Jeweiligkeit in Chiang Mai.

I sat there, basking in joy, drinking perhaps the best coffee that has passed these sincere, unpretentious lips and mused over the thought that if Plato, Heidegger, Nietzsche and Sartre were still alive today they would surely have come to this oasis of insight to discuss and contemplate the meaning of existence and experience for the first time the sensual pleasures of a traditional Thai massage.

  ¶ 9:10 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

The Diamond at the End of Time graces us with a post-metaphysical poem:

With metaphysics wearing thin
he examined our man Hölderlin.

Spike Milligan would be proud.
  ¶ 8:16 PM 0 comments

  Philip Pullman reports that the film of His Dark Materials will not be bowdlerized as had been reported earlier:

There will be no betrayal of any kind. I would not have sold the rights to New Line if I thought they were incapable of making an honest film from the story I wrote. Every conversation I have had with them, every draft of every screenplay I have seen, reinforces my belief in the integrity and the good faith of the film-makers.

We also learn that New Line are considering making three movies, one for each book in the trilogy. No word on how the death of God will be handled, if at all, but that doesn't happen until book three. TBA.  ¶ 8:11 PM 0 comments

  What is Philosophy?

Paragraph 54

But because poetry, if we compare it with thinking, is in the service of language in an entirely different and distinctive way, our discussion, which follows philosophy's thinking, necessarily leads to a discussion of the relationship between thinking and poetic creation. Between these two there exists a secret kinship because in the service of language both intercede on behalf of language and give lavishly of themselves. Between both there is, however, at the same time an abyss for they "dwell on the most widely separated mountains."

[Next]  ¶ 2:56 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Roger Kimball, in The New Criterion's Armavirumque ruminates on death:

And the so-called existentialists--Sartre, Heidegger, and Co.--brought in the fact of death early and often. (Heidegger even defined man as a 'being-towards-death.')

In that sense of existentialists, which includes Sartre and Heidegger in the same tent, we should also include Epicurus who put it succinctly earlier:

While we are, death is not; when death is come, we are not.

That tent would be supported by both philosopher's including freedom as consequence.

We may now summarize out characterization of authentic Being-towards-death as we have projected it existentially: anticipation reveals to Dasein its lostness in the they-self, and brings it face to face with the possibility of being itself, primarily unsupported by concernful solicitude, but of being itself, rather, in an impassioned freedom towards death --a freedom which has been released from the Illusions of the "they", and which is factical, certain of itself, and anxious.
P. 311

  ¶ 10:33 AM 0 comments

  The Democracts in the USA have had to deal with the problem that the President's cabinet is the most diverse ever. Since diversity that been a Democrat selling point for decades, this has been extremely troublesome for them. If the Democrats cannot continue to sell themselves as the party minorities can vote for to get their place at the trough of government spending, then they may never be a majority party again.

Recently we've been treated to the spectacle of old WASP-ish Democrat politicos trying to demonize the new secretery of state. Nothing brings forth the histrionics more than a member of the flagship minority refusing to stay on the Democrat plantation. As part of the concerted attack on Condaleeza Rice, we find one of the most bizarre uses of a philsopher in the media, when the New Republic accused Ms. Rice of being a Hegelian.

The future Secretary of State was indulging an understanding of politics favored by advocates of a Hegelian view of history--most of whom have, in the last century, been communists. In his lectures on the philosophy of history delivered in the early nineteenth century, the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel argued that history was a slaughter bench on which the happiness of individuals was sacrificed. (He also claimed that the course of history comprised the teleological unfolding of God's plan on earth at whose endpoint all human beings would be free, an idea that also appears to have some supporters in Washington.) The achievement of freedom, or in the case of the communists, the classless society, justified the sacrifices on the path to its perfection--as if such perfection could not, in the end, have come about without those sacrifices. In the aftermath of the Soviet victory in World War II, communist apologists, including sophisticated French intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, argued that the victory of 1945 either justified or sent into oblivion the horrors and crimes of the Stalin years.

Leaving aside the matter that this is a problematic summation of Hegel (Start with folding "God's plan" into the fact Hegel was an atheust) and that it was the left that bent over backwards to rationalize communist tyranny, and continues to do so. All this came about because Ms. Rice said at her confirmation hearing:

I know enough about history to stand back and to recognize that you judge decisions not at the moment but in how it all adds up. And that's just strongly the way I feel about big historical changes.

