Introduction : action, thought, pragmatism -- Neo-pragmatism and its critics -- Methodology : reconstructive dialectics -- A history of action theory -- Defining actions -- The explanation of action -- A material explication of agency -- Agency and existence.

The first work to offer a comprehensive pragmatist anthropology focusing on sensibility, habits, and human experience as contingently yet irreversibly enlanguaged.

This anthology focuses on “practical” forms and expressions of knowledge, like thinking through artistic media or by crafting things out of materials. The ten chapters follow and review various tracks in conceptions of contemporary knowledge, exploring human knowledge and experience from the perspective of human activities or practices, professional, artistic, domestic, or whatever. A guiding idea is that human knowledge seldom, perhaps never, fits into the traditional dualism between thinking and doing. -/- The chapters are written by philosophers and musicians (...) – some with a double experience as artists and theoreticians. The themes are philosophical, but above all, they touch on questions that are essential for how we understand ourselves as thinking and playing bodies, indeed as parts of nature. The book does not propose one single “theory of knowledge” but steps towards a more diverse and open attitude to the meaning of knowledge. -/- We hope that the texts will be of interest and useful in both disciplinebased and professional education: in philosophy, art schools, tea cher education, and in other programmes where tacit and practical knowledge are essential for the (future) practitioners. It is possible to independently read, and profit from, most of the chapters. (shrink)

Argues that the path to the good life does not consist in working toward some abstract concept of the good, but rather by ameliorating the problems of the practices and institutions that make up our practical life.

This paper argues that there is a conflict between two theses held by John McDowell, namely i) the claim that we are under a standing obligation to revise our beliefs if reflection demands it; and ii) the view that veridical experience is a mode of direct access to the world. Since puts no bounds on what would constitute reasonable doubt, it invites skeptical concerns which overthrow. Conversely, since says that there are some experiences which we are entitled to trust, it (...) undermines the prescriptive scope of. Drawing on C. S. Peirce's distinction between genuine and contrived doubt, I maintain that critical revisions of beliefs should be triggered only by unwanted disruptions of habits, thereby restoring unity between McDowell's two theses. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to elaborate on the phenomenological approach to expertise as proposed by Dreyfus and Dreyfus and to give an account of the extent to which their approach may contribute to a better understanding of how athletes may use their cognitive capacities during high-level skill execution. Dreyfus and Dreyfus's non-representational view of experience-based expertise implies that, given enough relevant experience, the skill learner, when expert, will respond intuitively to immediate situations with no recourse to deliberate actions (...) or mental representations. The paper will subsequently outline some implications and consequences of such an approach and will also examine to what extent Dreyfus and Dreyfus's skill model is capable to resist different attacks that have been made against their view, and in particular regarding the practical application of their approach to the skill domain of competitive sport. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to elaborate on the phenomenological approach to expertise as proposed by Dreyfus and Dreyfus and to give an account of the extent to which their approach may contribute to a better understanding of how athletes may use their cognitive capacities during high-level skill execution. Dreyfus and Dreyfus's non-representational view of experience-based expertise implies that, given enough relevant experience, the skill learner, when expert, will respond intuitively to immediate situations with no recourse to deliberate actions (...) or mental representations. The paper will subsequently outline some implications and consequences of such an approach and will also examine to what extent Dreyfus and Dreyfus's skill model is capable to resist different attacks that have been made against their view, and in particular regarding the practical application of their approach to the skill domain of competitive sport. (shrink)

I defend both conceptualists and nonconceptualists against an attack which has been leveled at them by critics such as Byrne (Perception and conceptual content In: Steup M, Sosa E (eds) Contemporary debates in epistemology. Blackwell, Malden, pp 231-250, 2005), Speaks (Philos Rev 114:359–398, 2005), and Crowther (Erkenntnis 65:5–276, 2006). They distinguish a ‘state’ reading and a ‘content’ reading of ‘(non)conceptual’ and argue that many arguments on either side support only the respective state views, not the respective content views. To prepare (...) the ground for my defense, I argue for an understanding of the state view in terms of concept exercise rather than concept possession and provide an overview of versions of conceptualism and nonconceptualism of different strengths. I then argue that conceptualists and nonconceptualists tacitly accept a so-called ‘state-to-content’ principle, show that existing defenses of this principle fail, and provide a new defense of it. It draws on the sources of the nonconceptualism debate, viz. the need to do justice both to the phenomenology of experience and to its epistemological role and to account for the existence of perceptual content and thought content. I argue that epistemological considerations together with considerations from the subject’s perspective support the claim that conceptual thought has conceptual and propositional content, whereas nonconceptual experience has nonconceptual and non-propositional content. (shrink)

