>
>When I took an existentialism and phenomenology course at Northridge
>(CSUN) in `65, we began with selections from Hegel, Kierkegaard,
>Nietzsche, using Nietzsche as the bridge to both branches: Husserl and
>Heidegger and Sartre and Merleau-Ponty.
I taught versions of this course at Michigan in the early and mid 1980s, at and Kalamazoo College in the late 1980s. I had a similar class from Kaufmann at Tigertown in 1975.
>
>Its hard to re-capture just how electrifying these writers were at the
>time. They have to be contrasted to the long, abstract and tedious
>Anglo-American analytical tradition,
Well, sorry 'bout that . . . .
>
>In continental philosophy as it was called then, phenomenologists and
>existentialists actually discussed the realm of ideas and its direct
>expressions in life and concrete experience: living in a mass
>technological society, death, alienation, the suffocation of mass
>culture... Compared to the lengthy and abstract deliberations on
>language and truth, the nuances of empirical induction and so forth in
>the Anglo-American tradition, these other guys were fire breathing
>radicals.
I think kids were attracted to the pomos in the late 80s and 90s for similar reasons. T recall a discussion with other analytical philosophers at Ohio State, they were wondering why their classes in semantics and metaphysics were not drwaing (mine in political philosophy were always full, although I'm very analytical), while the pomo stuff was hopping. I tried to explain, but they wouldn't understand.
The contrast between that world and say the Beach Boys was
>tremendous.
Hey, wadday got against the Beach Boys?
>
>In retrospect, it seems to me that there was an explicit, uniform and
>complete suppression of these works in the US academy and indeed the
>whole realm of thought that they represent.
Not so much by my time. Though mainstream analytical philosophy has ignorant contempt for anything that looks fuzzy and different. Still there was always at least one person hired to teach it--Kaufmann at Princeton, Fritjhof Bergmann at Michigan, there were twao at Ohio State, one of whom was bitter and alienated.
jks
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