Despite his initial reservations, Hartshorne nonetheless saw the publication of Sein und Zeit as a signifi cant event. Writing in the Philosophical Review in 1929, he even went so far as to suggest that Heidegger was “the most subtle and painstaking, perhaps the most original and profound, of all contemporary German philosophers.” There was great originality in his work and Hartshorne thought it developed Husserl’s phenomenology in interesting ways, but he still worried that Heidegger had taken a number of wrong steps. Foreshadowing a critique that would later be leveled against Heidegger by Herbert Marcuse and Günther Anders, Hartshorne wondered if Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis of existence offered only a false or “misplaced” sense of concrete, lived experience. He also wondered if Heidegger’s originality was not simply the result of the linguistic “oddness” of his work. The many neologisms and word-plays of Sein und Zeit were striking, especially for a non-native speaker of German, but such linguistic novelty is not always emblematic of philosophical progress. For these reasons and others, Hartshorne was reluctant to cede pragmatism’s many previous achievements to Heidegger and the phenomenological upstarts.

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