War experiences convinced thinkers traditional philosophy was obsolete

Evidence

In a 1959 study of war experiences, the American Heideggerian scholar J. Glenn Gray recalled travelling through the Italian countryside with his unit towards the end of the war there. One evening he stopped to exchange a few words in broken Italian with an elderly man smoking a pipe outside a hut. The encounter saddened Gray, since this traditional world and its age-old calm seemed about to be lost forever. Yet along with the premonition of loss he felt exhilaration and a sense of promise. Whatever happened next, Gray thought that evening, one thing was certain: the philosophers he had studied in college could have little to offer the post-war world. It would be a new reality, so new philosophers would be needed. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 530

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s larger narrative of existentialism arising specifically from historical rupture and displacement. — connects to: Existentialist philosophy was shaped by the wars and politics of the European century — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 103; Unmanned weapons render obsolete any teleological philosophy of history — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 645; Heidegger’s nostalgia rejected Plato and Socratic philosophy as the point of decay — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 427

Broader Connections

• Unmanned weapons render obsolete any teleological philosophy of history #expands (0.72) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 645
• Heidegger’s nostalgia rejected Plato and Socratic philosophy as the point of decay #exemplifies (0.72) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 427