Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Thursday, June 5, 2014
architects and conspiracy nutters
Perhaps it is time to require that architects have at least a completed major in physics. The case for requiring this of civil engineers and structural engineers has already been made.
No, engineers are not scientists, but they must at least be able to distinguish science from utter BS.
And what about historians ? How little science can be known and still claim to be an historian ?
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Huffington Post
The arrival of Howard Fineman may have been an uptick for huffingtonpost.com but it still ranks below Fox News which almost has a Science link on its home page.
There is a Science page for HP but you have to look for it: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/science
Here's a sample from today's page:
Remember: "we can't go on bowing down before the scientific method." Oh, that would be which of Mill's idols?
I am working on a model of a browser for science feeds with some concept mapping and some annotation features as an alternative to what remains my best tool: OneNote.
If you have a package better than OneNote 2003 or 2007 or 2010, I would love to hear about it.
There is a Science page for HP but you have to look for it: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/science
Here's a sample from today's page:
We have a problem. We can't go back to old-time religion in familiar ways, and we can't go on bowing down before the scientific method. What is a person to do?What I suggest is the NYT Science pages as a place to hang a link.
Remember: "we can't go on bowing down before the scientific method." Oh, that would be which of Mill's idols?
I am working on a model of a browser for science feeds with some concept mapping and some annotation features as an alternative to what remains my best tool: OneNote.
If you have a package better than OneNote 2003 or 2007 or 2010, I would love to hear about it.
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Charles Taylor on Science and Psychology: notes
In the "Human Agency and Language" collection of Charles Taylor's essays there is another inadequate index. But there is one thing that is immediately noticeable: a few entries for Frege, many for Heidegger, for Wittgenstein - but not a single reference to Brentano, Husserl or Twardowski.
Kazimierz Twardowski, seven years younger than Edmund Husserl, also died in 1938.
What is most striking - more so than the lack of any entries for Putnam or Searle - is the lack of any entry for Adolph Reinach.
During his years at McGill, Taylor was to be found in the department housing political science. During my years attending lectures in both that and the philosophy department, there was no shortage of hours spent on Frege, Cantor, Gödel - but not on the Munich School of phenomenology or the Göttingen school of phenomenology. With Taylor, it all starts at Freiburg with Heidegger replacing Husserl in '28 and then the trusted Gadamer (reputed to be the true philosphical confidante of the master in his exclusive visits to the thinker's hillside cabin.)
There has been some effort to provide a corrective in the works of Claire Ortiz Hill and in 1995 in "The Cambridge Companion to Husserl". Most recently, Alasdair MacIntyre, in 2006 in his short book on Edith Stein's years in academic philosophy has provided both an introduction to Husserl and to Reinach. MacIntyre also laments that Heidegger never troubled himself to learn Polish (remarkable given what Arendt was expecting from Heidegger on Logik.) One can only imagine Heidegger raked over the coals in Polish by a living poet, Czesław Miłosz.
Also missing: Anton Marty and Stanisław Leśniewski (notable as a corrective to the influence of John Duns Scotus on Heidegger.)
What is important though is try to assess to what extent Husserl also turned against science. Dorian Cairns makes a report of one clue that Husserl's attacks on physicalist and naturalist positions had evolved to a delight in anticipating failures in natural science.
At the time of Heidegger's absurd pronouncements on science, the NASA Gravity Probe B project was underway. While plagued by unanticipated problems in sources of error, and perhaps damned by the anti-science philosophers as a mere "technical" achievement, it ranks with the most important experiments since Galileo's inclined planes.
At Heidegger's hut the concessions to technology are the hand water pump, the ax, skiis, door hinges, boots and even forks on the table. There is no astrolabe, no sundial and not even a pre-telescope concession to astronomy. Husserl, on the other hand, had begun in astronomy - and by the time he was being driven out of teaching in Freiburg, the centuries old Vatican astronomical observatory was moving to its new home at Castel Gandolfo. It have have been there during summer meeting at the papal residence that Taylor first met Miłosz .
