Nothing Nothings
(Again)
Background: recent Log24 entries (beginning with Chorus from the Rock on Dec. 5, 2004) and Is Nothing Sacred? (quotations compiled on March 9, 2000).
From an obituary of Paul Edwards, a writer on philosophy, in this morning's New York Times:
"Heidegger's Confusions, a collection of Professor Edwards's scholarly articles, was published last month by Prometheus."
Edwards, born in Vienna in 1923 to Jewish parents, died on December 9.
Some sites I visited earlier this evening, before reading of Edwards's death:
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" 'Nothingness itself nothings' — with these words, uttered by Martin Heidegger in the early 1930s, the incipient (and now-familiar) split between analytic and continental philosophy began tearing open. For Rudolf Carnap, a leader of the Vienna Circle [Wiener Kreis] of logical empiricists and a strident advocate of a new, scientific approach to philosophy, this Heideggerian proposition exemplified 'a metaphysical pseudo-sentence,' meaningless and unable to withstand any logical analysis. Heidegger countered that Carnap’s misplaced obsession with logic missed the point entirely."
— Review of A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger
- Carnap's Criticism of Heidegger, by Abraham D. Stone (dated, for what it's worth, June 16, 2004… the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday.)
- "Death and Metaphysics," by Peter Kraus, pp. 98-111 in Death and Philosophy, ed. by Jeff Malpas and Robert Solomon. Heidegger's famous phrase (misquoted by Quine in Gray Particular in Hartford) "Das Nichts selbst nichtet" is discussed on page 102.