Monday, October 30, 2023

Links of Note

* Brian Kemple, On the Meanings of 'Object', 'Objective', and 'Objectivity', at the Lyceum Institute 

* Michael Walschots, Incentives of the Mind: Kant and Baumgarten on the Impelling Causes of Desire (PDF)

* Hazem Zohny, Twenty-five years of the 'Oregon model of assisted suicide'

* Emma Emrich, Aquinas and Buridan on the Substance of the Soul and Its Powers: On the Intermediary Nature of Properties (PDF)

* Nadya Williams, Democracies Need Shared Literature, at "Front Porch Republic"

* Michael Veldman, Mathematizing Metaphysics: The Case of the Least Action Principle (PDF)

* David Polansky, Do nations have navels, or what does it mean to belong?, at "Strange Frequencies"

* George E. Panichas, The structure of basic human rights (PDF)

* You can find out your birthday in the Aztec calendar. Since it was common in Mesoamerica for your birthday also to be your name, you can therefore find out your Aztec name. Mine is Seven Snake, or as it is sometimes given, Seven Serpent. Looking at the Florentine Codex online, you can also sometimes find how the Aztecs would read the day as an omen -- Seven Serpent was considered a day of extraordinary good fortune, since days in the seventh place are good luck and Seven Serpent in particular is associated with abundant harvest in "merits, gifts, and good deserts".

* Levi Durham, The Role of Hospice and Palliative Medicine in the Ars Moriendi (PDF)

* Terry Mattingly, The journey of Dorothy Sayers -- from classical education to murder mysteries and back, at "Get Religion"

* Robert Junqueira, What can anyone say so far on the Peirce-CJC relation? (PDF)

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Anonymous
0 points
14 years ago

I have a hard time buying this sentiment as authentically Ryle's (and Google doesn't show anything substantiating it). Ryle wrote a generally positive review of "Being and Time", and when asked about SuZ later he didn't have much to say other than "Oh, yeah, I read that a long time ago and wrote a book review, which I worked hard on but no one ever asked me about. Haven't really thought of it since. Dunno whether it influenced me or not. I liked logical positivism more, at the time, but I might've found appealing anti-Cartesian/proto-behaviorist stuff in SuZ." (I paraphrase; the full quote is in the appendix on p. 290 of Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, which also reprints Ryle's book review from Mind.)

I also don't see what's wrong with the sentiment Ryle genuinely had about SuZ: There're helpful things to be gleaned from it, but the project as a whole isn't the way to go.

I don't know what his character has to do with whether, say, his criticisms of Husserl hit their mark, despite the fact that Being is all over the place in a lot of those; the fact that a Nazi says that everything he's done with his work had to do with his Nazism doesn't make it so. I've never seen a defense of Husserl which takes the form "But this criticism only holds water if you're a Nazi, ergo Husserl escapes the charge."

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Anonymous
0 points
14 years ago

I doubt it's Ryle's, as well; it's a Rylean-like summation, though, even if it's not Ryle's own opinion. But Polt doesn't get into questions of provenance.

Since Ryle's sentiment in the comment really doesn't tell us anything about how to handle the question of Heidegger's Nazism, I'm not sure how it's relevant. Likewise, whether or not Heidegger's criticisms of Husserl are untowardly connected is something that has to be determined, not assumed. The fact that a Nazi says something doesn't make it false, true, but it also doesn't make it non-Nazi in attitude, formulation, or substance; given that we are quite literally talking about a Nazi, that there is nothing about it that is Nazi has to be shown, not insisted upon a priori. As I say, it has to be unwound and then rewound in such a way as to show that there is no Nazi distortion in it. If we can do that, fine and dandy; before we do it, though, we have no license to pretend that all is obviously safe.

Much of the problem lies precisely in reasoning by analogy here, which generally involves merely fooling ourselves by glossing over obviously significant differences. Nazism isn't a limited foible like drinking too much or sexual perversion, that might affect some philosophical fringes here and there but no more. It is a large-scale commitment; and, contrary to the tendency to insist on it as 'politics', it's not a merely political commitment like deciding one will support the Green Party in local elections. It carries a vision of technology, society, humanity. And this is undeniably so in Heidegger's case; Heidegger's own characterizations of his involvement, vague and weasely though they often are, links it with some of this major philosophical concerns. We should not fall into the hubris of pretending to know prior to all evidence what distortions such a commitment may or may not introduce into a philosophical approach, method, position, or system.