What have humans got, the other species haven't got?
— Corvus

Symbolic language. — Janus

(Access to this article is behind a paywall, so I copied most of it here)

The Animals Are Talking. What Does It Mean? by Sonia Shah

Language was long understood as a human-only affair. New research suggests that isn’t so.

Inside these murine skills lay clues to a puzzle many have called “the hardest problem in science”: the origins of language. In humans, “vocal learning” is understood as a skill critical to spoken language. Researchers had already discovered the capacity for vocal learning in species other than humans, including in songbirds, hummingbirds, parrots, cetaceans such as dolphins and whales, pinnipeds such as seals, elephants and bats. But given the centuries-old idea that a deep chasm separated human language from animal communications, most scientists understood the vocal learning abilities of other species as unrelated to our own — as evolutionarily divergent as the wing of a bat is to that of a bee. The apparent absence of intermediate forms of language — say, a talking animal — left the question of how language evolved resistant to empirical inquiry.

When the Duke researchers dissected the brains of the hearing and deafened mice, they found a rudimentary version of the neural circuitry that allows the forebrains of vocal learners such as humans and songbirds to directly control their vocal organs. Mice don’t seem to have the vocal flexibility of elephants; they cannot, like the 10-year-old female African elephant in Tsavo, Kenya, mimic the sound of trucks on the nearby Nairobi-Mombasa highway. Or the gift for mimicry of seals; an orphaned harbor seal at the New England Aquarium could utter English phrases in a perfect Maine accent (“Hoover, get over here,” he said. “Come on, come on!”).

But the rudimentary skills of mice suggested that the language-critical capacity might exist on a continuum, much like a submerged land bridge might indicate that two now-isolated continents were once connected. In recent years, an array of findings have also revealed an expansive nonhuman soundscape, including: turtles that produce and respond to sounds to coordinate the timing of their birth from inside their eggs; coral larvae that can hear the sounds of healthy reefs; and plants that can detect the sound of running water and the munching of insect predators. Researchers have found intention and meaning in this cacophony, such as the purposeful use of different sounds to convey information. They’ve theorized that one of the most confounding aspects of language, its rules-based internal structure, emerged from social drives common across a range of species.

With each discovery, the cognitive and moral divide between humanity and the rest of the animal world has eroded. For centuries, the linguistic utterances of Homo sapiens have been positioned as unique in nature, justifying our dominion over other species and shrouding the evolution of language in mystery. Now, experts in linguistics, biology and cognitive science suspect that components of language might be shared across species, illuminating the inner lives of animals in ways that could help stitch language into their evolutionary history — and our own.

For hundreds of years, language marked “the true difference between man and beast,” as the philosopher René Descartes wrote in 1649. As recently as the end of the last century, archaeologists and anthropologists speculated that 40,000 to 50,000 years ago a “human revolution” fractured evolutionary history, creating an unbridgeable gap separating humanity’s cognitive and linguistic abilities from those of the rest of the animal world.
Linguists and other experts reinforced this idea. In 1959, the M.I.T. linguist Noam Chomsky, then 30, wrote a blistering 33-page takedown of a book by the celebrated behaviorist B.F. Skinner, which argued that language was just a form of “verbal behavior,” as Skinner titled the book, accessible to any species given sufficient conditioning. One observer called it “perhaps the most devastating review ever written.” Between 1972 and 1990, there were more citations of Chomsky’s critique than Skinner’s book, which bombed.

The view of language as a uniquely human superpower, one that enabled Homo sapiens to write epic poetry and send astronauts to the moon, presumed some uniquely human biology to match. But attempts to find those special biological mechanisms — whether physiological, neurological, genetic — that make language possible have all come up short.

One high-profile example came in 2001, when a team led by the geneticists Cecilia Lai and Simon Fisher discovered a gene — called FoxP2 — in a London family riddled with childhood apraxia of speech, a disorder that impairs the ability of otherwise cognitively capable individuals to coordinate their muscles to produce sounds, syllables and words in an intelligible sequence. Commentators hailed FoxP2 as the long sought-after gene that enabled humans to talk — until the gene turned up in the genomes of rodents, birds, reptiles, fish and ancient hominins such as Neanderthals, whose version of FoxP2 is much like ours. (Fisher so often encountered the public expectation that FoxP2 was the “language gene” that he resolved to acquire a T-shirt that read, “It’s more complicated than that.”)

The search for an exclusively human vocal anatomy has failed, too. For a 2001 study, the cognitive scientist Tecumseh Fitch cajoled goats, dogs, deer and other species to vocalize while inside a cineradiograph machine that filmed the way their larynxes moved under X-ray. Fitch discovered that species with larynxes different from ours — ours is “descended” and located in our throats rather than our mouths — could nevertheless move them in similar ways. One of them, the red deer, even had the same descended larynx we do.

Fitch and his then-colleague at Harvard, the evolutionary biologist Marc Hauser, began to wonder if they’d been thinking about language all wrong. Linguists described language as a singular skill, like being able to swim or bake a soufflé: You either had it or you didn’t. But perhaps language was more like a multicomponent system that included psychological traits, such as the ability to share intentions; physiological ones, such as motor control over vocalizations and gestures; and cognitive capacities, such as the ability to combine signals according to rules, many of which might appear in other animals as well.


Fitch, whom I spoke to by Zoom in his office at the University of Vienna, drafted a paper with Hauser as a “kind of an argument against Chomsky,” he told me. As a courtesy, he sent the M.I.T. linguist a draft. One evening, he and Hauser were sitting in their respective offices along the same hall at Harvard when an email from Chomsky dinged their inboxes. “We both read it and we walked out of our rooms going, ‘What?’” Chomsky indicated that not only did he agree, but that he’d be willing to sign on to their next paper on the subject as a co-author. That paper, which has since racked up more than 7,000 citations, appeared in the journal Science in 2002.

Squabbles continued over which components of language were shared with other species and which, if any, were exclusive to humans. Those included, among others, language’s intentionality, its system of combining signals, its ability to refer to external concepts and things separated by time and space and its power to generate an infinite number of expressions from a finite number of signals. But reflexive belief in language as an evolutionary anomaly started to dissolve. “For the biologists,” recalled Fitch, “it was like, ‘Oh, good, finally the linguists are being reasonable.’”

Evidence of continuities between animal communication and human language continued to mount. The sequencing of the Neanderthal genome in 2010 suggested that we hadn’t significantly diverged from that lineage, as the theory of a “human revolution” posited. On the contrary, Neanderthal genes and those of other ancient hominins persisted in the modern human genome, evidence of how intimately we were entangled. In 2014, Jarvis found that the neural circuits that allowed songbirds to learn and produce novel sounds matched those in humans, and that the genes that regulated those circuits evolved in similar ways. The accumulating evidence left “little room for doubt,” Cedric Boeckx, a theoretical linguist at the University of Barcelona, noted in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience. “There was no ‘great leap forward.’”