Neuropsychological findings used to motivate the "two visual systems" hypothesis have been taken to endanger a pair of widely accepted claims about spatial representation in conscious visual experience. The first is the claim that visual experience represents 3-D space around the perceiver using an egocentric frame of reference. The second is the claim that there is a constitutive link between the spatial contents of visual experience and the perceiver's bodily actions. In this paper, I review and assess three main sources (...) of evidence for the two visual systems hypothesis. I argue that the best interpretation of the evidence is in fact consistent with both claims. I conclude with some brief remarks on the relation between visual consciousness and rational agency. (shrink)

We explore new connections between the epistemologies of mental rehearsal and suppositional reasoning to offer a novel perspective on skilled behavior and its relationship to practical knowledge. We argue that practical knowledge is "easy" in the sense that, by manifesting one's skills, one has a priori propositional justification for certain beliefs about what one is doing as one does it. This proposal has wider consequences for debates about intentional action and knowledge: first, because agents sometimes act intentionally in epistemically hazardous (...) environments, these justified beliefs do not always rise to the level of (practical) knowledge. Second, practical knowledge is more intimately related to basic knowledge than has been appreciated. Third, an attractive "middle way" opens between the Anscombian tradition of defending a necessary connection between intentional action and practical knowledge and the more recent tradition of explaining away substantive epistemic conditions on intentional action. (shrink)

Irene McMullin’s Existential Flourishing (Cambridge University Press, 2018) weaves together virtue ethics and existential phenomenology: the influence of Heidegger and Levinas, in particular, is clear throughout. This paper provides a summary of McMullin’s elegantly argued position and raises a number of possible concerns, particularly regarding the interaction of Aristotelian and Phenomenological assumptions. I focus specifically on the role of the 2nd-person perspective, on the links between exemplars and socialisation, and on the problem of those who, as Nietzsche put it, “are (...) both evil and happy – a species on which the moralists are silent”. (shrink)

What does it mean to know how to do something? This book develops a comprehensive account of know-how, a crucial epistemic goal for all who care about getting things right, not only with respect to the facts, but also with respect to practice. It proposes a novel interpretation of the seminal work of Gilbert Ryle, according to which know-how is a competence, a complex ability to do well in an activity in virtue of guidance by an understanding of what it (...) takes to do so. This idea is developed into a full-fledged account, Rylean responsibilism, which understands know-how in terms of the normative guidance and responsible control of one's acts. Within the complex current debate about know-how, this view occupies a middle ground position between the intellectualist claim that know-how just is propositional or objectual knowledge and the anti-intellectualist claim that know-how just is ability. In genuine know-how, practical ability and guiding intellect are both necessary, but essentially intertwined. (shrink)

I develop a “two-systems” interpretation of Husserl’s theory of belief. On this interpretation, Husserl accounts for our sense of the world in terms of (1) a system of embodied horizon meanings and passive synthesis, which is involved in any experience of an object, and (2) a system of active synthesis and sedimentation, which comes on line when we attend to an object’s properties. I use this account to defend Husserl against several forms of Heideggerean critique. One line of critique, recently (...) elaborated by Taylor Carman, says that Husserl wrongly loads everyday perception with explicit beliefs about things. A second, earlier line of critique, due to Hubert Dreyfus, charges Husserl with thinking of belief on a problematic Artificial Intelligence (AI) model which involves explicit rules applied to discrete symbol structures. I argue that these criticisms are based on a conflation of Husserl’s two systems of belief. The conception of Husserlian phenomenology which emerges is compatible with Heideggerean phenomenology and associated approaches to cognitive science (in particular, dynamical systems theory). (shrink)

