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By the way, do you know a lot about Heidegger and the existentialists (sp?)? There seems to be some debate on this thread concerning the merit of their thinking.

I know more about some existential thinkers than others. I take some more seriously than others. The adolescent thrashing is more characteristic of certain interpreters of the existentialists than the thinkers themselves, most of whom rejected the title of "existentialist."

What I actually find to be of interest is less "existentialism" per se than the phenomenological tradition that is closely associated with that movement, starting with Heidegger's teacher, Edmund Husserl. Phenomenology is a method of philosophy. It begins with the epoche, or the bracketing of one's assumptions, and then closely describes a phenomenon. This is called the phenomenological reduction. Then through the description of the various ways the phenomenon appears, one engages in an eidetic reduction, the process of identifying those structural regularities of the phenomenon that remain throughout all the variations. The aim is to arrive at the essential structure of the phenomenon, in order to identify what the phenomenon is.

Heidegger arrived on the scene as a critic of Husserl, and that is where I find him to be of interest. Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and others are also of interest, due to their roots in this phenomenological tradition of Continental Philosophy.