Whether Husserl eventually turned against natural science in bitterness or old age - or not at all - may be contested. What is more evident is that Taylor has been more clearly in the anti-science camp with his large "wisdom" tomes on the self and the scular age. This was not so obvious in his earlier essays and in his 1964 book on psychology, The Explanation of Behaviour, nor in his 1971 essay in Social Research. Taylor's earlier work is on the inabilities of certain theoretical commitments to deliver adequate explanations and true understanding due to the naive views of the nature of knowledge and science in the training of psychologists and social scientists: they failed to understand that the objects of study were agents with a mental life and the actions of those agents given their values. This could be corrected - and one such corrective can be found in a recent work by Colin McGinn, Mindsight.
But Taylor, in my view, stands closer to the Sartre of "the psychology of the imagination". Sartre was never trained in phenomenology, instead he found what he was looking for in Heidegger (Raymond Aron referred Sartre to phenomenology - Merleauu-Ponty, on the other hand, would advice the Viet Kong philosopher ___ to go to Leuven even during the war.) Sartre's rhetorical ploy was that conceptual analysis would have to suffice because his readers were not familiar with phenomenology. Taylor, on the other hand, entered the scene at a time when ... de Beauvoir ntoed that Sartre seemed happiest writing what he did not yet understand - often clear in his obscure condescension to his "French" reader denied access to the Husserl archive - when it is clear that Sartre in "néantisation" was providing not phenomenology verifiable by another, but "a way of talking" about the visual field in perception, for example, which is not distrubed by whether it is adequate - it is enough that it "fits". But phenomenology is not mere description of human experience in novel forms or cleverness about "néant" and hypostatization. The latter is a serious problem facing certain views of intentionality in their account of mental life, mental contents and common referents which are not physical individuals validated as existing in space and time (for recent non-phenomemologist philosophers on intentionality see Roderick Chisholm "Perceiving: A Philosphical Study" and John Searle, Intentionality - An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind, and for an interesting parallel to MacIntyre, Peter Geach and Eliz. Anscombe; s/a Anscombe's Intention paper of 1957)
Taylor's targets have too often been the easy targets: his reader could easily draw the conclusion that there was no stronger challenge (behaviorism was dominant in academic life and in practice - but not successful in the one and with very limited success in the other - and today finds more success in practice as a nuddled language-cognition variant of behaviorism.)
Both Taylor and MacIntyre embrace a kind of limited relativism - a view that a philosphical standpoint always involves presuppositions and arises within a tradition, whether that tradition is recognized, avowed or affirmed. Comparing Taylor to Putnam or Searle is comparing him to philosophers who see nothing to fear in science and trends attributed by historians to "the enlightenment" and the "secular". Comparing Taylor to MacIntyre in his "Whose Justice? Which Rationality? " - say in MacIntyre's treatment of Hume and Thomas Reid, there is the feeling of a philospher at work and not a lecturer (for that we have his realted Gifford Lectures.)
When Hegel was working on his logic, he was teaching the equivalent of high school students. When Taylor was working on his philosphy of social science, he was very active in Canadian politics. It is possible that Taylor sacrficed scholarship for his political commitments: it cannot be expected that many of his students would know that Heidegger/Gadamer/Habermas are only one train out of Freiburg -and that the train departed first from Göttingen where it had come up from Munich - or that Roman Ingarden had departed in quite another direction, as had Koyré. MacIntyre, if he chooses, could provide that corrective in a book on realism and nominalism in the past century.
note: Thomas S. Kuhn nennt Koyrés Schriften als bedeutsam bei der Entstehung seines Hauptwerkes Die Struktur wissenschaftlicher Revolutionen.
A persisting curiosity: the absence of Murdoch in Taylor.
Academic lives to compare when Americans mock the British sense of "fair-play": Iris Murdoch at Oxford, Edith Stein at Göttingen (and Philippa Foot & Anscombe some 30+ years later; women and the "chairs" of Collège de France)
Note: John Haldane places Germain Grisez in this group along with John Finnis and Henry Veatch
Compare: three writers on Simone Weil: Iris Murdoch, Czesław Miłosz, Charles Taylor.
