I have to say in two hours a lot of things, there is a danger of generalization I have to be aware of it. I need to talk about an event that came long before your lifetime and there is a danger of producing stereotypes. I am talking about what primo Levi wrote that after all of these years of thinking about it that memory  tends to settle into a stereotype. There is a possibility of tyrning a horrific event into a cliché. The holocaust has become a cultural commodity. There have been a lot of cheapening of this horrific story. Can we still say remember, never forget in a meaningful way. Another moment I want to highlight is that 70 years later the holocaust is receding into history and becoming one of a number of historical events rather than something a-historical it is moving form eye witness experience into history.

This morning I am going to talk to you about technology, poetry and revolution, these are exciting themes. Ill talk about them in a way that is not intuitive and may be complicating but hopefully I can flesh out these very difficult themes. Why devote two lectures to this thinker? If one grants Heidi unrivalled importance many thinkers could hold claim to as much importance.. the answer although we understood young Heidegger, it’s the work of the later Heidegger in the post war period that is most alive to us today. Just as Wittgenstein scholars speak of an early and late Wittgenstein, where the break is dramatic. He will insist himself philosophy of his early self is overturned by his later work. So we have here a clean and easily locatable division. Things are much more complicated sadly in Heidegger’s case. He himself does not recognize a break in his thinking. He is still very deeply informed by his earlier discoveries. Let’s recall those briefly.

I am extremely excited. I hope you can feel the excitement in the air, today is hugely important in all of your lives. You can only encounter this for the first time twice. If your first impression is a bad one you might discredit him too easily so lecturers seek to do justice on the thinker they lecture on. I feel this responsibility very keenly today. I feel more keenly than usual today because Heidegger is a thinker who’s affected my understanding of the world, he is a source of pleasure and suffering for me and I recommend this thinker and thinking to you. He is a giant of 20^th century thought, not the greatest thinker of the 20^th century but all other contenders and their thinking is much less great. The thought we examine today is a very difficult one. I will move even more slowly than I usually move to drive home fundamental points. Another reason I feel pressure this morning is that Heidegger is very hard. Despite my best efforts this text seems to defeat students. Everyone prays not to be asked about him on the oral exam. He is the proverbial red headed step child of the fyp curriculum.

Einstein belongs in the next section probably but this does show the age of revolutions triumphs in human thought. Associated with the revolution is the quantum revolution you won’t get much of alas, Einstein resists it. Our speaker is an expert in both of those.

There will be more pumpkin flying next week. This is the last of the lectures on the era of revolutions and you have realized that all of this happens within one century. The one thing you have to ask is why are there so many rebellions during that one century? IN the FYP reader we read “all fixed fast frozen relations with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air….” All rebellions are different answers to questions brought up by Montaigne, by Hume. It’s a skepticism taking the 19^th century by the throat and they are really wondering and fearing that knowledge understood as justified true belief is perhaps not even possible. Could mere mortals achieve any kind of knowledge?