At the end of 1928 Husserl retired as Professor of Philosophy at Freiburg and Heidegger, who had once been a favorite pupil, took his place. Husserl had apparently expected that Heidegger would carry on his work of trying to find certainty through the so-called 'scientific' investigation of ideas; but during the time that Heidegger had been away from Freiburg he had published Being and Time and had become famous in his own right at least amongst students; although no one seemed able to say very clearly what the book was about. Indeed Heidegger seemed to be saying (so I gathered) that 'certainty' could not be put into words: it was to do with an attitude, a state of mind, a performance: words were good for saying what things were not; they were not good for saying what things were. I thought -- Well, yes, certainly, I have come across this sort of thing before.

Heidegger was due to give his inaugural lecture at Freiburg in July 1929. There was excitement amongst students at the prospect of this lecture: it was felt - as it had been about Einstein ten years previously - that there was something liberating about Heidegger's vision of what was beyond the bounds of conventional thought. I said to Franz, who had tried to read Being and Time, 'But how will Heidegger lecture if he does not trust in words! Will he come on and be silent? Will he make noises no one understands?'

Franz said, 'People seem to feel they understand. Perhaps this also says something about the nature of words.'

Bruno wrote to say that he was coming from Berlin to hear the lecture: Heidegger's fame had spread. I thought - Bruno and Franz will meet! What I feel about this cannot easily be put into words.

Pp. 114-5

¶ 4:49 AM 0 comments

This partly ironic, self-conscious Will to Order – a classificatory impulse that is supremely aware of its own futility, and of the fatal contingency of its classificatory criteria – is the precise juncture where the archival and/or encyclopaedic impulse in contemporary art enters into the picture: the "art of classification" that is implied in the archive, the atlas and the encyclopaedia (or its corollaries, the data-base and image-bank) is an integral self-reflexive part of what Martin Heidegger has called "the fundamental event of the modern age" – the "conquest of the world as picture."

And with Wood, Heidegger’s understanding of the work of art as a ‘clearing’ [Lichtung] comes to mind – as well as his way of thinking ‘off the beaten track’ [auf dem Holzweg, which literally means ‘on a track in the wood’]. Whatever weight the viewer might put on such references, they indicate that Brunner’s pictures, which on a first glance might appear formal and strict, at a closer look also have a playful, even ironic side.

¶ 11:01 AM 0 comments

[H]e sounds like Heidegger when he speaks of "our unproblematic openness to the world" and of how "we find ourselves always already engaged with the world". Like these existential phenomenologists, McDowell makes the bold claim that "this is a framework for reflection that really stands a chance of making traditional philosophy obsolete".

¶ 7:49 AM 0 comments

"We are part of the real world. Some of us have cars, some of us don’t. We just work for ourselves, and we take care of ourselves. We like to fix up cars, motorbikes, you know. I drive a VW bus. It’s me. It’s part of my blood. Urban bohemia? If you’re a part of it, you get it. If you’re not, ignore it.”

Is Courtney Taylor the new bohemian? “That’s why I throw around names like Nietzsche, and Mohammed and sh*t. I don’t care. I studied enough Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Sartre, and it’s really about where the f*ck did I park my car."

¶ 8:48 AM 0 comments

Heidegger’s most important point was that it is impossible to separate a person from the earth. Without the “world,” a human being could not know, grow or even live. A person is like a tree planted in the earth; without the earth, the tree could not exist.

¶ 11:08 PM 0 comments

The thing is even Heidegger recognized that we are thrown into this world without our asking to be.

¶ 8:53 AM 0 comments

The influential German philosopher Matin Heidegger believed that truth was not always readily discerned. Sometimes truth must be unearthed.

The staff of Aletheia Counseling Center keeps this in mind when they help guide their clients down the road to healing. They have helped people in the local area deal with everything from mild anxiety to sexual abuse and drug addiction.

¶ 9:28 AM 0 comments

I’m ready to be great at something. And not just to be Great, but to put the work into it to really understand it, to be an authority on it. When I was a philosophy major, I dreamed of being the Heidegger scholar studied enough to get a glimpse of his unpublished, untranslated papers tucked away in a small German library.

¶ 5:45 PM 0 comments

heidegger, n. A ponderous device for boring through thick layers of substance. "It's buried so deep we'll have to use a heidegger." Also useful for burying one's own past.

¶ 3:59 PM 0 comments

He found her in the high, echoing entrance hall. She was sitting on a chair beside an elephant's-foot umbrella stand, pulling on a pair of black gum boots. She was already wearing a big, padded coat with a hood. She said she was going for a walk, that she was trying to persuade granddad to go with her, and asked Quirke if he would like to come, too. He knew that he would remember forever, or for however long his forever would be, the look of her sitting awkwardly there with one foot raised and her face turned up to him, smiling. He spoke without preamble, watching her smile as it dismantled itself in slow, distinct stages, first leaving her eyes, then the planes besides her eyes, and last of all her lips. She said she did not understand. He told her again, speaking more slowly, more distinctly. "I'm sorry," he said when he had finished. She set down the gum boot and lowered her stockinged foot to the floor, her movements careful and tentative, as if the air around her had turned brittle and she was afraid of shattering it. Then she shook her head and made a curious, feathery sound that he realized was a sort of laugh. He wished that she would stand up, for then he might be able to find a way of touching her, of taking her in his arms, even, and embracing her, but he knew it was not going to be possible, knew that it would not be possible even if she were to stand. She let her hands fall limply by the sides of the chair and looked around her, frowning, at this new world that she did not know and in which she suddenly found herself a stranger, in which she had suddenly lost herself.