My assessment of the influence of Taylor: comparable to that of Northrop Frye on Margaret Atwood's "Surfacing". My correctives to that: Martha Ostenso's "Wild Geese", my great-grandmother's stories of life along the North Saskatchewan River in the 1880's, my cousin in the 1980's urging native women out on the wind-swept tundra to use the porta-potty and her collecting stones to hold down the tent; Samuel Hearne making tea; my cousin's body being prepared by her brother for an arctic burial; that Glen Gould thought The Great North was somewhere just outside Fort William and Port Arthur; my great-great uncle returnign via Hudson's Bay. Correctives to Taylor: taking seriously Oliver Sachs on the man who lost colour vision as might have Merleau-Ponty; abandoning the notion that what we need is another, older, tradition in order to escape scientism, physicalism, mechanism or naive materialism in a philosophical appreciation and assessment of current discoveries, achievements, theories and trends biology, neurology and linguistics. Ditto for assessing, constraining and advocating for technologies in relation to societies, economies and environments.
The less than subtle, incessant and continual pleading for theism in recent western philosophy: only satire may do, as without their appeal to "tradition" they cannot choose between Jeshua, Mahomet or Bahá'u'lláh.
Corrective to Heidegger on science: Hermann Weyl
term: subjectity as used in relation to Heidegger's Hegel by Robert Sinnerbrink.
Kazimierz Twardowski, seven years younger than Edmund Husserl, also died in 1938.
What is most striking - more so than the lack of any entries for Putnam or Searle - is the lack of any entry for Adolph Reinach.
During his years at McGill, Taylor was to be found in the department housing political science. During my years attending lectures in both that and the philosophy department, there was no shortage of hours spent on Frege, Cantor, Gödel - but not on the Munich School of phenomenology or the Göttingen school of phenomenology. With Taylor, it all starts at Freiburg with Heidegger replacing Husserl in '28 and then the trusted Gadamer (reputed to be the true philosphical confidante of the master in his exclusive visits to the thinker's hillside cabin.)
There has been some effort to provide a corrective in the works of Claire Ortiz Hill and in 1995 in "The Cambridge Companion to Husserl". Most recently, Alasdair MacIntyre, in 2006 in his short book on Edith Stein's years in academic philosophy has provided both an introduction to Husserl and to Reinach. MacIntyre also laments that Heidegger never troubled himself to learn Polish (remarkable given what Arendt was expecting from Heidegger on Logik.) One can only imagine Heidegger raked over the coals in Polish by a living poet, Czesław Miłosz.
Also missing: Anton Marty and Stanisław Leśniewski (notable as a corrective to the influence of John Duns Scotus on Heidegger.)
What is important though is try to assess to what extent Husserl also turned against science. Dorian Cairns makes a report of one clue that Husserl's attacks on physicalist and naturalist positions had evolved to a delight in anticipating failures in natural science.
At the time of Heidegger's absurd pronouncements on science, the NASA Gravity Probe B project was underway. While plagued by unanticipated problems in sources of error, and perhaps damned by the anti-science philosophers as a mere "technical" achievement, it ranks with the most important experiments since Galileo's inclined planes.
At Heidegger's hut the concessions to technology are the hand water pump, the ax, skiis, door hinges, boots and even forks on the table. There is no astrolabe, no sundial and not even a pre-telescope concession to astronomy. Husserl, on the other hand, had begun in astronomy - and by the time he was being driven out of teaching in Freiburg, the centuries old Vatican astronomical observatory was moving to its new home at Castel Gandolfo. It have have been there during summer meeting at the papal residence that Taylor first met Miłosz .
Whether Husserl eventually turned against natural science in bitterness or old age - or not at all - may be contested. What is more evident is that Taylor has been more clearly in the anti-science camp with his large "wisdom" tomes on the self and the scular age. This was not so obvious in his earlier essays and in his 1964 book on psychology, The Explanation of Behaviour, nor in his 1971 essay in Social Research. Taylor's earlier work is on the inabilities of certain theoretical commitments to deliver adequate explanations and true understanding due to the naive views of the nature of knowledge and science in the training of psychologists and social scientists: they failed to understand that the objects of study were agents with a mental life and the actions of those agents given their values. This could be corrected - and one such corrective can be found in a recent work by Colin McGinn, Mindsight.
