At his death in 2010, the Anglo-American analytic philosopher John Haugeland left an unfinished manuscript summarizing his life-long engagement with Heidegger’s Being and Time. As illuminating as it is iconoclastic, Dasein Disclosed is not just Haugeland’s Heidegger—this sweeping reevaluation is a major contribution to philosophy in its own right.

Many philosophers believe that there is a fundamental distinction between knowing that something is the case and knowing how to do something. According to Gilbert Ryle, to whom the insight is credited, knowledge-how is an ability, which is in turn a complex of dispositions. Knowledge-that, on the other hand, is not an ability, or anything similar. Rather, knowledge-that is a relation between a thinker and a true proposition.

Where does the mind stop and the rest of the world begin? The question invites two standard replies. Some accept the demarcations of skin and skull, and say that what is outside the body is outside the mind. Others are impressed by arguments suggesting that the meaning of our words "just ain't in the head", and hold that this externalism about meaning carries over into an externalism about mind. We propose to pursue a third position. We advocate a very different (...) sort of externalism: an _active externalism_, based on the active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes. (shrink)

It is still a widespread assumption that metaphysics and ontology deal with roughly the same questions. They are supposed to be concerned with the fundamental nature of reality and to give an account of the meaning of 'existence' or 'being' in line with the broadest possible metaphysical assumptions. Against this, Markus Gabriel proposes a radical form of ontological pluralism that divorces ontology from metaphysics, understood as the most fundamental theory of absolutely everything. He argues that the concept of existence is (...) incompatible with the existence of the world and therefore proposes his innovative no-world-view. In the context of recent debates surrounding new realism and speculative realism, Gabriel also develops the outlines of a realist epistemological pluralism. His idea here is that there are different forms of knowledge that correspond to the plurality of fields of sense that must be acknowledged in order to avoid the trap of metaphysics. (shrink)

The frame problem is the difficulty of explaining how non-magical systems think and act in ways that are adaptively sensitive to context-dependent relevance. Influenced centrally by Heideggerian phenomenology, Hubert Dreyfus has argued that the frame problem is, in part, a consequence of the assumption (made by mainstream cognitive science and artificial intelligence) that intelligent behaviour is representation-guided behaviour. Dreyfus' Heideggerian analysis suggests that the frame problem dissolves if we reject representationalism about intelligence and recognize that human agents realize the property (...) of thrownness (the property of being always already embedded in a context). I argue that this positive proposal is incomplete until we understand exactly how the properties in question may be instantiated in machines like us. So, working within a broadly Heideggerian conceptual framework, I pursue the character of a representation-shunning thrown machine. As part of this analysis, I suggest that the frame problem is, in truth, a two-headed beast. The intra-context frame problem challenges us to say how a purely mechanistic system may achieve appropriate, flexible and fluid action within a context. The inter-context frame problem challenges us to say how a purely mechanistic system may achieve appropriate, flexible and fluid action in worlds in which adaptation to new contexts is open-ended and in which the number of potential contexts is indeterminate. Drawing on the field of situated robotics, I suggest that the intra-context frame problem may be neutralized by systems of special-purpose adaptive couplings, while the inter-context frame problem may be neutralized by systems that exhibit the phenomenon of continuous reciprocal causation. I also defend the view that while continuous reciprocal causation is in conflict with representational explanation, special-purpose adaptive coupling, as well as its associated agential phenomenology, may feature representations. My proposal has been criticized recently by Dreyfus, who accuses me of propagating a cognitivist misreading of Heidegger, one that, because it maintains a role for representation, leads me seriously astray in my handling of the frame problem. I close by responding to Dreyfus' concerns. (shrink)

This paper discusses the major theme of Adrian Moore’s The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics. Moore argues that the philosophical theories of many modern Western philosophers, seen as the project of making sense of the world—in the most general sense of that notion—lead to self-referential contradiction. I agree with him. Moore takes this as a sign that this project requires the need of some non-propositional notion of making sense. Contrary to this, I argue (as in Beyond the Limits of Thought) that (...) it simply indicates the dialetheias at the limits of the project. (shrink)

In this paper, I will describe a technique for generating a novel kind of semantics for a logic, and explore some of its consequences. It would be natural to call the semantics produced by the technique in question ‘many-valued'; but that name is, of course, already taken. I call them, instead, ‘plurivalent'. In standard logical semantics, formulas take exactly one of a bunch of semantic values. I call such semantics ‘univalent'. In a plurivalent semantics, by contrast, formulas may take one (...) or more such values. The construction I shall describe can be applied to any univalent semantics to produce a corresponding plurivalent one. In the paper I will be concerned with the application of the technique to propositional many-valued logics. Sometimes going plurivalent does not change the consequence relation; sometimes it does. I investigate the possibilities in detail with respect to small family of many-valued logics. (shrink)

The point of this paper is to bring together three topics: non-existent objects, mereology, and nothing. There are important inter-connections, which it is my aim to spell out, in the service of an account of the last of these.

Such contradictions arise “at the limits of thought” in the following sense: we have reason to set boundaries to certain conceptual processes, which, however, turn out to actually cross those boundaries. The boundaries cannot be crossed, yet they can, for they are crossed. For example, Kant regarded noumena as beyond the limit of the conceivable, yet he made judgments about them, so he did conceive of them. For another example, Russell’s theory of types cannot be expressed, yet he does express (...) it. And so on, from Aristotle’s notion of prime matter to Derrida’s différance. The boundaries that cannot be but are crossed may concern iteration, expression, cognition, or conception. In most cases, a single argument pattern is operative, according to Priest. He calls it the Inclosure Schema [=IS]. It is a contradiction-generating mechanism that works as follows: suppose we define a set Ω, on the basis of a condition φ ); suppose that Ω exists and that it has property ψ. Next, suppose we can define a function δ such that, for any subset x of Ω that has property ψ, we have both δ ∉ x and δ ∈ Ω. As Ω is a subset of itself and it has ψ by hypothesis, a contradiction follows: both δ ∈ Ω and δ ∉ Ω. The two sides of the contradiction—or perhaps the operations by which they are established—are called Closure and Transcendence. ). For example, take Burali Forti’s paradox that is greater than all members of On, and therefore not an ordinal). Here Ω = On, and δ is the function that assigns to x the least ordinal greater than all members of x is both an ordinal—δ ∈ Ω, “Closure”—and not a member of x ). The condition φ is just the property of being an ordinal. (shrink)