Not being a Philosopher, my knowledge of Heidegger and fellow worthies such as Husserl and Hegel has been obtained from hearing my better informed colleagues lapse into incoherence when explaining them to me. Mr. Metcalf here does not do any better. I am afraid that when most of the verbiage is removed all that is left is "Denken Sie mit dein Blut". (Excuse my incompetent German) It is not at all surprising that he was gulled by the National Socialists and their Fuhrer. Metcalf tries to shock us by naming Werner Heisenberg as one of Heidegger's admirers. Heisenberg's brilliant contributions to theoretical physics mostly were achieved prior to 1930. After that a sort of mysticism seemed to infuse his thought. When I was a graduate student, Heisenberg gave a talk to the theoretical seminar at the University that I was attending. I understood hardly anything he said and was naturally somewhat depressed by this. After the talk, at a small social gathering, I was standing near an eminent Physisist and Nobel Laureate, and was able to overhear him whispering to a colleague, "Tell me . . . . ., what was Heisenberg talking about? It is always pleasurable to see a great crackpot taken down. The demolition of Heidegger, though perhaps not as satisfying as that of the Viennese Witch Doctor [quoth V. Nabokov], is still something to rejoice.

Equally (perhaps more) I'm not a philosopher, and I agree with the lapsing into incoherence - I've listened avidly to Hubert Dreyfus at Berkely on iTunes U, learned a lot from him. Even Dreyfus, fascinated with Heidegger for a long time now, can't make it through lecturing Being and Time (particularly Div II which is much more confused) without a lot of 'I don't know why he says that', or 'I can't tell you why he thinks that's convincing.'

And yet, I work in an area where the detail of how we apprehend what we apprehend is very important - and Heidegger's phenomonological work has been profoundly helpful to me. It's not reasonable to conclude that because many good ideas don't take us beyond our ability to lucidly articulate them, that lucid articulations are the necessary being of right ideas. (Wittgenstein was reasonably pro-Heidegger, and a heck of lot of the later continentals are very like Heidegger without attribution. Even Slavoj Zizek is big on the Background.)

Anyway, I, with very little philosophical training, and not overfurnished in the brain department, think Dreyfus on Heidegger is well worth hearing. He has got a lot of good out of it, and is able to pass that on.