So, to recap, because she believes historical events should judged by their consequences, and not necessarily by the decisions forced on individuals by events, then, according to the New Republic, she must be a Hegelian/Marxist/Stalinist?

Under any circumstances, we would deserve a Secretary of State who rejects this cynical doctrine that is fit for communism but not for a liberal democracy. But Rice's views are particularly problematic now. How can our diplomats win a war of ideas against Muslim totalitarianism when their boss flirts with a view of history that, for decades, was used to rationalize the worst injustices of totalitarian regimes? Hegel and the Hegelians of the twentieth century were wrong.

The administration didn't mention Hegel, instead the New Republic cynically conjured him up. Certainly the American voter deserves an opposition party that can engage in real criticism of the administration. Instead they get contrived fantasies imagining that the administration that aggressively replaces fascist regimes with democracy, is, in effect, totalitarian.
  ¶ 6:49 AM 9 comments

  What is Philosophy?

Paragraph 53

This corresponding is a speaking. It is in the service of language. What this means is difficult for us to understand today, for our current conception of language has undergone strange changes. As a consequence, language appears as an instrument of expression. Accordingly, it is considered more correct to say that language is in the service of thinking rather than that thinking, as co-respondence, is in the service of language. Above all, the current conception of language is as far removed as possible from the Greek experience of language. To the Greeks the nature of language is revealed as the λόγος. But what do λόγος and λέγειν mean? Only today are we slowly beginning to get a glimpse of its original Greek nature through the manifold interpretations of λόγος. However, we can neither ever again return to this nature of language, nor simply adopt it. On the contrary, we must probably enter into a conversation with the Greek experience of language as λόγος. Why? Because without a sufficient consideration of language, we never truly know what philosophy is as the distinguished co-respondence, nor what philosophy is as a distinctive manner of language.

[Next]  ¶ 8:07 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Angela's Journal on why blogging is good for you:

Well, despite the negative things that Heidegger points out about technology and its relationship to language and thought, he believes that we must say yes to technology; but we must do so in a way that does not alter the essence of our language and thought. We must figure out how to embrace technology without our language and thinking becoming one-dimensional and only focused on giving information instead of "saying-showing." I believe that a blog can be one good way of doing this. In blogs, people can try to communicate on a personal level. We can try to use language as a "saying-showing" on our blogs.

A post a day, keeps enframing at bay.  ¶ 7:50 PM 0 comments

  The generation lost to iPod:

Maybe they should read Heidegger's essay on technology. Dead philosophers sometimes have their uses.

Is Apple tech itself self-indulgent and anti-social, or is it just its users?

pseudo hip-hop sounding lingo
mixed up lowercase/capital letters
What you think this is Bingo?

Well rapped, Princess.  ¶ 7:46 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Translated, the title of this blog post Não se pode pensar em alemão, is "One cannot think in German". Heh.  ¶ 7:52 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Ideant starts with Heidegger and then ranges far and near.  ¶ 7:26 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

The blog of the Claremont Institute (home of the kill-em-all-and-let-allah-sort-them-out school of foreign policy) hosts the Manifesto of the Modern Protester, or Berkelefication:

While the goal of protesting is to end injustice and create a perfect world, it must be realized that justice is continually evolving. Therefore new and hitherto unrecognized injustices come to light every day. This process may never come to an end; Nietzsche and Heidegger might be right. Or perhaps it will come to and end; Hegel and Marx could be right. But even if an end is to come, it is a long, long way off.

Dudes, just a minor Claremontification: both Nietzsche and Heidegger can't be right. It's either the eternal recurrence of the same or waiting for the new god. And Hegel and Marx would be left not right; left behind by the new god's rapture.  ¶ 7:33 AM 0 comments

  What is Philosophy?

Paragraph 52

The expressly adopted and unfolding correspondence which corresponds to the appeal of the Being of being is philosophy. We are introduced to and become acquainted with what philosophy is only when we learn how, in what manner, it is. It is in the manner of correspondence which is attuned to the voice of the Being of being.

[Next]  ¶ 6:51 PM 0 comments

  Heidegger colleague does good.

