Has someone come right out and said that Stuart Hampshire plagiarized pages 39-85 of his "Thought and Action"? Or is it more polite to say "cribbed extensively"? What can be said about the 1st Ed. having no reference to Brentano or Merleau-Ponty?
The text is clearly that of Merleau-Ponty. Russell is mentioned along with the usual Hume, Descartes, empricists, idealists ...
Gilbert Ryle was no better. His 'knowledge how" versus "knowledge that" was taken straight out of Heidegger (he reviewed Sein und Zeit for Mind.)
And from their work during and after the war, perhaps one can understand how they may have felt uneasy referencing the Nazi or the Marxist.
In the Hampshire text it is often so painfully obvious - was he never confronted over this? The dust jacket touts his originality and imagination. The Times Literary Supp. seems to have been completely taken in. Has no one ever responded?
Someone who might have spoken up was John Searle. Did he? Nancy Cartwright might know ...
What if Chatto and Wind-up had asked Sam Beckett to look over the text?
Showing posts with label Merleau-Ponty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Merleau-Ponty. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Embracing the body: oxytocin
The afternoon was spent walking in a bog preserve where horsetails - water horsetails - stood together with rings of gold in their tiny hair-like "leaves" at each joint.
Allow me to say that these are ancient plants: I first knew the dry land variety.
In the Letter on Humanism, Heidegger is already confident in his insight into "science" and "technique".
Consider our walk: the varied symmetry of the now rare plants of the sheltered reserve: these have the symmetry of the hand, these others of the eyes and nose. We map plant to body without numbers. We need not not be "reckoning". Varieties of trillium, so distinct from varieties of ancient ferns.
Unlike Paul Celan, Heidegger offers us little in the way of botany: a stand of "Kiefer" on occasion, or "Eiche".
Consider the body. We now know the role of oxytocin not only in labor and maternal bonding, but in the male staying around for 18 months to 2 years after childbirth - if not longer. Why not embrace this hormonal, real embodiment? Heidegger despised the authority of the Church but was not opposed to the "genuine" assent to the authoring "few". This hormonal view of a human relationship need not be based on any falsifications and distortions - not the marriage contract or even avowed paternity. But it is based on the authority of medical science - applied science.
Heidegger could not accept this in his terms because the result is due to a controlled experiment in which experience was "rapt", forced to yield a pre-conceived expectation (Heidegger ignores disconfirmation and refutation.)
Why should not the hormonal body, the endocrine body, be a "ground" from which one might speak of a human relation without the subject-object reifications? This is the very sort of "basement" of chemistry which Freud had promised Binswanger - but it turns out not to be a "basement" as all. The metaphor is utterly misleading.
It was Jaspers who was opposed to "magic" in psychiatry - could Jaspers have oppposed hormonal science? On what grounds? Why should a human existence which is prey to hormones be less authentic than an existence which acknowledges itself as prey to lightning strikes, influenza or infarctus?
Was Heidegger's own life not rather prey to the action of testosterone?
See: our post and the likelihood that Heidegger fell prey to hypoglycemia and may have exploited the same.
Allow me to say that these are ancient plants: I first knew the dry land variety.
In the Letter on Humanism, Heidegger is already confident in his insight into "science" and "technique".
Consider our walk: the varied symmetry of the now rare plants of the sheltered reserve: these have the symmetry of the hand, these others of the eyes and nose. We map plant to body without numbers. We need not not be "reckoning". Varieties of trillium, so distinct from varieties of ancient ferns.
Unlike Paul Celan, Heidegger offers us little in the way of botany: a stand of "Kiefer" on occasion, or "Eiche".
Consider the body. We now know the role of oxytocin not only in labor and maternal bonding, but in the male staying around for 18 months to 2 years after childbirth - if not longer. Why not embrace this hormonal, real embodiment? Heidegger despised the authority of the Church but was not opposed to the "genuine" assent to the authoring "few". This hormonal view of a human relationship need not be based on any falsifications and distortions - not the marriage contract or even avowed paternity. But it is based on the authority of medical science - applied science.
Heidegger could not accept this in his terms because the result is due to a controlled experiment in which experience was "rapt", forced to yield a pre-conceived expectation (Heidegger ignores disconfirmation and refutation.)
Why should not the hormonal body, the endocrine body, be a "ground" from which one might speak of a human relation without the subject-object reifications? This is the very sort of "basement" of chemistry which Freud had promised Binswanger - but it turns out not to be a "basement" as all. The metaphor is utterly misleading.
It was Jaspers who was opposed to "magic" in psychiatry - could Jaspers have oppposed hormonal science? On what grounds? Why should a human existence which is prey to hormones be less authentic than an existence which acknowledges itself as prey to lightning strikes, influenza or infarctus?
Was Heidegger's own life not rather prey to the action of testosterone?
See: our post and the likelihood that Heidegger fell prey to hypoglycemia and may have exploited the same.
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