Introduction to Metaphysics (Heidegger)

Introduction to Metaphysics

Author	Martin Heidegger
Original title	Einführung in die Metaphysik
Translator	1984: Ralph Manheim 2000: Gregory Fried and Richard Polt
Country	Germany
Language	German
Subject	Ontology, hermeneutics, phenomenology
Publisher	1984: Yale University Press 2000: Yale University Press 2014: Yale University Press (revised and expanded ed.)
Publication date	1953
Published in English	1984 (Manheim) 2000 (Fried & Polt) 2014 (Fried & Polt, revised and expanded ed.)
Preceded by	Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics
Followed by	Contributions to Philosophy

Introduction to Metaphysics (German: Einführung in die Metaphysik) is a book by Martin Heidegger, the published version of a lecture course he gave in the summer of 1935 at the University of Freiburg. The content of these lectures was not published in Germany until 1953. Heidegger commended this book along with his work Being and Time (1927), as summarising his views at that time (1953) on ontology. The work, in which Heidegger refers to the "inner truth and greatness" of National Socialism, has been widely regarded as fascist in character.

Introduction to Metaphysics is famous for Heidegger's powerful reinterpretation of Greek thought and infamous for his acknowledgement of the Nazi Party. Julian Young writes that it is a work which "even those on the whole sympathetic to Heidegger have generally taken to be indelibly fascist in character." Nevertheless, the work has also been seen as being critical of Nazism for being insufficiently radical and suffering from the same spiritual impoverishment as the Soviet Union and the United States.