Heidegger’s Hidden Sources

…”makes a significant contribution to the growing body of work that explores the intellectual connections between early twentieth-century German philosophers and Chinese classical texts on the one side and contemporary Japanese philosophers on the other… May’s meticulous intertextual study and comparative reading of Heidegger, … not only traces Taoist influences in Heidegger’s work, but, furthermore, encourages contemporary scholarship to acknowledge the indebtness of European philosophy to non-European sources… The tension created by Heidegger’s seeming loyality to the Greco-European tradition and his silent indebtedness to Chinese and, as Graham Parkes has argued convincingly, Japanese sources encourages a rethinking of the philosophical canon and the traditional delineation of philosophical traditions.”

“At the same time as Heidegger was reaffirming the singularity of the Western metaphysical tradition, he was quietly trading on the side with the East, as did so many of his predecessors. With Graham Parkes splendid translation and introduction of Reinhard May’s remarkable book, our understanding of Heidegger will never be quite the same again.”