VANER MUNIZ FERREIRA

This dissertation aims to analyze Heidegger's confrontation with aesthetics, from his early considerations on the work of art in 1936 to his later writings. The engagement with aesthetics is contextualized within Heidegger's interpretation of metaphysics as the history of the forgetting of Being and the preparation for what he calls a "second beginning." Through this parallel with metaphysics, aesthetics is approached in the entirety of its historical-philosophical development, encompassing both its foundation in Modernity and its roots in the concepts of Plato and Aristotle. By revisiting Heidegger's lectures, conferences, and writings from the 1930s and 1940s, this study elucidates Heidegger's implicit dialogue with aesthetics in the essay "The Origin of the Work of Art." Finally, it presents Heidegger's interpretation of aesthetics in his later thought on art, which comes to address questions concerning technology and space. The distinctiveness of Heidegger's thinking on art—neither an aesthetics nor a philosophy of art—is demonstrated through this dialogue, at times implicit and at times explicit, with traditional philosophical conceptions of art.