Proponents of enactivism should be interested in exploring what notion of action best captures the type of action-perception link that the view proposes, such that it covers all the aspects in which our doings constitute and are constituted by our perceiving. This article proposes and defends the thesis that the notion of sensorimotor dependencies is insufficient to account for the reality of human perception, and that the central enactive notion should be that of perceptual practices. Sensorimotor enactivism is insufficient because (...) it has no traction on socially dependent perceptions, which are essential to the role and significance of perception in our lives. Since the social dimension is a central desideratum in a theory of human perception, enactivism needs a notion that accounts for such an aspect. This article sketches the main features of the Wittgenstein-inspired notion of perceptual practices as the central notion to understand perception. Perception, I claim, is properly understood as woven into a type of social practices that includes food, dance, dress, music, etc. More specifically, perceptual practices are the enactment of culturally structured, normatively rich techniques of commerce of meaningful multi- and inter-modal perceptible material. I argue that perceptual practices explain three central features of socially dependent perception: attentional focus, aspects’ saliency, and modal-specific harmony-like relations. (shrink)

I argue that Husserl’s concept of position-taking, Stellungnahme, is adequate to understand the idea of second nature as an issue of philosophical anthropology. I claim that the methodological focus must be the living subject that acts and lives among others, and that the notion of second nature must respond to precisely this fundamental active character of subjectivity. The appropriate concept should satisfy two additional desiderata. First, it should be able to develop alongside the biological, psychological, and social individual development. Second, (...) it should be able to underlie the vast diversity of human beings within and across communities. As possible candidates, I contrast position-taking with two types of habit-like concepts: instinct and habitus, on the one hand, and customary habits, on the other. I argue that position-taking represents the active aspect of the subject while the habit-like concepts are passive. A subject’s position-takings and ensuing comportments are tied together by motivations, which evince a certain consistency, and for this reason are expression of the subject’s identity. I conclude by nuancing the relation between Stellungnahme and passivity. Passivity is deemed necessary to action but subservient to it; position-taking is thought to be prior to passivity. (shrink)

What is a philosophy class like? What roles do teachers and students play? Questions like these have been answered time and again by philosophers using images and metaphors. As philosophers continue to develop pedagogical approaches in a more conscious way, it is worth evaluating traditional metaphors used to understand and structure philosophy classes. In this article, we examine two common metaphors—the sage on the stage, and philosophy as combat—and show why they fail pedagogically. Then we propose five metaphors—teaching philosophy as (...) world-traveling, wondering, conducting an orchestra, storytelling, and coaching—that can better respond to the needs of increasingly diverse student bodies. Further, these metaphors find their ground in long-standing beliefs about what philosophy is, how it is done, and what it can do for those willing to engage in it. While no single one of them is comprehensive, we think that these models can help us enliven our own thinking about our teaching and the roles we and our students play in our classrooms. (shrink)

What would happen if one morning you wake up clumsy, as if your sense of touch were unreliable, arbitrarily on and off? And what would this clumsiness look like if we could transfer it to the moral sense? The article expounds an interesting analogy between the sense of touch, loosely construed, and the moral sense: just as a sort of consistency is necessary for the sense of touch to do its job, so it is for the moral sense to play (...) its part. Touch enables us to navigate the everyday world of coffee pots and staircases; our moral sensibility comes into play when we act or when we judge our actions and those of others, and plays a directive role in what we feel, how we feel it, and how we react to it. Taking the analogy further, I will suggest that inconsistency causes, in both cases, a certain clumsiness, and that clumsiness is linked to arbitrariness – like the person that helps others in dire need, but only does so on some rainy days. (shrink)