Albert Hofstadter was a twentieth century American philosopher.

Life and career

Hofstadter taught at Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

 (1950–67), the University of California at Santa Cruz (1968–75) and the New School for Social Research (1976–78).

Thoughts on the Later Heidegger

As a Heidegger

Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."...

 scholar, Hofstadter contends that Heidegger is able to shape and use language in keeping with his basic insight that language is the house of Being, i.e., where humans dwell. "It is by staying with the thinking the language itself does that Heidegger is able to rethink, and thus think anew, the oldest, the perennial and perenially forgotten thoughts." One of these is the Being of beings in the sense of aletheia. Hofstadter praises Heidegger's project to free human beings from alienated ways of relating to thing

Object (philosophy)

An object in philosophy is a technical term often used in contrast to the term subject. Consciousness is a state of cognition that includes the subject, which can never be doubted as only it can be the one who doubts, and some object or objects that may or may not have real existence without...

s, "letting us find in it a real dwelling place instead of the cold, sterile hostelry in which we presently find ourselves."