Category: Heidegger
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Birthdays
People celebrate birthdays. But what's to celebrate? First, birth is not unequivocally good. Second, it is not something you brought about. It befell you. Better to celebrate some good thing that you made happen. "It befell you." Riders on the storm . . .Into this house we're born, into this world we're thrown. Thus Jim…
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On the Manifold Meanings of ‘World’
A reader asked whether the concept world in the transcendental-phenomenological sense is a limit concept. Before addressing that question, and continuing the series on limit concepts, a survey of the several senses of 'world ' is in order, or at least those senses with some philosophical or proto-philosophical relevance. 1) In the planetary sense, the…
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Husserl and Heidegger
Husserl seems to think that everything can be brought into the light of adequate, indeed apodictic, evidence. The dark and hidden get their revenge in his most distinguished student, Heidegger.
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Excerpts from Enzo Paci, Phenomenological Diary
May 30, 1957 Glory has no meaning, power has no meaning, your personal success has no meaning. Vanity. That vanity which Husserl always fought. And he was sincere. He did indeed love truth and live for truth. Glory is the mundane, and the meaning of life reveals itself only in the negation of the mundane,…
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The Strange Thought of Absolute Nothingness
I had the giddy thought of absolute nothingness as a boy; the old man I've become can't quite recapture in full its eldritch quality. But he can rigorously think what the boy could mainly only feel. The boy reasoned that if God hadn't created anything, then only God would exist. But suppose no God either!…
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Deleuze and his Chiasmus
This excellent missive just over the transom from a long-time correspondent, the erudite Claude Boisson. He is responding to yesterday's On Gilles Deleuze. Many French philosophers can surely be infuriating. They are to me too, even though I am French. In fact *because* I am French and I remember that there was a time when the French…
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Heidegger and Anti-Semitism, Noch Einmal
I will begin by repeating part of something I wrote back in 2010. It bears repeating. Refer back to the 2010 entry for context. ……………………. I should begin by saying that I haven't yet read Emmanuel Faye's Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy. But if the earlier NYT article is to be trusted —…
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Martin Heidegger on Muhammad Ali
Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes last night gushed over the late boxer as a "transcendent" specimen of humanity. Her over-the-top performance put me in mind of what I call the 'Pincers Passage' in Heidegger's 1935 lecture, Introduction to Metaphysics (tr. Ralph Manheim, Doubleday 1961, p. 31, emphasis added. This Europe, in its ruinous blindness forever…
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Carnap and Clarity
This entry is installment #2 in a Carnap versus Heidegger series. Here is the first in the series. It couldn't hurt to at least skim through it. Part of what I am up to is an exploration of the origin and nature of the analytic-Continental split. To quote from the first installment: If I were…
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Heidegger, Carnap, Das Nichts, and the Analytic-Continental Schism
One of the reasons I gave this weblog the title Maverick Philosopher is because I align neither with the analytic nor with the Continental camp. Study everything, I say, and drink from every stream. Reverting to the camp metaphor, when did the camps become two? In dead earnest this occurred when Heidegger burst onto the…
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The Heidegger Chair Affair
The Black Notebooks have ignited a controversy with repercussions far beyond the Black Forest. Here are three links for those who read German (HT: Kai Frederik Lorentzen): http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/streit-um-heidegger-lehrstuhl-martin-edmund-13452086.html http://www.badische-zeitung.de/literatur-und-vortraege/heidegger-lehrstuhl-perdu–101142616.html http://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/die-austreibung-des-geistes-1.18496785
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Mrs. Hopewell Meets Professor Heidegger
Flannery O'Connor, "Good Country People," in A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories, Harcourt, 1955, p. 185: One day Mrs. Hopewell had picked up one of the books the girl had just put down and opening it at random, she read, "Science, on the other hand, has to assert its soberness and…
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Heidegger’s Black Notebooks to Appear
This old Heidegger man can't help but wait with bated breath for this material to see the light of day. In his will, Heidegger, who died in 1976, stated the order in which his unpublished writings were to be released. That drawn-out process is why the 1,200 pages of the 1930s and 1941 notebooks are…
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Be Here Now
"But how could I fail to be?" By not minding your being here now. The rocks on the trail are here now but they cannot attend to their being here now. They can't appreciate or appropriate or affirm their being here now. As the existentialists rightly pointed out, to be for a human being is…
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Neglected Philosophers
It is unfortunate that a philosopher like Heidegger receives a vast amount of attention, and indeed more than he deserves, while a philosopher such as Wolfgang Cramer is scarcely read at all. I have German correspondents who have first heard of Cramer from me, an American. I admit to being part of the problem: I…