Stephen Hicks

Heidegger and World War One — Altman’s good book

The “Heidegger Wars” are an academic battle about the significance of Martin Heidegger’s commitment to Natonal Socialism as an ideology and to the Nazi Party in particular. William H. F. Altman’s important book, Martin Heidegger and the First World War: Being and Time as Funeral Oration, opens with this question: “Was Martin Heidegger an apolitical […]

Heidegger and World War One — Altman’s good book Read More »

UNCERTAIN PROSPECTS: BERTRAND RUSSELL and JOHN DEWEY. Lecture 1 of Postmodern Philosophy [Peterson Academy course]

At the beginning of the 20th century, both religion and philosophy seem to have reached a dead end: Russell: philosophy’s answers “are none of them demonstrably true.” Dewey: religions merely “steep and dye intellectual fabrics in the seething vat of emotions.” Lecture One: Uncertain Prospects. Bertrand Russell and John Dewey Themes: Disquieting inheritance: Entropy, Karl

UNCERTAIN PROSPECTS: BERTRAND RUSSELL and JOHN DEWEY. Lecture 1 of Postmodern Philosophy [Peterson Academy course] Read More »

Heine versus Nietzsche on obscurantism in philosophy

To what extent is bad writing style, particularly bad academic style, a result of (a) poor skill, (b) affectation, (c) imitation, or (d) a tool to conceal the meaning and implications of one’s ideas? Heinrich Heine here lambasts many of his fellow intellectuals: “Distinguished German philosophers who may accidentally cast a glance over these pages

Heine versus Nietzsche on obscurantism in philosophy Read More »

The philosopher Martin Heidegger on the Führer Principle

Quoted in Emmanuel Faye’s Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935 (Yale, 2009), p. 140, italics in the original. “Only where leader and led together bind each other in one destiny, and fight for the realization of one idea, does true order grow. Then spiritual superiority and

The philosopher Martin Heidegger on the Führer Principle Read More »