Husserl Wollheim electron object art

Philosophy TA : Husserl on EIDOS; sceptical student might consider 'electron' post-chromodynamics. ; not as concept ! Individuals ??

See also: Wollheim 68/71 on art objects

Edmund Husserl's 1927 encylopedia article on Phenomenology

Over at aule-browser.com there are now two links to alternate versions of Edmund Husserl's 1927 article on phenomenology: one is a Curl version of the text and one is a version for readers new to his awkward German style.  The latter requires a screen with at least 1024 pixels width (for the time being.)

At the level of web code, the difference between the two is minimal: both use the same source file.  That text file has minimal markup - so it remains very readable and easy to correct.  But the minimal markup in one case does very little and in the other case it reformats the text line-by-line.  As a result, the second version breaks down every sentence into a bite-size phrase formated rather like a paragraph, but with inverse indenting.

Very simple Curl text procedures are declared which permit this: in one case display the text and in the other case, re-format the text. The procedures are
  {article }
  {section }
  {para  }
  {ln }

It is the last which results in most of the reformatting, while the {para } markup has the effect of preserving white-space in the text.  {article } wraps the entire piece and {section } wraps each original division of the article.

This is very similar to the minimal markup which I use for poems
   {poem }
   {stanza }

More information on Curl can be found in English at curl.com and in Japanese at curlap.com

Heidegger's Vom Wesen des Grundes

In 1949 Heidegger had the opportunity to a add a preface to the 3rd edition of his Vom Wesen des Grundes.  He took the occasion to close an additional preface as follows:

Wie wäre es, wenn die Besinnlichen begännen, auf diese seit zwei Jahrzehnten wartenede selbe Sache endlich denkend einzugehen?

When you hear that Heidegger was unapologetic, it can help to remember that twenty years earlier he had celebrated a Fest for Husserl in the company of Edith Stein with whom he had worked on the Husserl texts for inner time consciousness.  Stein had since perished in the Holocaust.
Let us turn to the ending of the book:

dem Dasein als Selbst das Erwachen der Antwort des Mitseins, im Mitsein mit dem es die Ichheit darangeben kann, um sich als eigenliches Selbst zu gewinnen.

It is difficult to read such a closing passage knowing that the Master had a chance to add a thoughtful rewording with less of Self and individual.  Consider this: his one case of collaboration also dates back to 1928 (the year he says gave us his Kant book and this book on "grounds" or "reasons") and in his editor's introduction to that book he suggests that Edith Stein had worked on it as a steno who had added the chapter and paragraph divisions to a "transcription".

Nothing in the closing of the Grounds book evokes You or We.  This is the author who ridiculed Schelling as being a mere "thinker" and not a "philosopher" - this is Heidegger who took the concept of "horizon" and "Eigenwelt" and reached his greatest depths of profundity in evoking the "world" and "transcendence".

So in some matters he was a thoughtless fool and ingrate.  But he also seems to suggest that this book has been denied its readers those past twenty years - and that it is what they have been waiting for (Heidegger is at the time not banned from publishing but banned from teaching.)  What grounds might we have for distrusting the insight of the Master?

One reassuring possibility for his concerned, thoughtful reader is that the mere Schrift of an Edith Stein on empathy and others could not be expected to have interested Heidegger - or yet another possibility is that he also repeatedly neglected to actually read the work of his former lover and later confidante, Hannah Arendt.

But there is a philosopher with whom he will not now be able to communicate, an author who converted to the Catholicism of his youth, with whom he worked closely, the trusted secretary of his own former Master - Edith Stein.

To turn Heidegger on himself: we need not ask for the "reason" that he makes no mention, exposes no regret, but we can be open to someone evoking the "ground" for this neglect.

ad hominem: Dufrenne on Ingarden

1) Ingarden as having followed Husserl

2) Ingarden as a "rationalist" (read: "Cartesian")

[before expanding this post I am going to go through the deplorable 1957 article on Karl Jaspers by Paul Ricoeur as published in translation in the Schilpp collection "The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers" pp 611-642 when Ricoeur was at U. Strasbourg - it contains some nasty bits right from the first paragraph (it promises "personal questions" but presents "Critical Remarks" as an alternative to a futile opposition of "argument ... opposed to argument" - Ricoeur had not yet become 'hermeneutical' in his approach.  This is not some adolescent rant excused as the errors of the young as we might over-look his stay in Munich or his pamphleteering in the camp: this is at his second university appointment and only one step from the new Nanterre venture - this is the young philosopher attacking Jaspers: the verb "to flee" needs to be checked against the original as Jaspers had not "fled" to Basel and the whole compared to Ricoeur 1947, 1948 and 1954.  The Ricoeur paper in Schilpp is entitled "The Relation of Jaspers' Philosophy to Religion" but the title should be "... to Evangelical Protestantism" or, at the most generous, "... to Christian Religion".  The 1981 reprint exposes Jaspers on Heidegger in an expanded section interposed between pages 75 and 76 as an extended insert.]

