Placebos are commonly defined as ineffective treatments. They are treatments that lack a known mechanism linking their properties to the properties of the condition on which treatment aims to intervene. Given this, the fact that placebos can have substantial therapeutic effects looks puzzling. The puzzle, we argue, arises from the relationship placebos present between culturally meaningful entities, our intentional relationship to the environment and bodily effects. How can a mere attitude toward a treatment result in appropriate bodily changes? We argue (...) that an ‘enactive’ conception of cognition accommodates and renders intelligible the phenomenon of placebo effects. Enactivism depicts an organism’s adaptive bodily processes, its intentional directedness, and the meaningful properties of its environment as co-emergent aspects of a single dynamic system. In doing so it provides an account of the interrelations between mind, body and world that demystifies placebo effects. (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)

Abstract John McDowell has claimed that the rational link between perceptions and empirical judgements allows us to perceive objects as belonging to a wider reality, one which extends beyond the objects perceived. In this way, we can be said to have a perceptual awareness of the world. I argue that McDowell's account of this perceptual awareness does not succeed. His account as it stands does not have the resources to explain how our perceptions can present objects as belonging to a (...) wider reality, regardless of the judgements we make about that reality. I suggest that we can give a better account of this perceptual awareness of the world by appealing to transcendental phenomenology. A phenomenological study of perceptual experiences describes how they are structured by a sense of the perceived objects as belonging to a world containing other objects of possible perception. I shall outline this sense we have of the world, and argue that it allows us to perceive objects as belonging to a wider reality. Transcendental phenomenology can thus help to explain our perceptual awareness of the world. (shrink)

There are many in the social sciences and social philosophy who would aspire to overcome the ‘nature/culture binary’, including some who, with at least an implicit nod toward a putatively ‘anti-essentialist’ process ontology, have set out with an orientation toward a paradigm of ‘biosocial becoming’ (Ingold and Palsson, 2013). Such contemporary work, however, in areas such as social and cultural anthropology and sciences studies has often failed to clarify, let alone justify, the warrants of their most basic assumptions and assertions. (...) In what follows, adumbrations will be offered for a comprehensive metaphysics of ‘biosocial becoming’ that can stand accountable both to empirical/descriptive and to normative claims. (shrink)

To gain insight into human nature philosophers often discuss the inferior performance that results from deficits such as blindsight or amnesia. Less often do they look at superior abilities. A notable exception is Herbert Dreyfus who has developed a theory of expertise according to which expert action generally proceeds automatically and unreflectively. We address one of Dreyfus’s primary examples of expertise: chess. At first glance, chess would seem an obvious counterexample to Dreyfus’s view since, clearly, chess experts are engaged in (...) deep strategic thought. However, Dreyfus’s argument is subtle. He accepts that analysis and deliberation play a role in chess, yet he thinks that all such thought is predicated on intuitive, arational expert perception, and action. We argue that even the so-called intuitive aspect of chess is rational through and through. (shrink)

Mind &Language, Volume 34, Issue 3, Page 376-392, June 2019.

One of the more striking aspects of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (1945) is his use of psychological case studies in pathology. For Merleau-Ponty, a philosophical interpretation of phenomena like aphasia and psychic blindness promises to shed light not just on the nature of pathology, but on the nature of human existence more generally. In this paper, I show that although Merleau-Ponty is surely a pioneer in this use of pathology, his work is deeply indebted to an earlier philosophical study (...) of pathology offered by the German Neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer in the third volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1929). More specifically, I argue that Merleau-Ponty, in fact, follows Cassirer in placing Kant's notion of the productive imagination at the centre of his account of pathology and the features of existence it illuminates. Recognizing the debt Merleau-Ponty's account of pathology has to the Kantian tradition not only acts as a corrective to more recent interpretation of Merleau-Ponty's views of pathology (Dreyfus, Romdenh-Romluc), but also recommends we resist the prevailing tendency to treat Merleau-Ponty's philosophy as anti-Kantian. Instead, my interpretation seeks to restore Merleau-Ponty's place within the Kantian tradition. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that in spite of suggestions to the contrary, Merleau-Ponty defends a positive account of the kind of abstract thought involved in mathematics and natural science. More specifically, drawing on both the Phenomenology of Perception and his later writings, I show that, for Merleau-Ponty, abstract thought and perception stand in the two-way relation of “foundation,” according to which abstract thought makes what we perceive explicit and determinate, and what we perceive is made to appear by abstract (...) thought. I claim that, on Merleau-Ponty's view, although this process can sometimes lead to falsification, it can also be carried out in such a manner that allows mathematics and natural science to articulate what we perceive in a way that is non-distortive and in keeping with the demands of perception itself. (shrink)

