New Books in History Martin Heidegger, "Being and Time: An Annotated Translation" (Yale UP, 2026)
Feb 23, 2026
Cyril Welch, professor emeritus and long‑time Heidegger teacher who produced a new annotated translation of Being and Time. He explains how decades of classroom work shaped the translation. He discusses teaching strategies, Heidegger’s ties to Greek thought and phenomenology, everydayness and authenticity, tone and translation choices, and why the book’s unfinished form matters.
01:25:49
Use Novels To Ground Heidegger's Philosophy
- Welch pairs Being and Time with novels because both reveal lived situations and help students see philosophy as an account of where they are.
- He regularly used Faulkner's Go Down Moses to make Heidegger's dramas concrete for students.
Heidegger Redeems Greek Philosophy
- Welch argues Heidegger re-reads Plato and Aristotle to recover questions about being-in-the-world rather than being-in-nature.
- He sees Heidegger redeeming ancient texts by showing they assume our being-in-a-world prior to naturalistic accounts.
Practice Phenomenology Don’t Just Read It
- Do phenomenology by looking at phenomena yourself and suspending received opinions; practice it rather than only read about it.
- Welch recommends readings from Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty and notes Merleau-Ponty's short essay as an entry point.
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Intro
00:00 • 2min
Cyril Welch's academic background
01:52 • 1min
Origins of the translation in teaching
03:11 • 7min
Teaching method: reading Being with novels
10:12 • 4min
Heidegger and ancient Greek thought
13:45 • 9min
Phenomenology: look for yourself
23:09 • 8min
Everydayness and the philosophical task
31:07 • 10min
Historicity and communal seeing
40:50 • 5min
Authenticity as taking ownership
45:33 • 8min
Heidegger's tone and colloquial passages
53:30 • 3min
Translation style: balance of ordinary and special
56:20 • 5min
Footnotes, marginalia, and later revisions
01:01:19 • 6min
The unfinished project of Being and Time
01:07:46 • 6min
Form, age, and philosophical style
01:13:39 • 2min
Hopes for readers and teaching advice
01:15:46 • 6min
Outro
01:21:35 • 2sec
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A full century ago, a young and relatively unknown philosophy instructor in a small town in Germany would publish a book that would be swiftly picked up and radically reshape the intellectual landscape around it. Everything published before could now be reread in a new light, while everything after would often be seen as a sort of development in response to this book. Its author was Martin Heidegger, and the book was his Being and Time (Yale UP, 2026), one of the most important and influential works in the history of philosophy. Due to the difficulty of the text, filled with dense neologisms or unconventional uses of common terms, Heidegger’s work has proven a consistent challenge for any translator trying to render him in English. The first attempt was by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson in 1962, with a repeated attempt by one of Heidegger’s students, Joan Stambaugh, arriving in 1995, with revisions by Dennis Schmidt in 2010. Now in 2026, Cyril Welch has brought his own translation to publication. Initial work began several decades ago in his classroom where he was trying to teach the text, and so he started offering up his own translations of key passages for his students. Over time these translations were revised and added to until eventually he found he had enough to consider formal publication. The publication was held back for some time, but now is finally able to come to light, giving both seasoned and fresh readers of Heidegger a chance to read his work anew.
Cyril Welch is professor emeritus of philosophy at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, Canada.
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