Edith Stein, the daughter of Jewish parents Siegfried Stein and Auguste Courant, was born October 12, 1891 in Breslau, Germany, today known as Wroclaw, Poland. Before World War I, she studied at the Universities of Breslau and Goettingen, and after the war, at the University of Freiburg, where she received her Doctor of Philosophy degree summa cum laude. Later she became an assistant of Edmund Husserl...[W]ith the rise of the Nazis, her activities became more circumscribed, so she became a postulant nun, joining the Order of Discalced Carmelites, at the convent in Cologne, and taking her final vows in 1935, under the name of Sister Teresia Benedicta...On August 2, 1942, she was arrested by the Nazis and deported to Auschwitz...Father McCarthy, of Newton, Massachusetts, began to take a keen interest in the philosophy and writings of the Jewish nun, naming his next daughter Terisia Benedicta in her honor...Little Terisia Benedicta, now 2, was taken to the hospital on March 20, 1987, having ingested a large overdose of Tylenol, which she thought was candy. She was suffering spasms and loss of consciousness. The amount of the medicament in her bloodstreams was 16 times toxic levels, and it looked as if a liver transplantation might be necessary, but no liver compatible with her age and size was to be found. On the 21st, McCarthy led his friends and acquaintances in a crusade of prayer. On the 24th, the child had made a remarkable recovery.

After nine years of study, the Medical Board of The Congregation of the Cause of Saints voted, in February, 1997, that the child's recovery had been a miracle, with Harvard Medical School's Dr. Kleinman testifying that there was no scientific explanation for the phenomenon. On February 16, 1998, the decree of canonization of Sister Terisia Benedicta of the Cross was entered in the Acta Apostolica Sedis, the official record of the Vatican. One of the two miracles required for sainthood was the recovery of Terisia McCarthy from her Tylenol overdose by the posthumous miraculous intervention of Sister Terisia Benedicta.

In other words, the Vatican is claiming that the nun, dead 45 years, heard the prayers of the priest and his circle, and cured the girl in Massachusetts. This was one of the miracles she needed to be canonized.

It takes a lot of gall!

More like it takes a heck of a gal. It's a mystery, dontcha know?  ¶ 8:48 AM 0 comments

  Reification applied broadly (and the verbing of retrojection):

In effect retrojecting Lukács' analysis of reification back across the entire history of Western thought, [Heidegger] sees philosophy from Plato onwards as essentially anthropocentric in nature, implicitly intent from the start on reducing the world to a conceptually determinable, and therefore manipulable, object-for-use.

However Heidegger's reification is different from Lukács':

Where Lukacs’ analyses reified consciousness from within a problematized subject/object metaphysics (unlike Marx, as Heidegger fails to see), Heidegger sets out from the phenomenon of reified consciousness (formalized in the new terminology as inauthentic Dasein) in order to get at the essence behind this appearance.

In Miles Groth's translation of the Postscript to "What is Metaphysics?" Heidegger describes the reification of be-ing as limited to be-ing.

[B]ecause all reification of be-ing arises by way of bringing into be-ing and safeguarding be-ing, and acquires the possibilities of its progress from this, reification stays with be-ing and no doubt takes this for be[ing].

Interestingly, in William McNeill's translation, the reification is of beings.

[B]ecause all objectification of beings is preoccupied with procuring and securing beings and obtains from beings the possibilities of its own continuation, this objectification keeps to beings and even considers beings to be being.

And in the original translation the reified is what-is.

[B]ecause all objectivisation of what-is ends in the provision and safeguarding of what-is and thus provides itself with the possibility of further advance, the objectivisation gets stuck in what-is and regards this as nothing less than Being (Sein).

The differences above demonstrate that Heidegger's way of thinking is reified in the anglophone world--the translation of texts is reification--as Heidegger indicated.  ¶ 10:09 PM 1 comments

  Reification in software:

Reification is a popular technique to reduce complexity of the software design process. This technique has to be re-investigated for the comprehensive object-oriented approach. Object-oriented specifications comprise structure and behavior of systems. Due to this sophisticated idea two kinds of reification appear: data reification and action reification.

