Seriously, I have read all of these folks. They mostly speak gibberish in order to purff themselves up. It would be better if they remained silent. Better for the world and better for clear thought. And better for political activism. Practically everything that Heidegger said about science, physics, etc. is mainly anti-science... Jerry Monaco
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Seriously, you need to go back when you have the time and re-read some of them types, especially Heidegger. The point would not be to appreciate him, but see him as representative of cultural and historical themes.
While I can't read him in German and therefore can not see him in quite the way I would like to, enough of what he does with language comes through even in bad translation. The thematic core is an identification between Being, or Zeit or Hegelian zeitgeist and language---as a consummate discourse, thought, as philosophy, as historical narrative--whatever you want to call it, I call it the art impulse, via Cassirer and Malraux---and human existence as a supra-material state or a metaphysics bound in time, the time of history as it unfolds through thought and action, in work and works and thereby becomes conscious of itself. This is a very beautiful idea. But...
When I finally saw this theme in Heidegger, it explained why and how he could have become an apologist for the Third Reich. The importance is not them so much as any national identity cult which somehow envisions itself as more than human, more than just any other human community struggling to become its own ideal. (This goes to my own diatribes against the US great white masses and their current rightwing bullshit identity complex, manifested as all kinds of xenophobias, and its atrocious celebration of war on the Muslim world---reduced to Good v. Evil. I think this same collective identity and its attending ideals are reflected on the other side, that is as Muslim political acts and terrorism against western targets like the US and the WTC.)
So then to the anti-science theme. H saw the historical shift (in Germany) from an academic emphasis on high German philosophy, language arts, and the humanities---heavily influenced by 19thC neo-classicism---towards a state academy domination by technical fields of mathematics, physics, chemistry, the physical sciences. This academic and intellectual shift was in his view a denial of the essence of the (German) human spirit, tantamount to a death wish, and a devaluation of mind, language, and philosophy. He saw the physical sciences as a perversion of the ancient Greek techne, associated with the arts, particularly architecture, in effect turning beauty into machines---and by extension humanity into a machine. Also not an entirely bad idea, and yet... wrong headed.
Again the point isn't to appreciate that Heidegger per se wrote about these ideas or formulated them in a particular way, but that he represents a strong theme in western societies that oppose science as anti-human---and recognize that such impulses can be easily degraded into a swath of anti-intellectualisms---including those from the physical sciences academy and its endless wars on the humanities and arts as pure bullshit---not worth offering in the course catalog.
(I've blown my three post today, and haven't gotten started on the Iran's great leap toward Trinity... Tomorrow I guess or later in the week. Yes, I have been working on SWUs, struggling with the antihuman horror of Dirac...)
CG
ps. Sorry if this was unintelligible. I had to cover a great deal of ground from memory (some wrong no doubt, maybe Chris will correct some of it)...