’s moves to function, and they ask whether those presuppositions can be re-composed to yield a thinking adequate to our age.
Part III returns to Being and Time under the pressure of appropriation. Rudi Visker begins from a phenomenon that the volume itself puts on display—philosophical styles—and uses it to probe the limits of Heidegger’s account of facticity and everydayness. If styles are not superficial but articulate deep postures of disclosedness, then the variegation of style among Heideggerians may indicate that average everydayness lacks the resources to register its own internal differentiations; the result is a pressure to thicken the concept of facticity such that it can bear the weight of these stylistic divergences without collapsing into psychologism. Hubert L. Dreyfus then performs a decisive internal re-reading: taking Division II’s account of higher intelligibility as a rule for rereading Division I, he argues that public practices ground the pervasive transparency of everyday readiness-to-hand, and that the “higher” is not an esoteric add-on but a more perspicuous grasp of what already guides skillful coping. The philosophical implication is that political and ethical deliberation can draw upon the dynamics of expertise and virtuosity in ordinary life, which can be redescribed without importing alien norms into the lifeworld. John Sallis recovers another time—the temporality that gifts both concern-time and world-time by submitting to a light that is neither merely subjective nor simply physical; the gesture here is to exhibit the phenomenality of time’s “otherness” without severing it from the sky’s given radiance. Finally, Mark Okrent leverages Being and Time to craft a pragmatist resolution of intentionality’s riddle: teleology and normativity are not imported from outside but are immanent to purposive comportment as it is disciplined by public measures of success and failure. Collectively, these essays demonstrate the book’s title claim: to appropriate is neither to repeat nor to discard; it is to let the phenomenon lead so that one’s reading alters the weightings within the whole.
A notable strength of the volume’s outer framing is its refusal to treat the table of contents as a sequence of unrelated specialists. The editors map the parts with explicit cross-references: Part I asks about the age and names the structural pressures any reading must feel; Part II uncovers enabling backgrounds in theology, phenomenology, and the contested place of the human; Part III tests whether Being and Time can still instruct once the second division is allowed to set the norm for interpreting the first. That sequence is itself an argument: age → presuppositions → re-reading as displacement. The editorial essay concludes by recentering the collection’s claim: these essays attend to the enigmatic everyday and reflect on how they do so, with the intention of opening discussion both among Heideggerians and with those outside the circle. The aboutness of the book is therefore double: it is about Heidegger and about how to make Heidegger matter at all.
If one tracks how the parts merge into and displace one another, a deep tension emerges that the volume neither conceals nor resolves—indeed, it turns the tension into a productive engine. On one side stands the historical thesis: we live within a technological dispensation whose completeness threatens to render philosophy into analysis and ethics into instrumentality. On the other stands the insistence that ethical, political, and theological questions cannot be deferred; they show up within the technological dispensation and must be articulated without presupposing a vantage outside it. Wrathall’s appeal to historical thinking names the condition under which the first side can be thought; Borgmann’s demand for supererogatory norms names the compulsion that drives the second. Bernasconi intensifies the bind: when the very categories used to diagnose our age carry racialized exclusions, historical thinking must purify its own instruments or risk reproducing the harm it sought to overcome. Caputo’s theological excavation and Dastur’s ontological self-overcoming then respond by showing how conceptual resources can be re-inscribed without nostalgia for foundations. The resultant composition is not symmetric: Part III, by re-reading Being and Time from Division II, displaces the first division’s tempting proximities to anthropologism and methodological formalism, yet it does so in a way that returns to practice and public measure—precisely the sites at which Borgmann lodges his claims.
The volume’s argumentative core can thus be rendered as a sequence of claims with warrants:
First, a claim about method: appropriation is legitimate when it tests the presuppositions out of which it reads, because Heidegger’s own project requires thinking the background that makes phenomena intelligible. The warrant is Wrathall’s delineation of Geschichte versus Historie, which justifies interpretive “violence” not as license but as obedience to the matter when foreground traces are insufficient by themselves.
Second, a claim about age: technological revealing has so permeated our intelligibility that analysis can appear as philosophy’s proper end. The warrant is the reconstructed line from Descartes’ self-legislation to Carnap’s program, where the self’s architectonics and the criterion of empirical meaningfulness express the same background domination in different keys.
Third, a claim about ethics: in such an age the salient norms are those that exceed obligation precisely because the world’s form requires more than minimal justice; it requires a counter-ethos of practices that refigure availability. The warrant is Borgmann’s diagnosis of postmodern refinement and dematerialization, read through Heidegger’s technology essay and its intimations of a long duration in which a saving power would have to be cultivated within technological forms.
