Thursday's classes

When I arrived at class I realized I did not bring the camera! So I will try to reconstruct some notes on what we discussed. In Early Modern Philosophy we were looking at Heidegger and Sartre - Existentialism. We also touched on Hannah Arendt - who was a graduate student and lover of Heidegger (and also Frau Blucher!) ANd Sartre's life partner was Simone de Beauvoir. To start I pointed out both had relationships with their teacher Husserl who taught what he called Phenomenology. Since Hegel introduced Phenomenology as the appropriate study of all that we experience (following Kant's limitation on the noumena, the self, things in themselves, instead considering all experience as phenomena Husserl sought to be an unbiased observer of what people experience. I mentioned as an example the book assigned to my philosophy of religion class in college - https://www.amazon.com/Religion-Essence-Manifestation-Princeton-Library/dp/0691610444 which catalogs reported experiences of people in all cultures as a sort of encyclopedia of phenomena associated with the sacred. Sartre studied in Germany with Husserl as did Heidegger. A noteworthy event was that when Heidegger was the Regent of the university under the Nazis he fired all Jewish academics including his mentor Husserl. Also note that his lover Arendt was Jewish. So there are difficult conflicts to resolve regarding Heidegger's personal relationships. I mentioned the recent publication of this book -- my internet just dropped out! It was the Love Letters between Hannah and Heidegger....