But Taylor, in my view, stands closer to the Sartre of "the psychology of the imagination". Sartre was never trained in phenomenology, instead he found what he was looking for in Heidegger (Raymond Aron referred Sartre to phenomenology - Merleauu-Ponty, on the other hand, would advice the Viet Kong philosopher ___ to go to Leuven even during the war.) Sartre's rhetorical ploy was that conceptual analysis would have to suffice because his readers were not familiar with phenomenology. Taylor, on the other hand, entered the scene at a time when ... de Beauvoir ntoed that Sartre seemed happiest writing what he did not yet understand - often clear in his obscure condescension to his "French" reader denied access to the Husserl archive - when it is clear that Sartre in "néantisation" was providing not phenomenology verifiable by another, but "a way of talking" about the visual field in perception, for example, which is not distrubed by whether it is adequate - it is enough that it "fits". But phenomenology is not mere description of human experience in novel forms or cleverness about "néant" and hypostatization. The latter is a serious problem facing certain views of intentionality in their account of mental life, mental contents and common referents which are not physical individuals validated as existing in space and time (for recent non-phenomemologist philosophers on intentionality see Roderick Chisholm "Perceiving: A Philosphical Study" and John Searle, Intentionality - An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind, and for an interesting parallel to MacIntyre, Peter Geach and Eliz. Anscombe; s/a Anscombe's Intention paper of 1957)
Taylor's targets have too often been the easy targets: his reader could easily draw the conclusion that there was no stronger challenge (behaviorism was dominant in academic life and in practice - but not successful in the one and with very limited success in the other - and today finds more success in practice as a nuddled language-cognition variant of behaviorism.)
Both Taylor and MacIntyre embrace a kind of limited relativism - a view that a philosphical standpoint always involves presuppositions and arises within a tradition, whether that tradition is recognized, avowed or affirmed. Comparing Taylor to Putnam or Searle is comparing him to philosophers who see nothing to fear in science and trends attributed by historians to "the enlightenment" and the "secular". Comparing Taylor to MacIntyre in his "Whose Justice? Which Rationality? " - say in MacIntyre's treatment of Hume and Thomas Reid, there is the feeling of a philospher at work and not a lecturer (for that we have his realted Gifford Lectures.)
When Hegel was working on his logic, he was teaching the equivalent of high school students. When Taylor was working on his philosphy of social science, he was very active in Canadian politics. It is possible that Taylor sacrficed scholarship for his political commitments: it cannot be expected that many of his students would know that Heidegger/Gadamer/Habermas are only one train out of Freiburg -and that the train departed first from Göttingen where it had come up from Munich - or that Roman Ingarden had departed in quite another direction, as had Koyré. MacIntyre, if he chooses, could provide that corrective in a book on realism and nominalism in the past century.
note: Thomas S. Kuhn nennt Koyrés Schriften als bedeutsam bei der Entstehung seines Hauptwerkes Die Struktur wissenschaftlicher Revolutionen.
A persisting curiosity: the absence of Murdoch in Taylor.
Academic lives to compare when Americans mock the British sense of "fair-play": Iris Murdoch at Oxford, Edith Stein at Göttingen (and Philippa Foot & Anscombe some 30+ years later; women and the "chairs" of Collège de France)
Note: John Haldane places Germain Grisez in this group along with John Finnis and Henry Veatch
Compare: three writers on Simone Weil: Iris Murdoch, Czesław Miłosz, Charles Taylor.