Replying to Husserl: working notes

prima facie case for revisiting Husserl: the merits of Colin McGinn's phenomenology in Mindsight
   pdf review
and his treatment of Hume; compare and contrast with Husserl's responses to Hume

...
Iris Murdoch on Husserl in MGM and various in S of G ex: the lack of a telos.
...
Science and the Nations:  Raymond Aron (irony, RA introduced J-P S to Huss and Heid)
   RA on philosophy of history
   the effort to prohibit aerial bombardment through amendments to Geneva conventions
   the case for international law
...
  1935  Husserl on the gypsies as outside European life though present throughout
  wp
         In 1934, Reinhardt and Parisian violinist Stéphane Grappelli formed the "Quintette du Hot Club de France"
...
  EH and the West - as if there had not been China or India - or Jerusalem.  The assimilated Jewry of Europe in shock and dismay at the threat to the "immanent telos" of civil society and academe - and within 2 years he is driven out - within 3 years out of his home - and dead.  Q:  the fate of his wife and son?
   Despite his comment on India, if in fact Jeshua the Nazarene had studied as a Buddhist healer in India, this cultural gap would not be as he imagines - and the fact that these Causcasians are speaking an Indo-European language?  But he is looking for his European entelechy (if this had been embraced, would Poland have been spared?  Where did Russia stand in this group? )
...
  Was his Europe (1935) based more on Greece or more on the Salic laws ?  This was not a remnant of a Greek Empire but a Roman Empire - and on its northern fringe, the Salic traditions.  That Greek world came ot Europe through Arabia - but to a Europe that already had something of an "ethos" very distinct from that of Ionia or Athens or the Attic.  His mathematics - a mix of Greek and Indian and Arab and then European.
...
Science without universals: (contra Husserl's characterization of the actual practice of science)
   the particular star, Sol
   a particular planet [but one of a family of terrestrial planets, yet the only one with oceans and continents]
   plate tectonics
   a particular instance of carbon-based life on a planet
   DNA/RNA - only one particular form of life
   Luna - the moon illusion
   Galileo and the one planet Jupiter - Q:  a brown dwarf or not?  A singluar-historical question?
   the one cosmos [cp: Lee Smolin ]

   the inability to reduce mathematics to logic
...
  the conflation of "appearances" and the "data" of science (the Humean error )
...
   Bacon
   technical mastery of nature
     Leiss "The Domination of Nature"
...
  EH on the "validity" of his phenomenological discovery/adumbration of a world as horizon of an experience

  IM  literary criticism in contrast to physical science: freedoms and constraints, the good and the true

It seems clear that Husserl's views on science in the early 1930's came to colour what was known as phenomenology for decades in the English-reading philosophy world.

In particular, authors such as Charles Taylor have a certain appeal to some readers based on the presumed case against "natural science" where the "human sciences" are concerned.  Taylor often refers to Habermas and Habermas takes the Husserl case against natural science as a given - only he goes a step or two further.
A large part of the case against "secularism" hearkens back to the doctrine that an attitude perhaps appropriate in "natural science" is misplaced in the humanities - and in advise to our leaders both political and academic.

In the days when behaviourism and instrumentalism passed as scientific psychology and philosophy of psychology, respectively, in North America, I was sympathetic to this case against "the natural attitude" in considering the prospects for "human psychology".  My sympathies have since shifted to the need for a philosophical anthropology which might better inform our assessment of scientific psychology in terms of goals, means and presuppositions.

Quentin Lauer's 1965 translation of a post-1935 "Crisis in Science" essay gave English readers access to what previously had been largely eluded to in the more popular literature on the existential phase of phenomenology

The casual reader of the "Krisis" essay might be advised to realize that Husserl had spent a great deal of time with some of the most prominent thinkers in twentieth century mathematics, such as Cantor at Halle.

Why might this be well-advised?  Take for example the 1994 book published by Northwestern U: Lawrence Vogel's The Fragile "We". In his brief treatment of Heidegger's own engagement in politics, there is no mention of Jaspers.  The one mention of Husserl is merely in passing, late in the text.

