Relative Identity in Heidegger

Poor neglected blog; even my images are dead now. Ah well, mourning is for the dead.

I have noted before that Heidegger had read some Frege; this isn't a huge surprise, given that he was a student of Husserl, but it's easy to forget from our current "analytic/continental" vantage point. I just stumbled across a place that reminded me of this, and where better to make a note of it than on a dead blog?

In section 44 of "Being and Time", Heidegger is concerned with picking apart the view of truth as adequatio intellectus et rei. His point in doing this isn't to deny the view so much as to complain that it obscures what is significant about truth: if we try to have a "thing" and a "mind" already in view, and then want to add "truth" (and falsity) on top of those as a certain kind of relation between the two ("agreement", "correspondence", or the lack of this), then we have gone badly awry: instead we need to first have Dasein's openness to the world in view, and then the "mind" and "thing" which are supposed to "agree" will all show up as abstractions from a more important phenomena which originally makes claiming possible at all.

One of the ways Heidegger tries to do this is by poking at the "adequatio" relation, which Heidegger translates as "Übereinstimmung": "Was meint überhaupt der Terminus »Übereinstimmung«?", what does one in general mean by the term "agreement"? It has to be some sort of relation, it has to be a bringing-together of two things, but clearly not just any relation will do: we need to get a sort of "agreement" which relates a "thought" and a "thing" just in that the one agrees with the other with regards to truth: and this is obscure. Plausibly, the only way to pick out the right sort of relation is by already having an understanding of truth: A true thought agrees with its object just in that the thought says that things are thus-and-so with the object, and the object is thus-and-so -- and cashing out this "says that" talk already will involve a notion of truth, for saying that things are thus-and-so is just to put forward "things are thus-and-so" as true. (And so adequatio intellectus et rei is empty as a definition of truth; it moves in a circle.)

But that is not what interests me -- I want instead to point to a moment in Heidegger's discussion of relations of "agreement":

Die Zahl 6 stimmt überein mit 16 - 10. Die Zahlen stimmen überein, sie sind gleich im Hinblick auf das Wieviel. Gleichheit ist eine Weise der Übereinstimmung. Zu dieser gehört strukturmäßig so etwas wie ein »Hinblick auf«. Was ist das, im Hinblick worauf das in der adaequatio Bezogene übereinstimmt?

Auf Englisch: The number '6' agrees with "16-10". The numbers agree, they are equal in regard to "how many". Equality is one way of agreeing. To this belongs structurally something like a "regards to". What is that in regards to which the terms related by "adequatio" agree? [This is my own translation; someone please let me know if I've fouled it up too much.]

Heidegger here mentions numerical equality as one form of "agreement", and says that "agreement" always takes a complement: Two things agree in some particular respect, with regards to something: For example, '6' and "16-10" agree in coming to the same number, but not in being the same arithmetical formula.

Heidegger here puts forward (as unproblematic and not in need of argument) a view of equality as distinct from identity; equality is only sameness of number, not "sameness" as such. This is Frege's early view, in Begriffschrift; I believe he changes to his more familiar view (that equality simply is identity) in "Sense and Reference", when he settles on truth-values as the referents of sentences -- that move lets him consolidate a fair bit of his notation. (I would check this if I were not too lazy to do so.)

More interestingly (if you are me), Heidegger also puts forward as unproblematic a view of the genus of which numerical equality is a species, a view of what I think we analytics usually call "identity", as needing a complement: "Wieviel", "How much?" specifies the sense in which '6' and "16-10" are identical, they are the same number. Without some such question as this, no species of "agreement" is specified: The question "Do they agree, are they identical?" does not itself have a sense, unless the context makes clear in what respect agreement is being asked about. (It may be that the context makes clear that every respect is meant, and any dissimilarity will be an absolute lack of agreement between the one and the other.)

If I am reading Heidegger correctly here, then he agrees with Geach against Frege (and against the vast majority of analytic philosophers) in holding that "identity is relative": that to say that A and B are identical is, in the primary case, to say that they are the same in some definite respect, such as being the same color or the same make of shoe. To say that they are absolutely identical, which Frege had taken as the more primordial notion, Geach claims is only to say that they are the same in every respect: they are the same color, the same make of shoe, occupy the same location in space, etc. -- Geach uses Leibniz's Law to introduce the notion of "absolute" or "simple" identity as a defined term in logic.

To remind the reader of the opposing view: Many have held that to say that A and B are the same color is, when put in a logically regimented way, to say that

There is an X and a Y such that X is the color of A, and Y is the color of B, and that X is (absolutely) identical to Y, and that there is no Z such that Z is the color of A or Z is the color of B and Z is not (absolutely) identical to X (and to Y).

This way of rewriting "A is the same color as B" carries with it an ontological commitment to colors; Quine and Davidson take this commitment along happily (Davidson a little more happily than Quine), and so see a sort of Platonism as an unexciting logical consequence of some ordinary claims: There are colors, and there are shapes, because there are true claims on the order of "X and Y are the same shape", and writing those out in a logically acceptable way involves committing oneself to the truth of "There is a W such that W is a shape".

Geach is able to avoid these commitments: he treats "A is the same color as B" as a primitive equivalence relation in the language, and so does not need to quantify over colors to write "A is the same color as B" in ordinary first-order logical notation; it just comes out as looking like "aRb". By a neat trick, Geach notes that he can (in a sense) keep his ideology conservative as well: Quine's way of writing "A is the same color as B" requires a way to say "A has a color", which he writes as "There is an X such that X is the color of A"; Geach writes "A has a color" as "A has the same color as A", as anything which lacks a color cannot be the same color as anything: he is able to use his primitive equivalence relations to do the work of coloredness-predicates, and so doesn't need the latter as primitive terms in his language. This trick works in general for turning predicates into equivalence relations. So Geach doesn't need to include more predicates in his language than Quine did, but is able to reduce his ontological commitments. And since Geach is able to introduce a sign for "absolute" identity in his language by means of Leibniz's Law, the resulting calculus is just Quine's beloved first-order predicate calculus with identity; Geach disagrees with Quine not over a matter of regimented logical notation, but of how to rewrite ordinary language claims in that regimented form.

There are a few other wrinkles to Geach's account of relative identity, but hopefully the above is clear enough to get it in view. One aspect of his view which Geach finds remarkable is that he, unlike Frege, is able to treat statements of sameness and statements of number along the same lines: where Frege insisted that "How many?" required a complement, that statements of number were assertions about concepts, he had also insisted that "Are A and B identical?" required no complement, and that this identity was a logically peculiar notion which everyone immediately grasps in a special way. Geach thinks this was quite odd of Frege; Frege had demolished the idea that "oneness" is a special property of every object, and had left "self-identity" as a special property of every object: but in English and German both we have the phrase "one and the same" "ein und dasselbe", which Geach thinks should have already suggested to Frege that sameness and oneness ought to be handled along the same lines. I think that Heidegger had (without having much affection for logical notation) done just this: he requires an im Hinblick auf before questions of sameness are answerable. It would be interesting to see if Heidegger was consistent in this; rejecting "absolute" in favor of "relative" identity has a fair number of consequences in metaphysics, as Geach was well aware -- puzzles about whether a statue is identical with its clay fall to the ground, for example -- and Heidegger is not uninterested in a number of these metaphysical puzzles.

