Husserl ranked with Socrates as the main representative of the greatness of Western thinking

recent philosophy

from Object-Oriented Philosophy by doctorzamalek (Graham Harman) 

One of the consequences of this way of looking at things is the much higher status I give to Levinas than most people do. His attitude from the start seems to me the right one: “we cannot go back to pre-Heideggerian philosophy, but there is something out of order about the climate of that philosophy.” [...] And I think readers of this blog know that I’ll be the first to give Whitehead as much credit as possible: he’s a genuinely great philosopher, and any given century doesn’t have too many of those. [...]

There are no hidden objects in Husserl. A mailbox is not hiding behind its successively visible profiles. For Heidegger, the mailbox does obviously hide behind those profiles. The two thinkers give us complementary models of objects. As I have argued, Heidegger senses this, and constructs a fourfold model out of it: explicitly so from 1949 onward, but really as far back as his early struggles with Husserl in 1919.

What has happened since? The tension required to maintain these ambivalent models of objects dissipated somewhat. Either the object was overmined by a return to the German Idealist downgrading of reality-an-sich, or it was undermined by appeal to a more indeterminate continuum, with actual individuals stripped of autonomy.

For this reason, I hold that what we need is not more philosophy of the subject (overmining), and not more natural science (undermining). What we need instead is the object-oriented spirit of phenomenology mixed with the more cosmic object-oriented spirit of Whitehead.

S.K.Maitra

In my college days I was a great admirer of Hegel, whom I regarded as the greatest philosopher that had ever lived. Curiously enough, Kant left cold. In fact, I looked uponKant as an incomplete Hegel and Hegel as the completed kant. The influence of Hegel, however, did not last long. Heraclitus was undoubtedly earlier than Parmenides. But Hegelian logic required that Parmenides should come first and then Heraclitus. "Emerging Theory of Values"  11:34 PM Friday, October 21, 2005

J.N.Mohanty

I emphasized Whitehead's Platonism rather than his process-philosophy (66). My interest still centres around Husserl and Kant. To think of Husserl is to think also of Heidegger. Heidegger has been Husserl's other, not from the outside but from within Husserl's thinking. The same is true of Kant --to think with Kant is to think of Hegel, who critiqued and opposed Kant from within. For me Husserl ranked with Socrates as the main representative of the greatness of Western thinking (114). [Between Two Worlds: East and West: An Autobiography]  5:07 PM Sunday, October 16, 2005

J.N.Mohanty

The philosopher is still a concrete human being: however far-flung and cosmic his thinking may be; the thinker is still an embodied, historically situated, biologically constituted, socially rooted, linguistically localized and culturally conditioned creature. It is a miracle that he can use these constraints to open out, in his thoughts, to the world at large (116).

There are layers of rootedness, to all of which I cling with utmost tenacity. Yet in my thinking, I wish to be free. A tradition nourishes your life, makes possible a meaningful world but leaves openings through which other traditions may be contacted. I realize, I am the mid-point of a series of concentric circles. To actualize those circles within my consciousness is what it takes to be a world philosopher. Dialogue with other traditions is also a dialogue within oneself (117). [Between Two Worlds: East and West: An Autobiography]  5:16 PM Monday, October 17, 2005 

sacw.net : India: An account of a visit to the police state of Chhattisgarh For anthropologists, our professional life is difficult to separate from our personal – our research depends on developing deep friendships with the people we `study'. In the twenty years that I have been visiting Bastar off and on, I have acquired a range of friends, acquaintances and people who are like family members, whose concerns are my concerns. This does not in any way diminish one's commitment to independence and objectivity. As Kathleen Gough said in 1968, when the American Anthropological Association was debating whether to pass a resolution against the war in Vietnam, `genocide is not in the professional interests of anthropology.' Nandini Sundar, “Police states, anthropology and human rights”, 3rd January 2010 From nabesh n_bohidar@yahoo.com date 4 January 2010 12:53