John Searle reports this conversation with Michel Foucault about deconstructionist Jacques Derrida: ‘You can hardly misread him, because he’s so obscure. Every time you say, “He says so and so,” he always says, “You misunderstood me.” But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that’s not so easy. I once said this […]
Derrida, according to Searle and Foucault Read More »
Following up on two posts on the achievements of modern anatomy (“The Knife Man” and “Anatomy and Philosophy”), here is St. Augustine (354-430) disapproving of the practice: “With a cruel zeal for science, some medical men, who are called anatomists, have dissected the bodies of the dead, and sometimes even of sick persons who have
St. Augustine against anatomy and science Read More »
A bold statement from Nobel-Prize-winning novelist Hermann Hesse: “The German intellectual has constantly rebelled against the word and against reason and courted music.” (From Steppenwolf, p. 152, Modern Library ed.) I like the spirit of it, as it fits with my assessment of mainline German philosophy in Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to
Hesse on Germans versus reason Read More »
[Grégoire Canlorbe is a French intellectual entrepreneur. He currently resides in Paris. He interviewed me for The Foundation for Economic Education. Excerpt below:] Grégoire Canlorbe: Both Rand and Nietzsche vehemently despise the ancestral notion of “Common Good”, dating back at least to Aristotle. Nietzsche eloquently and provocatively sums up his grievances against it in paragraph 43
Do Rand and Nietzsche both despise “Common Good”? Read More »
Marcus Herz was Immanuel Kant’s friend, a former student, and a well-educated man — he qualified as a physician and eventually became a professor of philosophy. Yet, “when Kant gave the MS. of the Critique to his friend Herz, a man much versed in speculation, Herz returned it half read, saying he feared insanity if
Kant, Herz and fearing insanity Read More »
From Klaus Christian Köhnke’s The Rise of Neo-Kantianism (Cambridge, 1991): “In the 1870s Kant became the most frequently read of the classics in Germany’s universities” (p. 8) That decade marked the decline of Hegelianism and triumph of neo-Kantianism: “Immediately after the Franco-Prussian war [1870-71] things moved forward rapidly and neo-Kantianism as a whole rose rapidly in the
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My Explaining Postmodernism book is negative on the major developments in German philosophy, tracing a devolution from Kant through Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger to the postmodernists. Lots of room in that story for nuances and exceptions, and I’ve received much criticism for being harsh on the German thinkers. I have two forthcoming Open College
Is German philosophy really Counter-Enlightenment? Nietzsche’s assessment Read More »
From Durant’s The Story of Philosophy, p. 380 (or p. 265 of this Google Books edition). THE Kantian philosophy which announced itself as “prolegomena to all future metaphysics,” was, by malicious intent, a murderous thrust at traditional modes of speculation; and, contrary to intent, a damaging blow to all metaphysics whatsoever. For metaphysics had meant,
Will Durant on Kant Read More »