ABSTRACTMost scholars agree that meaning and intelligibility are central to Heidegger’s account of Dasein and Being-in-the-world, but there is some confusion about the nature of this intelligibility. In his debate with McDowell, Dreyfus draws on phenomenologists like Heidegger to argue that there are two kinds of intelligibility: a basic, nonconceptual, practical intelligibility found in practical comportment and a conceptual, discursive intelligibility. I explore two possible ways that Dreyfus might ground this twofold account of intelligibility in Heidegger: first in the distinction (...) between the hermeneutic and apophantic “as”, and second in the presence and absence of the as-structure. I argue that neither approach succeeds because practical intelligibility is always already discursive and discursive articulation is a condition of practical comportment. (shrink)

This paper criticizes two closely connected rationalist views about human agency. The first of these views, rationalism about agential control, claims that the capacities for agential control in normal adult human beings are rational capacities. The second view, rationalism about action, claims that the capacities for agential control in virtue of which the things we do count as our actions are rational capacities. The arguments of the paper focus on aspects of technical skills that control integral details of skillful action, (...) like the details of a baseball player’s pitching technique. I argue that these aspects of technical skills are largely non-rational capacities, but are nonetheless capacities for agential control, and can help make the things we do count as actions. While rational capacities do have a central role in human agency, their importance should not lead us to neglect the significant constitutive role of non-rational capacities in our agency. (shrink)

I argue that Hubert Dreyfus’ work on embodied coping, the intentional arc, solicitations and the background as well as his anti-representationalism rest on introspection. I denote with ‘introspection’ the methodological malpractice of formulating ontological statements about the conditions of possibility of phenomena merely based on descriptions. In order to illustrate the insufficiencies of Dreyfus’ methodological strategy in particular and introspection in general, I show that Heidegger, to whom Dreyfus constantly refers as the foundation of his own work, derives ontological statements (...) about the conditions of possibility of phenomena not merely from descriptions, but also from analyses. I further show that deriving ontological statements directly from descriptions entails implausible results. I do so by discussing representative cases. Based on these general methodological considerations, I show that Dreyfus’ work on action, skill and understanding is introspective. First, I demonstrate that Dreyfus’ influential claim that rules and representations do not govern skillful actions is the result of introspection, because it is merely founded on the absence of rules and representations in representative descriptions of skillful actions. Second, I show that Dreyfus’ work on embodied coping, the intentional arc, solicitations and the background is also based on introspection. These ontological structures are merely reifications of descriptions and are not further substantiated by analyses. (shrink)

In the following I show that Hubert Dreyfus’ account of skill rests on a misguided interpretation of Martin Heidegger’s work on understanding in Being and Time. Dreyfus separates understanding according to the analytic philosophical concept pair, so called ‘know-how’ and ‘knowledge-that’, that corresponds for him to the pragmatist differentiation between skillful acting and theoretical conceptual thinking. Contrary to that, Heidegger argues that only one form of understanding exists that is neither captured by ‘know-how’, ‘knowledge-that’ or a combination of both. Instead (...) of presupposing two radically different ways to engage with the world, one practical-agential, the other theoretical-conceptual, Heidegger shows that all genuine forms of comportments rest on the same form of understanding that exhibits the highest degree of intelligibility when we deal with the world ordinarily. The Heideggerian account therefore comes without the many dichotomies so often criticized in the literature on skill and understanding, and offers a radically different view of world disclosure and of what we do when we ‘theorize’. (shrink)