By 1935, on this view, Heidegger had outstripped his master and by 1937 the master would indeed be stripped. This despite the long-standing concern of Husserl for the I and the others.  Heidegger, with no background in mathematics or science and impressed by language (the "furrow" of the field is indeed a very old part of "culture" but Heidegger never actually farmed a field or handled a plow - his favoured tools were the pen, the pipe, the walking stick, the Bavarian cap and sturdy hiking boots.  Elfride handled the technology of cookery) took his cue from Duns Scotus.  Working under Rickert and Husserl (Husserl would take Rickert's chair at Freiburg), Heidegger finds his later themes in an author, Duns Scotus, immensely far removed from the author who most concerned Kant and then Husserl: Hume.

Anecdote: some years ago I spent an evening listening to Mahler with a prominent British philosopher - a philosopher specializing in mathematics and space-time geometry.  That evening he told me of how impressed he was by his current reading of Arendt on the Nazi in Jerusalem - particularly concerning what he had now learned about the Danish King and the Nazis.  Looking back, I see that evening as just one more in a series that led inexorably to his divorce.  Philosophers can be fundamentally mistaken about a great many things, especially experts in quite narrow fields.  In their wider reading, they may rely much more on the rhetoric, the style, the tone of an author than they would in reading within their specialty.  A philos0pher of physics inclined to advocate a humane socialism has little time for casual reading and is likely to eschew writing by known conservatives - the tone, the rhetoric, risks being too aggravating to be suited to a relaxing distraction for the strenuous mental tasks of professional specialization.

Husserl ventured to speak very generally.  His rhetoric is not essential to an argument, but it is essential to his having readers of his argument. I would like to consider that rhetoric.

"Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man" begins with a bit of a howler: the analogy we are offered is that concerning scientific medicine versus folk medicine.  Why this analogy?

It is not merely that every sort of superstition was flourishing in Europe ... that was nothing new.  True, inexpensive printing had created a wider audience for novel variants on old themes, but I suggest, there was nothing really new.  What Husserl was addressing was the Heidegger phenomenon.

[ Claude Bernard on medicine;  Jaspers and Hans Jonas; current:  GC
    JB  JV  C d Fr  chaires  2 femmes  disparus  immortels  discours   podcasts  
    CIP  JFP   CT  "the immanent frame"  SSRC  R & PS  S of R   JH contra 

]

[ la leçon inaugurale M-P   I.H.

Anne F-L [Chaire De Philosophie Des Sciences Biologiques Et Médicales - Leçon Inaugurale Anne Fagot-Largeault  PDF

Les expressions « sciences de la vie et de la santé », ou « sciences biologiques et médicales », qui sont d’usage courant, sont redondantes. Les sciences médicales font évidemment partie des sciences biologiques.
...
La philosophie des sciences est ma formation première, la médecine une formation seconde.
...
« Il faut transporter la philosophie dans la médecine et la médecine dans la philosophie. »
...
Etre médecin n’est pas neutre philosophiquement.
...
L’évolution scientifique de la médecine, c’est-à-dire l’incorporation à la médecine des impératifs de la recherche, et d’une recherche instrumentée, technologique, est souvent assimilée à une déshumanisation. D’aucuns parlent de « barbarie technoscientifique », de « glissade vers l’enfer biomédical ». Et ce qui est souvent préconisé pour éviter la dérive technoscientifique est un retour en arrière. On cherche dans les médecines dites douces des recettes ancestrales, on rêve d’un « retour à Hippocrate » (thème récurrent et illusoire, car la médecine hippocratique se voulait rationnelle, et elle n’était pas douce).
]

[ R & SS Coll de Fr ]
[attacks on medecine as quackery: Molière, Flaubert]
[ the reality of palliative care; morphine and the death of Freud; thanatology; euthanasia ]
[Mengele and the spectre of medecine; psychiatric abuses in the West and in USSR ]
[ link

Georges Canguilhem : Philosophie et Médecine

10/06/2005, Collège de France, Paris

]

[Collège de France - Recherche en psychiatrie : pathologies multiples, modèles communs ? link ]

[Conférence "Merleau-Ponty, Le corps en acte" Collège de France (Inv. by Bernard Andrieu) link]

[Colloque de rentrée, les 15 et 16 octobre 2009 link pdf  ]

[U of C  SCNL  ]

[ru  IP UNESCO World Philosophy Day  ]

[Egbert Scheunemann

"Habermas‘ Philosophie ist der Versuch, das Projekt der Moderne, also die Entwicklung

der modernen Zivilisation, als – in der Tradition Kants – dreigestaltige Rationalitätsentfaltung

zu begreifen: als Prozess der Differenzierung der kognitiv-instrumentellen, der

normativ-praktischen und der ästhetisch-praktischen Vernunftsdimension sowie der immer

weiteren Ausdifferenzierung dieser Dimensionen entsprechend immanenter Logik."