My assessment of the influence of Taylor: comparable to that of Northrop Frye on Margaret Atwood's "Surfacing". My correctives to that: Martha Ostenso's "Wild Geese", my great-grandmother's stories of life along the North Saskatchewan River in the 1880's, my cousin in the 1980's urging native women out on the wind-swept tundra to use the porta-potty and her collecting stones to hold down the tent; Samuel Hearne making tea; my cousin's body being prepared by her brother for an arctic burial; that Glen Gould thought The Great North was somewhere just outside Fort William and Port Arthur; my great-great uncle returnign via Hudson's Bay. Correctives to Taylor: taking seriously Oliver Sachs on the man who lost colour vision as might have Merleau-Ponty; abandoning the notion that what we need is another, older, tradition in order to escape scientism, physicalism, mechanism or naive materialism in a philosophical appreciation and assessment of current discoveries, achievements, theories and trends biology, neurology and linguistics. Ditto for assessing, constraining and advocating for technologies in relation to societies, economies and environments.
The less than subtle, incessant and continual pleading for theism in recent western philosophy: only satire may do, as without their appeal to "tradition" they cannot choose between Jeshua, Mahomet or Bahá'u'lláh.
Corrective to Heidegger on science: Hermann Weyl
term: subjectity as used in relation to Heidegger's Hegel by Robert Sinnerbrink.
Monday, March 8, 2010
Heidegger and science
The great things about youtube is the occaisonal gem: one such is Martin Heidegger on physics.
There was an old canard about i the 50's that relativity was understood by only a handful of physicists.
In Heidegger's moth this becomes quiet different: it begins with his notion that the new way to thinking can be followed by only a few - but that is reaaly not so unusual. To dispel the notion that this elete might result from mere obscurantism he offers his listener the case of the radio "Apparat" and the television "Apparat". You will be surprised to learn that these both required relativity - and that the physics underlying both is under stood by only 5 or 6 physicists.
Perhaps he meant only 5 ot 6 philosophers. Let's see: 1964 ... Hermann Weyl had died in 1955; Paul Valéry had dies in 1945; Einstein had dies in 1955; Cassirer had dies in 1955; Hans Reichenbach in 1953 - maybe Heidegger was right! Death had taken them all! But Russell of the ABC's lived until 1970 - and Grunbaum on space-time came out in '63 in English - and was fundamentally mistaken on the relativism of any space-time metric ... so that leaves Feynman, Bethe, Gell-Mann -- no, what about John Wheeler, 1962 - oops, in English. Besides he may have meant physicists in Bavaria or even physicists known to have praised Heidegger's thought-experiments in the philosphy of time ...
What I really hope is that he heard it from Husserl who was only having some fun at Heidegger's expense.
There was an old canard about i the 50's that relativity was understood by only a handful of physicists.
In Heidegger's moth this becomes quiet different: it begins with his notion that the new way to thinking can be followed by only a few - but that is reaaly not so unusual. To dispel the notion that this elete might result from mere obscurantism he offers his listener the case of the radio "Apparat" and the television "Apparat". You will be surprised to learn that these both required relativity - and that the physics underlying both is under stood by only 5 or 6 physicists.
Perhaps he meant only 5 ot 6 philosophers. Let's see: 1964 ... Hermann Weyl had died in 1955; Paul Valéry had dies in 1945; Einstein had dies in 1955; Cassirer had dies in 1955; Hans Reichenbach in 1953 - maybe Heidegger was right! Death had taken them all! But Russell of the ABC's lived until 1970 - and Grunbaum on space-time came out in '63 in English - and was fundamentally mistaken on the relativism of any space-time metric ... so that leaves Feynman, Bethe, Gell-Mann -- no, what about John Wheeler, 1962 - oops, in English. Besides he may have meant physicists in Bavaria or even physicists known to have praised Heidegger's thought-experiments in the philosphy of time ...
What I really hope is that he heard it from Husserl who was only having some fun at Heidegger's expense.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
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
[U of C SCNL ]
[ru IP UNESCO World Philosophy Day ]
[Egbert Scheunemann
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]
[
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]
[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
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
[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
Science in the daily news: protecting astronomy funding
Ever since Senator Joe McCarthy referred to Harlow Shapley as an astrologer, if should have remained clear to us that funding for astronomy must be protected from idiots in high office.
The BBC online reports that Britain may try protecting funding for astronomy and physics research.
This report comes at a time when BBC online is undergoing some changes to reflect the interests of their current viewers/visitors.