I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s use of the case of Schneider in his arguments for the existence of non-conconceptual and non-representational motor intentionality contains a problematic methodological ambiguity. Motor intentionality is both to be revealed by its perspicuous preservation and by its contrastive impairment in one and the same case. To resolve the resulting contradiction I suggest we emphasize the second of Merleau-Ponty’s two lines of argument. I argue that this interpretation is the one in best accordance both with Merleau-Ponty’s general (...) methodology and with the empirical case of Schneider as it was described by Gelb and Goldstein. (shrink)

Being and Time’s emphasis on practical activities has attracted much attention as an approach to meaning not modelled exclusively on language. However, understanding this emphasis is made more difficult by Heidegger’s notion of Rede, which he routinely characterizes as both language-like and basic to all disclosure. This paper assesses whether this notion can be both interpreted coherently and reconciled with Heidegger’s emphasis on intelligent nonlinguistic behaviours. It begins by identifying two functions of Articulacy – the demonstrative and articulatory – and (...) a potential source of incoherence in Heidegger’s analysis. Having reviewed some standard approaches to Heideggerian Articulacy, I show how Heidegger’s discussion of predicative judgements implies that language can be linked with different kinds of content. This allows Heidegger’s analysis to be read coherently, provided Articulacy is understood as having distinct purposive and predicative modes. The final section shows how this reading preserves a close connection between Articulacy and language while accommodating intelligent nonlinguistic behaviours. (shrink)

In this paper we explore in what sense we can claim that affordances, the objects of perception for ecological psychology, are related to normativity. First, we offer an account of normativity and provide some examples of how it is understood in the specialized literature. Affordances, we claim, lack correctness criteria and, hence, the possibility of error is not among their necessary conditions. For this reason we will oppose Chemero’s normative theory of affordances. Finally, we will show that there is a (...) way in which taking advantage of affordances could be considered as possessing a normative character, but only when they are evaluated within the framework of social normative standards in particular situations. This reinforces our claim that affordances, per se, lack normativity and can only be taken to be rule-governed in relation to established normative practices. (shrink)

Robert Brandom and John McDowell pursue similar, yet strikingly different approaches to a shared problem: that of how we can be answerable to the world in our beliefs about it in the wake of Sellars' critique of the myth of the given. While McDowell attempts to rehabilitate the idea that experience is capable of providing justifications for our beliefs, Brandom constructs a sophisticated social-pragmatist account of the objectivity of our conceptual commitments in which experience is, as he says, not one (...) of his words. In this article, I argue that McDowell is right in stressing the indispensability of the idea of experience, but that he is wrong in believing that Brandom lacks the resources for making sense of the idea of being answerable to the world in experience. Especially when we expand Brandom's account of discursive practice to include its relation to what he has called practical intentionality, his work provides the resources for an answer to McDowell's concerns, but only if it is understood not as an attempt to simply deny McDowell's claims about experience, but as an attempt to explain what we must be capable of doing in order for experience, in McDowell's sense, to be possible. (shrink)

Will robots ever be able to learn like humans? To answer that question, one first needs to ask: what is learning? Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus had a point when they claimed that computers and robots would never be able to learn like humans because human learning, after an initial phase of rule-based learning, is uncertain, context sensitive and intuitive under contract F49620-C-0063 with the University of California) Berkeley, February 1980.. Washington, DC: Storming Media. https://www.stormingmedia.us/15/1554/A155480.html. Accessed 10 Oct 2017, 1980). I (...) would add that learning also builds on prior learning, and that from the outset, human learning is a socio-cultural materially grounded collective epistemology. This posthuman acknowledgement shifts the focus from the individual learner to learning within collective phenomena. Dreyfus and Dreyfus do not seem to emphasise the essentially social and cultural nature of the human condition. Learning theory, new materialism and postphenomenology have emphasised in different ways the materially based socio-cultural nature of human learning. They thereby point towards a ‘posthuman’ learning that is far from the machine-like or enhanced creature envisioned by singularists. Until robots are essentially social and ground their epistemologies in socio-cultural materiality, I suggest that human-like AI is not possible. (shrink)

