[lit-ideas] Re: 30 years ago today ?
- From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 27 May 2006 21:04:12 -0700
John McCreery wrote:
Perhaps it is time to reexamine our tacit assumption that a great
philosopher must be a good man. Perhaps it is as dubious as the
assumption that philosophy implies politics or vice-versa, which
Richard Rorty challenges using Heidegger as an example.
I'm not sure what's meant by 'philosophy implies politics,' but maybe
it's the notion that one's 'philosophy' underlies one's politics, which
in the non-technical sense of 'philosophy' (one's 'philosophy of life,'
e.g.) seems not only true but very nearly tautological.
In the narrower sense of philosophy, in which a philosopher not only has
a 'philosophy of life,' but actively does philosophy, this is less
clear. Gottlob Frege was the greatest philosophical logician since
Aristotle. He was also a well-known anti-semite. But that Frege thought,
as later did Kurt Gödel, that numbers were objects, would seem to have
little bearing on his bigotry or vice-versa.
People worry about the relation between Heidegger's Nazi sympathies and
the content, or even the usefulness of his philosophical writings. If
he'd been a mathematical logician, surely this difficulty wouldn't have
arisen; but since it has, I can only say that insofar as Heidegger
purports to tell us something about the human condition, I cannot
respect—I think that's the word I want—what he says.
I know that others disagree.
Robert Paul
Reed College
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