There's another, (more?) pernicious, form of reification in software: when user requirements are transmitted to the software designer. Ideally the person designing the software should sit down with the user, and design an application according to the user's requirements, but for a variety of reasons designers get requirements from people who are not the users. When that is the case, while the software itself may have an object representing the user that is reified--with all the compromises that requires--in addition the user object is itself based on reified users and not actual users--reality-based users and not real users.  ¶ 7:58 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Jacob G. Corbin ponders those whom gals prefer to date:

she's one of those Overachiever Girls - you know the type I mean? They often graduate high school early, probably with a 4.0. Probably play violin, piano, or both. Dress dowdy. Then they get into college, fill out (they're usually late bloomers), turn into hipsters, and date pretentious older guys who talk about Heidegger and obscure Argentinian poets.

Pretentious? Moi? The only Argentinian I talk about is that filet mignon I had rare the other night.  ¶ 7:29 AM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Jus Gladii, is having a hard time:

I would swear that Joan Stambaugh, translator of my edition of Being and Time, belongs to the neo-masochist school of academia.

Really? I thought she was in the first wave. What with having retired and having to make way for post-freedom neos:

Whenever sexual freedom is sought or achieved, sado-masochism will not be far behind.

  ¶ 7:17 AM 0 comments

  What is Philosophy?

Paragraph 51

It looks as though we were only posing historical questions. But, in truth, we are considering the future nature of philosophy. We are trying to listen to the voice of Being. Into what kind of tuning does this put contemporary thinking? The question can scercely be answered unequivocally. Presumably a fundamental tuning prevails. It is, however, still hidden from us. This would indicate that our contemporary thinking has not yet found its unequivocal path. What we come across is only this--various tunings of thinking. Doubt and despair, on the one hand, blind obsession by untested principles, on the other, conflict with one another. Fear and anxiety are mixed with hope and confidence. Often and widely, it looks as though thinking were a kind of reasoning conception and calculation completely free of any kind of tuning. But even the coldness of calculation, even the prosaic sobriety of planning are traits of an attunement. Not only that--even reason, which keeps itself free of every influence of the passions, is as reason, attuned to confidence in the logically mathematical intelligence of its principles and rules.

[Next]  ¶ 6:46 AM 0 comments

  It appears that a band named Lomov has a new release entitled Holzwege.

"Holzwege" (meaning wood-ways) is a topic of mine since I've studied philosophy. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger used this scene to describe the way man are used to percept reality. Imagine you awake within a dark forest. You can't percept the whole forest, only the environment around you.

Off the beaten path percept is a verb, but is that a dead-end?  ¶ 12:06 PM 1 comments

  The reification of the customer:

Software engineers with a database background are accustomed to treating customers, products and other business concepts as data objects. From a data-oriented perspective, a key task of business systems analysis is to divide up 'customer-space' and 'product-space' into fixed, predictable, discrete units of customer and product. Customer and product information can then be captured as a set of data records, each representing a fixed set of facts about a specific customer or product.

But from a business perspective, this can be a gross simplification. Customer relationship management is a (collaborative) process of relating to the customer; product management is a process of developing products. Business management often needs much more flexible, fluid, complex notions of customer and product.

The object-oriented way of describing the world is extremely useful, especially for designing and managing components. It is also useful for describing the behaviour of components, and their performance in complex environments. There are excellent techniques for creating objects out of processes, out of relationships, or perhaps even out of nothing. Philosophers and software engineers have a word for this; they call it reification.

  ¶ 1:09 PM 2 comments

  There will now be two movies on the short life of Ian Curtis:

Mrs Curtis will act as co-producer to Williams, along with Tony Wilson, whose Factory Records label formed the basis of Winterbottom's film. The highly rated young Manchester writer Matt Greenhalgh, creator of Manchester's BBC drama Burn It will develop Mrs Curtis's book Touching From a Distance into a screenplay.
Wilson insisted yesterday that the rival bid, with London-based Neal Weisman and musical input from New Yorker Moby, could not succeed without Mrs Curtis's co-operation.

I read Touching From a Distance when it came out and the basic problem with it as a biography is that Ian was estranged from the Mrs during the final creative period of Joy Division. She can relate the background of Ian as a school child, but we really don't get an insight into the creative and thus interesting Ian. That will have to wait for his somewhat mysterious mistress, who was there with him on tours and during recordings, to have a turn at writing a biography, or film.