Hubert Dreyfus has defended a novel view of agency, most notably in his debate with John McDowell. Dreyfus argues that expert actions are primarily unreflective and do not involve conceptual activity. In unreflective action, embodied know-how plays the role reflection and conceptuality play in the actions of novices. Dreyfus employs two arguments to support his conclusion: the argument from speed and the phenomenological argument. I argue that Dreyfus's argumentative strategies are not successful, since he relies on a dubious assumption about (...) concepts and reflection. I suggest that Dreyfus is committed to a minimal view of conceptuality in action. (shrink)

Early twentieth-century philosophers of perception presented their naïve realist views of perceptual experience in anti-Kantian terms. For they took naïve realism about perceptual experience to be incompatible with Kant’s claims about the way the understanding is necessarily involved in perceptual consciousness. This essay seeks to situate a naïve realist account of visual experience within a recognisably Kantian framework by arguing that a naïve realist account of visual experience is compatible with the claim that the understanding is necessarily involved in the (...) perceptual experience of those rational beings with discursive intellects. The resultant view is middle way between recent conceptualist and non-conceptualist interpretations of Kant, holding that the understanding is necessarily involved in the kind of perceptual consciousness that we, as rational beings, enjoy whilst allowing that the relations of apprehension which constitute perceptual consciousness are independent of acts of the understanding. (shrink)

In Sein und Zeit Heidegger makes several claims about the nature of ‘assertion’ [Aussage]. These claims are of particular philosophical interest: they illustrate, for example, important points of contact and divergence between Heidegger's work and philosophical movements including Kantianism, the early Analytic tradition and contemporary pragmatism. This article provides a new assessment of one of these claims: that assertion is connected to a ‘present-at-hand’ ontology. I also indicate how my analysis sets the stage for a new reading of Heidegger's further (...) claim that assertion is an explanatorily derivative phenomenon. I begin with a loose overview of Heidegger's position and then develop a sharper formulation of the key premises. I go on to argue that existing treatments of the supposed link between assertion and the ‘present-at-hand’ are unsatisfactory, and advance a new, ‘methodological’, interpretation of that link. Finally, I sketch the implications of my interpretation for the further claim that assertion is explanatorily derivative. (shrink)

In several papers, Hubert Dreyfus has used chess as a paradigmatic example of how experts act intuitively, rarely using deliberation when selecting actions, while individuals that are only competent rely on analytic and deliberative thought. By contrast, Montero and Evans (Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 10:175–194, 2011 ) argue that intuitive aspects of chess are actually rational, in the sense that actions can be justified. In this paper, I show that both Dreyfus’s and Montero and Evans’s views are too extreme, (...) and that expertise in chess, and presumably in other domains, depends on a combination of intuitive thinking and deliberative search, both mediated by perceptual processes. There is more to expertise than just rational thought. I further contend that both sides ignore emotions, which are important in acquiring and maintaining expertise. Finally, I argue that experimental data and first-person data, which are sometimes presented as irreconcilable in the phenomenology literature, actually lead to similar conclusions. (shrink)

In this paper, I review recent contributions of phenomenology to a variety of disciplines, including the cognitive sciences and psychiatry, and explore (1) controversies about phenomenological methods and naturalization; (2) relations between phenomenology and the enactive and extended mind approaches; and (3) the promise of phenomenology for addressing a number of controversial philosophical issues.

The objective of this paper is to supplement Gottlieb’s challenge to Dryfus who claims that concepts are not operative in expert’s unreflective actions. First, concepts that an agent develops over time with practice, starting from the stage of novelty, become deeply rooted and persist through his expertise stage, according to common sense. It is unlikely that such rooted concepts become inoperative just when it is time for the agent to put them to use during the time that he is in (...) the zone (i.e., in flow). Second, an expert's inability to remember reasons behind his actions while he is in the zone is insufficient to prove that concepts are inoperative when he is acting in the zone. For an agent to not remember reasons as such could more likely be a consequence of the adequacy of his minimized reflections on his maximized (i.e. expert level) concepts, while he is in such a state. Moreover, not recalling every reason behind every step of an agent’s actions in the zone could be a consequence of his maximum concentration on successful processing and coordination of the task at hand, as opposed to committing his finite mental capacities to memorizing the reasons behind his step-by-step actions when he is performing an expert level action in the zone. Third, I point out to the prevalence of examples when experts or observers provide testimony about use of concepts to strategize or review actions before, during, and after their ‘in the zone’ actions (e.g., review of video replays of a game or a tournament on sports channels), which supports the operations and conceptuality of unreflective actions in flow. (shrink)

