Scott McLemee on l’affaire Heidegger.

Every few years, somebody notices that Martin Heidegger was a Nazi -- and it all starts up again: the polemics, the professions of shock, the critiques of his philosophy’s insidious role in the humanities. At times the denunciations have a rather generic quality, as if a search-and-replace macro had been used to repurpose a diatribe again John Dewey or Jacques Derrida. Calls for a boycott of Heidegger’s writings are made, issued by people who cannot name two of them.

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  PopMatters reviews Heidegger's Hegel.

This is not “Hegel for Dummies”, nor does this new translation make Heidegger’s interpretations of Hegel easier to comprehend. In fact, in their introduction, the translators themselves concede that much of Heidegger’s original text is “fragmentary and much less polished than many of his other works.” In places the introduction even reads like the translators’ apology for the incomprehensibility of much of the book, perhaps wishing to absolve themselves of responsibility for the readability of the text.

Some of the lesser Gesamtausgabe volumes have this, it's a list of jottings not a book, problem. If you are interested in Hegel read Hegel, or the secondary lit. Heidegger's only interested in teasing his understanding out of Hegel.

Pieces of the text will literally be Greek to readers, as the text uses not foreign words but characters from foreign alphabets, as well. The Latin, Greek, and German to English translations are as epic in scope as a Gutenberg bible reading.

At this point (first translation), specialists want to get as close to what Heidegger wrote, as possible. Later, the consensus interpretations will present themselves.   ¶ 7:29 AM 0 comments

  The THE reviews Peter Trawny's Freedom to Fail.

Released from the straitjackets of “argument” and ethics, Trawny contends, Heidegger is free to combine the true and the untrue in a poetic drama. “Truth in its essence is untruth”, as the master once wrote. Correction! “Truth is un-truth”; the hyphen signifies concealment, which links to the notion of the “clearing” – the dangerous and ambitious task Heidegger set himself.

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  Dominicana Journal on Laudato Si: Technology and Vision.

The Pope (along with Heidegger and Guardini) is not against technology or science; he is against the “undifferentiated and one-sided paradigm” it has become in our vision of the world. And we should be too.

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  There's a response to Thomas Sheehan's article "Emmanuel Faye: The Introduction of Fraud Into Philosophy?" in Philosophy Today, from François Rastier.

Heidegger having been compromised, to say the least, Dr. Sheehan thinks he can defend him by attacking the reputation of Emmanuel Faye, and by thus jeopardizing his honor.

In so far as I can tell, Rastier's argument can be summed up with: "Faye says Heidegger was Nazi, Sheehan says he wasn't. Everyone knows Faye is right", which is absurd. Heidegger's Nazism has been officially documented since the denazification committee published its report in 1945. Over the decades Sheehan has published many articles critical of Heidegger's Nazism. Sheehan's point is that Faye has added nothing to our understanding of Heidegger, much of Faye's interpretation of Heidegger is wrong (doesn't correspond with what Heidegger wrote or meant), and Faye has altered some texts to support his point of view. This response is an ad hominem attack on Sheehan that never engages with "Emmanuel Faye: The Introduction of Fraud Into Philosophy?".

The open letter is signed by 21 academics. I recognize three names. Sidonie Kellerer I believe studied under Faye. Richard Wolin is a historian, not a philosopher. Johannes Fritsche is the author of Historical Destiny and National Socialism in Heidegger's Being and Time; it's on my list, but I'm into Andrew Mitchell's The Fourfold now.

We append to the present letter a short bibliography intended to enable the readers of Philosophy Today to reach their own conclusions.

Gosh, papers by the same people who signed the letter. They will need to get some "name" Heideggerians on board, or respond to the items in "Emmanuel Faye: The Introduction of Fraud Into Philosophy?", to get any traction.

[Some version of some browsers (UC, Chrome) can't display the response PDF file when you click on the link. Try Firefox, Edge, or downloading PDF file.]   ¶ 1:40 PM 1 comments

  In the Boston Review, Peter Godfrey-Smith reviews Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor's Retrieving Realism.

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.

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  Jon Cogburn interviews Graham Harman.

Meillassoux is certainly not alone in opting for this taxonomical path. Heidegger does it in Being and Time, for instance, by implying that the zuhanden can be found in cases such as tools, the vorhanden in cases such as theoretically accessible or spatially positioned entities, with Dasein as a separate third case found only in humans. But as I have argued since my first book Tool-Being, the zuhanden and the vorhanden are actually two faces of every entity (including human beings) rather than two taxonomically distinct kinds of entities.

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  In Forbes, Greg Satell on tech stories.

We can further understand the relationship between technology and story through another Heidegger essay called Building Dwelling Thinking, where makes the almost tautological—but not quite obvious—point that to build for the world you must first understand what it means to live in it. Stories are how we make sense of what we encounter in the world.

And that, I think gets to the heart of the matter. Technology, when properly understood, is far more than the product of algorithms, microscopes, test tubes and other apparatus, but the revealing of truths in the service of human life. And so, the endeavor can only reach its highest level with humans—and their stories—at its center.

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  Thomas Sheehan's article "Emmanuel Faye: The Introduction of Fraud Into Philosophy?" is now available.

A week after the conference (September 20, 2014) Faye circulated an extraordinary 3500-word open letter in French to the conference panelists, protesting against my presentation and trying to counter some of its arguments. I responded to Faye a week later with a 5500-word open letter refuting in detail each point of his circular letter and further exposing the obvious and quite serious flaws in Faye’s reading of Heidegger.