On the other hand, some element of mystery is necessary for any mythology. I used to consider Moby a deeply spiritual musician inspired by Jesus, but then he started blogging and I now know him to be another pedestrian bore, skilled enough to produce pop music. And judging from his faithful covers of Joy Division songs, he'll probably do a competent job in his movie.  ¶ 6:57 AM 0 comments

  Timothy Clark has a new book out, The Poetics of Singularity:

forms an ethically compelling alternative to the currently dominant cultural/social studies paradigm in literary criticism, a neo-Darwinian understanding of art and life which is sometimes only a disguised version of American nationalism.

Whatever. A friendly American girl once told me it takes a submissive bottom to recognize a dominant paradigm. I am curious about the chapter on Heidegger's Dream of Singularization. Here's a singularity compelling (definition: To exert a strong, irresistible force on; sway) the real universe.

That is the essential swaying of be-ing itself. We call it enowning.
P. 6

  ¶ 8:08 PM 0 comments

  What is Philosophy?

Paragraph 50

However, on what does the τέλος, the completion of modern philosophy, depend, if we may speak of such. Is this end determined by another tuning? Where must we seek the completion of modern philosophy? In Hegel, or not until the later philosophy of Schelling? And how about Marx and Nietzsche? Do they already step out of the course of modern philosophy? If not, how can we determine their place?

[Next]  ¶ 6:47 PM 0 comments

  Took the critters to see the Lemony Snicket flick. A most unfortunate event.

Things were lightened by a drop from Tigerbeat6. The DJ/Rupture album and a CD collection from the first nine twelve inches from the Shockout label. Some great electronically enhanced dancehall, reinforcing the notion that the second age of Jungle is nearly here. Gotta love those basso profundos. Kid606 also included the rupture vs mutmassik disk, which I've already got. Will trade for, let's see, the Julian Young Later book. Drop me a note.  ¶ 4:07 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Eric S. Raymond was asked by Edge (a publicity agency for scientists and technologists who write books for the general public; Eric edited The Hacker's Dictionary and a popular book of analogies for open source software) "What Do You Believe That You Cannot Prove?" and he has blogged his answer:

I believe the most important moment in the foreseeable future of philosophy will come when we realize that mad old Nazi bastard Heidegger had it right when he said that we are thrown into the world and most cope, and that theory-building consists of rearranging our toolkit for coping. I believe the biggest blind spot in analytical philosophy is its refusal to grapple with Heidegger’s one big insight, but that evolutionary biology coupled with Peirce offers us a way to stop being blind. I beleve that when the insights of what is now called “evolutionary psychology” are truly absorbed by philosophers, many of the supposedly intractable problems of philosophy will vanish.

I believe that the way we think philosophical problems changes over time, but the problems themselves never vanish. Otherwise philosophy would vanish in a puff of logic, or some such metaphor.

In Dark Star a smart bomb starts to wise up to the universe and an astronaut tries to reason with the bomb. However, when the bomb thinks through to the Cartesian cogito ergo sum, it blows itself up to be its own big bang of creation, ceasing to exist. The bomb got the wisdom (like modern man), but it didn't love the wisdom (which is what philosophers do).

I just tracked down the original nihilating puff of logic:

"The argument goes something like this: `I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, `for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.'

"`But,' says Man, `The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.'

"`Oh dear,' says God, `I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanished in a puff of logic.

I don't believe everyone getting Heidegger's insight would really wrap it up for philosophy. Then again, I can't prove it either.  ¶ 9:51 PM 0 comments

  Anonymous left a comment in the previous post with the URL for Mitdasein, an online forum on Heidegger. I think online forums are a good idea and I'm disappointed it isn't more popular. I like the idea of going to a specific site when I want to read what people have to say about Heidegger, instead of being interrupted by posts from mailing lists.

The original discussion forums on the internet were mailing lists, followed by usenet news. News has collapsed as a useful mechanism for public discussions because too many parasites post spam on news. To avoid the spam on news you need a moderator to vet every posting and few people are willing to take on that burden on an ongoing basis. To moderate a newsgroup you have to get involved several times a day, or it becomes too impractical to have conversations.

Mailing lists also suffer from spam, but they can make it more difficult to post anonymously (you generally need to subscribe to the list) and they can also filter the mail for spam because it goes through a single server.

Another problem with mailing lists are trolls that respond to every post with obscene remarks about the subject of the list. Yes, there are people so sad, that they spend there lives being negative pests. The perennial Heidegger troll (we're talking years of posting daily garbage) has actually been absent from the lists for a few months, so things there have been less unpleasant.

