Dreyfus and Taylor are inspired by Heidegger; I am inspired by others. If the project on the table were serious history of philosophy, Dewey would be important and the relations between his ideas and Heidegger’s would deserve a close look. Dewey and Heidegger were influenced by different people—Dewey by William James and Darwin, and also by the nineteenth-century idealist philosophies of Hegel and his American admirers. Heidegger, on the other hand, trained in theology and then worked intensively with Edmund Husserl, the main figure in the early development of “phenomenology” as a philosophical method. Phenomenology is the close study of conscious thought, especially the way it is directed on objects, from a first-person point of view. Everyone wants their favorite people included in a tale of progress, and my people differ from theirs.

¶ 2:24 AM