Heidegger's Confessions

"Anyone tempted to take Heidegger's occasional references to Augustine as marginal asides, worthy of curiosity or perhaps biographical but not philosophical interest should read Ryan Coyne's Heidegger's Confessions. Coyne's examination of the Heideggerian texts and their histories makes clear that a confrontation with Augustine is indispensable to Heidegger's elaboration of the most important questions, issues, and phenomena the master treated. . . . What is perhaps most impressive about Heidegger's Confessions is the erudition and philological care Coyne exercises in documenting the presence of Augustine in the Heideggerian corpus. Coyne's analyses are meticulous, his mastery of the texts and their histories compelling. These are indispensable virtues in the reading of a corpus as dense and complicated as Heidegger's."-- "Continental Philosophy Review"
"Coyne's new study of Heidegger's extended, complex, and fluctuating relation to Augustine is an excellent piece of work that proceeds through a series of close critical readings of key texts extending from the early post-World War I lectures on religious life through to the 1957 paper on 'The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics.' Taking in central elements of Being and Time, the Contributions to Philosophy, the critique of Nietzsche, and the return to the Pre-Socratics, the apparently narrow focus on Augustine is used to develop an overall reading of Heidegger's deeply conflicted relation to religion."-- "Journal of the American Academy of Religion"