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American Heideggers … and Heidegger

Martin Woessner: Heidegger in America. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011, 308. ISBN 9780521518376. $95.00 Hardcover

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Notes

  1. I should add that, regarding the parts of his account of Heidegger’s American reception that I know personally, I have a few quibbles (e.g., neglect of Heidegger’s influence on feminism and ecology studies, and perhaps too little on Arendt) but no real criticisms. I am indebted to the author for clarifying for me the chapter plan of HA’s structure.

  2. Werner Brock’s phrase, about which he himself has doubts, in Brock (1935).

  3. Margolis (2003: 16) identifies twentieth century Anglo-American philosophy as the last of four centuries committed above all to “testing, in the most uncompromising ways imaginable, the limits of every conceivable form of scientism”.

  4. “Clearly the ‘best’ analytic philosophers do not resonate with the concerns of the broader culture in the way that figures like Nietzsche and Sartre do” (from Brian Leiter’s posting on analytic vs. continental philosophy at his website, http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/analytic.asp).

  5. After all, the same author who is widely credited with turning the tide against logical positivism quite famously reassured his fellow revisionists in the 1970s that “Philosophy of science [is still] philosophy enough,” and that “To be [is still] to be the value of a variable”. See, respectively, Quine (1976: 151, 1953: 15).

  6. “Even unbiased seeing is a seeing and as such has its position of looking and indeed has it in a distinctive manner, i.e., by having explicitly appropriated it so that it has been critically purged” (Heidegger 1999: 64).

  7. Heidegger (2002: 97–102). On Husserl, Scheler, and Dilthey, see Heidegger (1985: 17, 108f., 128–131).

  8. This, he adds, is “something more or less akin to different preferences of specialty within the same discipline” (Rorty 2007: 123).

  9. Such countermovements, says Heidegger, always remain caught in the traditional (“metaphysical”) understanding of everything as a matter of representation, production, and ordering—because they have not thought through the difference between willing, “not-willing” (as a kind of rebellion against Cartesian-style resolve), and non-willing (which promises to open up the possibility of letting how presencing is actually taking place for us “be”) (Heidegger 2010: 117–122, 37–42).

References

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Scharff, R.C. American Heideggers … and Heidegger. Hum Stud 35, 607–614 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-012-9230-4

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