One of the thorniest problems researchers sought to address was the link between thought and language. Philosophers and linguists long held that language must have evolved not for the purpose of communication but to facilitate abstract thought. The grammatical rules that structure language, a feature of languages from Algonquin to American Sign Language, are more complex than necessary for communication. Language, the argument went, must have evolved to help us think, in much the same way that mathematical notations allow us to make complex calculations.

Ev Fedorenko, a cognitive neuroscientist at M.I.T., thought this was “a cool idea,” so, about a decade ago, she set out to test it. If language is the medium of thought, she reasoned, then thinking a thought and absorbing the meaning of spoken or written words should activate the same neural circuits in the brain, like two streams fed by the same underground spring. Earlier brain-imaging studies showed that patients with severe aphasia could still solve mathematical problems, despite their difficulty in deciphering or producing language, but failed to pinpoint distinctions between brain regions dedicated to thought and those dedicated to language. Fedorenko suspected that might be because the precise location of these regions varied from individual to individual. In a 2011 study, she asked healthy subjects to make computations and decipher snatches of spoken and written language while she watched how blood flowed to aroused parts of their brains using an M.R.I. machine, taking their unique neural circuitry into account in her subsequent analysis. Her fM.R.I. studies showed that thinking thoughts and decoding words mobilized distinct brain pathways. Language and thought, Fedorenko says, “really are separate in an adult human brain.”

At the University of Edinburgh, Kirby hit upon a process that might explain how language’s internal structure evolved. That structure, in which simple elements such as sounds and words are arranged into phrases and nested hierarchically within one another, gives language the power to generate an infinite number of meanings; it is a key feature of language as well as of mathematics and music. But its origins were hazy. Because children intuit the rules that govern linguistic structure with little if any explicit instruction, philosophers and linguists argued that it must be a product of some uniquely human cognitive process. But researchers who scrutinized the fossil record to determine when and how that process evolved were stumped: The first sentences uttered left no trace behind.

Kirby designed an experiment to simulate the evolution of language inside his lab. First, he developed made-up codes to serve as proxies for the disordered collections of words widely believed to have preceded the emergence of structured language, such as random sequences of colored lights or a series of pantomimes. Then he recruited subjects to use the code under a variety of conditions and studied how the code changed. He asked subjects to use the code to solve communication tasks, for example, or to pass the code on to one another as in a game of telephone. He ran the experiment hundreds of times using different parameters on a variety of subjects, including on a colony of baboons living in a seminaturalistic enclosure equipped with a bank of computers on which they could choose to play his experimental games.

What he found was striking: Regardless of the native tongue of the subjects, or whether they were baboons, college students or robots, the results were the same. When individuals passed the code on to one another, the code became simpler but also less precise. But when they passed it on to one another and also used it to communicate, the code developed a distinct architecture. Random sequences of colored lights turned into richly patterned ones; convoluted, pantomimic gestures for words such as “church” or “police officer” became abstract, efficient signs. “We just saw, spontaneously emerging out of this experiment, the language structures we were waiting for,” Kirby says. His findings suggest that language’s mystical power — its ability to turn the noise of random signals into intelligible formulations — may have emerged from a humble trade-off: between simplicity, for ease of learning, and what Kirby called “expressiveness,” for unambiguous communication.
For Descartes, the equation of language with thought meant animals had no mental life at all: “The brutes,” he opined, “don’t have any thought.” Breaking the link between language and human biology didn’t just demystify language; it restored the possibility of mind to the animal world and repositioned linguistic capacities as theoretically accessible to any social species.


The search for the components of language in nonhuman animals now extends to the far reaches of our phylogenetic tree, encompassing creatures that may communicate in radically unfamiliar ways.
This summer, I met with Marcelo Magnasco, a biophysicist, and Diana Reiss, a psychologist at Hunter College who studies dolphin cognition, in Magnasco’s lab at Rockefeller University. Overlooking the East River, it was a warmly lit room, with rows of burbling tanks inhabited by octopuses, whose mysterious signals they hoped to decode. Magnasco became curious about the cognitive and communicative abilities of cephalopods while diving recreationally, he told me. Numerous times, he said, he encountered cephalopods and had “the overpowering impression that they were trying to communicate with me.” During the Covid-19 shutdown, when his work studying dolphin communication with Reiss was derailed, Magnasco found himself driving to a Petco in Staten Island to buy tanks for octopuses to live in his lab.

Reiss’s research on dolphin cognition is one of a handful of projects on animal communication that dates back to the 1980s, when there were widespread funding cuts in the field, after a top researcher retracted his much-hyped claim that a chimpanzee could be trained to use sign language to converse with humans. In a study published in 1993, Reiss offered bottlenose dolphins at a facility in Northern California an underwater keypad that allowed them to choose specific toys, which it delivered while emitting computer-generated whistles, like a kind of vending machine. The dolphins spontaneously began mimicking the computer-generated whistles when they played independently with the corresponding toy, like kids tossing a ball and naming it “ball, ball, ball,” Reiss told me. “The behavior,” Reiss said, “was strikingly similar to the early stages of language acquisition in children.”

While experimenting with animals trapped in cages and tanks can reveal their latent faculties, figuring out the range of what animals are communicating to one another requires spying on them in the wild. Past studies often conflated general communication, in which individuals extract meaning from signals sent by other individuals, with language’s more specific, flexible and open-ended system. In a seminal 1980 study, for example, the primatologists Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney used the “playback” technique to decode the meaning of alarm calls issued by vervet monkeys at Amboseli National Park in Kenya. When a recording of the barklike calls emitted by a vervet encountering a leopard was played back to other vervets, it sent them scampering into the trees. Recordings of the low grunts of a vervet who spotted an eagle led other vervets to look up into the sky; recordings of the high-pitched chutters emitted by a vervet upon noticing a python caused them to scan the ground.

At the time, The New York Times ran a front-page story heralding the discovery of a “rudimentary ‘language’” in vervet monkeys. But critics objected that the calls might not have any properties of language at all. Instead of being intentional messages to communicate meaning to others, the calls might be involuntary, emotion-driven sounds, like the cry of a hungry baby. Such involuntary expressions can transmit rich information to listeners, but unlike words and sentences, they don’t allow for discussion of things separated by time and space. The barks of a vervet in the throes of leopard-induced terror could alert other vervets to the presence of a leopard — but couldn’t provide any way to talk about, say, “the really smelly leopard who showed up at the ravine yesterday morning.”

