Issa Spyglass

Perhaps Heidegger was misled by his Japanese aristocrat student: Issa did not say "telescope".  He was speaking of a "spyglass".

He must have waited his turn with his 3 coins - but what was he expecting to see as if near?  Fuji-san?

That three-kanji combination is now archaic, but was not in 1790.

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Worringer Heidegger

I am not the first to note parallels between Heidegger and Worringer.

Worringer's text shows astonishing parallels to Heidegger's later etcetera

Here in New Brunswick I have no access to the German original of Abstraction and Empathy [1908/1919] but the second section of part II has entire paragraphs which could be used as an alternative to Heidegger's Feldweg altogether. Forget Die Kehre, we had the gist succinctly stated by Worringer and so much more easily disputed, extended or defended.  And more readily understood.

The "Etat de l'Âme" of Worringer need only be taken as the Stimmung of Heidegger and great deal more of his views of a return via "before Plato" seem simplified.  And relativized.

Does Husserl anywhere comment on Worringer?  See the relation of both to T. Lipps.

Did Heidegger assume this echo was present for his listener, his reader?  Did this come to him via Jaspers, Arendt or even both?  Heidegger seems to come to Van Gogh rather late (see his correspondence.)

Abstraktion und Einfühlung Wilhelm Worringer

See notes on Hoelderlin, Kunst, Dichter, Gedichte

Note: the Heidegger/Arendt attack on the telescope of Galileo - why not also the teknik of the press of Gutenberg and leaden moveable type?

The hyperborean moons of Jupiter and 20/200 vision above 3000m altitude: the tale and claims of a liar?

The stellar furnaces and a universal grammar: Gamow, Hoyle, Husserl, Benoist

The course of understanding is not linear.

The success of chemistry comes very late in European science.

But the realization must be this: that in a cosmos of diffuse hydrogen as an endpoint of a highly structured evolution - there is simply no foothold for a reflexivity with regard to that structure.

In a cosmos where diverse heavy elements are projected by exploding stars, carbon can be viewed as a topic or oxygen as an adverb of great interest. H2O.  Herself, ardently, herself.

The eventual sentences will be in a double helix - short statements confirmed or suppressed by the murmering chorus - seemingly unstructured - that lies entwined with them but between them.  Not mere caesura.

And the seemingly random but inevitable mis-crossings and mutations (in the rain of stellar particles that penetrate the great magnetic shield, gift of a molten core) are not so unlike an unexpected turn of phrase that bears repeating.

The pause to breathe is there in each segment of the poem transmitted (with interruptions - some Schopenhauer correcting the sage in the presence of his audience.)

Canetti: atem and acoustische Maske
Topology and the animalian torus: podia

Galileo's Starry Messenger in Curl web-content markup

Over at http://phil.aule-browser.com/ there is now a text of Galileo's Starry Messenger complete with marginal glosses.

The page requires the Curl plugin for your browser, which is available at http://www.curl.com/download/rte.

Galileo's text, also known as Sidereal Messenger or Sidereus Nuncius, recounts his construction of his telescope, his noting the surface of the moon, some nebula as themselves stars, the Milky Way as stars and the 4 great satellites of Jupiter.

I was able to find two other text versions on the internet, but both had deficiencies.

The marginal glosses had disrupted the OCR scan of the PDF images: they were restored manually using a custom Curl text procedure. Documentation on these can be found at the Curl site of Cambridge, MA. Curl Corporation, a subsdiary of Sumisho or by visiting an SCS web site.

Each marginal gloss is wrapped simply in {gloss } and placed before the text, itself wrapped in {para }.
Here is the gloss definition used at this time:

{define-text-proc public {gloss ...}:any
  {return {paragraph font-size = 12pt,
    font-family = "serif",
    paragraph-left-indent = 8pt,
    text-preserve-whitespace? = true, {italic {splice ...}}}}
}

which is found in the top-level curl file which includes the Galileo text as an scurl file. A reference to the top-level Curl file is embedded as an OBJECT in a regular HTM page at http://phil.aule-browser.com/messenger.htm

My versions of Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition on Galileo and his telescope can be found at http://phil.aule-browser.com/
Mention of a telescope is in Eugen Fink's Conversations with Husserl. For Husserl on Galileo, see his Krisis. For Heidegger on science and the instrument makers, see his Technik lecture. For excellent telescopes at fair prices, see http://www.astronomics.com/

Albert Hofstader's Heidegger

Albert Hofstader's translation of Heidegger's Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie comes with a lexicon which doubles as a partial index. We may have the National Endowment to thank for this as it was often not the norm with Indiana University Press.

