In a message dated 11/10/2009 2:22:47 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx writes: I thought Heidegger was being purposely obscure so that his less-intelligent Gestapo overseers wouldn’t know what the heck he was talking about and leave him alone. I received no support for that early theory of mine. --- Add Grice. When delivering his 1967 William James lectures at Harvard (of all places) he said, provocatively "Heidegger is the greatest living philosopher" WoW (googlebooks, i). For anglo-philosophers (like myself, for I have read mostly anglo-philosophers), Heidegger is a good joke. It all started in Oxford in 1929, when Gilbert Ryle (not yet professor of metaphysical philosophy) reviewed "Sein und Zeit" for _Mind_. When Ryle's student (Ayer) went to Vienna, he came back with that bit of propaganda, that "Das Nicht nichtet" (Nothing noths) -- "Sein und Zeit" was only LATER translated. was a bit of a piece of nonsense. In the Vienna circle quarters, the idea of 'metaphysics' as 'nonsense' (or flouting of syntax rules) was fashionable. Grice tried all his life to untie himself from the Vienna Circle constraints. But he ran along lines different from Heidegger. For Grice, it became increasingly obvious that the Vienna Circle's concerns with metaphysics were too prohibitive. I agree with you, and with Geary, that Heidegger waxes poetical, and that his English translation do not do him any justice. --- Oddly, in Argentina, for those who are NOT committed Griceans, Heidegger is "palabra santa" (sacred word). Many a metaphysics course in the University of Buenos Aires was dictated along nothing but STRICTLY metaphysical lines. Heidegger translates VERY well to the romance languages. "Ser-ahi" for example is the Dasein. I once analysed the "da" in "Dasein", for surely it is idiotic to stick to the explicature of 'there' in things like "Being There" (the film with Peter Sellars). "There is" is NOT 'geographical' in "There is a green hill far away", or perhaps it is. All the other linguistic concoctions of Heidegger make similarly good sense. His prose was refreshing in more than one way. Consider the more literalistic prose of a Jasper as he sticks to his neo-Kantian forefathers. Heidegger is also considered to have taken the phenomenological tradition of Husserl seriously enough. When Sartre made Heidegger popular in France, that was the death for Heidegger. Sartre's French is never as convoluted as Heidegger's German and thus less of a pleasure to read. But again, one thing is to read Heidegger in your night stand for the sheer pleasure of it; another to have to be _tested_ on him in metaphysics courses, where doctors of philosophy feel it's their duty to corrupt their students by instilling on them the Heideggerian jargon. It has to grow naturally on you. Cheers, J. L. Speranza Bordighera, etc.