]   PKR  

There is a common view today that Heidegger had somehow brought Husserl to his senses.  I am troubled by this view: Heidegger's major contribution to Husserlian phenomenology had been his work with Husserl's assistant, Edith Stein, in preparing "The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness" lectures for publication.  Husserl had a history of dissatisfaction with his own formulations and a history of quasi-new beginnings, more often new forays with the same problematic in mind.  Now he was faced with the rising star of Heidegger.  No other figure on the intellectual scene had so embraced his phenomenology.  I imagine Husserl struggling to grasp what was becoming of his hard-won achievements in regions, passive and active genesis, co-constitution, Urwelt, Mitwelt, Eigenwelt in the metaphysics/ontology rhetoric of Heidegger.

Husserl's next fallacies are double: reductionism and the notion that social institutions are formed of their individual members.  Let us being with the latter.  Take Heidegger and Arendt's own Marburg: the social institutions of Marburg were in no way disrupted either by the burning of the great synagogue (never rebuilt) in Marburg or the loss of the community of Jews in that university town with its theology college.  True, there is no Hermann-Cohen Weg or Strasse - but there is a small plaque at the old university.

[ reductionism  ( ex: Freud to Binswanger;)  agency, action, causality ]
[ intentionality reference mental-contents ]
[ dasein versus "the person"; public | personal | private ]
[ psychologism ]
[ mechanism and explanation ]
[ mathematical objects ]
[ natural kinds and universals in language and in logic ]
[ history and Dilthey ]
[ cultural artifacts ]
[ intuition and insight ]

[science and the taste of the soup (Einstein)
   Zu-Hause-sein
   a typical morning at home over coffee with Bach: husband and wife (normal day, unremarkable)
      as circumstance to be described, to be explained, to be characterized, to be diagnosed
      as narrative
      as social "instance" - roles, gender, niveau, privacy, property, stability (peace time), religion
      non-remarkable conversation and inconsequential reading
      variant example: disclosure of infidelity
        objective risk to the spouse (Wien, Prag, Paris or Berlin 1935)
        objective assessment of the response of the injured party
        jurisprudence
        moral assessment, remembering and forgiving
        the medical viewpoint (Arthur Schnizler)
        as preserved as a poem
        as communicated in a letter (family; friend)
        social: stigma and reaction of significant others; penalties
]
Take the case of Estonia and its neighbours.  The towns do not vanish because their inhabitants have been shipped to Kazakhstan.
Take the case of Poland: a minor pogrom occurred even after World War II had ended.
The simplistic view that societal forms are built on the minds of the individuals found in them negates a century or more of Geisteswissenschaften.

[ Alfred Schütz, Adorno, Marcuse ]

Let's move on to the next rhetorical move: the mentions of infinities.  By 1935 some of Husserl's listeners should have known that "infinities" occurring in mathematics are an entirely different concern from "infinities" occurring in formulations in physics.  The topic cannot be introduced without a clear demarcation between mathematics and physics.  Essential considerations are glossed over.

Perhaps it is because Husserl was a Jew converted to Lutheranism that he failed to appreciate the supra-individual nature of a centuries old institution such as Heidegger's Catholic tradition.

Husserl proceeds with a rhetoric of "Theoria" already utterly biased ( a bias that will perpetuate in the work of Habermas) - a rhetoric devoid of the actual historical science required to explicate the rise of scientific medicine, the mathematization of mechanical motion, of optics and the nature of categories and classification in the emergence of modern chemistry.

In 1935, Husserl could not be expected to image that we would one day be obtaining positron-emission tomographs of individual brains during the performance of typical tasks.  In 1971, when I took biology with a new textbook, electron microscopes had not yet demonstrated the structural nature of the so-called "cell membrane" in relation to the so-called "nuclear membrane" in typical cells of our bodies.  A reticulating structure was named and some partial views offered.

Husserl could not have anticipated, any more than my own philosophy professors in the 1970's, that certain types of phenomena deemed unsuited to scientific explanation due to their "randomness" would fall prey first to catastrophe theory and then be encompassed in the domain of chaos theory (René Thom was only born in 1923.)  By the time Kolmogorov visited Gottingen, Husserl was in Freiburg.