In recent years there has been growing attention paid to a kind of human action or activity which does not issue from a process of reflection and deliberation and which is described as, e.g., ‘engaged coping’, ‘unreflective action’, and ‘flow’. Hubert Dreyfus, one of its key proponents, has developed a phenomenology of expertise which he has applied to ethics in order to account for ‘everyday ongoing ethical coping’ or ‘ethical expertise’. This article addresses the shortcomings of this approach by examining (...) the pre-reflective ethical know-how individuals first develop and on which all later forms of ethical expertise are dependent. In the first section an account is given of the ‘ethical second nature’ which every individual develops from childhood onwards and which forms the basis of pre-reflective ethical know-how. The acquisition of an ethical second nature early on opens up the very domain of ‘the ethical’ for us in the first place and is constitutive of our sensitivity to it. The second section turns to pre-reflective ethical know-how and whether it is conceptual in nature. Just as sensorimotor understanding forms the basis of our reflective perceptual concepts, pre-reflective ethical know-how is similarly proto-conceptual and is the source of our reflective ethical and moral concepts. Finally, the third section examines the process whereby ethical second nature and pre-reflective ethical know-how are actually acquired, namely, through immersion in an ‘ethical world’. This world consists of both the web of ethical meanings and significances which has evolved in a particular society or community as well as its members whose actions and interactions continually reproduce that web. (shrink)

How should accounts that stress the embodied, embedded and engaged character of human minds accommodate the role of rationality in human subjectivity? Drawing on Matthew Boyle’s contrast between ‘additive’ and ‘transformative’ conceptions of rationality, I argue that contemporary work on embodied cognition tends towards a problematic ‘additivism’ about the relationship between mature human capacities to think and act for reasons, and sensorimotor capacities to skillfully engage with salient features of the environment. Additivists view rational capacities to reason and reflect as (...) a distinct ‘layer’ or ‘storey’ of human cognition, with a normative structure that differs from that of the sensorimotor coping skills which support it. I argue that emphasizing the embodied and engaged character of human minds is better combined with a ‘transformative’ conception of rationality – one which holds that acquiring abilities to give and ask for reasons transforms the normative structure of our unreflective embodied dealings with the environment. And I argue that a transformative embodied cognitive science of human rationality is not only possible, but underway. Integrating existing work on embodied cognition with work on the cultural and developmental contexts that shape human minds suggests how human immersion in culture transforms the structure of sensorimotor engagements by bringing about the communicability and negotiability of the meanings to which those engagements attune us. (shrink)

Overview of the (non)conceptualism debate in Kant studies.

This compilation of references includes all references for the knowledge-how chapters included in Bengson & Moffett's edited volume. The volume and the compilation of references may serve as a good starting point for people who are unfamiliar with the philosophical literature on knowledge-how.

