Fazzo, Silvia and Makuc, Jaka, “Heidegger’s teaching on Metaphysics Lambda 6 (HGA 62 , pp. 102-105): a challenge for Aristotelizing scholars”, Kronos VOLUME XI / 2022 / ISSN 2392-0963, pp. 72-85

MH' approach to Aristotle is highly unconventional. It offers a crucial key towards MH's own philosophy. As a specimen, our paper deals with MH's deconstructed approach to a book by Aristotle – Metaphysics Lambda – as in HGA 62, summer semester 1922. Aristotle’s Metaphysics Lambda played the overarching role in the Aristotelian scholarly tradition, whereas the young MH, for the sake of his 1922 Freiburg classes, reduces it to bits and pieces. Here, we put in the middle his short but significant quotes from this book. We focus on MH’s most original methodological attitudes. We find that MH’s quotes are fully idiomatic, refilled as they are with new meaning and values: his Übersetzungen are in no way meant to be just literal translations. In fact, in MH’s own view, the remaining part of his class can be regarded as an investigation and exegesis of his own Übersetzungen from Aristotle. This offers the chance to contextualize Heidegger’s way of treatment of Aristotle's Metaphysics books, particularly Lambda, in the early 20th c. German Universities. A main role was played by Werner Jaeger’s youth monograph (Studien zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Metaphysik des Aristoteles, Berlin 1912) which was credited with immediate success within the German academic milieu: Jaeger’s hypothesis were promptly amplified and taken as a paradigm in the 1919 revised edition of Ueberweg-Praechter Grundriß …– i.e., in MH’s favorite reference work for the sake of MH’s 1922 classes. We may conclude that Jaeger’s negative reconstruction of the aim and scope of Aristotle's first philosophy underlies MH’s attitude toward Lambda and other Aristotle Metaphysics books.