This paper poses a new challenge to control-based theories of moral responsibility. Control-based theories – as defended, for instance, by Aristotle and John Martin Fischer – hold that an agent is responsible for an action only if she acted voluntarily and knew what she was doing. However, this paper argues that there is a large class of cases of unreflective behavior of which the following is true: the persons involved did not have the kind of control required by control-based theories, (...) yet we intuitively take the persons involved to be morally responsible. (shrink)

Recent empirical findings from social psychology, ecological psychology, and embodied cognitive science indicate that situational factors crucially shape the course of human behavior. For instance, it has been shown that finding a dime, being under the influence of an authority figure, or just being presented with food in easy reach often influences behavior tremendously. These findings raise important new questions for the philosophy of action: Are these findings a threat to classical conceptions of human agency? Are humans passively pushed around (...) by situational factors, or are there agential aspects in the way we spontaneously experience and react to situations? How can one conceptualize the pervasive influence of situational factors on human action? What are situations in the first place, and how should the influence of these situations on action be thought of? This paper sets out to develop a new conceptual repertoire for thinking about the influence of situations on action, drawing on research from ecological psychology as well as from embodied and enactive cognitive science. The key proposal is the development of a philosophical sensorimotor account of agency: Action, it is proposed, should be conceived of as constant dynamical interaction of agential and environmental factors – factors which should all be conceptualized in new ways. (shrink)

In his recent paper “Getting Real About Pretense: A Radical Enactivist Proposal”, Daniel Hutto raises several objections against our so-called praxeological enactivist account of pretense (Weichold & Rucińska 2022). He argues that one should, instead, adopt his radical enactivist explanation of pretend play. In this short reply, we defend our praxeological enactivist account against his objections, and argue that it has crucial advantages over his radical enactivist alternative.

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

I advance a variety of intellectualism about knowing-how that is, paradoxically, suggested by Ryle's positive discussions of that phenomenon. I discuss the roots of the view in Ryle's work, its affinity with John Hyman's () view of factual knowledge, and important points of contrast with Stanley and Williamson's () proposal. Drawing on work by Cath () and Wiggins () I also discuss conditions on knowing practically, in ‘the executive way’, as an alternative to appealing to practical modes of presentation.

Summary In this article the ethical systems of Risieri Frondizi and Maurice Mandelbaum, both decisively influenced by Wolfgang Köhler, are investigated for the first time. Each writer took different things from Köhler, Frondizi the idea of value as a Gestalt quality and Mandelbaum the idea of value as a felt demand. Their positions are highly complementary and Frondizi’s axiological approach enlightens the ontology of value whereas Mandelbaum’s phenomenological approach clarifies the nature of “requiredness” (Köhler) or “fittingness.”.

Over the course of the past few decades 4E approaches that theorize cognition and agency as embodied, embedded, extended, and/or enactive have garnered growing support from figures working in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Correspondingly, there has been a rising interest in the wider conceptual and practical implications of 4E views. Several proposals have for instance been made regarding 4E’s bearing on ethical theory, 505–526, 2009; Cash, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 9, 645–671 2010). In this paper I contribute (...) to this trend by critically examining the enactive contribution made by Colombetti and Torrance, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 8, 505–526 and by laying the foundations for an alternative enactive approach. Building off recent enactive approaches to social interaction, Colombetti and Torrance, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 8, maintain that many of our actions and intentions “and in particular the ethical significance of what we do and mean” are “emergent from the interactions in which we participate”. Taking this seriously, they argue, entails a radical shift away from moral theory’s traditional emphasis on individual or personal responsibility. I challenge their suggestion that accepting a broadly enactive 4E approach to cognition and agency entails the kind of wholesale shift they propose. To make my case I start by revisiting some of the general theoretical commitments characteristic of enactivism, including some relevant insights that can be gathered from Vasudevi Reddy’s broadly enactive approach to developmental psychology. After that I examine both the arguments internal to Colombetti and Torrance’s proposal and, in an effort to sketch the beginnings of an alternative view, I draw some connections between enactivism, the ethics of care and P.F. Strawson’s work on personal responsibility. I believe that a consideration of the commonalities but also the differences between these views helps advance the important conversation concerning the link between enactivism and questions of personal responsibility in ethical theory that Colombetti and Torrance have undeniably helped jumpstart. (shrink)

