As an anonymous ad hominem attack, I would like to say that, as a graduate trained philosopher with many years' experience reading popularized treatments of philosophy, every time I have read anything by Carlin Romano on a topic that I knew anything about, he was invariably wrong and wrong-headed. I infer that his work is without value generally. It is a discredit to the Chronicle of Higher Education that they publish him. There must be hundreds of writers who could do a better job easily. (Jim Holt is good.)

I'm not offering any concrete evidence, so if you don't believe me, then search the Chronicle website for an article by Romano on a topic on which you have some expertise, and see if he has any idea what he's talking about.

Clive James in his great collection of biographical sketches, "Cultural Amnesia" said it best (p. 676-7):

"The means scarcely existed for anyone--philosopher, philologist, literary critic, journalist, or clinical psychologist--to point out the truth which has since become steadily more obvious, even if it does not appear axiomatic yet: that these two men, Heidegger and Sartre, were only pretending to deal with existence, because each of them was in outright denial of his own experience, and therefore had a vested interest in separating existence from the facts. Will it ever be realized that they were a vaudeville act? Probably not. Even George Steiner, who can scarcely be accused of insensitivity to the historical background, persists in talking about the pair of them as if they were Goethe and Schiller. Those of us who think they were Abbott and Costello had better reconcile ourselves to making no converts."

The predictive quality of this analysis shows just how on the mark the wily Aussie was, putting the above into print two years before this latest kerfluffle. And made all the more delicious by the clarity and liveliness of Mr. James, writing in a style that shows Heidegger and Sartre's offerings to be the rhetorical equivalent of the Mississippi River, turbid and meandering.

Clive James is just another Romano. Did you read his contorted, embarrassing attempt to understand Wittgenstein? James thinks that knowing a person's biography is the same thing as knowing their thought. So, he spends most of his article on Wittgenstein talking about the Wittgenstein mystique. Since James doesn't understand Wittgenstein, surely it must all be a shell game. Similarly, since James can't make head or tales of Heidegger or Sartre, and these dudes had some pretty bleak biographies, it must be that their thought is entirely devoted to divorcing their reality from existence. Except that claiming "separating existence from facts" was the goal of either Sartre's or Heidegger's philosophy is complete bunk.

As for Mr. Romano, the original poster is correct. Romano does not understand Heidegger's writing. It is painfully clear when he talks about Dasein.