This dissertation is about human knowledge of reality. In particular, it argues that scientific knowledge is bounded by historically available instruments and theories; nevertheless, the use of several independent instruments and theories can provide access to the persistent potentialities of reality. The replicability of scientific observations and experiments allows us to obtain explorable evidence of robust entities and properties. The dissertation includes seven chapters. It also studies three cases – namely, Higgs bosons and hypothetical Ϝ-particles (section 2.4), the Ptolemaic and (...) Kepler model of the planets (section 6.7), and the special theory of relativity (chapter 7). -/- Chapter 1 is the introduction of the dissertation. Chapter 2 clarifies the notion of the real on the basis of two concepts: persistence and resistance. These concepts enable me to explain my ontological belief in the real potentialities of human-independent things and the implications of this view for the perceptual and epistemological levels of discussion. On the basis of the concept of “overlapping perspectives”, chapter 3 argues that entity realism and perspectivism are complementary. That is, an entity that manifests itself through several experimental/observational methods is something real, but our knowledge of its nature is perspectival. Critically studying the recent views of entity realism, chapter 4 extends the discussion of entity realism and provides a criterion for the reality of property tokens. Chapter 5, in contrast, develops the perspectival aspects of my view on the basis of the phenomenological-hermeneutical approaches to the philosophy of science. This chapter also elaborates my view of empirical evidence, as briefly expressed in sections 2.5 and 4.5. Chapter 6 concerns diachronic theoretical perspectives. It first explains my view of progress, according to which current perspectives are broader than past ones. Second, it argues that the successful explanations and predictions of abandoned theories can be accounted for from our currently acceptable perspectives. The case study of Ptolemaic astronomy supports the argument of this chapter. Chapter 7 serves as the conclusion of the dissertation by applying the central themes of the previous chapters to the case study of special relativity theory. I interpret frame-dependent properties, such as length and time duration, and the constancy of the speed of light according to realist perspectivism. (shrink)

I argue that embodied understanding and conceptual-representational understanding interact through schematic structure. I demonstrate that common conceptions of these two kinds of understanding, such as developed by Wheeler (2005, 2008) and Dreyfus (2007a, b, 2013), entail a separation between them that gives rise to significant problems. Notably, it becomes unclear how they could interact; a problem that has been pointed out by Dreyfus (2007a, b, 2013) and McDowell (2007) in particular. I propose a Kantian strategy to close the gap between (...) them. I argue that embodied and conceptual-representational understanding are governed by schemata. Since they are governed by schemata, they can interact through a structure that they have in common. Finally, I spell out two different ways to conceive of the schematic interaction between them—a close, grounding relationship and a looser relationship that allows for a minimal interaction, but preserves the autonomy of both forms of understanding. (shrink)

In Law, Pragmatism and Democracy, Richard Posner wrestles with the ghost of John Dewey for the mantle of pragmatist jurisprudence. Most commentators have seen this work as pitting Posner against Dewey in a contest of pragmatisms, the stakes for which are no less than their respective legacies for legal and democratic theory. Some have sided with Posner and others with Dewey. I contend that the commentators have misidentified the target of Posner’s critique. Posner had another legal theorist in mind and (...) he was disingenuous in naming Dewey. A careful reconstruction of Posner’s argument shows that Dewey’s pragmatism provides a genuine middle way between Posner’s position and that of his intended rival. (shrink)

