Dreyfus' Heidegger Berkeley 185 Course discussion group

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Kafkaontheshore
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Dreyfus' Heidegger Berkeley 185 Course discussion group

Post by Kafkaontheshore »

Hi there,

I was wondering whether anybody on here would be interested in creating an online discussion group for Hubert Dreyfus' Berkelely 185 Philosophy course on Being and Time which is available as a free podcast from iTunes, and the syllabus also available online (I am not able to post links yet, but they are available).

I was thinking that we could create a sort of open blog on wordpress, or maybe a discussion group on google groups, to discuss each week - if, that is, anyone else is interested in getting to grips with Heidegger. It would be possible to set up an entry for each week so that people can move at their own speed with it and then contribute back to those who are struggling etc. It would be great if we could get a large group of people to contribute from different perspectives, especially if there is a varied focus in terms of secondary literature.

It is worth bearing in mind that you need to be relatively well informed in terms of at least some other key figures - whether that means Aristotle or Descartes, Derrida or Husserl - you are going to need some decent philosophical standing from which to approach this to get enough out of it to make it worth while.

That said, I really think that from what I have listen too so far that this really is a brilliant course, but one that would benefit from some sort of group discussion. I thought I would air the suggestion here and if people liked the it I thought I would post it some other places as well.

So what do you think, does this sound like a good idea?

Cheers,

Sam
Fhbradley
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Re: Dreyfus' Heidegger Berkeley 185 Course discussion group

Post by Fhbradley »

Being and Time is just simply not worth reading. To be frank, not much in the continental tradition is.
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Kafkaontheshore
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Re: Dreyfus' Heidegger Berkeley 185 Course discussion group

Post by Kafkaontheshore »

I can't measure the extent to which I disagree with that statement! Who do you think are the key philosophers this century then? Quine maybe? Russell? I mean their projects are just manifest failures! All the important Anglo-American philosophers that are around today - McDowell, Brandom, Pippin, Davidson (until recently Rorty) etc. - would just fundamentally disagree with such a statement. And such a broad one; I mean the ignorance of the continental tradition has led anglo-american philosophy down such an utterly pointless, empty path. It isn't until Sellars that things got moving again in the US - Wittgenstein and Austin in the UK - and Sellars himself is just reiterating the Hegelian point, no doubt somebody else who to you is simply not worth reading. I'd be interested to know how much of B+T you have even attempted to read and to really understand. Nonetheless, I don't mean this to be a argument - if your not interested thats fine, but please don't write ignorant statements to put off other people.
Fhbradley
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Re: Dreyfus' Heidegger Berkeley 185 Course discussion group

Post by Fhbradley »

Kafkaontheshore wrote:I can't measure the extent to which I disagree with that statement! Who do you think are the key philosophers this century then? Quine maybe? Russell? I mean their projects are just manifest failures! All the important Anglo-American philosophers that are around today - McDowell, Brandom, Pippin, Davidson (until recently Rorty) etc. - would just fundamentally disagree with such a statement. And such a broad one; I mean the ignorance of the continental tradition has led anglo-american philosophy down such an utterly pointless, empty path. It isn't until Sellars that things got moving again in the US - Wittgenstein and Austin in the UK - and Sellars himself is just reiterating the Hegelian point, no doubt somebody else who to you is simply not worth reading. I'd be interested to know how much of B+T you have even attempted to read and to really understand. Nonetheless, I don't mean this to be a argument - if your not interested thats fine, but please don't write ignorant statements to put off other people.
I was not trying to put you off. I apologize if it came off that way. Anyways, Russell and Quine are from the 20th (Quine passed away in 2000), so they couldn't be the key philosophers of this century. Russell is one of the main contributers in revolutionizing logic, so I would hardly call his project a failure. Sure, logic wasn't ultimately reducible to logic, but that's not the point. If being wrong in a few areas made a bad philosopher, then there has never been a good philosopher. As far as Being and Time, yes, I understand it. I'm not going to lie and said I've read all of it, but I have read through essential parts. To give an extremely short summary, it's a polemic against representationalism and Cartesianism. He wants to contend that the Cartesian way of looking at human beings is fundamentally wrong (and thus by doing this he dissolves a whole host of philosophical problems [mind-body, the external world, etc.]). One way of doing this is by showing how we are in our everyday averageness. There, objects are ready-to-hand. Objects are tools, not things we go on theorizing about etc. etc. you know all this already. I just feel that there are no arguments. It's just a bunch of assertions dressed up in fancy language-terminology. I believe that philosophy is defined by its arguments, and that nothing without argument cannot be properly called 'philosophy'.
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Re: Dreyfus' Heidegger Berkeley 185 Course discussion group

Post by Kafkaontheshore »

Fair enough, I mean I think you are wrong (For example, the subject-predicate calculus underlying the logicians project is just an assertion itself (in that it says there are self sufficient objects that have properties) - albeit one of the most tenacious kind - and in that sense Heidegger's account improves upon theirs in that it is better able to represent the phenomenology of our experience. Also objects are not just ready to hand, they are also present to hand in that traditional way (we can look at objects as if they are objects with properties and investigate them, but this is not what we ordinarily do), just what he finds is that this mode of being (=mode of intelligibility) is derived from the former. The idea that Heidegger is without argument is simply scandalous...) but at least you weren't trying to put people off (I didn't really mean me, but that hardly matters).
Fhbradley
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Re: Dreyfus' Heidegger Berkeley 185 Course discussion group

Post by Fhbradley »

Haha, I just realized I wrote, "logic wasn't ultimately reducible to logic." What I meant say was that mathematics wasn't reducible to logic. I'm interested in where you think Heidegger's arguments are. Could you refer to me a section in B&T where you think he actually makes an argument for his contentions?
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APhilosopherInEssex
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Re: Dreyfus' Heidegger Berkeley 185 Course discussion group

Post by APhilosopherInEssex »

At the risk of what, online, is called 'necromancy': I am unsure that Being and Time even meant to offer arguments. For Heidegger conceived that book as, at least in part, a work in 'phenomenology'; and phenomenology is meant to work (at least in large part) through a certain kind of description, rather than argument. To that extent (and there are some arguments in the book, or at least parts that can be reconstructed as arguments; for instance, section 44 is at least fairly argumentative), the following holds. To dismiss Being and Time for lacking arguments is to beg the question against phenomenology. However, and as that last statement indicates, one can ask, with some justice, for an argument for the whole phenomenological approach to philosophy. . .
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