Toshitaka Suzuki, an ethologist at the University of Tokyo who describes himself as an animal linguist, struck upon a method to disambiguate intentional calls from involuntary ones while soaking in a bath one day. When we spoke over Zoom, he showed me an image of a fluffy cloud. “If you hear the word ‘dog,’ you might see a dog,” he pointed out, as I gazed at the white mass. “If you hear the word ‘cat,’ you might see a cat.” That, he said, marks the difference between a word and a sound. “Words influence how we see objects,” he said. “Sounds do not.” Using playback studies, Suzuki determined that Japanese tits, songbirds that live in East Asian forests and that he has studied for more than 15 years, emit a special vocalization when they encounter snakes. When other Japanese tits heard a recording of the vocalization, which Suzuki dubbed the “jar jar” call, they searched the ground, as if looking for a snake. To determine whether “jar jar” meant “snake” in Japanese tit, he added another element to his experiments: an eight-inch stick, which he dragged along the surface of a tree using hidden strings. Usually, Suzuki found, the birds ignored the stick. It was, by his analogy, a passing cloud. But then he played a recording of the “jar jar” call. In that case, the stick seemed to take on new significance: The birds approached the stick, as if examining whether it was, in fact, a snake. Like a word, the “jar jar” call had changed their perception.

Cat Hobaiter, a primatologist at the University of St. Andrews who works with great apes, developed a similarly nuanced method. Because great apes appear to have a relatively limited repertoire of vocalizations, Hobaiter studies their gestures. For years, she and her collaborators have followed chimps in the Budongo forest and gorillas in Bwindi in Uganda, recording their gestures and how others respond to them. “Basically, my job is to get up in the morning to get the chimps when they’re coming down out of the tree, or the gorillas when they’re coming out of the nest, and just to spend the day with them,” she told me. So far, she says, she has recorded about 15,600 instances of gestured exchanges between apes.

To determine whether the gestures are involuntary or intentional, she uses a method adapted from research on human babies. Hobaiter looks for signals that evoke what she calls an “Apparently Satisfactory Outcome.” The method draws on the theory that involuntary signals continue even after listeners have understood their meaning, while intentional ones stop once the signaler realizes her listener has comprehended the signal. It’s the difference between the continued wailing of a hungry baby after her parents have gone to fetch a bottle, Hobaiter explains, and my entreaties to you to pour me some coffee, which cease once you start reaching for the coffeepot. To search for a pattern, she says she and her researchers have looked “across hundreds of cases and dozens of gestures and different individuals using the same gesture across different days.” So far, her team’s analysis of 15 years’ worth of video-recorded exchanges has pinpointed dozens of ape gestures that trigger “apparently satisfactory outcomes.”

These gestures may also be legible to us, albeit beneath our conscious awareness. Hobaiter applied her technique on pre-verbal 1- and 2-year-old children, following them around recording their gestures and how they affected attentive others, “like they’re tiny apes, which they basically are,” she says. She also posted short video clips of ape gestures online and asked adult visitors who’d never spent any time with great apes to guess what they thought they meant. She found that pre-verbal human children use at least 40 or 50 gestures from the ape repertoire, and adults correctly guessed the meaning of video-recorded ape gestures at a rate “significantly higher than expected by chance,” as Hobaiter and Kirsty E. Graham, a postdoctoral research fellow in Hobaiter’s lab, reported in a 2023 paper for PLOS Biology.

The emerging research might seem to suggest that there’s nothing very special about human language. Other species use intentional wordlike signals just as we do. Some, such as Japanese tits and pied babblers, have been known to combine different signals to make new meanings. Many species are social and practice cultural transmission, satisfying what might be prerequisite for a structured communication system like language. And yet a stubborn fact remains. The species that use features of language in their communications have few obvious geographical or phylogenetic similarities. And despite years of searching, no one has discovered a communication system with all the properties of language in any species other than our own.
For some scientists, the mounting evidence of cognitive and linguistic continuities between humans and animals outweighs evidence of any gaps. “There really isn’t such a sharp distinction,” Jarvis, now at Rockefeller University, said in a podcast. Fedorenko agrees. The idea of a chasm separating man from beast is a product of “language elitism,” she says, as well as a myopic focus on “how different language is from everything else.”

But for others, the absence of clear evidence of all the components of language in other species is, in fact, evidence of their absence. In a 2016 book on language evolution titled “Why Only Us,” written with the computer scientist and computational linguist Robert C. Berwick, Chomsky describes animal communications as “radically different” from human language. Seyfarth and Cheney, in a 2018 book, note the “striking discontinuities” between human and nonhuman loquacity. Animal calls may be modifiable; they may be voluntary and intentional. But they’re rarely combined according to rules in the way that human words are and “appear to convey only limited information,” they write. If animals had anything like the full suite of linguistic components we do, Kirby says, we would know by now. Animals with similar cognitive and social capacities to ours rarely express themselves systematically the way we do, with systemwide cues to distinguish different categories of meaning. “We just don’t see that kind of level of systematicity in the communication systems of other species,” Kirby said in a 2021 talk.

This evolutionary anomaly may seem strange if you consider language an unalloyed benefit. But what if it isn’t? Even the most wondrous abilities can have drawbacks. According to the popular “self-domestication” hypothesis of language’s origins, proposed by Kirby and James Thomas in a 2018 paper published in Biology & Philosophy, variable tones and inventive locutions might prevent members of a species from recognizing others of their kind. Or, as others have pointed out, they might draw the attention of predators. Such perils could help explain why domesticated species such as Bengalese finches have more complex and syntactically rich songs than their wild kin, the white-rumped munia, as discovered by the biopsychologist Kazuo Okanoya in 2012; why tamed foxes and domesticated canines exhibit heightened abilities to communicate, at least with humans, compared with wolves and wild foxes; and why humans, described by some experts as a domesticated species of their ape and hominin ancestors, might be the most talkative of all. A lingering gap between our abilities and those of other species, in other words, does not necessarily leave language stranded outside evolution. Perhaps, Fitch says, language is unique to Homo sapiens, but not in any unique way: special to humans in the same way the trunk is to the elephant and echolocation is to the bat.

The quest for language’s origins has yet to deliver King Solomon’s seal, a ring that magically bestows upon its wearer the power to speak to animals, or the future imagined in a short story by Ursula K. Le Guin, in which therolinguists pore over the manuscripts of ants, the “kinetic sea writings” of penguins and the “delicate, transient lyrics of the lichen.” Perhaps it never will. But what we know so far tethers us to our animal kin regardless. No longer marooned among mindless objects, we have emerged into a remade world, abuzz with the conversations of fellow thinking beings, however inscrutable.”

