Richard F. H. Polt

I'll probably read any new book about typewrites. It's nice to even have them. "The Typewriter Revolution" was thorough and informative. I could have done without the "Insurgency!" bits and probably didn't need the defensiveness around typists being called "hipsters". Otherwise, a fun read.

I studied Kierkegaard with Richard Polt one summer many years ago. His introduction to Heidegger is readable and useful for navigating the sometimes impenetrable shoals of his thought. I found this useful to have beside me while attempting to read Being and Time.

There's plenty to dislike about Heidegger - the nazism, the self-mythologization, the rather too frequent dips into nonsense - but I most dislike the insufferable literary habits of his epigoni. Thankfully Mr Polt writes clearly if not beautifully.
Although he has a penchant for the hackneyed or tasteless which I've come to expect from Heideggerians (e.g., Heidegger's writing can be beautiful, Polt says, and gives as his example: "the clearing center itself encircles all that is, as does the show more nothing, which we scarcely know." Indeed. Or the original idea that we shouldn't speak well by 'policing our words,' but by "learning to respect the mysterious powers of language." That seems to me, well, a little bit like Metaphysics, treating humans as objects; in this case objects which are affected by the Great God of Language.), it never gets in the way of the point, which he makes seem important. I think maybe I *should* try to be open to Being a bit more often.
That Polt structures the book more as a commentary and less as a monograph is the major downside here; the good news, of course, is that it is very helpful as a guide to Heidegger's own writing. show less