What follows are the details of the mistranslations, misrepresentations, and falsehoods that populate both Faye’s book and his open letter. Unfortunately it is a long and dreary chronicle. (The footnotes, tedious as they may seem, are crucial to the argument). After examining the evidence, the reader may decide whether or not Emmanuel Faye is engaged in an effort to trash Heidegger without managing to understand him.

Earlier excerpt.   ¶ 1:27 PM 0 comments

  I was aware of one place where Wittgenstein commented on Heidegger.

Michael Tweed has shared another one with me, in "Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Conversations with Rush Rhees(1939–50): From the Notes of Rush Rhees", edited by Gabriel Citron.

21. Reports of philosophical remarks of Wittgenstein’s, from Rhees’s correspondence and notes

When I mentioned Heidegger to him once — I forget in what connexion — Wittgenstein remarked that a man might be obscure and still have something important to say; but he added: ‘But I don’t trust Heidegger’.

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  In NDPR, Chad Engelland reviews David E. Storey's Naturalizing Heidegger: His Confrontation with Nietzsche, His Contributions to Environmental Philosophy.

As long as phenomenology deals with experience from the inside there is no way to transfer it from the human to the non-human world. Some sense of experiencing experience from the outside is necessary. The way to rehabilitate this possibility is to reintroduce animate form and movement, which makes manifest outwardly what is inwardly experienced. In my view, it is this methodological failing that renders the later Heidegger inadequate for a philosophy of nature.

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  Magdalena Holy-Luczaj on the sheltering un-disclosedness.

In order to properly understand this change, it is necessary to analyze another dimension of the Turn, which is a different approach to the problem of concealment. Since On the Essence of Truth the status of concealment is enhanced. According to Heidegger, truth is an “unconcealment” (Un-verborgenheit) that is “bringing out of the concealment.” Although Heidegger already indicated that truth of being as a-letheia originally conceals itself, in Being and Time he focused on its disclosing; the notion of concealment had pejorative meaning as a (merely) “closure” of being. Later, in the lecture On the Essence of Truth, Heidegger draws attention to the verb bergen (as a part of the noun Verborgenheit), which means to hide something in sense of saving and rescuing something. In this sense Verbergen means a “shelter” of being. Thus the notion of “concealment” gains strongly positive connotations.

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  Tom Sheehan on the undisclosed clearing.

As William J. Richardson pointed out over fifty years ago, Heidegger’s lecture “On the Essence of Truth,” delivered in December of 1930 but not published until 1943, is the “decisive point” in Heidegger’s development and constitutes the “breakthrough” in which “Heidegger I becomes Heidegger II.” That breakthrough consisted in Heidegger’s insight into the intrinsic hiddenness of the appropriated clearing. Being and Time had spoken of the hiddenness of thrown-openness, but not in terms of the clearing as such. The inaugural lecture at Freiburg, “What Is Metaphysics?” (1929), took a small step forward when it spoke, somewhat hesitantly, of “the essential impossibility of determining” the clearing, the no-thing encountered in dread. However, it was not until a year later, in “On the Essence of Truth,” that Heidegger began to articulate his dawning insight that the clearing is hidden in and of itself and not because of the limitations of our knowing powers. The lecture reaches its climax in section 6, where Heidegger declares for the first time in his career that, in contrast to ἀλήϑεια-2 as the disclosedness of things, ἀλήϑεια-1, as the openness of the clearing, is un-disclosed, and this un-disclosedness is the very essence of the clearing.

Pp. 223-4

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  The Wichita Eagle reviews Peter Trawny's Freedom to Fail.

But it equally makes little sense to lionize Heidegger. He pursued the truth of being into the clearing of anarchy, as Trawny shows us. There, as part of the necessary concealment to openness, he committed his errant acts (or, more precisely, thoughts). Yet, however he intended them, they remain tied to guilt and transgression, responsibility and principle – not tragic choices, to be sure, but pathetic and culpable ones.

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  Trish Glazebrook on Vandana Shiva, Heidegger, and how agriculture is now a womanized food industry.

Shiva’s assessment does not, however, have a theoretical connection between technoscience and capital, other than historical contingency and a mass of case studies showing how particular technologies have served to empower colonizers. Heidegger’s account of the mathematization of nature can provide that theoretical link. Once the link is made, reflection upon technology is not so essential, and confrontation with it not so decisive—as if Ereignis, the event of being that determines a historical epoch, is ever in any way in human control. Rather, women’s agricultural practices in the global South provide a quiet revolution, an unremarked model of care in the daily reproduction of the material conditions of life. For their work is not a trivial exercise of a small group. According to the FAO some three decades ago, women are globally 70% of agricultural workers and 80% of food producers. More recently, in Ghana, for example, women were growing 70% of food crops in 2003 (GPRS I 2003), but 87% by 2010 (Social Watch Coalition 2010). Women’s agriculture is a practice that opens worlds for billions.

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  Huffington Post interviews Peter Sloterdijk.

Cecil Rhodes’ dictum “Expansion is all” only applies to the sphere of the political with significant qualifications. For the current worlds of money and information, by contrast, it is all the more valid. The spheres of artificial intelligence and intelligent artificiality develop of their own accord an expansionist constitution that has increasingly permeated all aspects of existence. In this sense, existence in the technical world per se is characterized by ever-greater artificialization. Modern and postmodern humans not only live in the “house of Being” (as Heidegger called language), but increasingly in the abode of the technosphere.

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