There are two Heidegger mailing lists on the net. The oldest was hosted at the Spoons Collective for a decade, but the financial backers (U of Virginia) decided to stop funding the list servers. "Free" as the internet is, in the end, someone somewhere needs to play host, paying for the hardware and connections, and administer the list. The list has moved on to an advertising supported list server, but it is on its last legs. There is almost no discussion of Heidegger because most subscribers looking for philosophical discussions are put off by the frequent posts from morally superior fascists and marxists spouting the usual anti-american and anti-semitic prejudices that passes for thinking in so many places these days. This week the superiority of German volk was praised, which, if you think about it, is kind of what you'd expect on a mailing list about a dues paying Nazi.

The younger Heidegger list has been on a roll recently, with several discussions of morality and science, and much quoting of Heidegger and other philosophers. Of course, you need to be fairly thick-skinned to participate in a discussion on the net, but despite the heat, the back-and-forth is ongoing and enlightening. And the list is always a good place to get answers to Heidegger related questions.  ¶ 8:27 PM 0 comments

  What is Philosophy?

Paragraph 49

Of a very different sort is that tuning which made thinking decide to ask in a new way the traditional question of what being is, in so far as it is, and thus to begin a new era of philosophy. In this Meditations Descartes does not ask only, and does not ask first, τί τὸ ὄν, what being is, in so far as it is. Descartes asks what that being is that is true being in the sense of the ens certum. For Descartes, the essence of certitudo has changed in the meanwhile, for in the Middle Ages certitudo does not signify certainty but the fixed delimitation of a being in that which it is. Certitudo here is still synonymous with essentia. On the other hand, for Descartes that which is true is measured in another way. For him doubt becomes that tuning in which the attunement [structure of determination] vibrates to the ens certum, i.e. being in certainty. Certitudo becomes a fixing of the ens qua ens which results in the unquestionability of the cogito (ergo) sum for man's ego. Thereby, the ego becomes the distinctive sub-jectum and thus the nature of man for the first time enters the realm of subjectivity in the sense of the ego. Out of the attunement to this certitudo the language of Descartes obtains the determination of a clare et distincte percipere. The tuning of doubt is the positive acquiescence in certainty. Henceforth, certainty becomes the determining form of truth. The tuning of confidence to the absolute certainty of knowledge which is attainable at all times is πάθος and thus the ἀρχή, the beginning of modern philosophy.

[Next]  ¶ 8:20 PM 1 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

A Moment in the Text, ends a post entitled Heidegger with a quote from a poem of Hölderlin. The quote appears in What is Called Thinking?, where Heidegger focuses on Socrates' answer to the question about deep thought, and love.

Curious rationalism which bases love on thinking! And an unpleasant kind of thinking which is about to become sentimental! But there is no trace of any of this in that line. What the line tells we can fathom only when we are capable of thinking. And that is why we ask: What is called thinking--and what does call for it?

We shall never learn what "is called" swimming, for example, or what it "calls for," by reading a treatise on swimming. Only the leap into the river tells us what is called swimming. The question "What is Called Thinking?" can never be answered by proposing a definition of the concept thinking, and then diligently explaining what is contained in that definition.
P. 21

  ¶ 8:06 PM 0 comments

  In-der-Blog-sein

Maverick Philosopher feels he's been had by Paul Edwards' last book, Heidegger's Confusions:

Twenty dollars for a thin (129 pp.) paperback is bad enough, especially given the mediocre production values of Prometheus Books; but the clincher was my discovery that there is nothing in this volume that has not appeared elsewhere.

On the other hand, it is useful to have this stuff collected in one place instead of dispersed through obscure journals. Paul Edwards is someone persons who haven't read, and would prefer to continue to ignore, Heidegger point to when they dismiss the need to re-examine the forgotten ontology in western metaphysics. So, having these criticisms collected in an available book, makes it easier to review and deal with them; as Lawrence Hinman does in an obscure journal article.

MP:

In a nutshell, the Edwards strategy is this: Heidegger assumes something that Russell denies; therefore, Heidegger is wrong.

Edwards' formative debt to Russell is possibly his major flaw. An especially precarious position because Russell changed his mind, several times. Read the whole thing.  ¶ 7:31 PM 3 comments