Mark Wrathall

Hubert L. Dreyfus's engagement with other thinkers has always been driven by his desire to understand certain basic questions about ourselves and our world. The philosophers on whom his teaching and research have focused are those whose work seems to him to make a difference to the world. The essays in this volume reflect this desire to "make a difference"--not just in the world of academic philosophy, but in the broader world.Dreyfus has helped to create a culture of reflection--of questioning the deep premises that inform and shape work in artificial intelligence and cognitive science. He has also been the primary introducer and interpreter of Martin Heidegger's work to the world of information technology. The essays in this volume represent the fruitful application of deep philosophical analysis to the concerns of our modern technological world.The sections are Coping and Intentionality; Computers and Cognitive Science; and "Applied Heidegger." In addition to cognitive science and artificial intelligence, topics include everyday skills, religion, business practices, and medical care. The book concludes with Dreyfus's responses to the essays.Contributors : Daniel Andler, Patricia Benner, Albert Borgmann, Harry Collins, George Downing, Fernando Flores, Sean Kelly, Joseph Rouse, Theodore R. Schatzki, John Searle, Robert C. Solomon, Charles Spinosa, David Stern, Charles Taylor, Terry Winograd, Mark Wrathall

Although Martin Heidegger is undeniably one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, among the philosophers who study his work we find considerable disagreement over what might seem to be basic issues: why is Heidegger important? What did his work do? This volume is an explicit response to these differences, and is unique in bringing together representatives of many different approaches to Heidegger's philosophy. Topics covered include Heidegger's place in the 'history of being', Heidegger and ethics, Heidegger and theology, and Heidegger and Nazi concepts of race. More generally, the contributors also address their respective visions of the nature of philosophy and the presuppositions which guide their understanding of Heidegger.

A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism is a complete guide to two of the dominant movements of philosophy in the twentieth century. Written by a team of leading scholars, including Dagfinn Føllesdal, J. N. Mohanty, Robert Solomon, Jean–Luc Marion Highlights the area of overlap between the two movements Features longer essays discussing each of the main schools of thought, shorter essays introducing prominent themes, and problem–oriented chapters Organised topically, around concepts such as temporality, intentionality, death and nihilism Features essays on unusual subjects, such as medicine, the emotions, artificial intelligence, and environmental philosophy

How should we understand religion, and what place should it hold, in an age in which metaphysics has come into disrepute? The metaphysical assumptions which supported traditional theologies are no longer widely accepted, but it is not clear how this 'end of metaphysics' should be understood, nor what implications it ought to have for our understanding of religion. At the same time there is renewed interest in the sacred and the divine in disciplines as varied as philosophy, psychology, literature, history, anthropology, and cultural studies. In this volume, leading philosophers in the United States and Europe address the decline of metaphysics and the space which this decline has opened for non-theological understandings of religion. The contributors include Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor, Jean-Luc Marion, Gianni Vattimo, Hubert Dreyfus, Robert Pippin, John Caputo, Adriaan Peperzak, Leora Batnitzky, and Mark Wrathall.

This book includes ten essays that trace the notion of unconcealment as it develops from Heidegger's early writings to his later work, shaping his philosophy of truth, language and history. 'Unconcealment' is the idea that what entities are depends on the conditions that allow them to manifest themselves. This concept, central to Heidegger's work, also applies to worlds in a dual sense: first, a condition of entities manifesting themselves is the existence of a world; and second, worlds themselves are disclosed. The unconcealment or disclosure of a world is the most important historical event, and Heidegger believes there have been a number of quite distinct worlds that have emerged and disappeared in history. Heidegger's thought as a whole can profitably be seen as working out the implications of the original understanding of unconcealment.

This paper discusses Heidegger's 1931-32 lecture course on The Essence of Truth. It argues that Heidegger read Platonic ideas, not only as stage-setting for the western philosophical tradition's privileging of conceptualization over practice, and its correlative treatment of truth as correctness, but also as an early attempt to work through truth as the fundamental experience of unhiddenness. Wrathall shows how several of Heidegger's more-famous claims about truth, e.g. that propositional truth is grounded in truth as world-disclosure, and including Heidegger's critique of the self-evidence of truth as correspondence, are first revealed in a powerful (if iconoclastic) reading of Plato.