What remains in how best to conceive of mind in relation to science.  Where Husserl would suspend metaphysics in the sense of "bracketing" ontological commitments which functioned as obfuscating presuppostions, Heidegger was already moving to his radical demolition, demotion, un-founding.  Husserl, anxious for a secure foundation for science which would not degenerate into sheer scientism where mathematics and human knowledge were concerned, had somehow abetted the launch of anti-science.


The problem with the rhetoric by which Husserl invites the listener, the reader, to consider his appeal for the need of a pure science of the essence of human spirit is that he has already needlessly undermined science and history in making his case.  His later readers would lump the failures of eidetic science with the failures of metaphysics and the greatest failure: science.  Husserl's openess to a certain relativism - a relavitism to which his own philosophy would be immune - was one of far too many concessions.


In some ways the very history of Husserl's phenomenology was its own undoing: his early sympathizers could not follow him into an idealism excused by its being "transcendental".  In the case of Merleau-Ponty, even the eidetic reduction itself would be rejected and phenomenology would merge into variant of a descriptive psychology only to be displaced by the structures of language and the very temporal, relativized, historicized achievements of aesthesis.


When Husserl urged that we recognize horizons, he could not have imagined the doctrine of our being cast into the historical world.  In his own case, it is hard to imagine a figure in philosophy less suited to making the case for a careful reassessment of the spiritual situation of Europe in 1935.


The eventual conflation of science with technique in Heidegger and of science with theoria infected with bias and disguised in social speech acts in Habermas may have slightly different routes, or "paths",  Habermas certainly made a serious reading of Husserl on "the natural attitude" but with an entirely different project in re-thinking the use of human knowledge in the social world.


What is perhaps a shame in hindsight is that we have few clues as to what Heidegger might have taught had he been allowed to resume teaching in Berlin or Heidelberg in the new academic year of 1945-46.  By that time, with Max Weber dead for a quarter century and had Jaspers been lost in a forced march (which, as it happens, he narrowly escaped) and with Elfride hosting faculty and student soirées, we might have more accounts of the view of the master on the triumph of American technology over the leading people of Europe - and the use that the Asiatic hordes might yet make of the technological devices shipped to them from America and now lurking in the East or of the need to reclaim Ost-Preussen, to restore the eastern border.


We have no idea of what Husserl might have thought and taught in the psot-war, as he had died a few months before Kristalnacht.


During the time that Arendt was hoping to see a Heidegger tome on Logik, no mention is made in their correspondence of the fate of the logicians of Warsaw, no mention of the Jews of Poland- as if this were some Polish issue - this despite the very origins of the family name, Nietzsche.


Where Heidegger had Duns Scotus, the salient philosophers for Arendt were Augustine and Plato - but in 1929, when Husserl was being honoured in the presence of Heidegger and Edith Stein, Arendt was only a student who had graduated with less than full honours the previous year (her dissertation had a routine printing in Berlin in 1929.)   Unlike Iris Murdoch [see John Bayley on home with Iris], Husserl and his wife were driven from their home [...]


Heidegger's most curious remarks are that the "Juden" lost were "Ost-Deutschen" - which perhaps he took to include those of Poland and Ukraine [see the exception of Bulgaria.]


[Arendt's 1926 semester under Husserl]


[Jaspers-Heidegger Korr./Briefwechsel ]


[Iris Murdoch on Husserl; on ethics - that an ethics must also point us toward the good and be itself informed by that good; cp Arent and Jaspers on the lack of character in Heidegger (a nice enough chap in his way, not generally offensive, as was his wife, Elfride) ]


[Heidegger's failure to mention Arendt; the lost dedication to Husserl; the break with Jaspers ]


[the rescue of the Husserl papers: imagine if this had been undertaken by Heidegger, or at his behest; Van Breda and the role of the Belgian government and diplomats in the 1938 rescue of the papers; look for corr. with Heid or leading pupil in Frei. or Hdlbrg]


[
Eh characterization of philosophy - without sufficient regard to the Stoics or the role of rhetoric and law; 
his neglect of poesis
]
[
EH on a norm within a life (was he thinking of MH here - when he says not developed in every person ??)
]
[EH account of the idea in history - cp.  the Tao and Confucianism
    the manner in which the Dao became a religion and ceased to be an ethos would not sit well here
    the manner in which a religio without temples became the religion of cathedrals (cp the origins of the synagogue
]
[events in Marburg and the failure to rebuild the 1897 synagogue (the only building "lost" in Marburg in 1933-1945]
[