Until now, BBC has been distinctive for having a news category of "Science and Environment" and that category is distinguished from "Technology". American services, pandering to the anti-science right-wing Christians, have moved from "Tech and Science" to "Technology". After all, science news is a form of entertainment and available elsewhere for those who feel the need (a tiny minority of skepticks.)
But now the BBC is changing the rubric to "Science and Nature". You see, Nature is something that appeals to all of us - especially to Deists and is almost o-kay with theists. And as Palin has taught Americans, man does not affect nature. God created nature. It's His design. Part of His plan. "Environment" is a word cooked-up by liberals! The people want "raw Nature". With more pictures (nature is never obscene or pornographic unlike those "animal rights" doctored snapshots!) Nature abhors a hoax. "Environment" is the holy whore of scientism!
Of course pictures are alright. But how many people REALLY want to see the Hubble picture that demonstrated gravitational lensing? That relativity stuff - it's just a theory! It has critics, just like that theory of evolution! Big Bang? Heck no! That theory is about to go POOF!
And what about errors in measurement? The longest-standing NASA research project was Gravity Probe B and they have been given months just to squeeze out of the data what they want! It's "climate change" all over again! Errors on top of more errors! CLIMATE_GATE! We know, we just ran another viewer poll ... once Hawking's gone, fizzle, pip. That hole Black Matter business, sucked down the tubes.
FLASH: BBC reports that American science "journalists" have been denying global viewers regular updates on the advocates of Hidden Variable Theory! By relying on the unreliable statistics of a Bell curve and some known inequalities, the real alternative to foaming quantum space-time has been denied us! Bring back unpasteurized Pilsner! They are gamma-irradiating our ale! Warning: some opinion always colours the reporting of most facts. It's a fact. Some opinion is added for colour to hold the attention of you, our viewer, during tedious factual reporting until the next advert. and that lovely advert's more colourful facts of new technology and those trusty old no-interest payment plans!
The BBC online reports that Britain may try protecting funding for astronomy and physics research.
This report comes at a time when BBC online is undergoing some changes to reflect the interests of their current viewers/visitors.
Until now, BBC has been distinctive for having a news category of "Science and Environment" and that category is distinguished from "Technology". American services, pandering to the anti-science right-wing Christians, have moved from "Tech and Science" to "Technology". After all, science news is a form of entertainment and available elsewhere for those who feel the need (a tiny minority of skepticks.)
But now the BBC is changing the rubric to "Science and Nature". You see, Nature is something that appeals to all of us - especially to Deists and is almost o-kay with theists. And as Palin has taught Americans, man does not affect nature. God created nature. It's His design. Part of His plan. "Environment" is a word cooked-up by liberals! The people want "raw Nature". With more pictures (nature is never obscene or pornographic unlike those "animal rights" doctored snapshots!) Nature abhors a hoax. "Environment" is the holy whore of scientism!
Of course pictures are alright. But how many people REALLY want to see the Hubble picture that demonstrated gravitational lensing? That relativity stuff - it's just a theory! It has critics, just like that theory of evolution! Big Bang? Heck no! That theory is about to go POOF!
And what about errors in measurement? The longest-standing NASA research project was Gravity Probe B and they have been given months just to squeeze out of the data what they want! It's "climate change" all over again! Errors on top of more errors! CLIMATE_GATE! We know, we just ran another viewer poll ... once Hawking's gone, fizzle, pip. That hole Black Matter business, sucked down the tubes.
FLASH: BBC reports that American science "journalists" have been denying global viewers regular updates on the advocates of Hidden Variable Theory! By relying on the unreliable statistics of a Bell curve and some known inequalities, the real alternative to foaming quantum space-time has been denied us! Bring back unpasteurized Pilsner! They are gamma-irradiating our ale! Warning: some opinion always colours the reporting of most facts. It's a fact. Some opinion is added for colour to hold the attention of you, our viewer, during tedious factual reporting until the next advert. and that lovely advert's more colourful facts of new technology and those trusty old no-interest payment plans!
