Heidegger

Why Foucault as “basically a Nazi”?

Getting some flak for the placement of Michel Foucault on this spectrum between Marx and Heidegger. So: remember that Foucault himself said: “I am simply a Nietzschean.” And: “Heidegger has always been for me the essential philosopher.”* Heidegger was a member of the National Socialist Party in the 1930s and 1940s. Foucault was a member […]

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Viktor Frankl: On the original preparation for the gas chambers

Frankl was a Holocaust survivor and Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of Vienna Medical School: I became acquainted with the last stages of corruption in my second concentration camp in Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity

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German philosophy in pre-World-War-II Japan

In Western nations, there is a clear connection between philosophy and totalitarian politics in the 20th century. Hegel’s philosophy, for example, took a “left” turn in Marx’s thinking — which Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin drew upon — and it took a “right” turn in Treitschke’s and Nietzsche’s thinking — which Goebbels, Hitler, and the National

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Philosophy’s longest sentences, part 4

My fourth and final contribution to contest, my earlier three being from John Stuart Mill, Immanuel Kant, and Aristotle. I am surprised that we have no entries from Hegel, Fichte, or Heidegger, noted for their why-say-it-in-eight-words-when-sixty-are-available tendencies. But to my knowledge, the longest sentence written by a philosopher is the following 309-word original from the

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