The Nazi Persecution
of the Gypsies

Guenter Lewy

OXFORD

UNIVERSITY PRESS

2000

]
[T4 link with Marburg
"
Physicians, the most highly Nazified professional group in Germany, were key to the success of "T-4," since they organized and carried out nearly, all aspects of the operation
"
Marburg-related documents: (1)  + ease with which NS psychiatrists came to Uni Marburg after WWII

ad hominem and the author

Whether philosophical anthropology is a subject matter or not, imagine for a moment that it forms a series of three courses, each for one of the last three years of a four-year degree.
I will suppose that one of those course will treat of "existence" and will have to address itself to the writings of "existentialists". Suppose that my tone in my own lectures is mocking.  How might I proceed?
I would almost certainly begin with the curious exchange between Bryan McGee and Iris Murdoch in which both seem to share the assessment that La Nausée by J-P Sartre is a great novel.  Matters could only be worse if they had gone on the agree that "L'Etranger" by Camus is even finer.
Camus was not a philosopher, but the course must consider those writers within the western tradition who have insight into the human condition (in truth we publish the book's title and author on the course list to ensure enrollment - departmental budgets are no trivial matter.)  Consider the book as a novel, not as a treatise or an assemblage of essays.  A Frenchman murders an Arab.  The French reader was aware that had Merseault been a somebody, a few thousand francs (or less?) to the victim's family and the whole matter could have been looked after - unless there were some political angle.
I encountered the book in two settings: first in a course on existentialism and then in a course in reading French.  The latter was the more useful, as the message for the philosophy student was of no interest - only the obvious flaws of the novel.  Change the setting such that a Russian kills an Estonian on a Baltic beach, or an Israeli kills a Palestinian on the West Bank or a Libyan diplomat murders a Turkish servant in Berlin - and the book (or in our day, a film based on the book) requires that we we know the life of that victim, how he came to be there that day, did he have brothers, was his father still living. what was his view of the French Empire (or Union or whatever face Paris was putting on their possessions.)
Were you to learn from an unpublished letter that some man born in Oran was obviously a racist, small-minded bigot, you might not purchase the letter (say you find it in a cardboard box in some shop.)  If a scholar found the letter and authenticated it as Camus writing to fellow writer X, we have publishing paydirt.
In the case of Camus' novel, it helps to read it in French and to discuss it with someone with some feel for character and its place in the moral evaluation or assessment of a novel.
In the case of Sartre's effort, it is essential to read La Nausée  in the original if you are to assess the book if only to be struck by the tasteless puns that litter the novel.  It is also essential to ask why it ends with an incident of sexual depravity in a library.  Why for all the attention to the root of a tree, there is nothing on the manner in which the root of the protagonist interacted with his partner in sex.  The root is seen in the library.
The entire effect is remarkably juvenile.  The only satisfaction for the reader is that Roquentin's time in a camp will be Sartre's (short) time in a camp.  That Sartre was a complete and utter scoundrel is something the reader simply must know.  Why?
Consider anonymity.  Personally, I wish to see anonymity established in natural science technical journals.  I wish to see the UN sponsor a research registry that is simply a science registry: you would not be published in a journal  even as EC1905uv-CHEM but as A3456gt (Feynman, for one, was well aware of what happens when a physicist ventures into biology - even physicists mock mathematicians and vice-versa - the word "mere" and "just" and "only" are essential to their gossip, banter and inuendo.)  Philosophers are worse: "She has only published one article - in philosophy of literature - and she has this thing about Simone Weil ..."
Tenure and promotion hang on publishing.  So, in the case of science, the registry would emit a rating.  Appeal it to an anonymous committee if you must (there would still be some abuses - students of X will still get more jobs, better jobs, than students of Y,etc - life is never fair nor expected to be so.)
Peer-reviewed may not suffice.  In literature, writers have demonstrated that they can submit their own best-seller years later to their own publisher under another title and with a pseudonym and only to have the publisher's reader reject it.

It is inconceivable that String Theory would have gotten so far in our day without the name of Gell-Mann.  Hidden variable theory got so far because some advocates were known by name as associates of Einstein.

Suppose you don't believe this.  Enter a bookstore and see a book, "I Did It" by Fred Smith.  Knowing that a legal loop-hole is allowing the royalties to go to a known murderer of another name, would you buy that book or woudl you instead by another thriller for the train trip to your conference?  Do you want to risk being seen reading THAT book when you have not yet received tenure or your first promotion?  (If you hope for tenure, pay attention even to the books -even the number of books, neither too many nor too few  on your office shelves.)
There are books that, ceteris paribus, we might borrow from a library but we would not purchase new unless remaindered.  If you are not that reader, I lost you a ways back, so I continue.

