TRANSLATED BY JAMES S. CHURCHILL FOREWORD BY THOMAS LANGAN
Publication Information : Book Title : Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Contributors : Martin Heidegger – author. Publisher : Indiana University Press. Place of Publication : Bloomington, IN. Publication Year : 1962.
AUTHOR’S PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
This work, the first edition of which was published twenty years ago and immediately sold out, appears here unaltered. It is preserved in that form in which in a multitude of ways it has been effective and ineffective.
My critics have constantly reproached me for the violence of my interpretations, and the grounds for this reproach can easily be found in this work. From the point of view of an inquiry which is both historical and philosophical, this reproach is always justified when directed against attempts to set in motion a thoughtful dialogue between thinkers. In contrast to the methods of historical philology, which has its own problems, a dialogue between thinkers is bound by other laws. These laws are more easily violated ; the possibility of going astray is more threatening, the shortcomings more frequent.
The extent to which I have gone astray in the present endeavor and the shortcomings thereof have become so clear to me in the period of time since its first systemation that I refrain from making it a patchwork through the addition of supplements and postscripts.
Through their shortcomings, thinkers learn to be more persevering.
Freiburg im Breisgau, June, 1950