Fine’s paper is an illustration of the divide between Analytic and contemporary Continental ways of thinking about metaphysics.
— Joshs

I don’t think this is plausible, and largely because Fine’s construal of metaphysics is the classical construal, stretching back thousands of years. It predates the curious dichotomy between the analytic and continental schools. — Leontiskos

I don’t doubt that Fine’s construal is the classical
construal, but that doesn’t change the fact that contemporary Continentals don’t understand metaphysics this way, for the same reason that they don’t understand the origin and function of logic in the classical way. I dont just have Heidegger in mind here , but the heirs of Husserl, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein.

You seem to be defining logic differently than Fine does. You seem to have in mind particular logics or particular epochs in logic. Fine is thinking of logic as that which pertains to the structure of thought itself — Leontiskos

If we define logic in the broadest possible terms, then it is simply the basis of the functioning of an economy or system of relations. Each metaphysical system brings with it its own logic. In his paper, Fine is not treating logic in this general sense, but presupposes a particular kind of systematics which he applies to his definition of metaphysics. All logic to him seems to be propositional in character, but this is not the case for the Continentals I mentioned.

Here is a paper by Kit Fine on the topic, "What is Metaphysics?" — Leontiskos

Fine’s paper is an illustration of the divide between Analytic and contemporary Continental ways of thinking about metaphysics. This paragraph encapsulates the difference:

“…the elements of meta­physics are those of penultimate generality, next in generality to the logical elements. Thus anything more general than a metaphysical element will
be logical and anything less general will be neither metaphysical nor logi­cal. If we were to think of logic as relating to the structure of thought and of metaphysics as relating to the structure of reality, then logic would provide us with the most general traits of thought and metaphysics with the most general traits of reality.”

Fine’s paper exemplfies this thinking by using a logical grammar to articulate his definition of metaphysics. By contrast, for contemporary Continentalists of various stripes, logic is not more general than metaphysics, it is the contingent product of a certain era of metaphysics.

They can be useful words, but in philosophical conversation in which we are trying to come to an objective solution to a problem, these words have so much cultural subjectivity loaded into them that their meaning become debates within a debate… When having a discussion that needs clarity, we should remove such words where possible to focus on the true issue we wish to discuss.
— Philosophim

What about words like worldview, cultural subjectivity, formulation of problems, perspective, frame of reference, bias, set of presuppositions, paradigm? If we dont remind ourselves that objective solutions to problems are true, factual and objective only in relation to the way problems are formulated, and that the formulation of the nature of problems is not itself amenable to scrutiny in terms of objective truth, then we fool ourselves into believing that objective truth can somehow transcend the cultural relativity and contingency of problem formulation.
Furthermore, focusing on objective solutions to problems often ends up marginalize those who don’t come into the conversation with the same set of presuppositions.

2. Making philosophy more directly relevant to the sciences. Because I read a LOT of popular science and philosophy of science it's become fairly obvious to me that a lot of bad science, bad philosophy, and wasted efforts talking past each other could be avoided by having science majors have a single "applied epistemology for the natural/social sciences," course — Count Timothy von Icarus

Most university philosophy departments offer specialization in philosophy of mind, which reaches into biology, neuroscience, computer science and cognitive psychology. Isnt this an example of scientifically relevant philosophy?

s this thumbnail sketch of Husserl's philosophy of math any good? — Wayfarer

The only issue I have with it is that one could get the impression that the reason Husserl “argued against the idea that the validity and truth of mathematical principles were dependent on psychological processes” was because he thought their validity and truth was dependent on the world. What he was trying to do was avoid psychologism (which he was accused of in Philosophy of Arithmetic) by grounding mathematical principles in transcendental
phenomenology.

What a happy coincidence how well the products of mathematical science work! We should all thank our lucky stars. — Wayfarer

That’s the point. To understand the origin of mathematical
logic in certain presuppositions about the way the world is constructed is see why it is not coincidence at all. As you say, the products of mathematical science work well. I would add that they work precisely, accurately in the sense dictated by the demands of formal logic.

Everything is possible until it is necessary, and both these concepts are contingent on the concept of negation, and negation contingent on the disjunction of plurality of experience, as in derived a posteriori. Logic precedes that of which there is formal systems, or of which there are the field of "Logic" the same way physics precedes everything ever thought in the field of physics — Julian August

This take on logic sounds more compatible with Analytic than with recent Continental approaches. Re your analogy of logic to physics, for many continental philosophers there is the field of formal logic, and there are the more general presuppositions grounding this formal field, which limit it to subject-object propositions generating necessary relations of truth or falsity, negation or affirmation. But there are more fundamental logics which are not propositional in nature.

Objectivity then is about descriptions that smooth out the differences that arise from variances in subjects' phenomenal experience. You view the same phenomena in many different ways, using tools, experiments, etc., and identify the morphisms between all perspectives. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Do we view the same phenomena or view similar phenomena that we call the same for the convenience of fabricating the kinds of objects that are amenable to mathematical calculation?

there is a strong tendency for the mathematical patterns "at work in," or "describing" natural phenomena to be similar at very different levels of scale — Count Timothy von Icarus

Karen Barad is among those who suggest that the geometric notion of scale must be supplemented with a topological notion of it. What this means is that scales interact each other to produce not just quantitative but qualitative changes in material forms.

the observation of mathematical patterns that describe and predict the world are among the very best established empirical facts. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That’s because the presuppositions concerning the irreducible basis of objectness which underlie mathematical logic guarantee that it will generate a world of excellently established facts. It fits the world that we already pre-fitted to make amenable to the grammar of mathematics. The very prioritization of established facts over the creative shift in the criteria of factuality demonstrates how the way mathematical reasoning formulates its questions already delineates the field of possible answers.

it seems obvious that living things must incorporate within themselves descriptions of nature that are isomorphic to nature. Such descriptions might be highly compressed, based on heuristics that make them prone to error, etc., but this doesn't preclude the fact that they are to some extent accurate descriptions of nature — Count Timothy von Icarus

It depends on how we describe living things. From an enactivist perspective, an organism is an inseparable system of reciprocal relations among brain, body and environment. There is a certain operational closure giving organisms a normative goal-oriented orientation toward their world but, strictly speaking, no inside and no outside, no separable parts or forms. The cognitively knowing organism doesn’t represent its surroundings, it interacts with it guided by expectations and purposes that can be validated or invalidated. If there is anything isomorphic between such self-organizing organisms-environment systems and nature in general it would not be particular contents but a general principle of organization that applies to all living things. Piaget identified such a formal principle as the equilbrating functions of assimilation-accommodation, which he suggested could be extended to non-living complex systems.

