Thomas Hager (p. 240) describes well the attitude of a majority of students and professors within the universities, when Hitler and and his Culture Minister demanded that all Jews be removed from their professorships: “German university students were, in general … devoted to making Germany great again. They were strongly pro-Nazi. Among faculty members, there […]
Forcing professors out, 1933 edition Read More »
Professor Kevin Hill drew my attention to Auerbach’s review of Herman Philipse’s Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being (Princeton, 1998) and this excerpt from Philipse in particular: Heidegger’s individualistic notion of authenticity, according to which Dasein has to liberate itself from common moral rules in order to choose one’s hero freely, tends to collapse into a collectivist
Philipse’s book on Heidegger — David Auerbach’s review Read More »
… and experienced, shall we say, the anxiety of incomprehension — then here is some possible consolation. In their 20s, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were among the very top philosophy students of their generation in France. Yet when they tried to read Heidegger in 1931, Beauvoir reported, “since we could not understand a
If you’ve tried to read Heidegger … Read More »
Nietzsche: “Being profound and seeming profound. —Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound. It is so timid and dislikes going into
Nietzsche and Heidegger on clarity Read More »
[First published at EveryJoe.com.] Full disclosure at the outset: I’m a philosopher, and this new series of columns on The Good Life will often be about human nature, knowledge, the meaning of life, and of course politics. So let me start by indicating some of my colleagues’ opinions about politics. A favorite party game for
Are Philosophers Stupid about Politics? [The Good Life] Read More »
[Courtesy of the translator, W. H. F. Altman, here is the text of Martin Heidegger’s speech, delivered on the occasion of a 25th anniversary reunion in Konstanz, May 26-27, 1934.] Martin Heidegger, The Reunion Speech Twenty-five Years after Our Graduation, Reunion in Konstanz on May 26-27, 1934 Dear classmates! Our reunion—after twenty-five years and more—might
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Will Altman: “It is perfectly natural to feel loyalty to the thinker who set you to thinking, to the writer whose writings first made you a careful and devoted reader, and whose example inspired your own way of life as a philosopher.” Altman’s words appear in the concluding chapter of his book on Martin Heidegger,
Loyalty to your first great intellectual love Read More »
Dr. Przemysław Zientkowski’s foreword to the Polish edition of my Nietzsche and the Nazis, translated into English. A PDF version is here, and the HTML version follows. Foreword to the Polish edition of Stephen Hicks’s Nietzsche and the Nazis By Przemysław Zientkowski, Ph.D. History teaches us that in politics—in order to reinforce the message, achieve
Zientkowski’s foreword to *Nietzsche and the Nazis* Read More »