Was Heidegger an Analytic Philosopher?

Brian Leiter is poking fun at the analytic/continental distinction again, this time by way of the late Dummett:

Unnoted, of course, is that Dummett's conception of "analytic" philosophy--as "an armchair subject, requiring only thought" and as trying "to clarify the concepts in terms of which we conceive of [reality], and hence the linguistic expressions by means of which we formulate our conception" as he put it in his last book--was such that huge numbers of philosophers in the Anglophone world today wouldn't qualify, though one can happily stipulate that Dummett is an "analytic" philosopher in his sense, and Heidegger is not.

The funny thing is, I'm not sure that Heidegger doesn't get counted as an "analytic" philosopher, if all we look at from Dummett's book is this one claim. He clearly wasn't doing "empirical" work in the way that Leiter likes to promote, so he can only be ruled out by the second part of Dummett's quote's criterion: Did Heidegger attempt to "clarify the concepts in terms of which we conceive of [reality], and hence the linguistic expressions by means of which we formulate our conceptions"?

My initial reaction is to say that he did, at least in Being and Time. It's easy to find passages like the one from section 14, where Heidegger presents a list of four ways in which the word "world" is used, and notes that he's "unraveling" these uses so that "we can get an indication of the different kinds of phenomena that are signified, and of the way in which they are interconnected." (p.93 in the Macquarrie translation). This looks to be straightforwardly what Dummett's quote says analytic philosophers do. But this is only a particularly clear instance of a general strategy: Being and Time is largely made up of discussions of ordinary sorts of words and experiences in a context which makes clear that it's easy to get confused about them. For instance, Heidegger's discussion of "reality" (the concept) is largely focused on the ways in which Descartes misunderstood things in this area, and the problems it lead him into. (Also fun is Leiter's joking attempt to unify "analytic" philosophers by the fact "that they all probably read "On Sense and Reference" at some point, given that we know that Heidegger read this work.)

What spurred me to think about this was a post Enowning linked to the other day; the post itself doesn't interest me, but I quite liked being pointed to a passage I had overlooked (it wasn't highlighted in my copy of the book): "Nevertheless, the ultimate business of philosophy is to preserve the force of the most elemental words in which Dasein expresses itself, and to keep common understanding from leveling them off to that unintelligibility which functions in turn as a source of pseudo-problems." (p.262 in the Macquarrie) The context of this quote is section 44 of the first division of Being and Time, the discussion of truth which closes that division, and why Heidegger is looking at (what he thinks of as) the etymology of "ἀλήθεια" in Greek. He notes that he needs to avoid "uninhibited word-mysticism" in doing this, and I'm not sure he meets his own demand here (and later on I think he clearly falls into it). But the success of what he's aiming at here doesn't interest me as much as what the goal he set for himself was: he's trying to avoid "that unintelligibility which functions in turn as a source of pseudo-problems" which comes from a "common understanding" which "levels off" words.

It seems to me that one of the main things that Heidegger is concerned with warding off in this section is the idea that it is only in true thoughts (judgements, assertions) that we (our minds, our thoughts, our language) "come into contact" with the world. This comes to seem obvious to us when we think of truth as exhausted by things like the T-schema: "S" is true IFF S. Truth is here a predicate of concatenated strings of signs, and to say of a string that it is true "is just to say what the string says itself": truth is chased up the tree of grammar. As a truth-predicate can be added onto any existing language without changing the inferential connections between the portions of that language which do not contain a truth-predicate, it can thus appear that truth is "not deep", is "redundant", "does not refer to a real property": thus we should handle how the language works without truth, and then a truth-predicate can be added onto it. This is what Heidegger has in view when he criticizes the idea that truth is rightly thought of as simply a property of judgements: to do so makes it easy to think that judgement should be intelligible without truth, and then truth be made intelligible in terms of antecedently-understood judgements.

Against this, Heidegger tries (in various ways) to get us to see that our ability to judge at all, rightly or wrongly, is possible only because of our "disclosedness": there is a binary hiddenness/revealedness to the entities uncovered in our being-in-the-world which is more primordial than explicit judgements, and our ability to say anything (truely or falsely) by means of concatenated strings depends on it. The appearance that the binary true-false predicates of truth could be added onto a language which was antecedently understood thus covered up the fact that the language was understood only against a background of some such disclosedness, which should itself be apprehended in a discussion of truth and falsity, as its binary and the true-false binary are kin. The "common understanding" that allows concatenated strings of signs to be regarded as "saying something (in a language)", and to take these independently-intelligible relations as a foundation for work in semantics, can only be achieved by a "leveling off" which occludes the fact that we symbolize only in the course of our lives together, and that we leave things unsaid if we insist on treating language solely in terms of signs, sets, and satisfaction-relations. Signs "in the language" have the set-theoretic relations they are established to have in the set-theoretic universe; symbols have meanings only in our life together.

So, it seems to me that Heidegger was concerned with clarifying our concepts (our thoughts) and the words we use to express them; if it is necessary to any analytic/continental distinction that Heidegger be opposed to the "analytic" group, then Dummett's quote does not give us such a distinction.

Heidegger on Frege

From "New Research in Logic" (1912, when Heidegger was 23), translated in "Becoming Heidegger", p. 33. To the best of my knowledge, this is the only time Frege is mentioned in Heidegger's corpus. I would be interested to learn otherwise, if I'm wrong about this.

Nevertheless, we ourselves are inclined to attribute a far-reaching significance to Husserl's penetratingly profound and very propitiously formulated Investigations, for they have truly broken the psychological spell and brought the above-mentioned clarification of principles into play. Husserl here does not hesitate to express his gratitude for the influential suggestions that he received from the Wissenschaftlehre (1837) of the Austrian mathematician and philosopher Bernard Bolzano. The planned reprint of this now rare book will probably soon appear. In this connection, the name of a German mathematician cannot be left unmentioned. Gottlob Frege's logical-mathematical researches are in my opinion not yet appreciated in their true significance, let alone exhausted. What he has written in his works on "Sense and Meaning" and on "Concept and Object" cannot be disregarded by any philosophy of mathematics. But it is also equally valuable for a universal theory of the concept. While Frege overcame psychologism in principle, Husserl in his Prolegomena to a Pure Logic has systematically and comprehensively confronted the essence, relativistic consequences, and theoretical worthlessness of psychologism.

McDowell Week Retrospective: "Avoiding the Myth of the Given" (Wednesday part 1)

Now that I have all of the phil100 papers for my section graded, I can get back to this.

On Wednesday there was a catered lunch in the department to give grad students a chance to talk to McDowell without professors present. Thus far in McDowell week, I had not said a word to McDowell, because I get anxious about things like that; at lunch, McDowell asked me an embarrassing question about my eating habits, and this served as an icebreaker. So I started asking him about "Avoiding the Myth of the Given".