I think the sciences are slowly moving away from the idea, exemplified by the periodic table, of pre-existing forms that reappear throughout nature. They are coming to realize that such abstractions cover over the fact that no entity pre-exists its interaction with other entities within a configuration of relations. The ‘entities’ are nothing but the changing interactions themselves, which tend to form relatively stable configurations. According to this approach, the world is not representation but enaction.

We can only know of the world in-itself through logical limitations and consequences. Namely, some "thing" must be there. But beyond that, everything is a model we create that attempts to represent what is there. Knowledge is the the logical application of our representations for our best chance at matching to the consequences of its existence. But such an existence can only be known as the representations we hold, as we only know how the thing in-itself impacts the world, not what it truly is to exist as itself unobserved — Philosophim

“Logical”, “model”, “representation”. I just want to point out that these concepts get their sense from to a particular sort of metaphysical foundation. If we shifted to a different metaphysics, we could find ourselves putting into question the assumed priority of logical, representational modeling as our fundamental mode of access to the world.

Logic is in the mind, but not of it. It’s not our invention but what we are able to discover through reason. I really don’t think that the idea of a world where there are no necessary facts is even an hypothesis — Wayfarer

You are allowing yourself to be fooled by your invented grammar. Mathematics, and the logic it is based on, rests on a peculiar way humans decided at a certain point in their history ( actually, as a gradual process of development) to formulate the idea of the persistingly present, self-identical object. Doing so led to subsequent assumptions such as the law of identity, the law of non-contradiction, geometrical forms such as lines and magnitudes, and propositional statements binding or separating a subject and predicate. Mathematical structures are only ‘embedded’ in the world to the extent that we force the world into such odd forms. But such processes of objectivation are derived modes of thinking which hide within themselves what gives them their sense and intelligibly. Put differently, a persisting object only persists for us in its meaning by continuing to be the same differently.

2+2 is true because of the shared presupposition built into the grammar of 2+2. A=A is true because it is presupposed as a basis for our formulation of objectness. Presuppositions are ‘true’’ in all possible worlds only to the extent that all possible worlds share the same or similar presuppositions. Given that presuppositions are contestable, partially shared constructs emerging from and maintained in actual interpersonal contexts of use, the truth of a proposition is dependent on this preserving of a particular meaningful sense of a proposition. When underlying presuppositions change , the propositions whose intelligibility depends on them dont become false, they either change their meaning and criteria of truth, or become non-sensical. When the sense of a proposition changes slowly enough, we tend not to notice the change in meaning and instead reify the proposition as self-identically repeatable. This is how we end up fooling ourselves into believing that mathematical structures are embedded in the world. What is embedded in the world is human discursive interactions, not the abstract forms that we fabricate out of these relationships.

And I think we can say that part of General Relativity is important for metaphysics. We shouldn't have a metaphysics that says modern physics is wrong. It would be a bad system, imo. — Manuel

A metaphysics is not a piece of evidence or a collection of facts to be compared against scientific claims. It’s the meta-framework within which scientific claims, facts and evidence are intelligible. Change the metaphysics and we don’t ‘disprove’ a science’s facts, we change their sense and relevance.

Heidegger wrote:

Metaphysics grounds an age, in that through a specific interpretation of what is and through a specific comprehension of truth it gives to that age the basis upon which it is essentially formed. This basis holds complete dominion over all the phenomena that distinguish the age. Conversely, in order that there may be an adequate reflection upon these phenomena themselves, the metaphysical basis for them must let itself be apprehended.

I was under impression that metaphysics has remained unchanged since the days of Aristotle whose work did not really gain traction until the age of Reason or Enlightenment beginning in the 17th century where Kant, Liebniz and others built upon it ? — simplyG

Metaphysical assumptions change with every cultural
era and with every innovation in philosophy. We can see this historical development in the transition from the neo-Platonism of Philo and Augustine to the neo-Aristotelianism of Maimonides and Aquinas, from the rationalism of Descartes to the empiricism of Hume to the Idealism of Kant and Hegel, to the various postmodernist philosophies.

In the sense that I defined it in the OP, I don't think we need metaphysics to expose errors in our reasoning: we can do so without making ontological claims — Bob Ross

We wouldn’t be able to distinguish truth from error in the first place if we didn’t have a pre-existing system of criteria ( theory) on the basis of which to make such determinations. Theory is a manifestation of a metaphysical viewpoint. If all we are interested in is exposing errors in reasoning, then we need not question our underlying metaphysical assumptions. In fact , we would be incapable of doing so if we merely remain stuck within a particular theoretical framework by looking for errors. The profoundly creative work of science consists not in exposing errors in reasoning but in changing the subject, turning the frame on its head, redefining the criteria of truth and error, not just checking our answers to old questions but asking different questions. In other words, transforming the underlying metaphysical presuppositions.

Heidegger wrote:

Metaphysics grounds an age, in that through a specific interpretation of what is and through a specific comprehension of truth it gives to that age the basis upon which it is essentially formed. This basis holds complete dominion over all the phenomena that distinguish the age. Conversely, in order that there may be an adequate reflection upon these phenomena themselves, the metaphysical basis for them must let itself be apprehended.

There’s more to metaphysics than just imagination it also includes reasoning not based upon experience but using deduction thereof such as found in math. It also includes tautologies which again are aspects of reason — simplyG

Metaphysics also exposes the error in our thinking. So, while that does not count as "knowledge", it makes us examine, or even discover, how we think ordinarily about reality, or the carelessness of how we think, or what we take for granted as true. — L'éléphant

This is an Enlightenment view of what metaphysics is and does. In other words, the metaphysical presuppositions of Enlightenment philosophy involve the belief that one can secure truth through deductive reasoning. Post-Enlightenment metaphysics is quite different.

Mathematical truth is not a supposition. It is logical independently of what we think — EnPassant

I think I’m going to put that on a T-shirt

It is the other war around; the universe is embedded in mathematics. pi is a geometric proportion but it can, with infinite precision, be expressed as infinite series -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz_formula_for_%CF%80

Numbers are eternal objects and the universe is designed around them. — EnPassant

This is true. The universe is designed around numbers. But who designed the scientific concept of ‘universe’ such that mathematics meshes with it so conveniently? Perhaps mathematics and the logic on which it’s based rest on presuppositions about the world rather than the world itself. This would mean that logic and math are derived forms of thinking or grammars.

