But it’s also impossible to set aside Heidegger’s sins—and they cannot help but reduce the ardency with which his readers relate to him. Philosophers like to play it cool, but the truth is that intellectual life depends on passion.A passion for reason, yes. Physicists have a passion, but I can't imagine them wringing their hands about Heisenberg, who accepted the call to Berlin U, in 1943, and spent the war trying to build an atom bomb. Any notion that physics itself is tainted by Nazism or anti-semitism, would be nonsensical, whatever Heisenberg personally thought. Philosophical thinking appears occluded by ad hominem talk. Perhaps that's the most troubling part of the current scandal. If so many smart people are perplexed, is there something rotten in ontology?