New Books Network Martin Heidegger, "Being and Time: An Annotated Translation" (Yale UP, 2026)
Feb 23, 2026
Cyril Welch, professor emeritus and longtime translator, offers a fresh annotated English rendition of Heidegger’s Being and Time. He recounts how decades of classroom work shaped the translation. Conversations cover using novels to teach Heidegger, his debt to Greek thought, phenomenology’s call to suspend assumptions, everydayness and authenticity, and key translational choices.
AI Snips
Chapters
Books
Transcript
Episode notes
Translation Born From Classroom Practice
- Cyril Welch began translating Being and Time because teaching it forced him to produce weekly translations for students over decades.
- He started in 1974, copied passages for classes, revised them with student questions, and only later submitted a full manuscript to Yale.
Read Being and Time With A Novel
- Welch recommends reading Being and Time alongside a novel to help students relate Heidegger's phenomenological revelations to lived experience.
- He used Faulkner's Go Down Moses because its character turning points map well onto Heidegger's account of human drama.
Heidegger Redeems Greek Thought
- Welch argues Heidegger reads Plato and Aristotle as already addressing the question of being-in-the-world and that later philosophy misread humans as beings-in-nature.
- Heidegger's project is to recover that original sense of being-there (Dasein) within the Western tradition.