One of the first things I asked him was whether his post-"Avoiding" view committed him to saying that all we see is facing surfaces of objects -- whether or not we saw objects as having backs. He said that we just see the facing surfaces, and not the backs, and that we see them as things with backs by seeing their surfaces. He compared it to seeing that John is at the table, where that it's John at the table isn't part of the content of the experience, as someone might not know the fellow's name and still see things the same as someone who did. This all left me flummoxed for a bit. I couldn't see how this could be said satisfactorily.

McDowell mentioned Anscombe's essay "Substance" as something he was teaching in his "Philosophy of Perception" seminar at Pittsburgh. I found this essay quite helpful; it's in the second volume of her papers, and runs shy of seven pages.

I asked McDowell how my belief that I see that John is at the table is supposed to be justified, if the content of my experience doesn't give me that the person I see is John. McDowell said that even if the content of my experience didn't involve my capacity to recognize people by name, it still brought those people into view. A little more work on trying to get clear at what bothered me lead McDowell to remark that recognitional capacities (which involve concepts over and above those involved in the content of an experience) can issue nondefeasible warrants to know that-P.

And this was around the time that lunch ended and I had to go to my office hours, and then to Kaplan's epistemology seminar. Then I got some closing-hour baked goods at City Bakery and it was time for McDowell's public lecture.

Somewhere in this expanse of time, I realized what had been bothering me about "Avoiding": I had missed two points. One is that recognitional capacities issue in warrants that are just as good as those gained by "carving out" a particular bit of the content of an experience (the two are epistemologically on a level). I thought that the warrants perception issued in were supposed to be tied to the fact that it was from intuition that I took what I claimed to know, but this is just not part of McDowell's story.

"Avoiding", page 259:

Such locutions -- "I see that...", "My experience reveals to me that..." -- accept, in their "that..." clauses, specifications of things one's experience puts one in a position to know non-inferentially. That can include knowledge that experience makes available by bringing something into view for someone who has a suitable recognitional capacity.

In a footnote to the first sentence, McDowell notes that "These locutions can even be understood in such a way that inferential credentials are not ruled out for the knowledge in question. Consider, for instance, "I see that the mailman has not yet come today.""

I believe I have misread this footnote in the past. What McDowell means here is that I can claim to know that the mailman has not yet come today because "I can see that this is so", but that what this means is that I take what I can see to give me grounds for a materially good inference to the claim that the mailman has not yet come today (say I see that the flag on the mailbox is still up, and the package I placed in it to be sent is still sticking out). The knowledge I attribute to myself in saying "I see that the mailman has not yet come today" is inferential. This shows up in how I reply if someone asks me why I think the mailman hasn't come today: "I see my package is still there, and the mailman would've taken it if he had come. So he hasn't come yet today." It can also be used to state things I am in a position to know non-inferentially, and that these things are known non-inferentially likewise shows up in how I reply: "Why do you think your package is still there?" -- "I can see it from where I'm standing". I stop there; I do not claim to infer the presence of my package from something else.

In the block-quoted portion, I had previously been misunderstanding what "bringing something into view" meant. I took it to be something that experience('s content) did, which then led to recognitional capacities kicking in. But nothing like that was meant: knowledge gained via recognitional capacities being actualized in perception works just like perceptual knowledge did before "Avoiding". I was over-reading McDowell.

The second point I had been confused on was this: I was worried that someone might want to say that all experience really gives me warrant for believing myself to see is colored expanses of various shapes and sizes; the warrants perception gives are solely those gained by articulating bits of intuitional content -- if I take myself to know that John is at the table because I can see him, this supposed knowledge must have some ground other than what experience presents to me, for experience presents only colored expanses, or perhaps it has no ground but is granted due to custom or habit etc. (The worry had the physiognomy of the idea that it is only in logic that we can be certain of anything, and that if we claim certainty in any non-logical matter we are, strictly speaking, irrational. Thus the young LW's refusal to grant Russell that there was no rhinoceros in his office.)

Relatedly, I was worried about the idea that it is only by abstracting from our everyday view of objects around us that we can see ourselves as presented with "expanses of color" (I recall Alva Noe having a nice paper on how hard it is to take up "the painterly point of view" and see a coin held at an angle as an elipse, though if you look at a photograph of a coin so held it's easy to draw the elipse at its border), and with related phenomeological ideas like Heidegger's argument that ready-to-handedness is prior to present-at-handedness, or Merleau-Ponty's "the blue of a carpet would never be the same blue were it not a woolly blue". All of these seemed to give compelling reasons for thinking that what McDowell had as "the content of experience" had to be an abstraction from how the world was presented to me. Which is an awkward-sounding idea.

But McDowell is committed to it being impossible for someone's experience to only ever put her in a position to know things non-inferentially via the articulation of bits of intuitional content. She has to also be able to tell things like whether the lighting is normal, which is not a matter of what colored expanses she is presented with, nor is it something she settles ahead of time or via an inference. (This is just following Sellars's line.) So it's already a part of his position that "the content of experience" is never the entirety of what experience gives to me. So he can keep accepting Heidegger's argument about ready-to-handedness and all that; "the content of experience" is just a name for the lowest-common-denominator stuff that one is able to take in just by virtue of having functioning sense-organs and being a rational animal.

This isn't the only place McDowell uses "content" like that. According to McDowell's disjunctivism in perception, "the content" of experience is never the whole story about experience. "The content of experience" is what he calls the common factor between the good case and the bad case, between veridical and nonveridical experiences. There is more to experience than its content. That's just the way McDowell uses the words.

So there was no reason for me to feel worried that taking McDowell's position seriously ought to shrink the circle of what experience puts us into a position to know to that of which colored expanses we're presented with. That possibility was already ruled out by other things McDowell was committed to.

So, I think I am now clear on both of the revisions McDowell made in "Avoiding". Both seem fine.

This post is long enough that I think McDowell's public lecture should be in another post. But I've actually run together some things from Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday together here; I think I can stop talking about "Avoiding" now. That has become a bit of philosophy that I can stop doing when I want to. Which is now.

i has an m.a.

I officially graduated last weekend. Finished my thesis in late November; I haven't been blogging because whenever I would get the urge to blog (or would begin a post), I would think "Shouldn't I really be working on my thesis instead?", and that killed the fun of it. And then after finishing my thesis, I had to get PhD applications done. Finished those of earlier this week. I am now free of any academical-type obligations, for the first time in quite a while. (It feels strange, like I must owe someone a paper, and just can't figure out who.)

So, now I can blog freely again.

Because it seems like a thing to do, here's a brief recounting of my year at Chicago:

Fall quarter was when I had to take the MAPH "core" course, which was about Theory. I was reminded of the "Theory's Empire" book-event from The Valve often. I did not enjoy this course, and was glad when it ended. I really can't say I got anything from this course, except some painful and awkward introductions to Freud, Lacan, and Adorno (and some other guys I would've been happy to never encounter). It wasn't even good for writing practice; the longest paper I had to write was five pages or something like that. And that paper was about Lauren Berlant and some movie I've never seen based on a book I've never read. Just a mess of a class.

There was an "introduction to analytic philosophy"-type course that was only open to MAPH students; I figured it was a good thing to take. There were issues that lead to the class being taught by a PhD student, Tom Lockhart, but he did a good job of it I thought. I enjoyed the class, and it was a pretty gentle way to get back into the swing of things after having a semester off (and before that, a semester of law school). I wrote a paper on the second part of "Mental Events" for it (and a shorter one on "Naming and Necessity", which was much easier to lay out than the second part of "Mental Events").