Almost everything that we do, we do by doing other things. Even actions we perform without deliberation or conscious planning are composed of ‘smaller’, subsidiary actions. But how should we think of such subsidiary actions? Are they fully-fledged intentional actions (in the sense of things that we do for reasons) in their own right? In this paper I defend an affirmative answer to this question, against a recently influential form of scepticism. Drawing on a distinctive kind of ‘action-demonstrative’ representation, I (...) show that the sceptic's arguments do not go through. (shrink)

According to Dreyfusian anti-intellectualism, know-how or expertise cannot be explained in terms of know-that and its cognates but only in terms of intuition. Hubert Dreyfus and Stuart Dreyfus do not exclude know-that and its cognates in explaining skilled action. However, they think that know-that and its cognates (such as calculative deliberation and perspectival deliberation) only operate either below or above the level of expertise. In agreement with some critics of Dreyfus and Dreyfus, in this paper, I argue that know-that and (...) its cognates are constitutive of rather than external to know-how and expertise. However, unlike those critics, who argue for this point only from a phenomenological point of view, my argument adopts a (telic) normative point of view. (shrink)

This paper critically examines Jay Garfield’s accounts of the self, consciousness, and phenomenology in his book, Engaging Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy. I argue that Garfield’s views on these topics are shaped, in problematic ways, by views he takes over from Wilfrid Sellars and applies to Buddhist philosophy.

If the bindingness of morality was to rest on something as ‘subjective’ as the non-cognitivist says it does, the grouse goes, and morality itself would come down crashing. Nothing less than an ‘objective’ source of normativity, it is supposed, could hold morality in orbit. Some of these worries automatically morph into worries about the projectivist model of normativity of law as well: one which understands the authority or normativity of law in terms of subjective attitudes taken towards the law. As (...) well as the stock worries about non-cognitivism, there are some additional ones that the projectivist model brings in its wake that it cannot account for the ‘uniform’ bindingness of law and that a subjective source of normativity of law based on mental states is unintelligible. This essay makes the case for acquitting the projectivist model of normativity of law from the above charges. But the route to that necessarily leads through first acquitt... (shrink)

According to Rosalind Hursthouse’s virtue based account of right action, an act is right if it is what a fully virtuous person would do in that situation. Robert Johnson has criticized the account on the grounds that the actions a non-virtuous person should take are often uncharacteristic of the virtuous person, and thus Hursthouse’s account of right action is too narrow. The non-virtuous need to take steps to improve themselves morally, and the fully virtuous person need not take these steps. (...) So Johnson argues that any virtue based account of right action will have to find a way to ground a moral obligation to improve oneself. This paper argues that there is an account of virtue that can offer a partial solution to Johnson’s challenge, an account where virtue is a type of practical skill and in which the virtuous person is seen as having expertise. The paper references the account of skill acquisition developed by Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus. Their research demonstrates that novices in a skill have to employ different strategies to act well than the strategies used by the experts, and so the ‘virtue as skill’ thesis provides support for Johnson’s claim that the actions of the non-virtuous will differ from the virtuous. On the other hand, their research suggests that there is no separating the commitment to improve yourself from the possession of expertise, and so the ‘virtue as skill’ thesis has the resources for grounding the obligation to improve oneself in an account of virtue. (shrink)

The problem of political action has its roots, arguably, in the sixth book of the Nicomachean Ethics, where Aristotle seeks to describe an intellectual virtue – phronêsis – that is different from the faculty of theoretical reason but that is nonetheless capable of producing genuinely objective, rational knowledge, i.e., knowledge of what is true. The problem, specifically, is to understand how such a thing is possible, and much of the recent literature appears to suggest that perhaps it’s not. Since rhetoric, (...) persuasion, interest and emotion are obviously central features of political life, it may seem that some kind of non-intellectualist and non-rationalist perspective must be the way to go. I argue, nonetheless, that any such account is, and cannot but be, deeply problematic; and I defend, by way of contrast, a decidedly intellectualistic understanding of political enterprise. (shrink)

Introduction to a special issue on confabulation.

