I’ve been mar­i­nat­ing a post on Ron Rosenbaum’s latest cri de crap­hole at Slate, won­der­ing if it was really worth the effort to attack an arti­cle that man­ages to be igno­rant about nearly every sub­ject it touches. I was glad, then, to see Michael swoop in and save me half the trou­ble. As he points out, and as the cover above makes plain,* Rosenbaum’s “troubling new revelations” are nei­ther new nor reveal­ing. Yes, they’re trou­bling, but I’m reg­u­larly amazed at how many people refuse to con­sider that it is not only pos­si­ble but might even be philo­soph­i­cally instruc­tive that Martin Hei­deg­ger was both a Nazi and one of the most impor­tant philoso­phers of the 20th century.

But Michael left out the most offen­sive part of Rosenbaum’s arti­cle, which is his attempt to tar Hannah Arendt with the same anti-​Heideggerian brush. Because, you know, they slept together.

The Guardian reported last week that a fight has broken out between Terry Eagle­ton and Martin Amis, who now are both teach­ing at Man­ches­ter Uni­ver­sity. In a new intro­duc­tion to his primer Ide­ol­ogy, Eagle­ton attacks Amis’s views on Islam, coming within a hair’s breadth of call­ing Amis a racist for “The Age of Horrorism,” a three-​part essay Amis pub­lished last year in the Observer. The Guardian has now pub­lished Eagleton’s response to the latest arti­cle, as well as Amis’s letter respond­ing to the response.

When Amis’s essay first showed up, I wrote an essay respond­ing to it. A much-​shortened ver­sion was pub­lished by a U. of Chicago email broad­sheet called Sight­ings. Since the sub­ject has come up again, I thought I’d post the orig­i­nal ver­sion in its entirety below. (Warn­ing: it’s long.)

(Photo by Stuart Price.)

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The Seduc­tion of Reasons

“Courage, sir” is the basic pre­req­ui­site of seri­ous moral thought, and for good reason.