Epistemology

What Is Called Thinking?

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Martin Heidegger

1954

Published from lecture courses given at Freiburg from 1951 to 1952, this work is Heidegger's most sustained meditation on the nature of thinking itself. He begins with a provocation: the most thought-provoking thing in our age is that we are still not thinking. What calls us to think, he argues, is not a problem or question but something that withdraws — Being itself as it retreats from presence. The lectures unfold through a sustained engagement with Nietzsche and the pre-Socratics, arguing that genuine thinking is not calculation or representation but a kind of following — a response to what calls and claims us before we have learned the name of what is calling.