More broadly, this makes me question my responses to human-created art. How much of that is just as hollow as that produced by machines? I don’t really want to ask “Is it art” - we’ve been through that before. Well, maybe I do… I can certainly see why it frightens graphic artists. I can see plenty of applications where it could replace human image-making e.g. book covers, posters, advertisements, book illustrations, comic books… — T Clark

Here’s an excellent argument against the notion that A.I. can ‘create’ art:

Reality does not require "faith" ... insofar as whatever there is constrains – encompasses – whatever else we believe or do not believe "is the case". — 180 Proof

Unless there is a reciprocal relation between the constraints posed by whatever there is and our way of life, which makes intelligible what we believe or do not believe is the case. Put differently, whatever there is is always produced via interaction within a web of relations contributing an ineradicable element of expectation, or ‘faith’.

This requires assuming that intentional or 'subject/object' consciousness reduces to the the 'Being, Consciousness, Bliss' of the Upanishads. This is nondualism, the rejection of all the distinctions that you say we should reject.

We seem to agree but maybe use the words differently — FrancisRay

Phenomenology offers this kind of approach, and a number of writers embracing phenomenology ( Evan Thompson, Francisco Varela) have tried to meld this philosophy with meditative traditions. But I have a problem with the notion of pure self-reflexive awareness, precisely in its claim to being devoid of intentional content.
The phenomenologist Edmund Husserl reduced everything to consciousness, but this ‘inwardness’ consisted of self and object poles in inseparable interaction via intentional directness. The nature of the self is continually being transformed by the world.

You're conflating consciousness and experience, but I;m suggesting that the former is prior to the latter. Bear in mind that experience-experiencer is a duality that must be reduced in order to overcome dualism — FrancisRay

How does making consciousness prior to experience eliminate the hard problem, which results from separating body and mind, subject and object? It seems to me that your approach reifies dualism by hardening the separation between these aspects of being. Dont we need to find a way to think subject and object, mind and world, inside and outside, feeling and thinking, experiencer and experience together, rather than giving one side priority over the other?

Most of Christina’s points rely on a comparison of religious modes of inquiry and scientific method. But her assumptions about how science proceeds amounts to scientism, which confuses itself with science. Scientism assumes a single ‘scientific method’ which offers a mode of access to truth that is superior to all other modes. I’m a dyed-in-the-wool atheist but I believe that neither a religious belief nor a scientific paradigm can be proved true or false. In other words, evidence does not enable us to choose between rival paradigms, because change in science assumptions is neither deductive nor inductive. Instead, it involves shifts in metaphysical presuppositions, just as does change in religious belief. If religious belief doesn’t evolve then neither does scientific theory.
I’m an atheist not because religion lacks evidence or is ‘untrue’ but because I find my worldview allows the world to make sense to me in a more elegant and harmonious way.

You cannot use physics to explain the special case of 'life'. This requires a special perspective, namely that of biology or better: metabiology. — Wolfgang

Do you think the reason we cannot use physics to explain life is because of some fundamental ontological difference between two natural domains, or is it that the conceptual understanding embodied in the vocabulary of physics hasn’t yet ‘caught up with’ that of evolution-based biology? In other words, have we imposed the difficulty on ourselves by the narrow way we have constructed our theories of physics up till now?

. I deliberately used the term metabiology of mind to make it clear that metaphysics is not sufficient to explain the specificity of all living things and especially of consciousness. After all, it is not physics that describes life, but biology. And there is only one brain and it is organic and not spiritual — Wolfgang

Are you saying that metaphysics is to be understood exclusively in relation to physics rather than to biology and psychology as well?

Without a metabiology of mind, brain research, as well as the philosophy of mind, will continue to sleepwalk between utilitarianism (which should not be underestimated) and philosophical speculation. — Wolfgang

What do you think of this review of the field of metabiology by Arturo Carsetti?

https://researchoutreach.org/articles/metabiology-complexity-natural-evolution/?amp=1

Greek ethical notions such as phronesis and areti are in opposition to universalizing ethics, and manage quite well without embracing Heidegger's destining of Being.

The essence of a thing is not the meaning of Being. Our involvement with it can take many forms, including building extermination camps — Fooloso4

Yes, Greek culture was a paragon of ethical humanism. They didn’t have the technology for concentration camps, but they were able to manage the technology of slavery quite well.

What is the connection between Being and ethics? — Fooloso4

The essence of a thing, including an ethical value, is to be found in the contextual particularity of our involvement with it. This precludes universalizing ethics.

↪Joshs For the record, my personal view is that ethics is not Heidegger's primary focus. I concede its "relative absence" in the interest of ongoing discussion. Either way, I don't think it is central to the thesis of the OP. — Pantagruel

Without determining whether Heidegger offers an ethics, and, if he does, without defining the nature of this ethics, it seems to me we can’t counter the implication of the OP, which is based on Wolin’s book Heidegger in Ruins. That is, the question is, is Heidegger’s reputation really in ruins? Wolin wants us to conclude that the ethical implications of Heidegger’s work, its most important feature, are dangerous and deserve to be left in ruins. I agree with the many who have been influenced by his philosophy that the method of grounding ethics his work offers is relevant and important.

But how many times does this poor argument need to be unmasked? Here are some places where it has already been done — Leontiskos

Lovely. I highly recommend Jean Luc Nancy’s The Banality of Heidegger for an antidote to Wolin’s book. To summarize, Heidegger absorbs the anti-semitic tropes from his culture, but not without reinterpreting them. For instance, he rejects the biological, racialized concept of jewry. Jewry represents for him a mode of thinking, a technicized, logicized instrumentalism that he traces back to Plato and Aristotle and which Jews co-opted from the Greeks and spread to Christianity and which reaches its apex with Enlightenement science. He considered Nazism to be the ultimate expression of this technicized thinking. Nancy argues that the ethical tools Heidegger provides in
his thinking can be used to insulate against the very essentialism that Heidegger succumbs to.

It should be noted that Levinas, who was strongly influenced by Heidegger but who offered a philosophical critique of his work, essentializes the jews in a different direction. He argues that we can discern two currents or styles of thinking in Western philosophy since its origins, the Greek and the Jewish. The Greek current focuses on neutral truth and the Jewish deems the ethical as fundamental.

Again, I think it depends on whether Heidegger's philosophy implicates the moral sphere. For an ethicist to produce a work of great import and then choose actions which are deeply flawed is incongruous. — Leontiskos

I’m sure your actions, from the vantage of a century or so hence, will come to be construed as deeply ethically flawed.