¶ 8:39 AM 0 comments

This distinction between subject and object pervades all the problems of modern philosophy and even extends into the development of contemporary phenomenology. In his Ideas, Husserl says: "The theory of categories must begin absolutely from this most radical of all distinctions of being — being as consciousness [res cogitans] and being as being that 'manifests' itself in consciousness, 'transcendent' being [res extensa]." "Between consciousness [res cogitans] and reality [res extensa] there yawns a veritable abyss of meaning." Husserl continually refers to this distinction and precisely in the form in which Descartes espressed it: res cogitans - res extensa.

Pp. 124-5

¶ 12:50 AM 0 comments

You cannot, after all, download a painting or a sculpture. The thingness of the thing itself -- all that stuff Heidegger talked about when you read him in college -- cannot be translated, even if an exhibit poster will do for poor college students and poverty-stricken bohemians looking for kitchen decorations. But the rich will still pay for the actual original.

This is antithetical to the American mission. I have nothing against all the great fine artists this country has produced, but they are a carryover from Europe. They are Old World. We'll never overwhelm the planet with brushes and clay and pencils the way we did with celluloid and vinyl and acetate.

¶ 8:27 PM 0 comments

The efficient delivery of pleasure is not what I want out of listening to music. In fact, the technical cult of efficiency, of developing algorithms to maximize pleasure, is part and parcel of the calculating, over-processed and data-saturated world that I turn to good music to escape, to interrupt, or to buffer. I don’t want to listen to what Heidegger, in his famous essay “The Question Concerning Technology,” called a “standing reserve.” What bothered Heidegger was not machines themselves, but the way that machines turn everything into a reserve of potential usefulness. Once you create a hydro-electric dam, then the rushing stream that inspired poets or musicians or hippie trippers becomes, inevitably, a “standing reserve” of power, another item in civilization’s immense calculus of extraction.

¶ 2:19 PM 1 comments

With the death of Heidegger and Sartre, Jurgen Habermas is now regarded as perhaps our leading living philosopher.

¶ 8:42 PM 0 comments

[O]ne of the most exciting things about Heidegger's philosophy is that it focuses on questions that one rarely encounters anywhere else (and which Heidegger thought were nearly completely new to the history of Western philosophy). These questions center around "Being." This may sound like a bit of metaphysical, mystical, overly obscure gobbledygook, like a question of Spirit or Life Souls or something, but it's really pretty direct.

¶ 8:38 PM 0 comments

It’s lazy for us to crave the goal without the effort, without the journey. The philosopher Martin Heidegger said: "Seeking itself is the goal."

¶ 8:31 PM 0 comments

[Corinna] Bath calls into question "computer science modeling that rests on the Cartesian epistemology," or the belief that way we know that we really "know" something is by having no doubt about it.

If our semantic markup reading robot finds markup asserting that a certain relationship exists and does not find any markup asserting that it does not exist - ought we conclude that we've determined the truth of the matter? Particularly if not all perspectives on the matter have been taken into consideration in even formulating how the situation is described, then an assertion that a particular object has a certain property or two subjects have a particular relationship may be woefully inaccurate in describing reality. There are a lot of things people disagree about and there's a lot of knowledge that people deny for political convenience. The absence of doubt is not sufficient basis for determination of truth.

...

Bath isn't suggesting that the semantic web should be rejected, quite the opposite in fact. "I am convinced," she says, "that the perspectives I tried to sketch here can contribute to build better semantic systems or even prevent them from failure in function or on the marketplace."

¶ 2:38 PM 0 comments

Contra what Kirsch implies, when Heidegger writes about earth he isn't referring to, you know, physical stuff per se — not rocks, or trees, or door-latches. Instead, he's referring to the tendency of things to resist our ability to understand, or even to notice, them. There's a whole realm of the unknown and not-understood out there, and it surrounds and contains us, even makes up a great deal of our physical self and our psyche, and this is what Heidegger has in mind when he writes about the earth (yeah, I know, it's an odd term, but it plays into a whole series of extended metaphors in Heidegger's writings, so let's let it slide).

¶ 1:51 PM 0 comments

Above all I think it is important that we as philosophers enjoy our discipline, as there is nothing that replaces the satisfaction that comes from better understanding a bit of Heidegger, getting that one point up on your substance dualist friends, or even being stumped by the neighborhood idealist.

¶ 11:37 AM 0 comments

In Kauffman’s emergent universe, reductionism is not wrong so much as incomplete. It has done much of the heavy lifting in the history of science, but reductionism cannot explain a host of as yet unsolved mysteries, such as the origin of life, the biosphere, consciousness, evolution, ethics and economics. How would a reductionist explain the biosphere, for example? “One approach would be, following Newton, to write down the equations for the evolution of the biosphere and solve them. This cannot be done,” Kauffman avers. “We cannot say ahead of time what novel functionalities will arise in the biosphere. Thus we do not know what variables—lungs, wings, etc.—to put into our equations. The Newtonian scientific framework where we can prestate the variables, the laws among the variables, and the initial and boundary conditions, and then compute the forward behavior of the system, cannot help us predict future states of the biosphere.”

This problem is not merely an epistemological matter of computing power, Kauffman cautions; it is an ontological problem of different causes at different levels. Something wholly new emerges at these higher levels of complexity.

¶ 7:18 PM 0 comments