41–45 of 45 posts
Could anybody explain one of it's new ideas? Did he just improved existing ideas?
I believe he is a bullshit artist but I would love to be refuted.
Heidegger perpetrated nonsense like "Das Nichts selbst nichtet" (The Nothing itself nihilates) [1], which positivists and empiricists rightly disdained. Obviously I am firmly in the analytic camp. If you like a bit of mysticism in your philosophy the later Wittgenstein is your man, especially his thoughts on language games, intersubjectivity and forms of life. A far more incisive set of philosophical tools for unders…
It's notable that Heidegger isn't simply "continental" but specifically taken to be within the "existentialist" branch of philosophy and thus he's been critiqued (and taken up) by a variety of other perspectives.
> The book was a refutation of the distinction between mind and body, and all the fallacies that follow. “I think, therefore I am” was, in Heidegger’s reckoning, a “naive supposition”, an anthropocentric conceit that went all the way back to Plato. Humans cannot be imagined either outside or prior to the world into which they are “thrown” – a bed of land, language, tradition, history and more. Heidegger believed that…
No, Heidegger explicitly attempts to refute and attack Descartes's supposition "cogito ergo sum" (the first therefore). And one can read all of Heidegger's early philosophy as an attempt to undo the errors started by Descartes: Heidegger faults Descartes with stymieing all of modern philosophy with a false first presupposition. Heidegger's fault with Descartes lies in the very first two words: "I think." Heidegger do…
The people who think Heidegger's philosophy is compatible with the Dartesian ego are reinterpreting his concepts to fit their own ways of thinking.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and other Heideggerian ideas, which have nothing to do with Nazism That's begging the question. We want to examine his writings to figure out a) how important is the biographical question to his work and b) how bad were the Nazis and why? Maybe thinking in terms of "Dasein" leads inevitably to death camps. Maybe not. But you can't just assume there's no connection (or that there is one). You have to argue it out.
I think the claim that Dasein has to do with Nazism would need to be demonstrated. I think for any idea it is reasonable to assume it doesn't have anything to do with Nazism until demonstrated otherwise. Dasein's throwness, so far as I can see, doesn't have anything to do with Nazism. Of course there is always the possibility for any idea that it leads to death camps. But it is rather hard to exhaustively explore the…