I recall reading some years ago that it was striking how little de Beauvoir had to say of interest of some of the remarkable people she met through her association with Sartre.  If you are a female reader, I risk now having lost you.  Let's switch to Iris Murdoch.

In her major work, Murdoch sees fit to link Husserl to his followers - but only to those who abandoned his project.  Roman Ingarden is missing.  Only Husserl in one phase is presented.  But then she chooses, having first introduced a humourous comment about Zen, to tie Husserl to a Zen reading of his project (curiously, she may have been unaware of Heidegger's Japanese student.)
Husserl was a regular interlocutor with Cantor in Halle.  Husserl was then a Goettingen.  Later he took Rickert's position at Freiburg.  Unlike Russell, he lost a son to war and he would lose all to Heidegger and the Nazis and die before seeing their defeat.  All irrelevant.  Start again.  Husserl's concern was with mathematics and foundations.  This is completely missing in the thoughtful chapter by Murdoch.  The chapter - the book - is very much worth reading.  Read carelessly, we see that Hegel begets Marx.  But somehow Husserl fails to have the importance of Wittgenstein.  Not that he is neglected by the author as is Ayer, Ryle and Russell (to see Ryle in psychoanalysis, read Roy Schafer, "A New Language for Psychoanalysis" and compare his early work on "internalization" - a strange affair of which Murdoch was perhaps unaware.)

Why is Husserl not worth the attention of Frege?  How could a man with no morals, Heidegger, garner such continued attention?

Consider the failure of Heidegger to write one word of Edith Stein to his Hannah Stern.
Well, then don't.  Consider this: we are finally getting back to Schopenhauer in the Anglo-American world of philosophy. In the German text, the idea of "family resemblance" is right there on the page, literally.  Why had the attendees of Wittgenstein's afternoons not read their Schopenhauer?  Terror of the master?  One cutting word from LW about Schopenhauer would do it, one supposes.
Walter Bieml, years later in a Heidegger seminar on Heraclitus, on a day when the master had the grippe, is recorded as saying, roughly, "Perhaps today, in the absence of the Professor, I might venture to say that .."

