Here is an example of a phenomenon that has long puzzled me: Nasty in-group fighting. In The Rise of Neo-Kantianism, Klaus Christian Köhnke asks: What can “explain one of the most distressing features of the neo-Kantians: the fierceness and bitterness of their polemics, the nastiness of their ad hominem arguments, which destroyed personal friendships and […]
Movement in-fighting and schisms — psychology Read More »
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 »
Quoted in Emmanuel Faye’s Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935 (Yale, 2009), p. 140, italics in the original.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 »
Updated for the new year: My collected posts on key thinkers from Homer, Socrates, and Augustine to Descartes, Kant, and Rand. Related: My Philosophers, Explained series.
Intellectual History page updated Read More »
Pope Alexander VI really knew how to throw a party. Rodrigo Borgia became Alexander VI in 1492 and livened things up at the Vatican. As reported in William Manchester’s excellent A World Lit Only by Fire, p. 79: ‘Once he became Pope Alexander VI, Vatican parties, already wild, grew wilder. They were costly, but he
Reformation-era extremes, Alexander VI version Read More »
Tim Black, a senior writer at spiked, has a good review discussion of “Why they’re really scared of Heidegger.” The “they’re” refers to many contemporary academics, and Black’s review is of Emmanuel Faye’s wave-making Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935 (Yale, 2009). Some key quotations from
Heidegger’s anti-humanism and the Left Read More »
In an 1846 review of Grote’s History of Greece, John Stuart Mill makes this claim: “The Battle of Marathon, even as an event in British history, is more important than the Battle of Hastings.” My first reaction to Mill’s sentence was agreement. My second reaction was to the audacity of the claim and to wonder
Audacious historical cause-and-effect claims Read More »
On this day, I am thankful in a way that history puts in perspective. Three quotations: From William Manchester, A World Lit Only By Fire, on life in medieval Europe: “Because most peasants lived and died without leaving their birthplace, there was seldom need for any tag beyond One-Eye, or Roussie (Redhead), or Bionda (Blondie),