I am working on a mass-market piece on the extraordinary Martin
Heidegger. "Heidegger made easy" if such a thing is possible. The current draft was here but I've posted it elsewhere so you can now find it here.
Showing posts with label truth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label truth. Show all posts
Oct 2, 2009
Sep 30, 2009
Padding the case for the new atheism
Mark Shea's article on the new atheists is copied below. It talks tacitly of tacit knowledge. The source is here.
Padding the Case for the New Atheism
Recently there has been a flurry of books from the “New Atheists.” Such figures as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens have been holding forth to state . . . well, not anything new.
The reason there is nothing new to say is that there cannot, by the nature of the discussion, be anything new to say. When it came to the question “Does God exist?,” St. Thomas could only think of two reasonable objections in the whole history of human thought.
Padding the Case for the New Atheism
Recently there has been a flurry of books from the “New Atheists.” Such figures as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens have been holding forth to state . . . well, not anything new.
The reason there is nothing new to say is that there cannot, by the nature of the discussion, be anything new to say. When it came to the question “Does God exist?,” St. Thomas could only think of two reasonable objections in the whole history of human thought.
Sep 15, 2009
The true and the pseudo problems of knowledge
The 'problem of knowledge' has traditionally been about the question of whether we can know anything certainly and if so how we can justify that knowledge. It is based on an inside-outside view which sees us (me: the knower) as a subject separated from the thing known which is the object of my knowledge.
Heidegger says that this subject-object separation assumes a subject which is not in the world of the objects that are known. As if one could put oneself on one side of a line and all things to be known on the other side. But this separation is just not the way the world is (our world: the world we live in and experience and cannot escape from). In Heidegger's language we are always and already in the world. We already know before we start to think of the so called problem of knowledge. But even more: we could not even dream up this wrong way of thinking about the question if we weren't already involved in knowing.
So if the 'old' problem of knowledge is a pseudo problem, the true problem according to Heidegger, is this: how do we, who cannot help being totally caught up in knowing the world, how do we disclose the world in which we already are? (History of the Concept of Time p.162)
Mmm... I think this could be clearer.
Heidegger says that this subject-object separation assumes a subject which is not in the world of the objects that are known. As if one could put oneself on one side of a line and all things to be known on the other side. But this separation is just not the way the world is (our world: the world we live in and experience and cannot escape from). In Heidegger's language we are always and already in the world. We already know before we start to think of the so called problem of knowledge. But even more: we could not even dream up this wrong way of thinking about the question if we weren't already involved in knowing.
So if the 'old' problem of knowledge is a pseudo problem, the true problem according to Heidegger, is this: how do we, who cannot help being totally caught up in knowing the world, how do we disclose the world in which we already are? (History of the Concept of Time p.162)
Mmm... I think this could be clearer.
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