<div>On 5/9/06, Chris Doss <<a href="mailto:lookoverhere1@yahoo.com">lookoverhere1@yahoo.com</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Jerry, the operative term here is "random underlined passages in my books." You seem to have attempted to understand none of this, not even mentioning that it is an obvious application of the Aristotelian notions of horismos and entelecheia as applied to a temporal phenomenon (human beings) within a basically Lutheran understanding of human nature. Heidegger is not talking about biology at all, he is attempting to describe the structure of the temporally determined locus of understanding and relate it to its borders, in terms of which it understands itself and the world, that is, its birth and death. </blockquote><div> Of course I know that Heidegger is not writing about biology.  He couldn't have if he tried.  But Aristotle did write about biology and he was one of the best writers on the subject for may 2000 years.  Aristotle had very respectable notions of biology and physics and they bear rereading for historical reasons and to give us an idea of why certain questions have not been answered.  (Questions on the paradox of motion for instance.)   If you want me to analyze what Heidegger actually says on death and mortality I can but I would rather do it over a cup of coffee or a glass of scotch because I have long ago written all of the stuff out of me. Below the verbiage Heidegger does not say anything intelligent about death and our relationship to it as human beings.  It is asserted by Heideggerian's that human life is being-towards-death and this is said to be a great insight.  But when you go through it all Heidegger is one great confusion.  He confuses very simple things by collapsing present and future, and equating death with thoughts about death.  I could go on.  He plays word games with all kinds of words but in talking about the death he plays many games with the German word for "possibility" and "end" and for notions of present and future.  (All one has to do is read "Being and Time" closely to see that he conflates such notions.)  He does this in order to say that being dead is the culmination of a persons life.  Does that satisfy you for a little analysis of Heidegger's great contributions to thinking about mortality and death.  I could go on and extend this to an actual essay but what is the use.  For Heideggerians it is a matter of being caught in a worldview that "wills" to reject everything but the Manichean metaphysics that can be reduced to simply a bad analysis of the  deep "language" of past philosophers The point is, that after the 1850s, anyone who writes about physics and biology and life in death in the way Heidegger does is simply rejecting what little knowledge we can have about the world.  The things he writes are not to be taken seriously except as very bad poetry.  Why intellectuals let themselves be conned by such nonsense, such posturing prose is one of the mysteries of dogmatic belief.  Just think how stupid I am for challenging the intelligence of Heidegger. </div> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">You probably don't understand what that means, but that have less to do with the words or content but with you possibly just not being very smart. Frankly you're coming aross as a real twit, lazy and </blockquote><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> "willfully ignorant." Actually a bit of a pseudo-intellectual. </blockquote><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> That said, I'm not going to engage with you the subject, cause you don't know what the fuck you're talking about. </blockquote> Frame it!  Put it on the marquis.  JM </div>