The problem is evident in the Introduction to Being and Time. Heidegger claims that the question of the meaning of Being is the fundamental question, the human question. H. says that we must make the inquirer, Dasein, transparent in his own Being. To ignore the ethical dimension of human being is to make what he intends to make transparent opaque. — Fooloso4

Heidegger doesn’t ignore the ethical dimension of Being, any more than Focault, Deleuze and Guattari ignore ethics in their work. One cannot properly think responsibility and justice without an understanding of Being. The question of Being is in its essence an ethical question. This is a central idea in Derrida. I think you’re looking for a prescriptive ethics and, not finding it , infer the total
absence of an ethical dimension.

Many authors have taken such as stance. For instance, Todd May writes:

“Second, however, is the question of whether poststructuralism admits of an ethics at all. In a
discourse that emphasizes the local and the contingent, is there room for principles of evaluation that are, if they are not to be mere personal reactions to situations, universal in scope?”

People should read Heidegger all they like. I don't seek to ban his books. I myself am inclined to avoid whenever possible those who, inter alia, think and are determined to tell everyone that certain groups of people (including themselves) are distinctive in spirit, or have a special place in the world, are especially a part of or have a unique understanding of "Being" or who knows what else is said to qualify as the kind of mystical-religious-philosophical locus of ultimate reality some of us need to manufacture, which in any case cannot be defined or understood through the use of reason; who think reason itself is detrimental to attaining what's true or real, and believe that it should be replaced by something or other like dancing, or marching, exercising, working (because it makes us "free") or running about the mountains in lederhosen pretending to be a peasant. Particularly when they are, also, unrepentant Nazis. — Ciceronianus

Wolin gets Heidegger half right in this respect. Heidegger did indeed reserve a special place for his own parochial culture over others. In his mind rural culture was better suited to grasping Being urban culture, the German volk grounded in blood and soil were better suited to this thinking than ‘rootless’ jews or other foreigners. What Wolin doesnt get is that the thinking of Being itself is a thinking of pragmatic engagement that in its particularities clashes with the structures of totalitarian political institutions. Wolin believes that at the heart of Heidegger’s concept of being is nothing but right wing fascist philosophy dressed up in mystic poetic terminology. But his philosophy is profoundly different from the sorts of conservative philosophies that were fashionable at the time, and still appear today. So Heidegger’s thinking appears as something new and radical but tied to the vestiges of parochial nationalism.

I don't see how the problem goes away unless one argues that Heidegger's academic work is inherently contrary to the unappealing aspects, and that he simply failed to recognize the way in which his philosophy precludes antisemitism, or Nazism, etc. A tall task. — Leontiskos

I hope this helps:

Eugene Gendlin was a Viennese Jew who , at age 13 , just barely made it out of Austria alive in 1939. As a philosopher and psychologist at the University of Chicago, he avoided reading Heidegger for years because of his political activities.After finally reading and embracing aspects of his philosophy, Gendlin wrote a remarkable analysis of the historical context of Heidegger’s actions. He didn’t excuse Heidegger or explain away what he did , but , like another famous Jewish philosopher who suffered at the hands of the Nazis, Emmanuel Levinas, he showed Heidegger’s faults to be symptomatic of a weakness endemic to European thinking. Rather than conveniently indulging in a pose of moral superiority, patting himself on the back for his righteousness, he looked beyond the individual to a climate of thinking common not just to the Nazis but to those who opposed them.

Here’s the first part of Gendlin’s article , plus the last paragraph:

“Jung offers deep and indispensable insights. I did not like knowing that Jung had said: "Hitler is the embodiment of the German spirit." The Nazis knew his views. Records show that they considered sending for Jung to help Rudolph Hess with his mental trouble.

Similarly, I had not wanted to know that Dostoevsky hated Jews, Germans, and Poles. He gave influential speeches in favor of the Panslavic movement. That movement was a direct cause of the Russian-French alliance and the World War.

What I heard of Heidegger's Nazi views made me decide not to read him at all. I read him when I was almost 40 years old. Then I realized that Heidegger's thought was already in mine, from my reading of so many others who had learned from him.

With these three we are forced to wonder: Must we not mistrust their seemingly deep insights? How could we want these insights for ourselves, if they came out of experience so insensitive to moral ugliness? Perhaps it might not matter if the insights were less deep. But they open into what is most precious in human nature and life. The depth is beyond question. The insights are genuine.

So one attempts to break out of the dilemma on the other side: Is there a way Nazism or hatred of other peoples might be not so bad? Could it have seemed different at the time? No chance of that, either. I am a Jewish refugee from Vienna, a lucky one to whom nothing very bad happened. I remember what 1938 looked like, not only to a Jew, but to others. I remember the conflicts it made in people. They could not help knowing which instincts were which. Many writers and ordinary people had no difficulty seeing the events for what they were, at the time.

So we return to question the insights again. But by now they are among our own deepest insights. We go back and forth: Nothing gives way on either side.

Did these men simply make mistakes? We can forgive mistakes. A human individual can develop far beyond others, but surely only on one or two dimensions. No one can be great in more than a few ways. And Heidegger did write of his "mistakes" in his application to be allowed to teach again at Freiburg (1946). He also distanced himself from the Nazi party already in 1934, long before most Germans. I have no difficulty understanding any person's mistake, and less difficulty if someone is highly developed in other ways. No human can have every kind of strength and judgement. On a personal level there is really no problem.

Why he was so silent about the mistake is also more than personal. It is the silence of a whole generation. I will return to this silence.

The problem is not about him, personally, at all. I pose a problem for us. The problem is, why his kind of philosophy---our kind of philosophy---fails to protect against this "mistake." That is the philosophical question.

His philosophy allowed for this mistake. It is therefore not just the personal accident. There is an inherent, systematic connection. These deep insights permit inhuman, racist views. To find the systematic connection, we must look exactly where these views---our views---are deepest, most precious, and not false but true. What was lacking at that most true point?

Something very important was lacking at the deepest point. We don't notice the lack, because when we read these writings today, we assume and add what is lacking.

I became an American when I was 13. As a child I had not belonged in, or identified with, Austria. I had been alienated in some confused and inarticulate way. I found I could really be an American, and I am one.

But, some European peculiarities remain from before. At the Heidegger Circle I laugh silently to myself, when other Americans discuss and share Heidegger's view that to be human is to dwell historically as a people on a soil. How do my fellow Americans manage to dwell with Heidegger on German soil?

My colleagues read this in a universalized way. For us, in the Heidegger Circle, the human is the same everywhere in this respect, and equally valuable. Humans are culturally particularized, certainly, but this particularization is itself universal. Humans are one species. They are all culturally particular. This universal assertion holds across us all, and we see no problem.

