This is an excellent and very well done anthology. Covering the classic readings, Croce, Plato, Ficino, Salsbury, Schelling, Dewey and others. The editors take space to introduce each selection and highlight its contribution to the field of Aesthetics. The selections are fair, even those including the existentialists, such as Nietzsche and Heidegger, who make large shifts in direction in Aesthetics. Hofstadter also contributes his own translation of Heidegger's selections and Schelling's selections. These are very good in particular.

The first difficulty is that the volume fails to point to advances beyond Heidegger. No volume can contain all the imporant classical and contemporary readings, but it should
have some sort of suggested reading list for newer materials. The problems of Aesthetics that have confronted the field since the 50's and 60's are just as important as the ones of ancient and medieval European culture. The problem of interpreting pure music (no lyrics) and its aesthetic effects in especially important to this field. Even Ayn Rand, who had a quick philosophical (if often flippant or facile) remark on any facet of culture, admitted she was confounded by the act of interpreting and judging pure music.

To address this, the reader should also read or purchase Arthur Danto's volumes. In particular Danto has articulated the main problems of the field (such as the problem of making value judgements) and set the tone. Problems such as ethnocentrism and cultural relativism in Western Aesthetics also need to be investigated by serious students of this topic.

Another issue to investigate that this volume misses is the category of the "Artist," which did not exist in ancient Greece or Rome as we know it today. In fact, the category of Artist, whether bohemian or otherwise, seems to be a fairly recent invention, and has had profound consequences for Aesthetics. To investigate this more, start by reading Flauber's novel "Sentimental Education." This staple of French literary realism will help jump start you past this anthology of philosophical readings.

This anthology of aesthetic texts surveys the key figures from the classic Western tradition in aesthetics beginning with Plato. Since the book's first pulbication in 1964, Hofstadter and Kuhns have been known among theoreticians, historians, and philosophers alike for this book's remarkable contribution to the field of aesthetics. In this book, one will find selections from the ancient Greeks: Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus; to the medieval: St. Augustine; to the Neoplatonist: Ficino; to the German Idealists: Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer; as well as others like: Shaftesbury, Croce, Nietzsche, Dewey, and Heidegger. This motley assortment is an indisputable must for every art historian, philosopher of art, literary critic, aesthetician, theoretician, and the general scholar. I would relish the opportunity at seeing a 21st century revision of this work; perhaps professor Kuhns may consider such a project with some of his brilliant collegues at Columbia University.

_Poetry, Language, Thought_ is a collection of seven of Heidegger's essays collected from other works originally written or delivered as lectures between 1935 and 1951. These essays all revolve around "art" in the broadest sense possible -- Heidegger meditates upon the poetry of Rilke and Holderlin and the paintings of Van Gogh.

These purposes shouldn't be understood, however, as art or literary criticism. These essays serve as examples of Heidegger's broader project of the investigation of Being in a totalizing sense. He sought to understand Being in the sense that it is common to rock, trees, animals, and people by an examination of the human mode of being, Dasein, being that questions the nature of its own being.

Heidegger believed we have so completely forgotten about being that we have even forgotten that we have forgotten -- and as a result, we need to pay special attention to the times when Being, via our Dasein, calls attention to the fact of its own hiddenness. In everyday human experience this can happen through the experience of anxiety or boredom or, in the case of _Poetry, Language, Thought_, it can happen through art.

Heidegger examines art in this collection of essays as it unveils the hiddenness of Being.

As you can see from my brief description, a bit of a background in Heidegger would be helpful before reading this book. If you're really interested, read his _Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics_ first (Indiana University Press). Then read _Being and Time_. If you still want to read Heidegger after that, then turn to _Poetry, Language, Thought_ as an application of his philosophy to the understanding of art, to how we are to understand art and what we should allow it to reveal to us.

Heidegger is difficult most times (FCOM is his least difficult), and impossible at others, and _Poetry, Language, Thought_ is no exception. In one essay he seems to especially talk in circles. But don't let that discourage you from reading this book if you're serious about understanding Heidegger -- it will add nuance to the development of his ideas about language and the uncovering of Dasein in our everyday experience.

Heidegger does not address the issue of poetry and truth from the vantage point of a traditional or academic art historian; nor does he employ conventional terms and classifications. Instead, he arrives at his subjects experimentally and tangentially and firmly grounds them on the approach of "ontological knowledge" which has made him famous. His highly idiosyncratic style, however, often playing with the cognate forms of the words of the original German, and which eludes translation, may make his arguments seem imprecise and willfully obscure. Though "Poetry, Language, Thought" is a collection of essays collected from Heidegger's miscellaneous later writings, it is no less formidable than "Being and Time", his masterpiece of ontological enquiry, published in 1927. The most beautiful formulation in the book is that truth is, by its very nature, poetic and this for Heidegger, does not imply a polarity between verse and prose, but actually includes prose as well. In "The Origin of the Work of Art", he defines the truth of the art work as being the setting-up of the art work in relation to the undisclosedness of Being, a conclusion which he argues up to at great length and with much skill and profundity. Like Wittgenstein and Derrida, Heidegger is not a philosopher in the traditional sense who aims to provide an all-embracing theory that would explain ultimate reality. He does not pretend to a First Philosophy which is based on some abstraction such as Reason, the Proletariat or the World Spirit. Rather, he is something of an exegete and experimentalist, probing the assumptions behind people's habits of speech and thought in a way of clarifying central misconceptions and errors. The volume also includes essays titled "What are Poets For?", "Building Dwelling Thinking" and a discourse on "The Thing", "thingness", or "thinghood". Heidegger's own poems, which are prefixed to the edition, may be flawed as art, but they serve, at least, to adumbrate the problems that occupy him in the following chapters.