La tradition phénoménologique a longtemps considéré que la perception naturelle n’était ni actualisée conceptuellement ni régie par des lois déterministes, mais qu’elle était plutôt organisée d’après la strcture pratiquement articulée de l’être-dans-le-monde physique. Or, cela laisse entier le problème d’explication de la façon dont la perception peut assurer un support justificatif à la pensée. La réponse de la phénoménologie est que c’est la structure significative de la perception naturelle qui nous permet de penser des objets en motivant nons pensées sur ces objets par la manière dont ils se présente à notre perception. Ce pont de vue permet de sortir des problèmes qui tourmentent la philosophie de l’esprit contemporaine

The Blackwell Companion to Heidegger is a complete guide to the work and thought of Martin Heidegger, one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Considers the most important elements of Heidegger’s intellectual biography, including his notorious involvement with National Socialism Provides a systematic and comprehensive exploration of Heidegger’s work One of the few books on Heidegger to cover his later work as well as Being and Time Includes key critical responses to Heidegger’s philosophy Contributors include many of the leading interpreters of, and commentators on, the work of Heidegger

In this paper I hope to demonstrate that, despite dramatic differences in approach, Analytic and Continental philosophers can be brought into a productive dialogue with one another on topics central to the philosophical agenda of both traditions. Their differences tend to obscure the fact that both traditions have as a fundamental project the critique of past accounts of language, intentionality, and mind. Moreover, writers within the two traditions are frequently in considerable agreement about the failings of past accounts. Where they tend to differ is in the sorts of positive accounts they give. By exploring the important areas of disagreement against the background of agreement, however, it is possible to gain insights unavailable to those rooted in a single tradition.

Heidegger and the study of his thought have earned wide acceptance, extending beyond philosophy to influence an array of other disciplines. Critically selected by leading scholars in the field, the articles in this new collection bring together the most essential and representative scholarship on Heidegger. Focusing on the major phases of his work which attracted most attention from contemporary thinkers, as well as exploring new and important areas of Heidegger scholarship, this four-volume set is an invaluable resource for any curriculum supporting philosophy, as well as political theory, literature, classics, anthropology, and cultural studies. This volume is available on its own or as part of the four-volume set, Heidegger Reexamined . For a complete list of the volume titles in this set, see the listing for Heidegger Reexamined [ISBN: 0-415-94041-9].

This paper develops a modification of the notion of incommensurable worlds upon which Dreyfus and Spinosa base their robust realism. In particular, I argue that we cannot make sense of a conception of incommensurability according to which incommensurable worlds entail cognitively incompatible claims. Instead, as Dreyfus and Spinosa sometimes suggest, incommensurable worlds should be understood as being practically incompatible, meaning that the inhabitants of one world cannot, given their practices for dealing with some things, engage in practices central to the other world. Practical incompatibility grounds a defensible account of incommensurability while securing a necessary step in Dreyfus and Spinosa's argument for robust realism. At the same time, it shows how their idea of incommensurability is immune to the sorts of objections Donald Davidson makes to the idea of a plurality of conceptual schemes, without at the same time refuting Davidson's argument. Finally, an appreciation of the failings of cognitive accounts of incommensurability demonstrates that Dreyfus and Spinosa are not entitled to deny that all true descriptions of the universe are compatible.

S. Kierkegaard argued that our highest task as humans is to realize an “intensified” or “developed” form of subjectivity—his name for self-responsible agency. A self-responsible agent is not only responsible for her actions. She also bears responsibility for the individual that she is. In this paper, I review Kierkegaard’s account of the role that our capacity for reflective self-evaluation plays in making us responsible for ourselves. It is in the exercise of this capacity that we can go from being subjective in a degraded sense—merely being an idiosyncratic jumble of accidental and arbitrary attitudes and affects—to being a subject in the ideal or eminent sense. The latter requires the exercise of my capacity for reflective self-evaluation, since it involves recognizing, identifying with, and reinforcing those aspects of my overall make-up that allow me to express successfully a coherent way of being in the world. Kierkegaard argues that taking immortality seriously is one way to achieve the right kind of reflective stance on one’s own character or personality. Thus, Kierkegaard argues that immortality as a theoretical posit can contribute to one’s effort to own or assume responsibility for being the person one is.

For more than a quarter of a century, Hubert L. Dreyfus has been the leading voice in American philosophy for the continuing relevance of phenomenology, particularly as developed by Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Dreyfus has influenced a generation of students and a wide range of colleagues, and these volumes are an excellent representation of the extent and depth of that influence.In keeping with Dreyfus's openness to others' ideas, many of the essays in this volume take the form of arguments with various of his positions. The essays focus on the dialogue with the continental philosophical tradition, in particular the work of Heidegger, that has played a foundational role in Dreyfus's thinking. The sections are Philosophy and Authenticity; Modernity, Self, and the World; and Heideggerian Encounters. The book concludes with Dreyfus's responses to the essays.Contributors : William D. Blattner, Taylor Carman, David R. Cerbone, Dagfinn Føllesdal, Charles Guignon, Michel Haar, Beatrice Han, Alastair Hannay, John Haugeland, Randall Havas, Jeff Malpas, Mark Okrent, Richard Rorty, Julian Young, Michael E. Zimmerman.