The chapters of The Givenness of Things were first given as lectures in universities, seminaries, institutes, and conferences. They do not seem to have been revised substantially before publication, and at times this is a pity. In the final chapter, “Realism,” we are told that, “Much of the language about society and culture derives from European ‘thought,’ so called, in the period leading to Europe’s great disasters, from the early nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth and after.” Then she continues: “This ‘thought’ was taken up with authenticity, rootedness, ethnic purity, all of which made people profound, as they could not be if they were transplanted, ethnically mixed, speakers of an adopted language.” I regret that, in this hasty survey of a hundred and 50 years of demanding literature, philosophy, and theology, no distinctions are drawn, and not one name or book title is given. Who actually is guilty here? The trouble is that without appropriate care one might very well condemn everything written by Fichte, Hegel, Hermann Cohen, Husserl, and Simone Weil, among others, rather than, as I imagine Robinson has in mind, passages in Schopenhauer, Gentile, and Wagner, Heidegger’s notebooks, and Frege’s diary, to name only a few of the most well-known nasty moments of ideas that rightly should be condemned. I regret too the scare quotes around the word “thought”: a sneer is not an argument.
I wonder how much Robinson really knows about phenomenology. By the way, it's the Rev. Boughton, not Broughton.
Hey, I'd carry openly were I allowed. And tell that to those whose lives have been saved by someoneRead too her pages in The Givenness of Things on how carrying a concealed weapon is a sign of a coward.
who happened to be carrying.
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