Over at Enowning there is a rather positive review of Heidegger's Confusions. It's apparently an extended attack on Heidegger's thought. I suppose the positive aspect is that the author actually engages with Heidegger's thought rather than simply attacking strawmen, as so often is the case. So all of you who have been wanting to attack Continental thought, here's the book for you. (I should add the caveat that I've never read it - but then I'm not sure I'm well versed sufficiently so as to argue many of the points either) Apparently the book focuses in on various places where Heidegger is known to be inconsistent. Exactly how one ought to take Heidegger in those places isn't clear. But I suspect those sympathetic to Heidegger might well differ with the author. Anyway, it sounds like a very intriguing book. I'd put it on my "to read" list were it not already filled up. Maybe next year.
Bill Vallicella has a largely negative review of this book at his blog.
. . .I found that it is nothing but an overpriced reprint of previously available materials. Twenty dollars for a thin (129 pp.) paperback is bad enough, especially given the mediocre production values of Prometheus Books; but the clincher was my discovery that there is nothing in this volume that has not appeared elsewhere. . . There is also the question of the quality of Edward’s Heidegger-critique . . . In a nutshell, the Edwards strategy is this: Heidegger assumes something that Russell denies; therefore, Heidegger is wrong. But it is actually worse than that given Edwards’ liberal admixture of invective and insult. There is much to criticize in Heidegger, but hostile polemic, though it may serve some purpose in the political sphere, is out of place in philosophy.
Enowning linked to a rather interesting response to Edwards. "Heidegger, Edwards, and Being-Toward-Death".
Also note my other discussion related to Edwards.
I'm really curious now as to what Edward's arguments actually are. I've been doing a Google search but nothing substantial has come up yet. Anyone with a good link, please feel free to add it here.
Looking about the web though I did find a few good quotes from the book.
Bertrand Russell once referred to Kant as the greatest catastrophe in the history of philosophy. C.D. Broad commented that this position surely belonged to Hegel. Both Russell and Broad were wrong, because this title undoubtedly belongs to Martin Heidegger.
True or not, that's a pretty good paragraph.
In terms of more substantial links, the following from the encyclopedia of philosophy that Edwards edited is quite revealing. "Nothing" That's technically not written by Edwards though.
In my search I did find a quote from the introduction to Vallicella's book A Paradigm Theory of Existence: Onto-Theology Vindicated It is relevant given his other comments.
The heart of philosophy is metaphysics, and at the heart of the heart lie two questions about existence. What is it for any contingent thing to exist? Why does any contingent thing exist? Call these the nature question and the ground question, respectively. The first concerns the nature of the existence of the contingent existent; the second concerns the ground of the contingent existent. Both questions are ancient, and yet perennial in their appeal; both have presided over the burial of so many of their would-be undertakers that it is a good induction that they will continue to do so.
For some time now, the preferred style in addressing such questions has been deflationary when it has not been eliminativist. Ask Willard Quine what existence is, and you will hear that 'Existence is what existential quantification expresses.'(1) Ask Bertrand Russell what it is for an individual to exist, and he will tell you that an individual can no more exist than it can be numerous: there just is no such thing as the existence of individuals.(2) And of course Russell's eliminativist answer implies that one cannot even ask, on pain of succumbing to the fallacy of complex question, why any contingent individual exists: if no individual exists, there can be no question why any individual exists. Not to mention Russell's modal corollary: `contingent' and `necessary' can only be said de dicto (of propositions) and not de re (of things). At the source of the Russellian-Quinean stream stands the imposing figure of Frege, perhaps the greatest of logicians, and certainly the greatest since Aristotle. But logic is not metaphysics, and we shall see that existence cannot come into focus through the lenses of logic alone. It is, as Santayana once said, 'odious to the logician.' (3) This is part of its charm, as the resolute reader will no doubt come to appreciate.
The critical task of this book is to put paid to deflationary and eliminativist accounts, thereby restoring existence to its rightful place as one of the deep topics in philosophy, if not the deepest. The constructive task is to defend the thesis that the nature and ground questions admit of a unified answer, and that this answer takes the form of what I call a paradigm theory of existence. The central idea of the paradigm theory is that existence itself is nothing abstract (hence not a property or a concept or a quantifier or anything merely logical or linguistic or representational) but is instead a paradigmatically existent concrete individual. The idea is not merely that existence itself exists -- which would be true if one said that existence is a property and one held a realist theory of properties -- but that existence exists in a plenary concrete sense that it cannot be the business of a preface to explain. But the idea may be limned as follows. Existence itself exists of absolute metaphysical necessity and the contingent existent exists in virtue of its dependence on self-existent existence. I submit that this robust theory of existence can be as rigorously defended as any deflationary theory.
(1) W. V. Quine, "Existence and Quantification" in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays New York: Columbia University Press, 1969) p. 97
(2) Bertrand Russell, "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism" in Logic and Knowledge, ed. R. C. Marsh (New York, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1956), pp. 232 ff.
(3) George Santayana, Scepticism and animal faith (New York: Dover Publications, Inc. 1955) p. 48.
I've closed comments in order to avoid spam since I don't check this older blog as much anymore.
and Theology
Number of unique visitors:
Blogged by Clark Goble