Heidegger contrasts the epistemological notion of truth as correspondence with his ontological notion of truth as disclosure. Another friend of mine, rather different in attitude from the friend mentioned above, once told me that the truths of fiction are “more true because they are fiction.” I think that’s a somewhat over-the-top way of making the point but I believe I understand what he is trying to say. In a similar manner to Heidegger, he has rejected the correspondence theory of truth, according to which we divide literature into fact and fiction, in favour of a notion of truth that can better be described as revealing or disclosing the intrinsic nature of the world. Rather than a relationship between propositions and facts about reality, alétheia is the disclosure of reality itself.

¶ 8:03 AM 0 comments

Zwicky's second essay is a humorously written monologue from the perspective of a cowboy in an Old Western saloon. This piece is an interesting complement to others in the book in that, unlike Bringhurst's discussion, for example, which traces some of the historical rejections of poetry by philosophers, here Zwicky is questioning the fervent celebration of poetry by an influential philosopher, "Marty Heidegger." The cowboy narrator is suspicious of what it means to think of poets the way Heidegger does. To think of language as the constitution of Being and to think of poets as the masters of language potentially eliminates humility from poetic acts of attention. Does the world exist outside of language? The cowboy cautions: "If you think it's obvious the world is out there, turns out you have to give up on bein able to provide a proof fer how you know that." Ultimately, we all have to decide what to believe in; whether it is to follow Heidegger's mythic ethos or acknowledge that there is a world outside of logic, outside of language. This choice, Zwicky reminds us, is fundamentally ethical.

¶ 7:28 PM 0 comments

Of late, I’ve been feeling cold about the web. So much of what is going on is the ordering of nature, which, if you believe Heidegger, is the inevitable drive of technology. And “dangerous” for our humanity.

¶ 4:11 PM 1 comments

What Heidegger is saying here that perhaps being cannot be defined, however, Being, which one should not confuse with being, could be defined.

¶ 8:10 AM 0 comments

How do we know that it is language itself that creates these differences in thought and not some other aspect of their respective cultures?

One way to answer this question is to teach people new ways of talking and see if that changes the way they think. In our lab, we've taught English speakers different ways of talking about time. In one such study, English speakers were taught to use size metaphors (as in Greek) to describe duration (e.g., a movie is larger than a sneeze), or vertical metaphors (as in Mandarin) to describe event order. Once the English speakers had learned to talk about time in these new ways, their cognitive performance began to resemble that of Greek or Mandarin speakers. This suggests that patterns in a language can indeed play a causal role in constructing how we think.

¶ 6:32 AM 0 comments

Furthermore, I am always found in a mood, a Stimmung. This is mood is the strong Aristotelian sense of pathos, a passion of the soul or an affect, something befalls us and in which we find ourselves. The passions are not, for Heidegger, psychological colouring for an essentially rational agent. They are rather the fundamental ways in which we are attuned to the world. Indeed, musicologically, Stimmung is linked to tuning and pitch: one is attuned to the world firstly and mostly through moods. One of the compelling aspects of Heidegger's work is his attempt to provide a phenomenology of moods, of the affects that make up our everyday life in the world.

This is another way of approaching his central insight: that we cannot exist independently of our relation to the world; and this relationship is a matter of mood and appetite, not rational contemplation.

Such moods disclose the human being as thrown into the 'there' of my being-in-the-world. As Jim Morrisson [singer for The Doorrs] intoned many decades ago, 'Into this world we're thrown'.

¶ 11:13 PM 0 comments