re: #391 Obdicut

I don’t like Heidegger. And what do you imagine is my area?

Do you just mean ‘not believing in the supernatural’? And I think that that’s just part of the classic false dichotomy between science and philosophy— that’s something Dennett actually addresses at length. I can’t really tell, though, since I’m not familiar with how Heidegger uses the term.

Heidegger, as a phenomenologist, doesn’t include the supernatural. His use of the term refers instead to what he terms the orientation of a human being toward Being as a whole, with “Being” understood strictly and completely without any mystico-religious overtones or implications.

It’s his contention that a fundamental shift occurred in Western thought, in which the articulated order of the world (Being) came to be understood not as a given state of affairs, to be managed and navigated as best one can, but rather as a large mass of relatively unorganized (for human purposes) dead matter, subject to fundamental manipulation (not just physically, but conceptually as well) according to the will of man.