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1466Husserl, Intentionality, and Cognitive Science (edited book)MIT Press. 1984.This new anthology will serve as an ideal introduction to phenomenology for analytic philosophers, both as a text and as the single most useful source book on Husserl for cognitive scientists.
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833Why Heideggerian ai failed and how fixing it would require making it more HeideggerianPhilosophical Psychology 20 (2). 2007.MICHAEL WHEELER Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005432 pages, ISBN: 0262232405 (hbk); $35.001.When I was teaching at MIT in the 1960s, students from the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory would come to...
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760Intelligence without representation – Merleau-Ponty’s critique of mental representationPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1 (4): 367-83. 2002.Existential phenomenologists hold that the two most basic forms of intelligent behavior, learning, and skillful action, can be described and explained without recourse to mind or brain representations. This claim is expressed in two central notions in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception: the intentional arc and the tendency to achieve a maximal grip. The intentional arc names the tight connection between body and world, such that, as the active body acquires skills, those skills are “sto…Read more
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656The Current Relevance of Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of EmbodimentElectronic Journal of Analytic Philosophy. 1998.In this paper I would like to explain, defend, and draw out the implications of this claim. Since the intentional arc is supposed to embody the interconnection of skillful action and perception, I will first lay out an account of skill
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564Intelligence without representation – Merleau-ponty's critique of mental representation the relevance of phenomenology to scientific explanationPhenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1 (4): 367-383. 2002.Existential phenomenologists hold that the two most basic forms of intelligent behavior, learning, and skillful action, can be described and explained without recourse to mind or brain representations. This claim is expressed in two central notions in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception: the intentional arc and the tendency to achieve a maximal grip. The intentional arc names the tight connection between body and world, such that, as the active body acquires skills, those skills are stor…Read more
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549Overcoming the Myth of the Mental: How Philosophers Can Profit from the Phenomenology of Everyday ExpertiseProceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 79 (2). 2005.Back in 1950, while a physics major at Harvard, I wandered into C.I. Lewis’s epistemology course. There, Lewis was confidently expounding the need for an indubitable Given to ground knowledge, and he was explaining where that ground was to be found. I was so impressed that I immediately switched majors from ungrounded physics to grounded philosophy.
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513Overcoming the myth of the mentalTopoi 25 (1-2): 43-49. 2006.Can we accept John McDowell’s Kantian claim that perception is conceptual “all the way out,” thereby denying the more basic perceptual capacities we seem to share with prelinguistic infants and higher animals? More generally, can philosophers successfully describe the conceptual upper floors of the edifice of knowledge while ignoring the embodied coping going on on the ground floor? I argue that we shouldn’t leave the conceptual component of our lives hanging in midair and suggest how philosophe…Read more
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43320. What Computers Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial ReasonIn Bernard Williams (ed.), Essays and Reviews: 1959-2002, Princeton University Press. pp. 90-100. 2014.
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416The return of the myth of the mentalInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 50 (4). 2007.McDowell's claim that "in mature human beings, embodied coping is permeated with mindedness",1 suggests a new version of the mentalist myth which, like the others, is untrue to the phenomenon. The phenomena show that embodied skills, when we are fully absorbed in enacting them, have a kind of non-mental content that is non-conceptual, non-propositional, non-rational and non-linguistic. This is not to deny that we can monitor our activity while performing it. For solving problems, learning a new …Read more
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409Mental Illness and PsychologyUniversity of California Press. 1986.This seminal early work of Foucault is indispensable to understanding his development as a thinker. Written in 1954 and revised in 1962, _Mental Illness and Psychology _delineates the shift that occurred in Foucault's thought during this period. The first iteration reflects the philosopher's early interest in and respect for Freud and the psychoanalytic tradition. The second part, rewritten in 1962, marks a dramatic change in Foucault's thinking. Examining the history of madness as a social and …Read more
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404Kierkegaard on the Internet: Anonymity vs. Commitment in the Present AgeKierkegaard Studies Yearbook 1999 (1): 96-109. 1999.
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385Being and power: Heidegger and FoucaultInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 4 (1). 1996.being, culminating in the technological understanding of being, in order to help us understand and overcome our current way of dealing with things as objects and resources, Foucault analyzes several regimes of power, culminating in modern bio-power, in order to help us free ourselves from understanding ourselves as subjects.
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361Response to McDowellInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 50 (4). 2007.In previous work I urged that the perceptual experience we rational animals enjoy is informed by capacities that belong to our rationality, and - in passing - that something similar holds for our intentional action. In his Presidential Address, Hubert Dreyfus argued that I thereby embraced a myth, "the Myth of the Mental". According to Dreyfus, I cannot accommodate the phenomenology of unreflective bodily coping, and its importance as a background for the conceptual capacities exercised in refle…Read more
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358The primacy of phenomenology over logical analysis: A critique of SearlePhilosophical Topics 27 (2): 3-24. 1999.