A standard interpretation of Hume’s naturalism is that it paved the way for a scientistic and ‘disenchanted’ conception of the world. My aim in this paper is to show that this is a restrictive reading of Hume, and it obscures a different and profitable interpretation of what Humean naturalism amounts to. The standard interpretation implies that Hume’s ‘science of human nature’ was a reductive investigation into our psychology. But, as Hume explains, the subject matter of this science is not restricted (...) to introspectively accessible mental content and incorporates our social nature and interpersonal experience. Illuminating the science of human nature has implications for how we understand what Hume means by ‘experience’ and thus how we understand the context of his epistemological investigations. I examine these in turn and argue overall that Hume’s naturalism and his science of man do not simply anticipate a disenchanted conception of the world. (shrink)

Among the characteristic features of depression is a diminishment in or lack of action and motivation. In this paper, I consider a dominant philosophical account which purports to explain this lack of action or motivation. This approach comes in different versions but a common theme is, I argue, an over reliance on psychologistic assumptions about action–explanation and the nature of motivation. As a corrective I consider an alternative view that gives a prominent place to the body in motivation. Central to (...) the experience of depression are changes to how a person is motivated to act and, also as central, are changes to bodily feelings and capacities. I argue that broadly characterizing motivation in terms of bodily capacities can, in particular, provide a more compelling account of depressive motivational pathology. (shrink)

There is an argument for incompatibilism that is based on the experience of agency. Authors who endorse this argument place pro tanto evidential weight on one or more of two putative aspects of the experience of being an agent: i) the experience of being the causal source of our actions; ii) the experience of having robust alternative possibilities available to one. With some exceptions, these authors and their critics alike neglect a third significant aspect of the experience of agency: iii) (...) the experience of the future as being modally open. This aspect is either neglected or conflated with or. In this paper I rehabilitate as a notable aspect in its own right, and demonstrate that it is a good candidate for having the same pro tanto evidential weight in the experiential argument for incompatibilism. Then, I go on to assess the prospects of this revised argument in the face of central compatibilist objections that are central to the literature. I find that it fares just as well, if not better, than the original argument. (shrink)

Developing an intellectualist account of skill, Stanley and Williamson define skill as a kind of disposition to action-guiding knowledge. The present paper challenges their definition of skill. While we don’t dispute that skill may consist of a cognitive, a dispositional, and an action-guiding component, we argue that Stanley and Williamson’s account of each component is problematic. In the first section, we argue, against Stanley and Williamson, that the cognitive component of skill is not a case of propositional knowledge-wh, which is (...) typically indexical. In the second section, we seek to show that Stanley and Williamson face difficulties in arguing for a generic claim about skill as a kind of disposition, and they fail to defend intellectualism about skill based on the dispositional account. In the third section we argue that Stanley and Williamson need a more detailed account of the action-guiding aspect of skill to avoid several difficulties, including a threat of a regress. We close with some lessons for the debate over intellectualism and anti-intellectualism about skill. (shrink)

The flow construct has been influential within positive psychology, sport psychology, the science of consciousness, the philosophy of agency, and popular culture. In spite of its longstanding influence, it remains unclear [a] how the constituents of the flow state ‘hang together’—how they relate to each other causally and functionally—[b] in what sense flow is an ‘optimal experience,’ and [c] how best to describe the unique phenomenology of the flow state. As a result, difficulties persist for a clear understanding of the (...) flow state’s structure and function. After explicating the standard view of the flow construct, I articulate several basic questions regarding its nature and functional roles, and I argue that these questions are best answered by integrating flow within broader streams of research on the dynamics of thought, on cognitive control resource allocation, and on creative thought. (shrink)

