Vol. 19 · No. 4 · Issue 61 · Winter 2001 · pp. 96-114 (19)

Peter Eli Gordon

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Abstract

Julian Young, Heidegger, philosophy, Nazism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997).

Herman Philipse, Heidegger's Philosophy of Being: A Critical Interpretation. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998).

Michael Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (Chicago: Open Court, 2000)

For a decade or so, philosophers in the so-called analytic tradition have grown increasingly conscious of the fact that their way of doing philosophy has a history. This is not an awareness that has come easily, since philosophers of this bent are famously indifferent to their past. They still tend to say that before Ludwig Wittgenstein, or Bertrand Russell, or-if they are bold enough to recall the nineteenth century-Gottlob Frege, there really isn't much worth keeping alive. And, while conceding that Kant got them on the right track, they will further claim that their way of doing things today represents such an improvement upon past habits that one may rightly regard the history of philosophy as yielding, at best, only the vaguest premonition of correct practice. This is a caricature of analytic philosophy, of course. But it is a caricature that captures its basic indifference to its own origins. It also captures the way analytic philosophers aspire to the scientific notion that we are converging upon the truth. And so, until recently at least, there has been a strong future-directedness to analytic philosophy, while its consciousness of its past debts has remained obscure.