Fourth, a claim about vigilance: any reconfiguration of categories must account for the ways in which Volk, history, and peoplehood have served exclusionary ends under cover of “spirit.” The warrant is Bernasconi’s archival correction and his insistence that the debate move beyond the binary of apologetics and repudiation toward an analysis of how conceptual grammars perform in racist conjunctures.
Fifth, a claim about text: Being and Time yields different guidance once Division II’s temporality and higher intelligibility are allowed to reshape our view of Division I’s everydayness. The warrant is Dreyfus’s phenomenology of skill acquisition and Sallis’s phenomenology of time’s otherness, which together support Okrent’s pragmatic untying of intentionality’s knot.
Because the book makes its stakes explicit, it also clarifies what success would mean for Heideggerian work now. Success would mean producing accounts that (i) display their own presuppositions; (ii) show how those presuppositions answer to the age’s background without solidifying it; (iii) generate practical orientations equal to our ecological, technological, and civic predicaments; and (iv) remain answerable to the injuries embedded in our inherited lexicon. The volume demonstrates that such success requires plural routes: American inflections of dwelling, phenomenological dissolutions of false alternatives, ontological passages through and beyond anthropologism, ethical articulations of excellence as fit to the epoch, and relentless archival sobriety regarding race. The essays’ disagreements do not collapse into an eclectic miscellany because the editors’ frame has given them a shared measure: the enigma of the everyday under technological revealing and the obligation to think it historically.
A further merit is the way the collection presses against a dichotomy between scholarship and philosophy. The introductory insistence that scholarly spadework is the condition of appropriation, not its aim, is realized in practice: philological detail appears as a stratum of argument, yet none of the essays allow philology to dictate the phenomenon. This makes the book unusually useful for readers who want to see how conceptual claims are warranted by textual, historical, and phenomenological materials without sliding into scholasticism. In that sense, the work models a style of writing whose rhetoric is integral to its content—style as disclosure—which in turn vindicates the decision to include essays whose voices differ markedly. Diversity of tone and idiom here is not an accident; it is an index of what the book wishes to claim: that the phenomenon of appropriation is polyphonic when faithful.
The outer framing promises an opening toward those outside Heidegger scholarship, and the content meets that promise. Wrathall’s reconstruction makes clear why analytical suspicion does not touch the phenomenon it targets; Critchley articulates a route past both scientism and obscurantism; Dreyfus and Okrent render the arguments in terms legible to philosophy of mind and action; Borgmann supplies the ethical register that contemporary debates require. At the same time, Bernasconi’s intervention ensures that entry into the conversation carries responsibilities that will not be satisfied by conceptual elegance alone. Together these moves widen the circle while raising the standard.
Two further tensions deserve emphasis because they animate the whole. First, authority and beginning: if historical thinking seeks the beginning to break the domination of the ordinary, how is appeal to a beginning protected from nostalgic return? The book’s answer is methodological: beginning is not an origin to be restored but a capacity to begin, enacted through readings that estrange the present sufficiently to reopen possibility. That is why Descartes can be read both as inaugurator and as symptom without contradiction: inauguration names a structured responsiveness to background, not a sovereign will. Second, mortals among the fourfold: Dastur’s gesture to the appropriating mirror-play can sound remote to ethical urgency, yet Borgmann’s analysis implies that precisely such “poetic” resources will be necessary to counter availability’s lock. The essays do not resolve this tension; they leave it as a productive oscillation between ontological and practical registers, which may be the sign that appropriation here has stayed with the matter.
If one were to ask for what the book proves, one would mishear its genre. What the volume shows—and shows in a way that can be followed and repeated—is how claims about the age, about ethics beyond duty, about theological residues, and about anthropologism are argued when one’s standard is the phenomenon’s power to reorganize intelligibility. That is a high bar, and the collection largely clears it. By giving readers a mapped space in which substantive disagreements are disciplined by declared presuppositions, it also furnishes a template for future work: to appropriate is to take responsibility for the background one avows, to test that avowal in contact with texts and practices, and to answer for the injuries those backgrounds have carried.
In closing, the book clarifies itself. Its scholarly stake is to demonstrate that Heidegger’s importance cannot be determined independently of the methods by which one reads him; its distinctive contribution is to make those methods explicit and contestable in a single, coherent space. The essays do not advance a common doctrine; they exemplify a common discipline. If the age is indeed one in which analysis has become philosophy’s default because the technological clearing has made background disappear, then the measure of our thinking will be the courage and finesse with which we can make background re-appear as that which obligates. Appropriating Heidegger offers a set of practiced ways of doing precisely that—historically, ethically, theologically, phenomenologically, and with eyes open to the weight of our inherited words.
Simon Gros 
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