"To many, the mystic borders on psychotic... he
cannot get solace from others because they no
longer speak a language that has any meaning for him." (Marsha Sinetar)

"When I undertake to tell the best, I find I cannot.
My tongue is ineffectual on its pivots, my breath
will not be obedient to its organs, I become a dumb man." (Walt Whitman).

Heidegger has been accused of being many of the above things, including mystic, psychotic, and poet, and sometimes even a philosopher. Some of us like to think of him as all of the above. But there is a pervasive trend in particularly modern philosophy that would like to bracket out such things proper subjects for philosophy. For example, many Anglo-American analytic philosophers tend to think Heidegger is simply sloppy, perhaps a charlatan, but certainly not a philosopher in any traditional sense, and perhaps they have a point. Heidegger would have been the first to admit he was no philosopher in the regular sense, as a matter of fact he often disdained that sort of thinking. One could say that the divide between continental and analytic thought comes down to what one does with Heidegger (and it's for this reason that a thinker like Richard Rorty is so vexing for nearly everyone, since he is made of equal parts Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Dewey).

Another way to examine this divide is to think about whether you take your philosophy as poetry, or as science (not to speak about poetic science or scientific poetry). Admittedly, this is an arbitrary and even false dualism, but as a heuristic device is can be helpful for getting one's mind around the later Heidegger, and for me, "Poetry, Language, Thought" is the best collection of the finest work of his "post-turn" period. The thing is a curious mix of philosophical poetry and prose-poems; they are literary tone poems, like those of Liszt and Strauss, and contain every color of Heidegger's complex thought. Every essay here is, I tend to think, the philosophy he always wanted to write, and the magnum opus of his later period, the Beiträge (translated with mixed success by Emad and Maly, 1999), is a full blown exposition in aphoristic form of the thought concealed in PLT. That's my reading, of course, but I am more and more convinced that it is close to the truth of Heidegger's whole project of his later years.

There is not one essay here that doesn't belong. Several of them are almost legendary in their importance to Heidegger studies; for example, "The Thing" introduced Das Ding fully into Heidegger's thought, and "On the Origin of the Work of Art," easily the most stunning of the performances in this volume, contains his famous Zen-like phenomenology of Van Gogh's "Peasant Shoes" that can almost bring Heidegger's most devout follwers to tears. Perhaps this is a bit much, but it is beyond question, at least to my mind, that Heidegger came closer to "telling the best," as Whitman wrote, in these essays than he did at any other time in his career . "What are Poets For?" is the most nuanced single discussion of Hölderlin in Heidegger's corpus, and Hölderlin (as everyone ought to know) is Heidegger's patron poet. "Language" is as successful in 20-odd pages as Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations is in 230: favorable comparisons between the two greatest thinkers of the 20th century aren't nearly as common as one might expect. And on and on.

For my money, however, the two most important essays in the book are the first one, "The Thinker as Poet," and the gnomic "Building Dwelling Thinking." In the first, Heidegger is writing philosophy as he best envisioned philosophy to be: as an unconcealing of Being which nevertheless contains within itself a concealment which is not amenable to investigation, only to experience. That, by the way, is as good a definition of poetry itself as you are likely to find, so it is no coincidence that Heidegger is writing philosophy as poerty. The reviewer below totally misses the point here--the editor hasn't prefixed some of Heidegger's poems to a book of philosophical essays. These aren't poems, they are some of the purest and clearest philosophy that Heidegger ever wrote (take that, Quine...), and that is precisely why they are so difficult. As in Being and Time, Heidegger is trying to talk about something vitally important for which there is no real language, so he has recourse only to poetry. The closest analogue I can think of are the koans in the Blue Cliff Record. Neither texts are meant to be analyzed, so much as thought (not thought-about). "Building Dwelling Thinking" lays out this poetic-philosophical vision in terms of living at home, "dwelling" in the world, and is a secret conversation with the "thinking and making" of Aristotle's Metaphysics 1032b 15-20. Both these essays are the twin keys to Heidegger's later philosophy, in my opinion.

If you buy this book, you'll get all of the above. You'll also get a great book, book-wise, and a first-rate translation of texts that are more or less untranslatable from beginning to end. If German poetry is hard to render into English, this unique German philosophical poetry is nigh on impossible to translate--Stephen Mitchell, if you are reading this, see if you can do for this book what you've done for Rilke! Until then, we can all be happy with A.H.'s work, it has survived several reprints, and will probably endure, since in the English-speaking world, to the extent that Heidegger's words in these essays have entered the language of the discipline, they are Hofstadter's words as well. A powerful, powerful book, and a masterful translation.