Haugeland's Heidegger's "Being and Time" was a good excuse to read the rest of division one of "Being and Time". I fell a day behind in the reading at one point, and caught up by skipping a section I'd read before: the bit about the broken hammer. It turns out that if you read all of division one except that bit, the "present at hand" sounds like a philosopher's fiction: nothing is ever actually given to Dasein like that. It's always something richer, like the ready-to-hand, the living, Daseins, etc.; the "present-at-hand" is paradigmatically what is presented to a res cogitans (i.e., it is nothing but something confused philosophers dreamed up). Now, in the broken hammer passage, this is clearly not Heidegger's view. We can see the broken hammer, and he says we see it as just something present-at-hand. So I spent a lot of this quarter misreading "Being and Time". I like my misreading a lot more than Heidegger's actual view, though, and I think that my misreading makes sense for pretty much all of the rest of division one (especially section 21, "Hermeneutic Discussion of the Cartesian Ontology of the 'World'"). Incidentally, this is the class that taught me how the quarter system works: I suddenly had to scramble for a paper topic when I realized the course was almost over, and ended up having to get an extension for the paper (by a week or two). I ended up writing something about Dreyfus's Heidegger and "Telling" that I don't think really came together, but was kinda fun to work on.

Winter quarter was very cold and dark.

I sat in on Ford's "Action and Practical Knowledge" seminar, which gave me an excuse to read Anscombe's "Intention" and Thompson's "Naive Action Theory", along with some more of Davidson's old action papers. This also got me up to speed on philosophy of action well enough to know some of what was going on at the Anscombe Conference in the early spring. Definitely glad I didn't take this for credit, though; I'm still mulling a lot of it over, and I'm not sure I really get what's so important about Thompson. (I've read the rest of "Life and Action" now, and still don't see it. Though he did say some stuff about gold and Kripke-Putnam essentialism in the third part that lead me to suspect I in fact do not want to get on board with his broader program. I should probably look at that passage again, and post on it.)

I also sat in on Irad Kimhi's "Active Thoughts" seminar. It was utter madness from beginning to end and I couldn't get enough of it. I couldn't tell you what the class was about, but there was a lot of interesting stuff crammed in there. Sitting in on it also gave me an excuse to read more Frege ("The Thought" and "Negation" especially), and some other fun logic-y stuff.

For credit, I took "Intermediate Logic", "Modern Moral Philosophy", and Pippin's "Kant's Critical Philosophy". Logic did not require me to write a paper, or to read very much; this made it an excellent course for the winter quarter. It was also fun to do more logic homework, though some of the completeness proofs were annoying.

"Modern Moral Philosophy" was taught by a visiting professor from Rome, Piergiorgio Donatelli. We read a little Bernard Williams, several Iris Murdoch pieces, two chapters from "The Claim of Reason", a McDowell essay I hadn't read yet, and then a lot of Cora Diamond's stuff. And Donatelli brought up dozens of other figures in the lectures. It was a heady mix of stuff; my lecture notes are a mess (though not as bad as the notes for "Active Thoughts"). I read an article of Diamond's that wasn't assigned for class (her piece in the "Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein") that bothered me in ways I couldn't quite get a handle on; I wanted to write on that, but wasn't getting a grip on it, so instead I wrote about something Diamond said about McDowell, and somehow a quarter of the essay ended up being about Davidson.

I read several Diamond pieces about Truth and Tarski-type approaches to it for this paper; I did not like them very much. She seemed to go after Rorty for the wrong reasons (as Conant did, in much greater length, in his article about Rorty and Orwell), and she seemed unhappy with Davidson's take on truth for no reason I could figure out. (If I recall correctly, it had something to do with there being "many ways something could be true"; I couldn't see how this was a problem for Davidson, since any difference between e.g. moral facts and chemical facts would be paralleled in the relevant T-sentences: they would say that the different sorts of sentences are true IFF different sorts of things are the case. Diamond didn't flesh any of this out so much as say we needed to pay attention to it. I can't tell what exactly I'm supposed to notice, so I don't see why Diamond-on-ethics-and-truth is so great.)

For Pippin's class I wrote a paper on the Transcendental Aesthetic. It was straightforward: Kant says that the transcendental ideality of space and time are established here; what are his arguments, and do they work? I defended the venerable "neglected option" objection, more or less. It was pretty easy to write, which was good because the rest of the quarter had me pretty frayed.

The Anscombe Conference was in the early spring. Thompson is a lot of fun to watch, and McDowell is surprisingly frail and birdlike in person; he looked like he might break if someone ran into him. I made it to most of the papers; most of them were good. McDowell had a paper on Anscombe-on-sensations that was pretty much the paper you would expect him to write on that topic. I will need to find my notes to say much about the rest of the speakers, but I do remember this: Thompson is a genius.

I was supposed to have a draft of my thesis done early in the spring; difficulties finding a workable topic lead to that not happening. I ended up writing about McDowell's criticisms of Davidson in "Gadamer and Davidson on Understanding and Relativism"; most of the paper was devoted to setting the stage, since "Epitaphs" is a tricky paper to get right. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, though Kremer (my advisor) remains unconvinced. One section of the paper ended up getting cut before it was even to the draft stage, what I was trying to articulate in the comments here, because a) I realized that spelling things out would take another paper to do well and b) I'm not at all sure that McDowell makes this argument against "Epitaphs" (and I'm suspicious that he doesn't make it because he knows it's not a good objection; certainly the closest he comes to making it explicitly is very hand-wavey stuff, and he could've made it very straightforwardly. I think Dummett does make it, for instance.). This paragraph probably makes sense to nobody except me, since only three or so people on the planet have read my thesis, but I refuse to cut it! Blogging is for vanity's sake.

Bridges taught a course on "Rationality" and a seminar on "Contextualism" in the spring; I considered both, but ended up taking neither. (I didn't know anyone in the seminar and it felt awkward; the "Rationality" course was not exciting in the first few courses, and was overfull -- I dropped it so someone else could have my slot.) Stephen Nadler (a visiting prof from U Wisconsin-Madison) had a course on Spinoza's "Ethics" which was simply phenomenal; I'd planned on just sitting in on it (and asking some questions about Hegel and Spinoza), but by the end of the second class I knew I had to take this course. Nadler did an amazing job leading the class: we got through the entire book, and discussion was always lively and unforced. I wrote a paper on Spinoza and anomalous monism, which I thought turned out very well, and it was the third Davidson-y paper I'd written in as many quarters. (When I asked Nadler about the topic, I assumed it was probably too banal to write on, and was going to ask for suggestions as to what in specific to focus on in the area; turns out it's not all that well-represented in the Spinoza literature, though Della Rocca does defend the connection, so I got to write a paper that came very easily.) Hands-down the best course I took for credit at Chicago.

