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Heidegger is, contrary to popular opinion, not that unreadable. Stambaugh's revised translation of Being and Time is really good. The problem is laypeople expe
by thebooktocome 6y ago
Heidegger is, contrary to popular opinion, not that unreadable. Stambaugh's revised translation of Being and Time is really good.
The problem is laypeople expect to be able to understand advanced philosophy without knowing anything about the history that led to this point.
Nobody complains about, e.g., Weinberg's textbook on QFT being unreadable. I think this is primarily because Weinberg is basically unknown to people who haven't had 4+ years of physics education.
- dajohnson89 6y agoOK. And is there any basic foundation for starting, that enables one to understand Heidegger well? Some kind of primer for continental philosophy?
- thebooktocome 6y agoThe "very short introduction" series has done a lot of work trying to make these folks more presentable, with varying levels of success. You could also start with some of heidegger's shorter works like What is Called Thinking? or the one about technology (I'm not sure what the popular translation of the title is).
- gumby 6y ago> Heidegger is, contrary to popular opinion, not that unreadable. Stambaugh's revised translation of Being and Time is really good. I disagree (I've never tried reading him in translation). His German coinage and turgid sentences are legendary. I had one particularly obscurantist sentence from Sein und Zeit on my whiteboard for over a year and it was always a source of discussion, both jocular and serious, when someone came into my office.
- thebooktocome 6y ago"I had an equation from The Quantum Theory of Fields on my whiteboard for over a year..."
- gumby 6y agoAnd did it lead to better understanding? This is the kind of phenomenon I miss in remote work
- sriku 6y agoOut of curiosity, what was that sentence? (Or a translation of it)