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343What Computers Still Can’T Do: A Critique of Artificial ReasonMIT Press. 1992.A Critique of Artificial Reason Hubert L. Dreyfus . HUBERT L. DREYFUS What Computers Still Can't Do Thi s One XZKQ-GSY-8KDG What. WHAT COMPUTERS STILL CAN'T DO Front Cover.
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336Essays discuss the themes of worldliness, affectedness, understanding, and the care-structure found in Heidegger's work on the nature of existence
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331From socrates to expert systems: The limits and dangers of calculative rationalityIn Carl Mitcham & Alois Huning (eds.), Philosophy and Technology II: Information Technology and Computers in Theory and Practice, Reidel. 1985.Actual AI research began auspiciously around 1955 with Allen Newell and Herbert Simon's work at the RAND Corporation. Newell and Simon proved that computers could do more than calculate. They demonstrated that computers were physical symbol systems whose symbols could be made to stand for anything, including features of the real world, and whose programs could be used as rules for relating these features. In this way computers could be used to simulate certain important aspects intelligence. Thu…Read more
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322of autonomous agency. Yet neither denies the importance of human freedom. In Heidegger's early work the subject is reinterpreted as Dasein -- a non autonomous, culturally bound (or thrown) way of being, that can yet change the field of possibilities in which it acts. In middle Heidegger, thinkers alone have the power to disclose a new world, while in later Heidegger, anyone is free to step back from the current world, to enter one of a plurality of worlds, and, thereby, facilitate a change in th…Read more
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301In this paper I would like to explain, defend, and draw out the implications of this claim. Since the intentional arc is supposed to embody the interconnection of skillful action and perception, I will first lay out an account of skill
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283Medicine as Combining Natural and Human ScienceJournal of Medicine and Philosophy 36 (4): 335-341. 2011.Medicine is unique in being a combination of natural science and human science in which both are essential. Therefore, in order to make sense of medical practice, we need to begin by drawing a clear distinction between the natural and the human sciences. In this paper, I try to bring the old distinction between the Geistes and Naturwissenschaften up to date by defending the essential difference between a realist explanatory theoretical study of nature including the body in which the scientist di…Read more
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276Heterophenomenology: Heavy-handed Sleight-of-hand (review)Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6 (1-2): 45-55. 2007.We argue that heterophenomenology both over- and under-populates the intentional realm. For example, when one is involved in coping, one’s mind does not contain beliefs. Since the heterophenomenologist interprets all intentional commitment as belief, he necessarily overgenerates the belief contents of the mind. Since beliefs cannot capture the normative aspect of coping and perceiving, any method, such as heterophenomenology, that allows for only beliefs is guaranteed not only to overgenerate be…Read more
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270A History of First Step FallaciesMinds and Machines 22 (2): 87-99. 2012.In the 1960s, without realizing it, AI researchers were hard at work finding the features, rules, and representations needed for turning rationalist philosophy into a research program, and by so doing AI researchers condemned their enterprise to failure. About the same time, a logician, Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, pointed out that AI optimism was based on what he called the “first step fallacy”. First step thinking has the idea of a successful last step built in. Limited early success, however, is not …Read more
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266Refocusing the question: Can there be skillful coping without propositional representations or brain representations? (review)Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1 (4): 413-25. 2002.
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257Martin Heidegger's major work, Being and Time, is usually considered the culminating work in a tradition called existential philosophy. The first person to call himself an existential thinker was Soren Kierkegaard, and his influence is clearly evident in Heidegger's thought. Existential thinking rejects the traditional philosophical view, that goes back to Plato at least, that philosophy must be done from a detached, disinterested point of view. Kierkegaard argues that our primary access to real…Read more
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253Interpreting Heidegger on Das manInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 38 (4). 1995.In their debate over my interpretation of Heidegger's account of das Man in Being and Time, Frederick Olafson and Taylor Carman agree that Heidegger's various characterizations of das Man are inconsistent. Olafson champions an existentialist/ontic account of das Man as a distorted mode of being?with. Carman defends a Wittgensteinian/ontological account of das Man as Heidegger's name for the social norms that make possible everyday intelligibility. For Olafson, then, das Man is a privative mode o…Read more
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216A Merleau-Pontyian Critique of Husserl’s and Searle’s Representationalist Accounts of ActionProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 100 (3): 287-302. 2000.Husserl and Searle agree that, for a bodily movement to be an action, it must be caused by a propositional representation. Husserl's representation is a mental state whose intentional content is what the agent is trying to do; Searle thinks of the representation as a logical structure expressing the action's conditions of satisfaction. Merleau-Ponty criticises both views by introducing a kind of activity he calls motor intentionality, in which the agent, rather than aiming at success, feels draw…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
20th Century Philosophy |
Continental Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
20th Century Philosophy |
Continental Philosophy |