Friday, February 19, 2010
Milosz and the Animals
In the 1982 collection of essays translated by Richard Lourie and published as "Visions From San Francisco Bay" Czeslaw Milosz asserts his own variant of Catholic anthropocentrism. It is not always so clear that scientism is his target: so often with Milosz it appears to be natural science that is loathesome.
One particularly troubling moment arrives in his reflections on the natural sciences, reflections in which he glides from animals to the observed behaviors of mutilated insects.
Writing in the language of a nation whose cavalry last rode into machine gun fire, obedient horses terrified by mortar shells, high-explosive ogives, whizzing and whining shrapnel, yet he fails to speak of animal suffering in a voice that I hear.
The Vatican has sought to bring some corrective to its words and statements promulgated over the years - a Vatican which was said to have opposed the creation of a humane animal mission within its walls (or was it within Rome itself?) What, after all, are our responsibilities in the soulless behemoth, the cowering dogs, the devious cats and rats, the fickle hawks and foolish pigeons? Where are their catacombs?
Years after his death, readers of Milosz may have leafed through a nature magazine as a series of photographs, no doubt faked, showed wolves hamstring and then harass a moose until, days later, it falls exhausted, enduring crows until blinded and then the arrival of the bears. Lions and hyenas follow the same course. The fate of the solitary wilderness moose must not be construed as either evil or even cruel. And we would protect the last pristine forests of eastern Poland from shorter railways, shorter highways, shorter pipelines, shorter power lines - before we do some wrong. No forest which has known such trespass has ever remained on its own course, to its own end.
Elias Canetti was also less than direct, but often more suggestive than Milosz of how our relationship to the animal world is evolving. Jeshua rides into the city on the back of a donkey. Another makes his escape while clinging to a goat. Canetti leaves us no doubt about the donkeys in the city of Marrakesh. And not to forget that the north African cites were so often cities of slaves and their traders and owners.
When to stop beating a horse?
Saudi morality police are said to have barred girls from exiting a burning building because of their uncovered heads.
Yes, the fate of a Sappho in any great city of Islam should concern us more than a comic-faced camel on market day.
Milosz never seemed to grasp that urwelt, mitwelt and eigenwelt would not be the cleft ontological regions of the categorized world knowledge for which he was as nostalgic as he was for an inspired deontic order like any poet untrue to his first marriage vows.
A journalist's notebook suggests that it is the rural world of Orthodox Serbia wherein the lost world of Milosz's Lithuania can be sensed in fable and superstition - the world of a lost Lithuania and others, their people uncounted or never returned from forced exile. Villages renamed. Manor houses plowed under. But here the rural life continues as it might have in a Lithuania unconverted - or Orthodox.
But which folk parables teach that the man cruel to an old horse will lose his fortune, cruel to an old rooster, will lose his wife? A carp is fattening in a tub. Geese are fed as we would rather not imagine.
In not so rural America, poultry parts bound for Russia begin their journey by "locking" the flightless wings behind the back of the fowl - which go silent, subdued, and are easily flipped, carried and slipped into their crates for their journey to evisceration - handled and mishandled by the poorest of the poor, night laborers traipsing back and forth from 18-wheeler into the "barn" until the feathers begin to settle and it is time for a wash, perhaps a toothbrush, and breakfast. If your great-grandmother showed your grandmother how to lock those wings, she doubtless also showed her how to hold the hatchet, or to choke up on the haft of an ax.
Those were not chickens. Call them "fryers". The eggs have been candled from broiler breeding hens and sit warm in the incubator racks and shelves. The stacked boxes from the hatchery arrive in a few days and a new cycle of life begins.
This is no plea for free-range poultry or vegan diet. The extremes are always easier to advocate.
Entering the Weisman Art Musuem at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis on the south shore of the Mississippi - a distinctive Frank Gehry (Ephraim Owen Goldberg) building - a great wall painting cannot be avoided if you turn left - a wall of galvanized layer cages - layers, trapped in pairs, in a simple binary pecking order, for their eggs, their days shortened and cycling with clever clocks, timers. Not the simple egg timer of a pleasant breakfast. It is not my favorite work in the collection.