This essay is an inquiry into John McDowell’s thinking on ‘subjectivity.’ The project consists in two parts. On the one hand, I will discuss how McDowell understands and responds to the various issues he is tackling; on the other, I will approach relevant issues concerning subjectivity by considering different aspects of it: a subject as a perceiver, knower, thinker, speaker, agent, person and (self-) conscious being in the world. The inquiry begins by identifying and resolving a tension generated by the (...) very idea of ‘rational animal’: human beings are at the same time natural and rational. Later the inquiry proceeds by considering how McDowell’s notion of ‘second nature’ enables us to be human subjects with many faces. By going through the diagnoses and responses of McDowell, two central problems in modern and contemporary philosophy – the narrow conception of nature and the Cartesian inner space model – are identified and repelled. In Episode N I first urge that we should leave room for a certain notion of ‘world.’ I further argue that mentality has many aspects, and to understand those aspects is to understand the many faces of human subject. In Episode Ⅰ the Aristotelian notion of ‘second nature’ is discussed in order to resolve the tension in the very idea of ‘rational animal.’ Later I reply to some worries about this maneuver, including the objection from Crispin Wright. Hans-Georg Gadamer’s distinction between world and environment is introduced and related to McDowell’s thinking. Episode Ⅱ discusses perception and knowledge; McDowell’s main target – the Cartesian inner space – is introduced and criticized. Barry Stroud’s and Simon Blackburn’s positions are evaluated. Later I connect the main theme of Mind and World to the present context; in particular, I discuss McDowell’s invocation of Donald Davidson and Immanuel Kant. And then I discuss a common accusation of idealism, and Robert Brandom’s accusation of ‘residual individualism.’ Episode Ⅲ concentrates on Saul Kripke’s Wittgenstein, arguing that the master thesis behind the rule-following paradox is a version of the inner space model, and that Kripke’s Wittgenstein is not Wittgenstein. Martin Kusch’s objections are answered; Michael Dummett’s demand of reductionism is rebutted. After this, I turn to Davidson’s ‘no language’ claim, and discuss to what extent McDowell agrees with him. In Episode Ⅳ I evaluate objections from Hubert Dreyfus concerning action and agency. I discuss how Dreyfus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty commit ‘the Myth of the Disembodied Intellect’ identified by McDowell. I answer Michael Ayer’s charge of intellectualism in passing. Later I bring in McDowell’s objections to Derek Parfit on personhood and to Davidson on the mind-body relation. In Episode Ⅴ I focus on consciousness and self-consciousness. McDowell applies his argument against Parfit to Kant, but Maximilian de Gaynesford dissents. I reply to his objections on McDowell’s behalf. I further connect this to McDowell’s attacks on the dualism of scheme and content. This leads to my McDowellian rejection to the existence of qualia, and further brings me to the debate between intentionalism and disjunctivism in the context of the argument from illusion. I argue against Tim Crane’s ways of conceiving issues about intentionalism and the argument from illusion. Varieties of disjunctivism are also discussed. In my Epilogue, I express my worry about McDowell’s notion of ‘self-determining subjectivity.’ According to McDowell, human freedom consists in causations in the space of reason, but as Richard Gaskin points out, a satisfying story of it is yet to be provided. I close this essay with some rough ideas about how to fill in the details of the McDowellian picture. (shrink)