Another (regularly) visiting professor, Jocelyn Benoist, was teaching a seminar titled "Intentional Objects: An Inquiry into the Common Origins of Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology"; about half of the course name shows up on my transcript. Benoist lectured about a lot of interesting people I'd had only superficial knowledge of before, like Bolzano and Brentano and Meinong, and some I had never heard of (mostly Polish philosophers, who were all interesting to read). All of it was shiny and new, and Benoist covered a lot of material very quickly. The guiding thread through most of the class was what to do about terms with sense without reference (if Meinong is wrong and there are any), and what lead into that question getting asked in that way. I wrote a paper about Frege and Evans's account of him in chapter one of "The Varieties of Reference", basically just trying to make sense of how Frege could be so cavalier in saying that "Odysseus" has the same sense whether or not Odysseus ever existed. (One nice point Benoist stressed was that Frege's example was not random; this was around the time when Troy was discovered by archaeologists, after having been considered as mythical for centuries.) I read a lot of Frege (and a fair bit of Evans) in preparation for this paper, but something just didn't quite come together in the end; I'm happy with what I have in the paper, but feel like I didn't really finish it. I don't know what I failed to write, but I definitely did not write something that needed writ.

It was a fun year.

And randomly: these conference papers are pretty good listenin'. And the "Coherentisme" paper is actually delivered in English. Hours of Sellarsian fun.

Something I should probably ask Haugeland about, if I get the chance

(The "Being and Time" class filled up in the first three hours of registration today. Hopefully somebody drops, or that I just end up being so gosh darn endearing he overrides the registration cap. Thus the conditional in the title.)

From "Truth and Finitude" part II, p.5 in the PDF. Haugeland is describing two "popular conceptions" of death, to which Heidegger opposes the existential sense of "death":

The first of these he calls perishing. This is the ubiquitous and all-too-familiar biological phenomenon that is the cessation of systematic biological function in an organism (and, typically, the onset of organic decay). All organisms eventually perish: plants, animals, fungi, and what have you, including all specimens of Homo sapiens. But Dasein never perishes -- not because it is immortal or everlasting, but because it is not a living organism in the biological sense at all.

The second popular conception of death Heidegger calls demise. Unlike perishing, demise is not a biological phenomenon, but pertains exclusively to Dasein. It is instead a social-cultural phenomenon. Roughly speaking, demise is that social event upon which you cease to be countable in the census, your spouse becomes a widow or widower [etc]. Although demise typically coincides with the perishing of an organism, these are not at all the same. The relationship between demise and perishing is loosely analogous to that between marriage and mating (which likewise are not at all the same).

Is the reason Dasein never "perishes" just because Dasein is a class noun -- i.e., does Dasein-in-each-case perish? If so, then why didn't Haugeland just say that? Or is Dasein-in-each-case supposed to be distinct from a specimen of Homo sapiens sapiens (which would be weird)? What are "specimens of Homo sapiens" if examples of Dasein-in-each-case are not? Pre-linguistic infants, I guess?

Since "all specimens of Homo sapiens" perish, I feel compelled to infer that the reason Dasein never perishes is because Dasein-in-each-case is the thing that perishes (as a specimen of Homo sapiens). But that doesn't seem to be what Haugeland meant. If it were, it'd be clearer to just note the Dasein/Dasein-in-each-case distinction, rather than just say that Dasein is "not immortal or everlasting". Hmm. Maybe I'm just reading too much into it.

The existential sense of "death" is the only one that's said to "individuate" Dasein. That much is clear. But it seems that non-individuated (fallen) Dasein can suffer "demise" but not "perish". But then what's the "specimens of Homo sapiens" doing there? (It also makes me wonder how far we're supposed to be able to take the analogy with mating and marriage. It strikes me as reasonable to say that human beings don't "mate" -- mating is a bestial behavior, to put it pointedly. So, by analogy, human beings wouldn't "perish" -- we don't die in the way that animals and fungi and plants die. But Haugeland explicitly says that "specimens of Homo sapiens" perish just like animals and plants and fungi.) Frown. I am puzzled.

Unrelated note that didn't deserve its own post: I read the introduction to Hegel's Philosophy of Nature the other day. It was a lot better than I expected. Hegel's goal in the Naturphilosophie is to reconcile the "practical approach" taken in everyday life with the "theoretical" point of view typical of the natural sciences. It seems clear in retrospect that his attempt did not work out. But, that's clearly a reasonable thing to want to try to do. It also explains a reference I once saw to McDowell as a Naturphilosopher.

Briefly Noted

Truth and Predication is now available in paperback. The "Predication" part is okay. I'm not sure I quite get how Davidson thinks Tarski (unwittingly) solved the problem -- it wasn't clear to me if he meant to distinguish Tarski from Frege on any grounds other than the fact that Tarski doesn't posit entities to correspond to predicates (whereas Frege did). I may have rushed through that last part, though; the book was due back at the library.

The book is notable for a few things, though. Davidson discusses Sellars and Strawson at more considerable length than he does elsewhere, for one. He doesn't discuss Wittgenstein at length. An editorial footnote:

[Davidson added the following note about this chapter: "My decision not to talk about Wittgenstein's view needs a comment. The reason is simply that try as I may I cannot satisfy myself that I have a sufficiently justified opinion what his views on predication were. I lament my failure here (as no doubt elsewhere) to fill in an important piece of the picture. There were clearly portentous exchanges between Frege and Wittgenstein, and between Wittgenstein and Russell. I have touched on some of the consequences of these exchanges, though of course I do not know exactly what they contained."]

I suspect Davidson had similar reasons for not discussing Wittgenstein much of anywhere else: He wasn't satisfied that he had justified opinions as to just what Wittgenstein thought.

The book's probably not worth reading unless you just like reading Davidson, or you haven't read "The Structure and Content of Truth" elsewhere. As posthumous works go, I guess it beats the Opus Postumum, but it's no Philosophical Investigations.

Also, as a trivial note, Davidson finally is satisfied by an account of non-referring terms:"[Parsons comments (in his notes on the original manuscript): "Davidson conditionalizes the whole truth definition with ('p' is true or 'p' is false) > ('p' is true IFF p)." Davidson remarks: "Wonderful! This also takes care of names that don't name."]" -- I remember Davidson admitting in a few essays (as an aside) that he didn't know what to do with non-referring singular terms. Seems he's happy to go paracomplete; I have no objections.

Next note: "Mr. Strawson on Logical Theory" was pretty good. I wish I'd read it a few months ago, when N.N. et al were discussing analyticity. I really need to read McFarlane's dissertation some day.

I confess that until recently I thought Strawson's "Introduction to Logical Theory" was just a logic textbook. An ordinary-language critique of modern symbolic logic sounds pretty interesting. (Though Geach notes in a brief review in "Mind" that Strawson is insufficiently critical about the fit between the traditional syllogistic logic and ordinary language -- I gather that the book is, in part, a defense of the virtues of the Old Logic. I found both of these essays about Strawson while trying to find "On Referring", which I have not read because, really, who does things that they set out intending to do? That is boring.)

Sudden transition: Finklestein's Wittgenstein seminar this term is limited to PhD students. I was leaning away from it anyway, since it conflicts with Haugeland's class. Apparently it's the first course at Chicago on the latter Wittgenstein in five or six years -- Conant's TLP class last term was the first time the early Wittgenstein was taught in about as long. Apparently this is something the PhD students at Chicago often complain about: you have to get your Wittgenstein subterraneanly/extracurricularly.

