Sunday, February 12, 2006

Why Philosophers are sometimes full of it

For example:

For it was Heidegger's radical assault on Sartrean humanism that had set the tone and provided the ammunition for the subsequent structuralist attacks.

In his 1941 essay "Recollection in Metaphysics," Heidegger declaimed, "The history of Being is neither the history of man and of humanity, nor the history of the human relation to beings and to Being. The history of Being is Being itself and only Being."

Five years later, in his 1946 "Letter on Humanism," which had been addressed to a French interlocutor, he claimed that the concept of "man" was a hindrance to anyone who wanted to understand the mysteries of Being. The "Letter," a manifesto of radical "anti-Sartrism," would in many respects become the foundational text of postwar French philosophy.

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