The extensive involvement of nonconscious processes in human behaviour has led some to suggest that consciousness is much less important for the control of action than we might think. In this article I push against this trend, developing an understanding of conscious control that is sensitive to our best models of overt action control. Further, I assess the cogency of various zombie challenges—challenges that seek to demote the importance of conscious control for human agency. I argue that though nonconscious contributions (...) to action control are evidently robust, these challenges are overblown. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's ballet musical The Red Shoes is concerned with topics surrounding phenomenology, action, and embodied agency, and that it exploits resources that are uniquely cinematic in order to “do philosophy.” I argue that the film does philosophy in two ways. First, it explicates a phenomenological model of action and agency. Second, it addresses itself to the philosophical question of whether an individual's non-reflective movements – those that are not the result (...) of deliberation or practical reasoning – are properly understood to be actions attributable to her as her own. (shrink)

I argue that Husserl’s transcendental account of the role of the lived body in sense-making is a precursor to Alva Noë’s recent work on the enactive, embodied mind, specifically his notion of “sensorimotor knowledge” as a form of embodied sense-making that avoids representationalism and intellectualism. Derrida’s deconstructive account of meaning—developed largely through a critique of Husserl—relies on the claim that meaning is structured through the complication of the “interiority” of consciousness by an “outside,” and thus might be thought to lend (...) itself to theories of mind such as Noë’s that emphasize the ways in which sense-making occurs outside the head. But while Derrida’s notion of “contamination” rightly points to an indeterminateness of meaning in an outside, extended, concrete lived world, he ultimately reduces meaning to a structure of signification. This casts indeterminateness in terms of absence, ignoring the presence of non-linguistic phenomena of embodied sense-making central to both the contemporary enactivist program and to the later Husserl, who is able to account for the indeterminateness of meaning in lived experience through his distinction between sense and more exact linguistic meaning. Husserl’s transcendental theory of meaning also allows for a substantive contribution to sense-making from the side of the perceived object—an aspect missing from Noë’s account. Thus, in contrast to Derrida and to Noë, Husserl accounts for sense-making in terms of both the lived body and the lived world. (shrink)

Movies have a striking aesthetic power: they can draw us in and induce a peculiar mode of involvement in their images – they absorb us. While absorbed in a movie, we lose track both of the passage of time and of the fact that we are sitting in a dark room with other people watching the play of light upon a screen. What is the source of the power of movies? Noël Carroll, who cites Maurice Merleau-Ponty as an influence on (...) his account of the power of movies, agrees with Merleau-Ponty that our perceptual experience of movies draws on many of the capacities at work in our perceptual experience of everyday situations. Yet Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception shows that Carroll’s emphasis on intellectual inference and the entertaining of unasserted thoughts is a distortion of the phenomenology of cinematic absorption. According to Merleau-Ponty, such intellectual operations come into play in cases of breakdown but should not be read back into the primary absorbed experience as being implicitly operative.. (shrink)

Within philosophy there is not yet an integrative account of unreflective skillful action. As a starting point, contributions would be required from philosophers from both the analytic and continental traditions. Starting from the McDowell-Dreyfus debate, shared Aristotelian-Wittgensteinian common ground is identified. McDowell and Dreyfus agree about the importance of embodied skills, situation-specific discernment and responsiveness to relevant affordances. This sheds light on the embodied and situated nature of adequate unreflective action and provides a starting point for the development of an (...) account that does justice to insights from both philosophical traditions. (shrink)

Starting from a decidedly Frijdian perspective on emotion in action, we adopt neurocognitive theories of action control to analyze the mechanisms through which emotional action arises. Appraisal of events vis-à-vis concerns gives rise to a determinate motive to establish a specific state of the world; the pragmatic idea of the action’s effects incurs the valuation of action options and a change in action readiness in the form of incipient ideomotor capture of the selected action. Forward modeling of the sensory consequences (...) of the selected action option allows for the evaluation and fine-tuning of anticipated action effects, which renders the emotional action impulsive yet purposive. This novel theoretical synthesis depicts the cornerstone principles for a mechanistic view on emotion in action. (shrink)

