My last post today! Or is it Heideggeriana? Grice once referred to Heidegger as "the greatest living philosopher". In a message dated 2/16/2015 2:23:33 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, jejunejesuit.geary2@xxxxxxxxx writes: I have not begun to read Heidegger or to contemplate his sermons sufficiently enough to pass judgment on what he preaches. So let's revise what C. B. posted. "Bultmann and Heidegger were colleagues at Marburg in the 1920's". "They attended each other's seminars; and Bultmann appears to have been caught up along with the others who quickly recognized Heidegger and his teaching as something extraordinary." Bultmann said that, reading Heidegger, "thinking has come alive again, the intellectual treasures of the past, long believed to be dead, have been made to speak again." Bultmann: "And it has been found that they bring forth very different things than one sceptically assumed." Bultmann: "There is a teacher." Bultmann: "One can perhaps learn thinking." Bultmann "One can perhaps learn that thinking, that springs as a passion from the simple fact of being-born-into-the-world." "'Now,' Bultmann said to Heidegger, 'you must, like Augustine, write your "Confessions" -- not in the least for the sake of the truth in your thought." Heidegger's face turned to a petrified mask and he left, impolitely, without saying a word. Another quote: "Some say that Heidegger's philosophy is a thing of evil; not only is it 'de-humanizing', but it has corrupted much of 20th century philosophy" This was I think Carnap's idea, and Ayer. Ayer, in Vienna, learned from Carnap, and brought to Oxford the idea that Heidegger's "Nothing noths" was a breach of logical syntax (metaphysics as nonsense). Another quote: "why philosophy has allowed itself to be corrupted by the 'Heidegger case'. -- for the ascription of the quotes vide C. B.'s post, "Permission". Ayer refers once to "a Heidegger" in his 1935 book. Ayer might be particularly interested in Heidegger seeing that Ryle (Ayer's tutor) had reviewed "Being and Time" for the journal "Mind": Ayer: "as there is no place in the empirical world for many of these 'entities', a special non-empirical world is invoked to house them. To this error must be attributed, not only the utterances of a Heidegger, who bases his metaphysics on the assumption that 'Nothing' is a name which is used to denote something peculiarly mysterious." P. L. Heath expresses it pretty well: "The universe at large is fringed with nothingness, from which indeed (how else?) it must have been created, if created it was; and its beginning and end, like that of all change within it, must similarly be viewed as a passage from one nothing to another, with an interlude of being in between. Such thoughts, or others like them, have haunted the speculations of nullophile metaphysicians from Pythagoras to Pascal and from Hegel and his followers to Heidegger, Tillich and Sartre. Being and non being, as they see it, are complementary notions, dialectically entwined, and of equal status and importance; although Heidegger alone has extended their symmetry to the point of equipping Das Nichts with a correlative (if nugatory) activity of noth-ing, or nihilating, whereby it produces Angst in its votaries and untimely hilarity in those, such as Carnap and Ayer, who have difficulty in parsing "nothing" as a present participle of the verb "to noth."" Cfr. "If sentences such as "The nothing noths" and "Numbers speak silently" do express propositions, then one ought to be able to have de re knowledge by acquaintance with the propositions they express." Cheers, Speranza ps.: C. B. in "Re: Reading Heidegger": "if you have not read Heidegger in German, you have not read Heidegger." Well, Carnap read it in German ("Das Nichts nichtet"); Ayer translated. "If you have not read Heidegger in German, you have not read Heidegger" -- but his translator. ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html