Category: Heidegger
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Nominalism and Being
Today I preach on an old text of long-time commenter and sparring partner, London Ed: Nominalism is the doctrine that we should not multiply entities according to the multiplicity of terms. I.e., we shouldn't automatically assume that there is a thing corresponding to every term. Das Seiende is a term, so we shouldnât automatically assume there…
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Heidegger and Wittgenstein: 17 Syllables
One went off the deep endThe other off the shallowStrange century.
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The Thing About Kierkegaard
He presupposes the truth of Christianity. The question for him is not whether it is true but how it is properly to be lived. His concern is the existential appropriation of what is antecedently accepted as true. This is reflected in his otherwise absurd dictum, "Truth is subjectivity." So Heidegger was right when he called…
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Heidegger’s Reduction of Being to Truth
This old article of mine (pdf format) was apparently used in a graduate course on Heidegger. Amazing what one can find while on ego surfari. There are people who say that no one reads the philosophy journals. False. If my articles get read and studied (see the underlining in the above photocopy), then a fortiori for…
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Heidegger: Nazi Philosopher or Nazi Philosophy?
My old friend Horace Jeffery Hodges over at Gypsy Scholar comments on a New York Times book review by Adam Kirsch entitled The Jewish Question: Martin Heidegger. One of the books reviewed is Emmanuel Faye's The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935 (translated by Michael B. Smith). Hodges…
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Günther Anders
I'm rereading portions of Günther Anders' posthumous Über Heidegger. Like Adorno's it is a critique from the Left. Here is a worthwhile webpage on Anders put together by Herbert Marcuse's grandson, Harold Marcuse. Anders was Hannah Arendt's first husband, but apparently his pessimism was too much for her. They were married from 1929-1937. Anders was…
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The Latest Heidegger Controversy
Court Merrigan writes, I wonder if you'd like to weigh in on the newly-intensified debate surrounding Heidegger. Should the man's odious politics disqualify him from being taken seriously as a philosopher, as this book newly translated into English seems to indicate? You may have seen this article, also, on Faye's forthcoming book. This is apart from…
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The Copula: Adorno Contra Heidegger
Time was when I was much interested in the philosophers of the Frankfurter Schule. That was in the 'seventies and 'eighties. Less interested now, I am still intrigued by Adorno's critique of Heidegger. Is it worth anything? For that matter, are Heidegger's ideas worth anything? Let's see. I will explain one aspect of Heidegger's notorious Seinsfrage,…
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Action and Existenz: Blondel and Heidegger
Commentators on Maurice Blondel have often noted the similarity of his thought to existentialism. Blondel’s concept of action, for example, is remarkably similar to the concept of existence that we find in Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Jaspers, Sartre and other existentialists. Herewith, a brief comparison of action in Blondel’s L’Action (1893) with Existenz in Heidegger’s Sein und…
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Paul Edward’s Heidegger’s Confusions: A Two-Fold Ripoff
(This was written 30 January 2006. Paul Edwards, though he made some significant contributions to contemporary philosophy, was a notorious Heidegger-hater. I slap him around good in this piece, ending with a nice polemical punch. He asked for it, and he deserves it. Not that I think that much of Heidegger. Recently, controversy about the…