Albert Hofstadter

Albert Hofstadter
Born	1910
Died	January 26, 1989
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Continental philosophy, Phenomenology
Main interests	Philosophy of art, philosophy in literature
Influences Hegel, Heidegger, Husserl

Albert Hofstadter (1910 – January 26, 1989) was a twentieth-century American philosopher.

Life and career

Hofstadter taught at Columbia University (1950–67), the University of California at Santa Cruz (1968–75) and the New School for Social Research (1976–78). He was the elder brother of physicist and Nobel laureate Robert Hofstadter and the uncle of Robert's son, Douglas Hofstadter.

Thoughts on the later Heidegger

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

References

• Bibliography of articles by Albert Hofstadter at philpapers.org