Sequence 2 parts 2009

Heidegger's Nazism

The apologists want to keep Heidegger’s philosophy and leave his Nazism behind. Two posts from November 2009 on why that separation has to be argued for.

Black-and-white photograph of the elderly Martin Heidegger, smiling, with a man in a hat leaning in beside him. — Martin Heidegger with O. E. Sutter in Hausen, photographed by Willy Pragher around 1960. Photo: Willy Pragher, CC BY 4.0.

The Dasein/Non-Dasein Problem
November 17, 2009
I’m generally opposed to “Great Man” theories of the history of ideas. My preference is for folks like Derek Parfit who acknowledge that philosophy is a discipline that builds on the work of one’s predecessors and that showing clearly why a bad idea is wrong can be tedious but also more useful than the flashy…
Heidegger and Nazism
November 18, 2009
Apologies for Heidegger’s Nazism take a few different forms. As I mentioned yesterday , some apologists, call them the Orthodox Apologists, try to show that Heidegger himself simply forgot the lessons of his own early work, or retreated into errancy. At worst, his later Nazi pronouncements betrayed that early work by appropriating fundamental ontology for…

Start with part 1

The Dasein/Non-Dasein Problem

Heidegger and Nazism