From Heidegger to Pomos (Was Re:It's a battlefield...)

JKSCHW at aol.com JKSCHW at aol.com
Thu Dec 10 19:42:27 PST 1998


In a message dated 98-12-10 13:33:40 EST, you write:

<< 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.

JKS: Hm. Maybe. K was a major figure in history of science and Kuhn probably read him, although I don't recall his quoting K in print or making anything of the connection.

JKS > As to Heidegger's Nazism, I don't think it's relevant to this. . . . I don't think his politics means he has nothing to teach

> us about science.

YOU: Hmmm...I have to disagree. I think that Heidegger's involvement w/the

Nazi party does have some bearing on his philosophy.

JKS: I didn't say the contrary, jsut that it doesn't make his comments on science worthless.

YOU: 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. . . . . so, in particular, science is

secondary to and derived from philosophical ontology.

JKS: I don't know whether "derived from" is right, H seems to have thought that knowledge of Being was great, the Greeks had and the rest of western history is some sort of mistake, including science.

YOU: Heidegger

apparently found that the Nazi party would inculcate the appropriate

attitude towards capital-B Being in the German people

HEIDEGGER: "Ve haff vays of making you manifest openness-to-Being!"

YOU: 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?

JKS: I think this is a boring question. Philosophers can say, like Alexander Haig, We are in charge, and this will make no more difference than Haig's intervention. It only makes philosophers look ridiculous. I don't maen science is in charge, but that what philosophy does can't be according any sort of "prioroty" in terms of importance or essentiality or anything of that sort. Course you hace to rember I am alsoa student of Rorty's as well as Kuhn's.

YOU: 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.

JKS: You lose me here. Seems to me that S&Bm from whgat I here, are being excessively modest, if anything. They are saying that these caharcters don't know squat about science and talk a lot of tommyrot when they do talk about science. They admit they don't knwo philosophy and don't presume to pronounce on it. What's imperial about that?

--jks



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