The Wittgstein Worksop is also limited to PhD students (or others with special permission), and I have a conflict with it this fall anyway. Hopefully I can manage to at least hear Price and Murray talk in February; I want to know how Murray's paper ends, and Price's paper is a lot of fun.

On a further not-good-note, Leiter Reports notes that Haugeland is retiring after this year. Well, I guess it's a good time to take a Heidegger course with him, then. :v

I'm halfway through "Truth and Finitude: Heidegger's Transcendental Existentialism". It's great so far. As a bit of idle speculation, I wonder if what Haugeland identifies as "ontological sofindingness" might be useful in formulating an argument against dialetheism. (See, ontological sofindingness is the rejection of impossibilities in Dasein's projecting-on of the possibilities of entities. Which works out to be a rejecting of inconsistent characterizations of entities. So at least on the surface, this looks like it might be a ground for denying that there can be true contradictions without relying on Explosion. If there's some "ontological" reason to reject inconsistent possibilities, then maybe that can be useful other places where Just Saying No To Contradictions crops up.)

An aside that probably could've just been a short e-mail to Duck: Isaac Levi can't really think that beliefs about set theory are incorrigible. For the first few beliefs of that sort that Frege & Russell had lead to inconsistency, hence they were revised in fact, hence they must have been corrigible in principle. So his exclusion of logic/set theory/mathetmatical beliefs from consideration in "The Enterprise of Knowledge" seems like it has to be (at least in part) for simplification.

A happy note about Chicago: There's a conference on (if memory serves) practical philosophy in the spring. McDowell will be there. So will several other people I know I was somewhat excited about when I heard about their attending, but whose names I now am forgetting. Hooray McDowell~

Another happy note: The guy on the faculty who studied Spinoza left last year. So, the Early Modern Philosophy Workshop suddenly had no one to run it. It has since been retooled into the "Modern Philosophy Workshop". Note that the page says it has been "expanded to cover the entire modern period". This is a bluff. All of the fall speakers are talking about Kant, except for Sally Sedgwick, who's talking about Kant and Hegel. Apparently the Early Modern Workshop generally had people talking about Spinoza and Leibniz. I am totally happy to make that trade.

Another happy note: I don't have to read any more Freud! Hooray!

A note on Chicago (not that one): I like the view from my apartment, and the weather's gotten a little better. Still not good weather, but not as bad as it had been. I still hate buses and think anyone who honestly likes the public transportation here must never have lived someplace where it was easy to get around by car, like Dallas. I miss Dallas. (Getting around by bus here is easier than trying to drive around and find a place to park, but I count that as a strike against the city generally. Getting anywhere takes forever here, no matter how you go about it. I suspect this will just get worse once it gets colder out and the nights come earlier.)

Only one more week until real classes start! The stupid theory class will keep going, but at least Freud will be done! Yeah for not-Freud!

Dreyfus, Heidegger, McDowell, and Action

Dreyfus has written about McDowell again, this time explicitly focusing on McDowell's account of action. (Edit: HT: Enowning.) It's generally more of the same, though the specific ways in which Dreyfus modifies his errors to take account of McDowell's response to his last critical piece might be of interest to some. He now "gets" that McDowell doesn't link conceptuality with "generality" in the sense Dreyfus assumed in his earlier articles, but he still links "propositional structure" and "objective facts" to what could be grasped by "detached observers", and he's able to throw out phrases like "timeless, descriptive, propositional account" -- as if the three were synonyms. So, same song, different tune.

Dreyfus is still as pleasant to read as ever, thankfully, and he does bring up interesting ways that McDowell might be misunderstood. His criticism of McDowell's appeal to demonstratives ("this moment", "this shade", "this situation") reminds me of Heidegger's critcism of Hegel's conception of time at the end of "Being & Time" -- though I think it's worth noting that Heidegger credits Hegel with linking "time" and "spirit", and merely complains that he didn't get their communion right. (Heidegger's criticisms seem to me entirely justified, incidentally. Hegel's account of time is just too quick, for just the reasons Heidegger gives. His long footnote about Hegel & Aristotle was also quite enlightening. Contrariwise, Dreyfus's criticisms of McDowell seem to me misplaced, for McDowell does not have a narrow notion of what relationship "this moment" can stand in to other times & happenings & events.)*

This bit from a footnote struck me as particularly egregious:

To say that the world solicits a certain activity is to say that the agent feels immediately drawn to act a certain way. This is different from deciding to perform the activity, since in feeling immediately drawn to do something one experiences no act of will. Rather, one experiences the environment calling for a certain way of acting, and finds one’s body responding to the call. There is no experience of an object and so no object to bring under a concept. There is also no “I”. Involved in the flow, one’s body is just drawn to do what needs to be done.

Here Dreyfus appears to me to make a number of errors.

The one that leaps out at me most is the notion that in (e.g) expert action one "finds one's body responding", rather than responding oneself (it can't be oneself that responds, since there is no "I" and therefore no one performing the action). I can "find my body responding" by spasming when a nerve is pinched by pants that are too tight, or find my leg swinging up when my knee is struck; but when things go normally, I do not "find my body" at all. I simply act, without any opposition between "me" and "my body" (or "my body" and "my mind" or my "soul" or "spirit" or "I"). "My body" exists for me only when I abstract in reflection because of some particular problem with my body which makes its being an issue for me. And the same for the things which are supposed to be opposed to "body" (mind, soul, "I") -- they exist by themselves only as abstractions. (I take this to be a Heideggerian point. SuZ 117: "The "substance" of human being is not the spirit as the synthesis of body and soul, but existence." "Body" is as much to blame for phenomenological errors as "soul" (and other more clearly "Cartesian" or "dualist" terms). I know I have seen this point made explicitly (perhaps in Macquarrie's introduction?), and I thought it was in SuZ itself, but I'm not finding it.)(Incidentally, I find it amusing that Heidegger remarks that "coporeality" is not something he is going to discuss in SuZ 108 -- indeed, the term is barely in the book at all. This is not what you'd expect if you approached Heidegger solely by way of Dreyfus.)

Dreyfus appears to slip up here: "one experiences the environment calling for..." -- surely this is irrelevant to what I find "one's body" to be doing. If one experiences an object, then one (one's body?) is not coping absorbedly, and one cannot experience any environment without experiencing any of the objects in it. Hence in truly absorbed coping, Dreyfus should say that not one, but a body responds to a call that is not experienced, but merely felt by that body. (I suspect that Dreyfus's account of "motor intentionality" could be modified to remove this vestige of intentional language, "feels". Surely Dreyfus wants to say that a "motor-intentional" being is put into a state of disequilibrium by the causal impetus of some facet of its environment, and its "motor-intentional" system moves itself in such a way that it will be returned to equilibrium -- thus is everyday action explained without any need for "intellectualizing" notions like "action". Hence removing the phenomenology from Dreyfus is the proper way to develop his phenomenology.)