Indeed, after 1945 Heidegger writes of the dangers of technological reason on a "planetary" level. But it is reason, which is thus planetary---the same universal reason he says he had always attacked. (Spiegel Interview.) Heidegger's planetary view differs from our more recent understanding of human universality. The difference has not been much written about, so there are no familiar phrases for it. For Heidegger there is no common human nature which is then also particularized and altered in history. There is no human nature that lasts through change by history. There is only the historical particular, no human nature.

Humans eat and sleep differently in different cultures. They arrange different sexual rituals, build different "nests," and raise their young differently. In an animal species the members do all this in the same way. Humans are not even a species. So, at least, it seemed to those thinkers who entered into what is most deeply human.

To them, the deepest and most prized aspect of humans was the cultural and historical particular.

In our generation we easily and conveniently universalize the particularization. Not Heidegger. For him, what is most valuable is the necessarily particular indwelling in one people's history and language, on its land, and not another's. We change it without noticing, to read: any indwelling in any people's history is this most highly valued aspect.

**************************
Last paragraph:

It is partly the influence of his work in us, which now makes us unable to grasp how he could have failed to sense the nonrational universality of humans. Today, in Chicago, when we look at Louis Sullivan's buildings, the ones that created modern architecture, we wonder why he used so much granite. Why didn't he use just steel and windows?

To understand may be to forgive, but it is certainly not to excuse. Without pretending to lighten the horror, we need to understand why that tradition of thought also brought
horror. Only so can we think through what we draw from our immediate past. Only then can we recover the other past, right behind that one. We need both, to articulate our own, non-rational universalization of human depth.“

But your presupposition is that the two bodies of work are in conflict, and that we therefore must choose either one or the other. Why think that? On my (admittedly limited) view, the two are not in conflict. — Leontiskos

No, my presupposition is that the two bodies of work are two aspects of the same thinking, and that we must use each side to better understand the other. But one side is profoundly richer, deeper , more fully elaborated than the other. Without a thoroughgoing scholarly immersion in that side, one ends misreading Heidegger’s philosophical use of the word ‘destruction’ for the conventional meaning, as Richard Wolin does. This is one of innumerable misreadings he makes in his diatribe against H.

When ↪Pantagruel attempts to excuse Heidegger on the basis that he was an intellectual and not a moralist, he seems to implicitly commit himself to the view that Heidegger's academic work is largely non-moral, and is therefore not contrary (nor promotional) to the moral evils of Nazism. This approach also does not see the two bodies of work as conflicting — Leontiskos

I would disagree that Heidegger’s work doesnt imply an ethics. It does. Both Derrida and Levinas have connected the limits of the ethicial implications of his thought with his political mistakes.

Margolis, a self-professed relativist who stressed the importance of cultural and historical situatedness, would not accept the kind of Heidegger apologetic we see here — Fooloso4

Margolis’s relativism seems to go only so far. He appears to embrace Foucault but his critiques of Husserl, Ricouer, Heidegger, Rorty and various postmodern writers seems to indicate his inability to make the phenomenological (and beyond that, deconstructive) move into a thoroughly relational model of being. Instead, he insists on maintaining a split between the methods of human and natural science, based on his belief in a certain notion of an ‘objective' physical reality. He says cultural time is reversible but physical time is irreversible:.

”Their [cultural meanings] narrative structure—their past, for instance—is, as we have said again and again, always subject to further change by way of further interpretation. Nothing like this obtains in the physical world...The human world is significantly different from the physical—in possessing Intentional structures; it is conceptually richer and more complex in virtue of incorporating the other—and more. The physical world must be older, we say, than human life, and independent of human inquiry; otherwise, all our conjectures make no sense.”

Disentangling the two is not as easy as Heidegger's students would wish. — Leontiskos

.

Let’s be clear about what are entangled here. On one side are the public record of Heidegger’s political actions, and his collected comments concerning his views about National Socialism and the Jews. On the other side are dozens of philosophical works spanning 6 decades and comprising tens of thousands of pages.

If as responsible readers we are charged with the task of using the public record and scattered diary fragments to illuminate the meaning of his published work, and vice versa, which of these two sides of Heidegger’s life do you think deserves the most attention in clarifying the ‘true’ intentions of as careful and complex a thinker as Heidegger?
I think it’s no coincidence that those, like Wolin, who are most inclined to treat Heidegger’s political activities and non-published comments as a proxy for actually mastering his published work are the ones who want to dismiss his philosophy entirely.

Two centuries ago slavery was a social norm widely embraced and even more widely tolerated. So whom from that time period should we exempt from moral censure?
— Pantagruel

There were plenty of Germans in Heidegger's time who did not fall for the Nazi foolishness, and if Heidegger is to be held up as a paragon of human brilliance I don't think this argument holds water. — Leontiskos

It had better hold water, or else the concept of human brilliance needs to be done away with.

Two centuries ago slavery was a social norm widely embraced and even more widely tolerated. So whom from that time period should we exempt from moral censure? Anyone today who espoused slavery would be rightly seen as a monster. Social contexts create themselves as norms. Sometimes extremely dubious things get realized as social contexts, it's the nature of the beast. Man can be a very ugly animal. As unpleasant a fact as social reality is, it is a reality. You downplay your awareness of the exigency of the social context at your own risk. Your outrage is far more of a social than an intellectual response, anyone can see that. If it were intellectual, then it would only be a matter of letting Heidegger's writings speak for themselves, wouldn't it? — Pantagruel

Good points. If Heidegger’s mistake was cultural essentialism, the eclipsing of individual difference in favor of the social whole, Ciceronianus’s mistake is subjective individualism, which downplays the social shaping of individual subjectivity. Both tendencies are formed within discursive traditions, and both can lead to potentially dangerous ethical myopia.

As for his philosophy, such as it is, it seems to me that Dewey's alleged observation that Heidegger "reads like a Swabian peasant trying to sound like me" describes whatever is of worth in it, by my understanding, if we subtract H's mysticism and Romanticism — Ciceronianus

Coming from you , that’s a compliment, given the brilliance of Dewey.

Yes, we are all too quick to criticize those who supported Hitler and the Nazi regime and referred to the Holocaust as the "self-annihilation of the Jews." The "wrong side of a socio-historic movement," forsooth. — Ciceronianus

I don’t know if it is any more improper to refer to supporters of Hitler as being on the wrong side of a sociologist-historic movement than it is to characterize Trump supporters that way.

“On Sunday evening, just as Rosh Hashanah was coming to a close, Trump posted a meme on his social-media platform, Truth Social, excoriating “liberal Jews” who had “voted to destroy America”.(Atlantic Magazine)