In this article, we inquire into Maxine Sheets-Johnstone and Michele Merritt’s descriptions and use of dance improvisation as it relates to “thinking in movement.” We agree with them scholars that improvisational practices present interesting cases for investigating how movement, thinking, and agency intertwine. However, we also find that their descriptions of improvisation overemphasize the dimension of spontaneity as an intuitive “letting happen” of movements. To recalibrate their descriptions of improvisational practices, we couple Ezequiel Di Paolo, Thomas Buhrmann, and Xabier E. (...) Barandiaran’s enactive account of the constitution of agency with case studies of two expert performers of improvisation: a dancer and a musician. Our analyses hereof show that their improvisations unfold as a sophisticated oscillation of agency between specialized forms of mental and bodily control and, indeed, a more spontaneous “letting things happen.” In all, this article’s conclusions frame thinking in movement concerning improvisational practices as contextually embedded, purposively trained, and inherently relational. (shrink)

IntroductionSporting skills divide contemporary theorists into two camps. Let us call them the habitualists and the intellectualists. The habitualists hold that thought is the enemy of sporting excellence. In their view, skilled performers need to let their bodies take over; cognitive effort only interferes with skill. The intellectualists retort that sporting performance depends crucially on mental control. As they see it, the exercise of skill is a matter of agency, not brute reflex; the tailoring of action to circumstance requires intelligent (...) conceptual guidance.On the habitualist side are Dreyfus, Beilock and ; intellectualism is defended in various ways by McDowell, Stanley, Sutton, Sutton et al., Montero and Fridland.I think that both sides are right, and that both are wrong. We need to distinguish different aspects of sporting performance. When we do so, we w. (shrink)

This article studies our philosophical understanding of experience in order to question the current political and theoretical dismissal of experiential accounts in feminist theory. The focus is on Joan Scott's critique of experience, but the philosophical issues animating the discussion go beyond Scott's work and concern the future of feminist theory and politics more generally. I ask what it means for feminist theory to redefine experience as a linguistic event the way Scott suggests. I attempt to demonstrate that the consequences (...) that she draws from such a theoretical move are both philosophically and politically problematic. A critical study of the evidence of experience does not have to imply metaphysical or epistemological foundationalism, as Scott claims, but on the contrary, such a study is indispensable for challenging them. We must hold onto experience as an important resource for contesting sexist discourses and oppressive conceptual schemas. (shrink)

The distinction between the space of reasons and the realm of law captures two familiar ways of making events intelligible, by reference to reasons or to natural laws, respectively. I describe a third way of making events intelligible, by explaining them in terms of an agent’s being motivated to do certain things. Explanations of this sort do not involve appealing to reasons for which the agent acts, nor to natural laws under which the event falls. To explain an event in (...) this way is to place it in the space of motivations. I outline the relation between the space of motivations and the space of reasons, and suggest that the space of motivations may serve as a common ground between the positions defended by McDowell and Dreyfus in their recent debate. (shrink)

This is a critical theoretical investigation of Hubert Dreyfus’ ‘phenomenology of everyday expertise’ (PEE). Operating mainly through the critical perspective of the ‘emancipatory interest’ the article takes issue with the contention that when engaged in expert action human beings are in non-deliberative, reason-free absorption. The claim of PEE that absorbed actions are not amenable to reconstruction places those actions outside the space of reasons. The question of acting under the wrong reasons – the question upon which the emancipatory interest rests (...) – is thereby rendered groundless. A further difficulty for the emancipatory interest is the elimination by PEE of reflective agency. Framing expert action as perception- and affordance-driven, PEE diminishes practical reasoning. Furthermore, it understands freedom – consistently with its notion of action as affordance – as primarily the capacity of human beings to submit themselves to processes rather than to step back reflectively from them. Several criticisms of the philosophical delimitations created by methodology of PEE – phenomenology – are also developed. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty’s notion of being motivated or solicited to act has recently been the focus of extensive investigation, yet work on this topic has tended to take the general notion of being motivated for granted. In this paper, I shall outline an account of what it is to be motivated. In particular, I shall focus on the relation between the affective character of states of being motivated and their intentional content, i.e. how things appear to the agent. Drawing on Husserl’s discussion (...) of perceptual awareness, I suggest that the intentional content of states of being motivated has a horizonal structure, in which both affective and perceptual features are implied. In states of being motivated, the agent becomes aware of certain possibilities for action, towards which they feel drawn. This structure is what Merleau-Ponty refers to as the “intentional arc” (1962, 136). (shrink)

Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action and The Embodied Mind, by ClarkAndy. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.