Page 371 of the Lexikon offers us the Four Basic Problems of the "science" of being:

1. ontological difference
2. articulation of being
3. modifications of being and unity of concept of being
4. truth-character of being

All of these, we are told, arise from the one "question" variously posed as

What does being signifiy?
Whence can something like being in general be understood?
How is understanding of being at all possible?

What is baffling for a philosphical lexicon by a translator is that its entries are most often without the original equivalent in German.

The lectures come to us through Fritz Heidegger and F-W von Herrmann almost 50 years after they were delivered as lectures in Marburg in 1927. The German reader, without an index, had the one benefit that von Herrmann broke up many long passages into paragraphs.

On the basis that Sein und Zeit was completed in 1926, these pages offer some additions: pg 173 has Heidegger on Rilke:

Rilke versteht auch das Philosophische des Lebesbegriffes, den Dilthey schon ahnte und den wir mit dem Begriff der Existenz als In-der-Welt-sein faßten.

which Hofstader renders with

which Dilthey had already surmised

cutting the reader off from the satisfied tone of Heidegger. The distance from ahnen to vermuten would not have been lost on Heidegger if said of him and his works by another.

To ignore Heidegger's tone is to miss everything he says of Stimmung, Besinnung - especially when he speaks of concepts. In this regard, the tone taken in his letters to Jaspers is invaluable. By 1927 in Marburg Heidegger was not mincing his words as he had in the early days in Freiburg.

Jaspers is, however, absent in these lectures and receives no credit for this Begriff der Existenz. Shrewd foresight on Heidegger's part.  From the name of the lectures no one not present could guess that Kant and Aristotle figure more largely than Husserl, whom Heidegger is soon to replace in Freiburg.

Ricoeur on recognition

The Vienna lectures on Recognition have a spectre which I cannot shake: Ricoeur and Gusdorf, Ricoeur immediately after the war and Ricoeur with Eliade.

The extent of the falsity and brutality of the post-war French purges is very sobering.  de Gaulle is influenced not to commute a death sentence by the impression - the recall - that he had seen that man on a magazine cover in a German uniform (likely he was mistaken as to that magazine cover.)  It was imaginable that André Gide be hanged (the doctine of homosexual and esthete weakness) when in fact the Wehrmacht may have triumphed because of the tyranny of military college maxims ("retreat to form a line") and misapprehensions of intent and counter-deception ("they will think that this is a ruse, so instead it will in fact be our intent ...").

Could Ricoeur not recognize himself in those "errors of his youth" ?  He was already married.  He was already a hero.  This was not the case with Eliade in Romania.

His first tasks are paraphrase:  paraphrase Jaspers, Marcel, then Husserl. 

Mikel Dufrenne later had a falling out with the appropriation of Heidegger in France (he was himself a case in point) - but how much of it could he see at work in Ricoeur (Ricoeur sees laborious intersubjectivity constructions as an argument against such efforts - would such be an argument against linguistics?  Evolution?  Economics? The search to identify authors of the Old Testament?)

Husserl and Jaspers abandoned: the strange case of Dufrenne and Ricoeur in the early 1950's; the role of Merleau-Ponty, Jean Wahl and others.

note: Ricoeur on "gift", "giving", "receiving", "gratitude" at the close of the lectures.

Phases of Venus (Experience and its modes)

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  At astronomygcse.co.uk (JPG of 5 cliches)

  At spacestationinfo.com (GIF 2002 with 14 cliches)

  Various 1910-1964 (JPG with 5 from distant/full & closer/crescent)

  At apod.nasa.gov (JPG with 7 images (none of full phase)
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  Adumbration u. Abschattungen (v. Horizont, Phänomena, Erfahrungen, Wahrnehmung u. Anschauungen)
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  appearances of the maiden goddess (Apparat, Beachtung u. Anerkennung) in eigentlich Dunkelheit Aspekt
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Husserl the bigot: more on the case of Edith Stein

One of the most painful passages in Hugo Ott's book on Heidegger and politics is surely the quote from Husserl on Edith Stein.

Ott appears not to have had access to the material quoted by Alasdair MAcINtyre or to have failed to see its relevance.

see: notes on the fate of Afra Geiger

see: notes on Husserl and Heidegger, 1918, after the loss of Wolfgang Husserl and Adolf Reinach and the Luther connection; Husserl on God and the transcendental ego.

On Heidegger and Weyl, see "Mind and nature: selected writings on philosophy, mathematics, and physics" by Hermann Weyl.