Incidentally, I ran across a Heidegger passage I liked while looking up index entries for "body" in SuZ, 47/48:

The person is not a thing, not a substance, not an object. Here Scheler emphasizes the same thing which Husserl is getting at when he requires for the unity of the person a constitution essentially different from that of things of nature. What Scheler says of the person, he applies to acts as well. "An act is never also an object, for it is the nature of the being of acts only to be experienced in the process itself and given in reflection." Acts are nonpsychical. Essentially the person exists only in carrying out intentional acts, and is thus essentially not an object. Every psychical objectification, and thus every comprehension of acts as something psychical, is identical with depersonalization. In any case, the person is given as the agent of intentional acts which are connected by the unity of a meaning. [I especially liked this sentence.] Thus psychical being has nothing to do with being a person. Acts are carried out, the person carries them out. But what is the ontological meaning of "carrying out," how is the kind of being of the person to be defined in an ontologically positive way? But the critical question cannot stop at this. The question is about the being of the whole human being, whom one is accustomed to understand as a bodily-soul-like-spiritual unity. Body, soul, spirit might designate areas of phenomena which are thematically seperable for the sake of determinate investigations; within certain limits their ontological indeterminacy might not be so important.

He then goes on to complain about a variety of dualistic conceptions of personhood (I laughed at his gloss of the "rational animal" as an animal life with "a higher endowment whose kind of being remains just as obscure as that of the being so pieced together").

And another short one: "Neither may Dasein's spatiality be interpreted as an imperfection which adheres to existence by reason of the fatal "linkage of the spirit to a body." On the contrary, because Dasein is "spiritual", and only because of this, it can be spatial in a way which remains essentially impossible for any extended corporeal Thing." (SuZ 368) Only a "spiritual" being can see things as far away, nearby, too close, too far, in the area, "a stone's throw away", etc.

* Actually, looking at Dreyfus again, his criticism of McDowell's use of demonstratives is not similar to Heidegger's criticism of Hegel's "now" at all. But I wanted an excuse to mention that that part of Heidegger is especially good, so this paragraph is staying as is, and the truth is being hidden in a footnote. Dreyfus thinks that referring to "this situation just now" would be "an empty gesture". Surely it would, for a "detached observer", just like all the other descriptions he's considered. But why should it not be sufficient for the chessmaster? He saw that the situation on the board was that way at that moment, and made the right move without hesitation, manifesting his chessplaying virtue. Seeing the same board wasn't sufficient for the detached observer, but that's because the detached oberver can't play chess (if he could, he would not be detached).

In Which I Complain About Things I Like

Lately I've been looking for articles that try to tie in Heidegger and what came after him with current "analytic pragmatist" philosophy. This strikes me as a potentially very fruitful area of research, but I keep being frustrated by how little fleshing-out a lot of claims are given.

"What Does The (Young) Heidegger Mean By The Seinsfrage?" is a nice example: Despite what the title might lead one to expect, most of the article is devoted to discussing Marburg neo-Kantianism (especialyl Cassirer and Cohen) and relating their concerns to those of Rorty and Brandom. (It's enlightening to see how easily one can be lead to Rortyan views from an explicitly scientistic starting-point. In an attempt to revise philosophy to be "in tune" with modern science, Cohen is said to have rejected the correspondence view of truth, limited the world's contribution to our knowledge to a "merely causal" one, adopted an explicitly social notion of "reason" as the various ways in which we justify and revise our beliefs, severely limited all claims to a priority (leaving only a vague imperative to understand nature as law-governed as genuinely a priori), delimited "reality" to just whatever our best physical theories talked about, and denied any epistemic role whatsoever to experience. And he billed all of this as "Kantian"!) Sellars is mentioned once or twice in the paper; Davidson a little more often. None of these four analytic-type figures is quoted in the paper; they don't even make it into the bibliography. They are all mentioned in the article abstract, though!

The author likes to throw in lines like this: "With this, the neo-Kantians have basically adopted the thoroughly coherentist conception of experience currently advocated by Sellars, Davidson, Rorty, and Brandom." At no point in the paper are the various views on "experience" held by these philosophers discussed; they are merely gestured at, and associated with the figures Heidegger is about to be introduced as overcoming. Also, by the point this paper was written, Sellars hadn't advocated any sort of view for a good decade. He’d been dead since '89.

I actually really like this article; I am inclined to agree with most of the unsupported claims the author throws out, and often find them insightful. For instance, take this footnote: "Hegel, of course goes a step further than Fichte, claiming to demonstrate philosophically that this Anstoss does not just factically occur, but rather for the sake of initiating Reason’ s process. Consequently, Fichte, not Hegel, is the more appropriate precedent for neo-Kantianism, and indeed for Brandom’ s social pragmatism." I find this a very suggestive remark: Both Brandom and Fichte want (in some sense) to found their systems on practical reason; both (in some sense) ground objective purport in the imperative that others should agree with a judgement; Brandom distinguishes perceptual judgements from others by their being casually, but not epistemically, distinctive (they are judgements which arise as the result of reliable differential responsive dispositions); Fichte's account of the genesis of consciousness is that it is "ocassioned" by a "shock" (Anstoss) which stimulates the Ego to posit both the Ego and the Non-Ego (but the "shock" is neither Ego nor Non-Ego; it is outside of cognition generally, a "noumenon in the negative sense" which Fichte uses to justify his claim to being a "realist"). In all of these, Brandom is closer to Fichte than to Hegel -- Hegel doesn't want to give primacy to either thinking or doing, objectivity or intersubjectivity, and his understanding of the world's "causal" role in our epistemic lives is one that lets it contribute genuinely conceptual matters for us to take up.

For Hegel on Fichte's "shock", see the second addition to ss60 in the Encyclopedia Logic. This is the last section before Hegel moves on to "The Third Position of Thought with Respect to Objectivity: Immediate Knowing", wherein Jacobi is taken to task in a way that is strikingly reminscent of "Mind and World" -- Jacobi manages to both affirm the Mythical Given and spin frictionlessly in the void. On Jacobi's account, our only true knowledge is of what is immediately given without mediation; all mediation is a form of ungrounded speculation. This is a form of the Myth of the Given, since our knowledge of particulars is supposed to be independent of all other sorts of knowledge (which we just don't have, on Jacobi's account; he takes Hume to have refuted all claims to knowledge of anything beyond bare sense-data). To compensate for denying that we can have knowledge of anything beyond these barren particularities, Jacobi attributes tremendous import to Faith, which includes both everyday beliefs which are unable to be grounded in our knowledge of particulars (such as whatever Hume believed when he stopped philosophizing) and more particularly religious doctrines, all of which are "immediately" held to -- they are not held for any reasons; reason cannot speak to matters of Faith. It is this Faith that Jacobi holds to actually be important; what we can know is nothing for us, is of no use in living. Hence in Jacobi Hume becomes a Fideist, and the Myth of the Given is tied to a "frinctionless coherentism" among our beliefs. (It's a good section. Hegel even argues against Jacobi by reminding us of the role of education in what is "immediate", as McDowell does, and as Sellars did in "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind". And unlike McDowell & Sellars, Hegel goes on to use his line of argument to object to Fideism in religion, which is something I'm always in the market for.)

But in the article, the remark is just hanging there. Not even a footnote to other work which discusses it, not even a “(forthcoming)” or “(manuscript)". The literature is seriously gappy, and name-dropping is a real problem.

