The Fourfold: Reading the Late Heidegger, by Andrew J. Mitchell, Northwestern University Press, 2015
https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/the-fourfold-reading-the-late-heidegger/
Heidegger’s later thought is a thinking of things, so argues Andrew J. Mitchell in The Fourfold. Heidegger understands these things in terms of what he names “the fourfold”—a convergence of relationships bringing together the earth, the sky, divinities, and mortals—and Mitchell’s book is the first detailed exegesis of this neglected aspect of Heidegger’s later thought. As such it provides entrée to the full landscape of Heidegger’s postwar thinking, offering striking new interpretations of the atomic bomb, technology, plants, animals, weather, time, language, the holy, mortality, dwelling, and more. What results is a conception of things as ecstatic, relational, singular, and, most provocatively, as intrinsically tied to their own technological commodification. A major new work that resonates beyond the confines of Heidegger scholarship, The Fourfold proposes nothing less than a new phenomenological thinking of relationality and mediation for understanding the things around us.(amazon) (kindle 2019-2-25)
ANDREW J. MITCHELL is an associate professor of philosophy at Emory University. His previous books include Heidegger among the Sculptors: Body, Space, and the Art of Dwelling (2010), and translations of Heidegger’s On Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: The 1934–35 Seminar and Interpretive Essays (2014), Bremen and Freiburg Lectures: Insight into That Which Is and Basic Principles of Thinking (2012), and, as cotranslator, Four Seminars (2003). (amazon)
Lastly, at least four cats have been involved with this: Torte, Lucy, Kit Marlowe, and Phoebe. Any remaining typos are theirs. (kindle location 153/9226)
While “The Thing” and “Building Dwelling Thinking” present the fourfold at its fullest and will serve as the guides for the interpretations that follow, two other early contextualizations of the fourfold are to be noted and will be drawn upon opportunely as the interpretations proceed: the lecture “Language” of 1950 and the letter to Ernst Jünger, “The Question of Being,” from 1955. These four texts provide the fullest sense of how Heidegger conceives the fourfold. (7119/9226)
