Region Western Philosophy Name Albert Hofstadter | Role Philosopher | |
Era 20th-century philosophy School Continental philosophy, Phenomenology Main interests Philosophy of art, philosophy in literature Died January 26, 1989, Santa Cruz, California, United States Education Columbia University (1935) Books Philosophies of art and beauty, Truth and art, Agony and Epitaph: Man, His Art, and His Poetry, Locke and Scepticism Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Humanities, US & Canada Influenced by Martin Heidegger, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Edmund Husserl Similar People Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich | ||
Albert Hofstadter (March 28, 1910 – January 26, 1989) was an American philosopher.
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Life and career
Hofstadter taught at Columbia University (1950–67), the University of California at Santa Cruz (1968–75) and the New School for Social Research (1976–78). He was the elder brother of physicist and Nobel laureate Robert Hofstadter and the uncle of Robert's son, Douglas Hofstadter.
Thoughts on the later Heidegger
As a Heidegger scholar, Hofstadter contends that Heidegger is able to shape and use language in keeping with his basic insight that language is the house of Being, i.e., where humans dwell. "It is by staying with the thinking the language itself does that Heidegger is able to rethink, and thus think anew, the oldest, the perennial and perennially forgotten thoughts." One of these is the Being of beings in the sense of aletheia. Hofstadter praises Heidegger's project to free human beings from alienated ways of relating to things, "letting us find in it a real dwelling place instead of the cold, sterile hostelry in which we presently find ourselves."