A philosopher tells his reader, not his technical colleague, but his intelligent reader, that you cannot enter a public building from an open square without also "entering a cathedral".  Follow me: the author is an unbelieving Jew whose grandparents had all converted but whose parents practiced no religion.  Variant: the author is named Mackenzie.  Variant: the author has converted from Methodist to Roman Catholic.  Variant: the author no longer attends a mosque.  Or: the author is an avowed atheist who never has a religion.  Or: the author is an atheist who had been raised a High Church Anglican.
It may help to know that the the early Christians thought of themselves as Jews without temples.  It may not. What about the insight: I remember entering a reknowned basilica after a day of cycling through summer farmlands and the near over-whelming frisson when gazing up in the dim and the chill of the nave.  In that moment I might even have undergone a conversion.  I do believe that it happens that the first large ceiling that I ever saw above me was indeed a church ceiling, but the first "Great Building" that I ever saw was seem from great distance across the prairie by the plume of black smoke rising from its unseen pinnacle, the great Bessborough, the Saskatoon railroad hotel (although now no railroad entered it below).  Had I first seen the great Banff Springs Hotel (my father saw it in the Bow Valley before he ever laid eyes on the Bess', but he already knew the MacDonald from his boyhood in Edmonton.  Unlike my first trip to the Bow Valley, he was there in knickers and later in a suit.  He vacationed in vacation dress.  His mother was English, his father a businessman - and an American at that.
The first building known by some of my mother's ancestors was a wigwam.  A wigwam is not a teepee.
What insight of my own might be elided if I follow the vision of the writer, every great public building, a cathedral, incomprehensible without the cathedral, the bishops's seat, where declarations were made such as that which would take Edith Stein to Auschwitz in reprisal.
When a piece of writing is not presenting an argument, say one found on a sheet of paper in a shop - consider this novel line of argument, author unknown, could anything be less appropriate than ad hominem?  It may depend on the premises I am asked to accept as true, the assumptions that appear to be required, but also the terms, the rhetoric, in which the matter is posed.
Take the case today of theists presenting the scientific case for the religious brain and the evolution of religion as the integument of culture and social structure and societal relations if not language itself.
Take the case of a writer child psychologist, appealing for consideration of mind, consciousness, self-awareness, character, courage in assessing the normal versus abnormal development of children.  And then we learn that he was an abuser at his charity institution.
Someone tells you that Adolf H*tler loved animals.  That he was neurologically afflicted.  This may hold no interest for you at all.
But someone proposes that our study of language acquisition in the bonobo be conducted by an autistic animal trainer who does not touch fur and is almost mono-syllabic, has no pets, and no "liking" for animals.  Now we may have an asset.  Now we can mask the animal detecting that we too, as trainers, have feeling, like the little fellow, find him amusing, endearing, are glad to see him this morning.
Think what a discovery if we learned from a letter than Stanley Milgram wept each night over the plight of those in his experiments, that M*ng*l* whipped himself each night with a belt and prayed for forgiveness, that Harry Harlow had buried each little monkey in its own grave, visited them each year, pausing for a moment before each.
I confess, I am unaffected by the report that Derrida was in the habit of praying.  I am too much aware of the man with whom he enjoyed conversing.  I cannot imagine what could endear Derrida to me, make me reconsider the value of what is written in that slim PUF volume in its endearing cover, gold yellow, rough pages, carried about now for years from one city to another.
In a similar vein I am unable to take Habermas seriously having never been able to take seriously a single lecturer who embraced him.
I remember my vexation when a philosopher of note addressed an international conference on history and logic of science to say of hermeneutics that interpretation is a game that anyone can play.
First: not a game.  Second, no, not anyone.  Third, this is not "mere" interpretation.  Even without a knock-down argument, a given reading of human life may be inadequate or unsatisfactory or otherwise incomplete on many grounds, if only a hunch.
But when the hunch we choose to follow is a hunch expressed in writing by an author we come to know as utterly disingenuous, a prevaricator, a liar, a traitor, a poseur or simply a person devoid of conscience we can politely say, "Sorry, she/he (or their book) simply doesn't interest me, failed to hold my interest..."  If there is an interlocutor who responds with "But I think that what X is trying to say is that ..." now we reach the author's intention, imputing a good motive, an effort to be understood, we are asked to be just, fair.  And with Samuel Beckett, I am always more than fair, and will ignore verse after verse until some one short verse catches hold of me.  I would have to learn something truly hateful about Lawrence Durrell before I would cease to suggest his poetry - long after I have seased to recommend his first Quartet.
A man with a nasty reputation but given to good causes, reported to his readers his shock at learning that Frege was an anti-Semite.  If I believe that a word from Frege was enough for Russell to have been deterred from visiting him to discuss propositional functions with him in Goettingen, at the university built as an alternative to building a prison, the home of Gauss, Hilbert - a doubt or suspicion is planted.  Some writers must be above reproach just as a Pope must be above reproach, an Irish Catholic Bishop above reproach, a Rector of Heidelberg University above reproach.  Any such reporach could be considered ad hominen, but in these special cases is excused.
And what of the Gifford Lectures?  Or a Pulitzer Prize?  Or the Nobel which may have been denied to Hoyle and Gamow?  Must the Vietnamese wait a century to learn about the fate of Ho's wife?
Eliade wanted us to understand his actions in Romania as mere youthful indiscretions.  Frankly I cannot read a writer today on the "sacred" in the "modern" age without hearing boots on paving stones.
I cannot read an attack on "technology" without seeing the marvelous inventions of Arthur Ganson.
Nothing in man's essence destined him to fly, but once airborne, who failed to denouce the "heros" who would drop bombs from aircraft?  The courageous pilots!
An old friend, a neighbor, lies on his deathbed in a hospice - at Seymour Johnson he taught barnstormers to find a homing beacon before they were sent off to Europe.  I reproached him for his habitual remarks about Jews.  He lived a short walk from what had been the Jewish golf course.  But he wrote no book, never stood for public office.  He always apologized, I always forgave.  His faults were not those of a Norm Coleman or a Michelle Bachmann, politicians here in our towns, our state,  who could never have my vote.  Leave politics, and I would accept them as neighbors, try to be just, try to forgive their faults, try to speak plainly but not too harshly. Even buy their autobiography - but only as a neighbor.
PS
In her remarks on "sees" in the same section, Murdoch appears unaware that the root for a "kind" in Russian is the same as the root for "to see" as in the Greek, video, VID, in Russian.  It is a shame that Russian must not have been one of her languages and perhaps not even taught at her college in her day. Yet it is closer to English than is, say Hungarian to its cousin, Finnish.  English, French and German - barely two languages from the diachronic standpoint, barely two from a synchronic standpoint if you instead consider English, French and Dutch.  Imagine if the Danes had never been in England, not Jutes and Angles but only Frisians and Dutch before the Normans ... and you may grasp how silly that we count those as "foreign" languages. Contrary to this view, Ricoeur on "recognition" in English, French and German.