Iain Cameron's Diary
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2010-08-05 - 7:16 a.m.

Going up to London for meetings/lunches etc means more reading and I am pressing on with Thomson on Heidegger. This book is much better than I remebered. I was reading yesterday a section where Thomson takes on Feenberg in terms of the interpretation of the essence of technology in H. Thomson mentions that F is biased towards the agenda of Paris 1968 on account of his having been there. This isn't really criticism but it is interesting. The basic subject of the book is how H thought that technology was spoiling university education and how education should be to counter this.The plot thickens because H became the rector of Heidelberg U at about the same time that the Nazis came to power and may have briefly been sympathetic to their cause. This was enough to disgrace H after the war. There is the subplot that at the end of the 20s while writing his masterpiece the married H had an affair with one of his students who happened to be Jewish - Hannah Arendt - who went on to become a significant intellectual in the USA.
I am gradually getting the hang of H's approach and I think there may have been a time when I was involved in a project which reflected H's ideas about valid education. This would have been in the early 90s when I was at the Civil Service College.

Yesterday I had meeting in UKTI in Victoria St at 11.30am. I emerged from this just before 1pm and slipped off to a gloriously unfriendly pub behined the BIS building for a baked potato and a pint. I met Laurence as planned outside Westminster Abbey and we went off to the Starbucks opposite the back entrance to St James tube. I hadn't seen him since the summer of 2007 and so there was a lot to talk about -not least the developments in OOO and SR. Then we walked across to Pimlico to a nicely alternative sandwich bar. I got back on the tube at Victoria just before 5pm.

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