Thursday, October 22, 2009

Philosophical food fight ...

... Heil Heidegger!

A good many of the comments are not exactly examples of dispassionate discourse. I'm no big fan of Heidegger, who seems to have been a pretty sorry excuse for a human being, but it seems his philosophy ought not to be judged exclusively in terms of his appalling behavior. To ban the publication of his works is up there with banning Wagner's operas. His influence is undeniable, and I can't see how you can examine the ideas of those he influenced without also examining what Heidegger wrote. He is, by the way, not the only German philosopher to emply the term Dasein. Karl Jaspers used it also, but not as Heidegger did. It is, after all, a perfectly common German word.

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