In the course of recent debate with Hubert Dreyfus John McDowell emphasizes the notion of conceptual form or shape to explain how conceptual capacities are ‘operative’ in prereflective ‘coping’ activities. This paper considers how that notion is to be interpreted. In particular it considers whether or not it imposes a determinate constraint on the form of content and argues that both interpretations are unsatisfactory. Assuming conceptual form to be determinate is unnecessary to explain the universal applicability of concepts and conflicts (...) with an argument McDowell uses against Evans. Attempting to avoid this conflict by leaving it indeterminate makes talk of conceptual form misleading, reducing it to an imprecise way of affirming our ability to apply concepts to subject-matter of any form whatever. As a consequence, Dreyfus’s challenge to McDowell cannot be met by appealing to the notion of conceptual form or shape. I further argue that it remains a puzzle how McDowell’s notion of conceptual form is to be understood, and that the difficulties with his response to Dreyfus point to an underlying tension between various claims McDowell makes about conceptual capacities. (shrink)

This thesis comprises a study of the ethical thought of Iris Murdoch with special emphasis, as evidenced by the title, on how morality is intimately connected to self-improvement aiming at perfection and how the study of fiction has an important role to play in our strive towards bettering ourselves within the framework set by Murdoch’s moral philosophy.

This thesis articulates a novel interpretation of Heidegger’s explication of the being (Seins) of gear (Zeugs) in §15 of his masterwork Being and Time (1927/2006) and develops and applies the position attributed to Heidegger to explain three phenomena of unreflective action discussed in recent literature and articulate a partial Heideggerian ecological metaphysics. Since §15 of BT explicates the being of gear, Part 1 expounds Heidegger’s concept of the ‘being’ (Seins) of beings (Seienden) and two issues raised in the ‘preliminary methodological (...) remark’ in §15 of BT regarding explicating being. §1.1 interprets the being (Sein) or synonymously constitution of being (Seinsverfassung) of a being (Seienden) as a regional essence: a property unifying a region (Region), district (Bezirk), or subject-area (Sachgebiet) – a highly general (‘regional’) class of entities. Although Heidegger posits two components of the being of a being, viz. material-content (Sachhaltigkeit, Sachgehalt) and mode-of-being (Seinsart) or way-of-being (Seinsweise, Weise des Seins, Weise zu sein) (1927/1975, 321), the unclarity of this distinction means that it does not figure prominently herein. §1.2 addresses Heidegger’s distinction between ontological and ontic investigations and his notion of ‘modes of access’ (Zugangsarten, Zugangsweisen). Part 2 expounds §15 of BT’s explication of the being of gear. §2.1 analyses Heidegger’s two necessary and sufficient conditions for being gear and three core basic concepts (Grundbegriffe) enabling comprehension of these conditions and therewith a foundational comprehension of gear. Heidegger explicates the being of gear through content of unreflectively purposeful, non-intersubjective intentional states. I term such states ‘mundane concern’, which is almost synonymous with Hubert Dreyfus’s term ‘absorbed coping’ (1991, 69). Heidegger’s explication highlights around-for references (Um-zu-Verweisungen) as the peculiar species of property figuring in mundanely concernful intentional content. §2.2 clarifies Heidegger’s position on the relationship between to-hand-ness (Zuhandenheit) and extantness (Vorhandenheit) in the narrow sense: two of Heidegger’s most widely discussed concepts. I reject Kris McDaniel’s recent reading of Heidegger as affirming that nothing could be both to-hand and extant simultaneously (McDaniel 2012). Part 3 develops and applies Heidegger’s phenomenology of mundane concern. §3.1 explains the phenomena of situational holism, situated normativity, and mundanely concernful prospective control. §3.2 undertakes the metaphysical accommodation of around-for references, which §3.1 posited as featuring prominently within mundanely concernful intentional content. This thesis thus contributes not only to Heidegger scholarship, but also to contemporary debates within the philosophy of action and cognitive science. (shrink)

The continued presence and importance of Christian moral values in our daily lives, coupled with the fact that faith in Christianity is in continual decline, raises the question as to why having lost faith in Christianity, we have also not lost faith in our Christian moral values. This question is also indicative of a more pressing phenomenon: not only have we maintained our faith in Christian values, we fail to see that the widespread collapse of Christianity should affect this faith. (...) To tackle this latter phenomenon, I claim, we have to pose the Nietzschean question of the value of our moral values, so as to see that this value can be a possible object of questioning. In chapter one, I consider different approaches found in the history of moral philosophy that look like potential candidates for this task. I argue that, ultimately, the task requires simultaneously taking our familiarity with Christian moral values as both sui generis and a questionable phenomenon. In chapter two, I articulate in detail the sui generis nature of this familiarity with moral values,in terms of the phenomena of habituation and sedimentation. In chapter three, I consider the possibility of estrangement that is built into our familiarity with moral values, by focusing on the role of cognition. I demonstrate how cognition, in the form of self-consciousness, can disrupt the sedimented, habituated nature of our moral values through a form of ironic disruption. In chapter four, I develop this account by considering the possibility of an appeal to an alternative moral outlook. To do so, I draw upon the structural isomorphism that is present between the process of estrangement and a rite of passage. (shrink)

The interest of this essay is meta-philosophical: I seek to reconstruct neglected concepts of thought available to us given the diverse use South Asian Buddhist philosophers have made of the term-of-art vikalpa. In contemporary Anglophone engagements with Buddhist philosophy, it has come to mean either the categorization and reidentification of particulars in terms of the construction of equivalence classes and/or the representation of extra-mental causes of content. While this does track much that is important in the history of Buddhist philosophy, (...) it is overly restrictive. Based on three examples, this essay reconstructs other concepts of vikalpa available before, during, and after Digṅāga’s epochal reformulation of Buddhist epistemology. The first example takes us away from the familiar context of content introduction in perceptual experience to consider Ratnakīrti’s way of treating cases where one exits from concept-involving modes of engaging content. The second takes up with Vasubandhu and Sthiramati the case of the contents of background awareness. The third and final case builds on the last concern, taking up a discussion of possible worlds in the Laṅkāvatārasūtra. This last was intended to address the relationship of thought to language. Moving beyond narrowly epistemological concerns allows a more expansive sense of vikalpa to come into view. Doing so, in turn, allows one to see that vikalpa need not indicate only occurrent representations, but also the structured systems of possible discriminations which some Buddhists took to serve as the background for all possible perception, thought, and action. The existence of such a background changes the salience and the value of distinctions drawn between conceptual and non-conceptual contents and experiences. (shrink)