book reviews 323

it seems, it deserves a hearing in a book so concerned with this theme. Merely registering
disagreement with Wood on the relevant issues seems insufficient (365n13, 368n33); one
would also expect a more sustained engagement with Rawls’s reading of Kant. She spends
a good deal of time on Kant’s “paradox of method,” which pertains to Kant’s attempt to
characterize goodness in terms of the supreme moral principle rather than the other way
around. But why not directly address Rawls’s highly influential “constructivist” interpreta-
tion of this issue? In not doing this, Shell misses an opportunity to examine the inspiration
for the claim that the right is prior to the good—a central commitment of the Rawlsian
position she sets out to criticize.
Despite these shortcomings, Kant and the Limits of Autonomy will prove rewarding for
political theorists seeking to broaden their understanding of Kant’s project. For such read-
ers, Shell’s far-ranging examination of Kant’s lesser-known works against the backdrop of
his personal and political circumstances will undoubtedly enrich their understanding of
one of liberalism’s most important resources.
Eric Entrican Wilson
Georgia State University

Richard Capobianco. Engaging Heidegger. Toronto-Buffalo-London: University of Toronto

Press, 2010. Pp. xvii + 182. Paper, $24.95.

Richard Capobianco gives us a clearly written book for specialists in Heidegger studies
that is often exemplary in marshalling textual evidence, in its appreciation of contextual
nuance, and in the circumscription of its project. Engaging Heidegger opens its first chapter
establishing a polemic, on the one hand, against those (a) who suggest Heidegger’s focus
changed over the course of his career from “Being” to something else (Ereignis); and, on
the other hand, against those (b) who contest the “standard version” of Heidegger (that
there is a shift in his thinking from Dasein as the occurrent place of Sein to thinking das Sein
selbst) by suggesting not only was there was no historical evolution, but that Sein was never
Heidegger’s focus. Thomas Sheehan, an exponent of the latter view, serves as Capobianco’s
foil for advancing a version of the standard version; namely, that throughout his career “Be-
ing” was the “Ur-phenomenon” for Heidegger, that “he named and renamed [it] again and
again over the course of his lifetime of thinking,” that “the abundant variety of names that
he put into play succeeded in bringing into view the varied features of this one, simple phe-
nomenon” (4). Capobianco’s project is “intra-textual,” and, notwithstanding a few remarks
regarding linguistic formulations, offers no critical assessment of Heidegger’s thinking.
The first chapter sets the stakes: “The Fate of Being” draws the line between proper
and improper readings of Heidegger according to the determination of what truly was
die Sache (“the matter”) of Heidegger’s thinking: ‘Sein,’ which Capobianco defines as “the
temporal-spatial, finite and negative, appearing of beings in their beingness, which calls
forth and even compels from the human being (Dasein) a correspondence in language that
allows both what appears—and appearing itself—to be made manifest meaningfully” (4).
Capobianco’s argumentative method engages and parries two strategically different
“differences”—one (a) is a difference in die Sache due to Heidegger’s evolution, and the
other (b) a difference that abjures the standard version of Sein as Heidegger’s Sache—so
as to bind Being and beings, Being and appearance, Being and the “event” (Ereignis) that
opens up the clearing (Lichtung) and lets beings appear and be the beings they are, so
tightly as to afford no meaningful place for either (a) or (b).
So, for example, Capobianco meticulously argues that, while Sein is das Sein des Seienden
(“the being of being”), it must not be confused with die Seiendheit des Seienden (“the beingness
of being,” metaphysics), and thereby he binds Sein absolutely to Seienden without reducing
the former to the latter. Or, when he addresses a passage of Heidegger about the giving
(Es gibt) of Being often read to indicate Sein must be thought apart from Seienden (21),
324 j o u r n a l o f t h e h i s t o r y o f p h i l o s o p h y 5 1 : 2 a p r i l 2 0 1 3
Capobianco sees this only as evidence that Sein is die Sache and dismisses its “separability”
from beings. “Ereignis: (Only) Another Name for Being Itself” continues this rejoinder to
(a) and (b) which see Ereignis as what “gives Being,” insisting that “Being itself [should]
be thought as Eriegnis” (49).
The core of Engaging Heidegger (chapters 3–6) offers us compelling surveys of Heidegger’s
thinking about being “at home,” Angst/astonishment, and Lichtung/light that adduce evi-
dence of a change in Heidegger’s thinking. Here Capobianco is at his best; for example,
chapter 3 artfully leads us from Heidegger’s early identification of Unheimlichkeit (“uncan-
niness”) with Dasein’s relation to Being, to the middle Heimkehr (“return home”) revolving
around readings of Sophocles, to the later, untroubled Heimat in Gelassenheit (“home in
letting-be”). This coheres well with the chapter “From Angst to Astonishment,” which details
a similarly nuanced movement from the anxious self-alienation of the early to more pacific,
joyful later Heidegger. Similarly, in two chapters on Lichtung (“light”), Capobianco shows
the early Heidegger’s move, by way of the Greeks, from Da-sein as the lighting of Being to
the later, non-photic clearing of Being, where ‘clearing of Being’ is read subjectively, rather
than objectively (which would make room for claims made by [a] and [b]).
Chapters 7 and 8 do not seem integral to Capobianco’s argument and lack the scholarly
tone we see in the earlier chapters. The seventh chapter, on dwelling and architecture,
is a polemic against deconstructionism/postmodernism and modern architecture that
caricatures the former as little more than nattering nabobs of negativism and the latter as
having “no presence and power” (130). In contradistinction to the book’s core, his conclu-
sion that “a strong and even vehement resistance to identity, meaning, and place still holds
sway in contemporary postmodern thinking” (129) lacks circumspection, nuance, or much
documentation; the cramped view that favors Victorian architecture against, apparently,
everything modern sells both Heidegger’s philosophy of art and architecture short, to say
nothing of deconstruction or postmodernism.
The final chapter yoking together Heidegger and Lacan via Antigone is the oddest
and possibly destabilizes Capobianco’s position. Capobianco’s Heidegger is a thinker of
plenitude, dwelling, identity, joy; Lacan is, if anything, a thinker of lack, painful jouissance,
absence permeating the symbolic order, and the darkness of the Real.
Engaging Heidegger succeeds in advancing the cause of establishing Sein as the unchang-
ing Sache of Heidegger’s thinking. Whether the matter is settled remains open, as does the
question of how sachlich Heidegger’s thinking was of the Sache.
Reginald Lilly
Skidmore College

Iain D. Thomson. Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2011. Pp. xix + 245. Paper, $27.99.

Iain Thomson’s Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity is an exceptional piece of Heidegger schol-
arship, providing detailed, informative analysis while remaining highly readable.
Thomson begins by reprising the argument from his earlier Heidegger on Ontotheology:
Technology and the Politics of Education (Cambridge, 2005), namely, that the concept of
ontotheology is key to understanding Heidegger’s thought. Ontotheologies comprehend
“the intelligible order in terms of both its innermost core [ontology] and its outermost
form or ultimate expression [theology]” (10). Thomson examines Heidegger’s claim that
these understandings of reality change over time, a history of being comprised of distinct
metaphysical “epochs” of intelligibility. Thomson recounts Heidegger’s project as an at-
tempt to overcome ontotheology, particularly its modern and late-modern forms, in which
entities appear solely as objects for control or resources for optimization.
Doing so requires cultivating a plural realism whereby entities are recognized as richer
in intrinsic meaning than we can capture. Thomson shows that Heidegger’s analysis of
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