Monday, April 15, 2024

Links of Note

 * Bryan Garsten, The Liberalism of Refuge

* Daniel Novotny, Prolegomena to a Study of Beings of Reason in Post-Suarezian Scholasticism 1600-1650 (PDF) and Scholastic Debates about Beings of Reason and Contemporary Analytical Metaphysics (PDF)

* George H. Nash, John Witherspoon: Educating for Liberty, at the Acton Institute

* Nira Arapovic, Aristotle's Hylomorphism and the Mind-Body Problem (PDF)

* Edward Feser, Boundaries of Belief, reviews Guy Mansini's The Development of Doctrine, at "First Things"

* Colin Marshall, Schopenhauer on the Futility of Suicide (PDF)

* Jess Cockerill, Expired Cans of Salmon from Decades Ago Reveal a Big Surprise, at "ScienceAlert", on an interesting way of researching changes of marine ecology.

* Renato Costa, Law and Reality: A Dialogue Between Herman Dooyeweerd and John Finnis (PDF)

* Richard Y. Chappell, Three Recent Papers I Liked, at "Good Thoughts"

* Parisa Moosavi, The Function Argument for Ascribing Interests (PDF)

* John Carlos Baez, Protonium, at "Azimuth". Protonium is a rare occurrence when a proton and and antiproton orbit each other.

* Karin De Boer, Kant's Transcendental Turn to the Object (PDF)

* Gregory Thompson, Hinges and a Lock: Hospitality in a World of Predators, at "Comment"

* Yvonne Chiu, Seven military classics: martial victory through good governance (PDF)

* Nathaniel Scharping, What Does the History of Natural History Museums Look Like?, at Discovery

* Elliot Polsky, The Modern Semantic Principles Behind Gilson's Existential Interpretation of Aquinas (Part 1) (PDF) and The Modern Semantic Principles Behind Gilson's Existential Interpretation of Aquinas (Part 2) (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.