ABSTRACT
As Steiner points out, Heidegger is often accused of wanting to make Being "into a hypostatized mystery," as if only to "obscure its everyday function as a grammatical copula." Heidegger's early and later attempts to reconnect the "broken links between techne and poiesis" by way of engaging these thinkers as fellow artist-philosophers have to be understood in confrontation with Cassirer, Kant, and Plato—in confrontation, that is, with the entire history of Western metaphysics. And intentional or not, it serves all the better to even the score with Protagoras, who had shown the temerity to challenge the claims of Parmenides and Pythagoras, mainstays in Plato's metaphysics. The stakes for Protagoras were his reputation as a great rhetorician and teacher and therefore his livelihood, which depended on student fees. In Fry's view, mathematics is what makes art serious, makes it philosophical and saves it from the popular and the frivolous.