In these essays Milosz is telling us of how and where he finds himself, a Polish speaking poet on the western coast of California and anyone who has deep feeling for this regretted poet will have wanted to read these pages.
One particularly troubling moment arrives in his reflections on the natural sciences, reflections in which he glides from animals to the observed behaviors of mutilated insects.
Writing in the language of a nation whose cavalry last rode into machine gun fire, obedient horses terrified by mortar shells, high-explosive ogives, whizzing and whining shrapnel, yet he fails to speak of animal suffering in a voice that I hear.
The Vatican has sought to bring some corrective to its words and statements promulgated over the years - a Vatican which was said to have opposed the creation of a humane animal mission within its walls (or was it within Rome itself?) What, after all, are our responsibilities in the soulless behemoth, the cowering dogs, the devious cats and rats, the fickle hawks and foolish pigeons? Where are their catacombs?
Years after his death, readers of Milosz may have leafed through a nature magazine as a series of photographs, no doubt faked, showed wolves hamstring and then harass a moose until, days later, it falls exhausted, enduring crows until blinded and then the arrival of the bears. Lions and hyenas follow the same course. The fate of the solitary wilderness moose must not be construed as either evil or even cruel. And we would protect the last pristine forests of eastern Poland from shorter railways, shorter highways, shorter pipelines, shorter power lines - before we do some wrong. No forest which has known such trespass has ever remained on its own course, to its own end.
Elias Canetti was also less than direct, but often more suggestive than Milosz of how our relationship to the animal world is evolving. Jeshua rides into the city on the back of a donkey. Another makes his escape while clinging to a goat. Canetti leaves us no doubt about the donkeys in the city of Marrakesh. And not to forget that the north African cites were so often cities of slaves and their traders and owners.
When to stop beating a horse?
Saudi morality police are said to have barred girls from exiting a burning building because of their uncovered heads.
Yes, the fate of a Sappho in any great city of Islam should concern us more than a comic-faced camel on market day.
Milosz never seemed to grasp that urwelt, mitwelt and eigenwelt would not be the cleft ontological regions of the categorized world knowledge for which he was as nostalgic as he was for an inspired deontic order like any poet untrue to his first marriage vows.
A journalist's notebook suggests that it is the rural world of Orthodox Serbia wherein the lost world of Milosz's Lithuania can be sensed in fable and superstition - the world of a lost Lithuania and others, their people uncounted or never returned from forced exile. Villages renamed. Manor houses plowed under. But here the rural life continues as it might have in a Lithuania unconverted - or Orthodox.
But which folk parables teach that the man cruel to an old horse will lose his fortune, cruel to an old rooster, will lose his wife? A carp is fattening in a tub. Geese are fed as we would rather not imagine.
In not so rural America, poultry parts bound for Russia begin their journey by "locking" the flightless wings behind the back of the fowl - which go silent, subdued, and are easily flipped, carried and slipped into their crates for their journey to evisceration - handled and mishandled by the poorest of the poor, night laborers traipsing back and forth from 18-wheeler into the "barn" until the feathers begin to settle and it is time for a wash, perhaps a toothbrush, and breakfast. If your great-grandmother showed your grandmother how to lock those wings, she doubtless also showed her how to hold the hatchet, or to choke up on the haft of an ax.
Those were not chickens. Call them "fryers". The eggs have been candled from broiler breeding hens and sit warm in the incubator racks and shelves. The stacked boxes from the hatchery arrive in a few days and a new cycle of life begins.
This is no plea for free-range poultry or vegan diet. The extremes are always easier to advocate.
Entering the Weisman Art Musuem at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis on the south shore of the Mississippi - a distinctive Frank Gehry (Ephraim Owen Goldberg) building - a great wall painting cannot be avoided if you turn left - a wall of galvanized layer cages - layers, trapped in pairs, in a simple binary pecking order, for their eggs, their days shortened and cycling with clever clocks, timers. Not the simple egg timer of a pleasant breakfast. It is not my favorite work in the collection.
In these essays Milosz is telling us of how and where he finds himself, a Polish speaking poet on the western coast of California and anyone who has deep feeling for this regretted poet will have wanted to read these pages.
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