I've been lurking for a while, and thought I'd pipe up on the question
of Martin Heidegger.
> I'm no Heidegger scholar, though I taught him now and then in
> classes on existentialism or cont phil when I was a phil. professor.
> I was quite startled to read several essays collected in the Farrel
> Krell anthology of Basic Writings which I thought were very deep
> and insightful as people of straight-out philosophy and history of
> science, written in intelligible and lucid prose. The point of view
> expressed in them was proto-Kuhnian--in fact, I'd say that H
> anticipated a good many of the ideas which are now associated with
> Kuhn.
I had to read some essays in that same collection; it was pointed out
to me that Kuhn was indirectly influenced by Heidegger via Alexandre
Koyre.
> As to his Nazism, I don't think it's relevant to this. The view I
> came to at the time is that he was attrcated to Nazism because of
> its superficial use of a certain anti-modernist romanticism, the
> Blut und Erde scheisse,a s well as by his own ambivalent
> anti-Semitism. (Why ambivalent? Well, he studied with Husserl and
> taught Arendt, and both of them loved him and so far as we can tell,
> he them.) I don't think his politics means he has nothing to teach
> us about science.
Hmmm...I have to disagree. I think that Heidegger's involvement w/the
Nazi party does have some bearing on his philosophy. I'm not saying
that his writings on science are wrong-headed -- on the contrary --
but that they're only part of his overall philosophical project, which
did have certain specific political aims. As I understand it,
Heidegger's position is that an inquiry into and a proper attitude
towards capital-B Being is a necessary precondition towards any
activities that concern small b-beings; so, in particular, science is
secondary to and derived from philosophical ontology. Heidegger
apparently found that the Nazi party would inculcate the appropriate
attitude towards capital-B Being in the German people (what that means
I don't know, but it is the gist of the notorious Rectoral Address),
and certainly wanted to play a role in some through going cultural
changes which certainly would have included the priority and prestige
of the physical sciences. So while Heidegger himself was
scientifically literate and his writings in the philosophy of science
accurate and substantial, science was for him secondary to concerns of
fundamental ontology.
To bring this back to Sokal and Bricmont, I understand many of the
thinkers they criticize -- Deleuze, Kristeva, Irigaray -- are, in some
sense, Heideggerians. They may not be fundamental ontologists, but
for them, philosophy has primacy over science. And this raises the
hard question that Sokal and Bricmont avoid: just what is the status
of philosophy vis-à-vis the hard sciences, and vice versa? It's
certainly disingenuous of thinkers in cultural studies to attack the
alleged originary ambitions of other discourses without acknowledging
their own Imperial roots, but as far as I can tell, S&B haven't even
done this.
--
Curtiss Leung