The article doesn’t actually get around to giving much of an answer to “What does the (young) Heidegger mean by the Seinsfrage”; the neo-Kantians eat up most of the space, and then the Heidegger stuff is mostly just about his criticisms of them. Certainly I don’t have a better grip on what “the question of Being” is supposed to be than I did before reading the article. But I like the article. It’s fun. But it’s becoming clear that some of the stuff I’d like to read still needs to be written.

I guess Nietzsche isn't cool anymore

Disturbing Letter Causes Concern at Lower Merion High:

Police have now identified and questioned a seriously disturbed student at Lower Merion High School believed responsible for the letters.... According to officials, the letter was written by someone who appeared to want to harm him/herself or others. While there was no language that specifically targeted the school community, the letter and a knife were found taped to an entrance at school. Other copies of the letter were found in girls and boys bathrooms during the school day.... School officials said the letter made specific references to the controversial German philosopher Martin Heidegger. He was at one time a member of Adolph Hitler's Nazi party.... "The student, though disturbed, had done some research or was a member of some group that supplied a certain amount of information," said Mike Bogad, a parent in the district.... "Obviously, he put time into it. He looked into it. He researched this philosopher. So I'm glad someone was taken into custody and hopefully, it is resolved."

Forcing strangers to read Heidegger is criminal, and the idea that there are organized groups reading Heidegger is troubling. I guess that's about right.

I'm curious what the specific Heidegger references were. I guess "being-towards-death" sounds pretty hardcore, and it'd fit with the random knife. Sounds like it wasn't the "inner truth and greatness of National Socialism" passages based on the rest of the article. Or maybe it was just some spiel about "authenticity".

edit: Update

Daly said that the student is a juvenile and he would not release her name or age. Nor would he disclose the full contents of the letter the girl taped to the door along with the knife and left copies in several places throughout the school.

He did say that it "was full of philosophical mumbo jumbo," quoting the philosopher Martin Heidegger. It contained no direct threats or racial or ethnic slurs, he said, but "had information that would lead you to believe that something was about to happen today," at the school. It included the phrase "Tomorrow it will fall apart," the police superintendent said.

The remark could have many meanings like a cry for help or a threat of suicide or violence, Daly said, but "you have to take it seriously."

Presumably it was the letter, and not Daly, who was quoting Heidegger.

So it turns out I have JSTOR access now

I now have a dozen more reviews of "Mind and World" than I had previously. Sadly, some of them are mislabeled; Noam Chomsky did not actually review "Mind and World." I am pretty sure McDowell didn't translate the Thaetetus, either, though I suppose he might have.

I also have McDowell's response to Dreyfus's APA address, along with Dreyfus's response to McDowell's response, McDowell's response to Dreyfus's response to McDowell's response to Dreyfus, and Dreyfus's response to McDowell's response to Dreyfus's response to McDowell's response to Dreyfus. I have no idea why, but for some reason all of these articles were free yesterday. I wasn't signed in, since the "sign in here" field was still visible, and I don't think UT subscribes to "Informaworld"; I know they don't list this "Inquiry" journal as one they have access to. I was actually looking at the Informaworld site yesterday so I could get an ISSN number for placing an interlibrary loan, but for some reason it had little green icons next to all of the articles.

But today the articles are all behind a paywall again. I am confused. I suspect I may actually have gained temporary access while signed on to the UT library site, but said site is currently 404ing on me, so I can't test this. But, if anyone wants access to the articles, feel free to e-mail me: dmlindquist at gmail. It looks like the issue in question might be viewable as a "free sample" if you register an account, but I know I never like having to futz around with journal sites any more than I have to.

So far I've only read McDowell's response, "What Myth?". McDowell answers Dreyfus's charges exactly like I'd thought he would: Dreyfus has an untenable view of language, of rationality, and of the conceptual (in all three cases, the flaw is that they are viewed as essentially situation-independent). These views are also attrubuted to Merleau-Ponty, but McDowell shies away from saying the same of Heidegger. (I wouldn't hesitate to lump Heidegger in with the other two, myself. But McDowell may be a more careful reader of the logos stuff than I am.) All of this is spelled out with reference to Aristotle's notion of phronesis, which is at least a start at elaborating on what McDowell gestured towards in lectures 4 & 6 of "Mind and World"; I know I've wanted to see him be more specific about what he was getting at with the "second nature" talk. I remember someone called him on this in the "Reading McDowell" volume and he demurred, claiming that his invocation of Aristotle was "merely suggestive" and meant to remind us that the notion of "nature" can be broader than "the realm of law". But if nobody can spell out how rationality is supposed to be a "second nature" for a human being, then it remains doubtful that the concept is up to the task demanded of it: in which case it wouldn't help us to see that "'nature' can be second nature" after all. McDowell's project needs a thicker conception of "second nature" than McDowell himself has thus far supplied.

Dreyfus had also made one of the most common charges leveled at McDowell's position, that it has to deny that non-rational animals can (for example) see that there is food in front of them. McDowell had already answered this in lecture 6 of "Mind and World", but I can understand why the complaint has stuck around: Lecture 6 is a mess, with far too much argumentative weight being put on a gesture to a distinction made by Gadamer (following Heidegger), that between "inhabiting an environment" and "being open to the world." McDowell really should have slowed down in that lecture; I know I couldn't figure out how his argument was supposed to work until I'd read a fair amount of McDowell's post-"Mind and World" work. It doesn't help that in "Mind and World" McDowell spells out the Gadamerian insight via reference to the early Marx -- one usually hopes for the explanans to be more readily understood than the explanandum!

In "What Myth?" McDowell revisits the issue again, and I think he does a much more satisfactory job of it. In response to the charge that because we share some of our perceptual capacities with some non-rational animals, our perceptual capacities cannot be "permeated with rationality", McDowell notes that "this sharing comes to no more than that there are descriptions that apply both to our competence and to the competence of other animals. I can acknowledge that, and still claim that there are further descriptions that fit our case only. There is more to our embodied coping than there is to the embodied coping of nonrational animals." Short & sweet.

(Hilary Putnam treats a very similar topic in chapter two of "Renewing Philosophy", part of an extended critique of Fodor. He brings it up again in "Mind, Body & World: The Threefold Cord". His treatment of non-rational animals' perceptual capacities is the best thing of Putnam's I've yet read.)

McDowell closes the essay with a section beginning thusly: "I am all for the project of giving an insightful phenomenology of our embodied coping. But a phenomenology of embodiment should be conceived not as a corrective to the thought that our orientation towards the world is permeated with conceptual rationality, but as a supplementation, filling out the details of something that needs to be presupposed by any acceptable version of that thought." Yes, exactly. Filling out the details in McDowell's story is precisely what I have been looking for in the phenomenologists. It is nice to see that McDowell is also interested in seeing this done; he's done a rather poor job of filling out the details himself, mainly due to sins of omission.

Will Dreyfus come to his senses? I have no idea! The title of his response essay doesn't exactly fill me with hope, but I haven't the slightest idea what Dreyfus would say against McDowell, here. Hopefully the whole thing doesn't devolve into exegesis of Aristotle, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty.

hat tip on the articles: spontaneity & receptivity