Theodore Schatzki

This paper combines views of Wittgenstein and Heidegger into an account of mind/ action. It does this by suggesting that these two philosophers be viewed in part as descendants of Life?philosophy (Lebensphilosophie). Part I describes the conception of life that informs and emerges from these thinkers. Parts Two and Three detail particular aspects of this conception: Wittgenstein on the constitution of states of life and Heidegger on the flow?structure of the stream of life. The Conclusion offers reasons for believing their combined viewpoint

Beginning with the provocative premise that the body is the anchor of the social order, this unique book delves into the multidimensional relationship between sociopolitical bodies and human bodies. Celebrated authors, including Judith Butler and Emily Martin, explore the ways that prevailing economic and political institutions affect our physical selves and how we experience them, and, in turn, the ways that our bodily senses, energies, activities, and desires reinforce or challenge the societal status quo. Timely and theoretically sophisticated, this book makes a significant contribution to some of the most vital debates of cultural studies and political theory today.

This article criticizes Bourdieu's and Giddens's overintellectualizing accounts of human activity on the basis of Wittgenstein's insights into practical under standing. Part 1 describes these two theorists' conceptions of a homology between the organization of practices (spatial-temporal manifolds of action) and the governance of individual actions. Part 2 draws on Wittgenstein's discussions of linguistic definition and following a rule to criticize these conceptions for ascribing content to the practical understanding they claim governs action. Part 3 then suggests an alternative, Wittgensteinian account of the homology between practices and actions that avoids this pitfall.

The paper outlines how Wittgenstein and Heidegger's views can be combined to form a general account of mind and action. It accomplishes this by interpreting Heidegger of the "Being and Time" era and Wittgenstein of the "Philosophical Investigations" onwards asdescendents of the School of Thought called life philosophy. Heidegger is construed as analyzing the occurrence of The Stream of Life, while Wittgenstein is understood as examining (a) The appearances of The Stream in The World and (b) The linguistic articulation tracking their appearances

This chapter argues that landscapes are not only spatial phenomena but spatial-temporal entities in that they both occur in time and occupy space. It further argues that aside from being spatial-temporal entities, they are “temporalspatial” phenomena as well, by virtue of the fact that they are anchored and drawn into the timespace of human activity. This phenomenon of “activity timespace” is an overlooked aspect in social theory, although it is arguably an important aspect of social life. Timespace is the dimensionality of humans proceeding in place; in anchoring and being drawn into timespaces, landscapes provide a solid basis for and figure in human existence in place. This chapter first explores the works of Heidegger and Gosden, and proceeds to examine the character of landscapes as temporalspatial phenomena.

This essay examines how nature pertains to social life. Part I describes the social ontology the essay employs to address this issue. This ontology is of the site variety and is opposed to ontologies of both the individualist and socialist sorts. Part II describes where nature appears in this ontology. Artifacts are differentiated from nature, and much of ?nature? is shown to be second nature, a type of artifact that looks and feels like nature. Part II concludes by disputing the idea that nature forms a backdrop against which society develops semi-autonomously. Part III examines the idea of human history as a natural history. Opposing construals of natural history that treat human-social existence as a piece of nature, it defends the necessity of maintaining distinctions between social life and nature and between social history and natural change. None the less, it continues, human history is a natural history. These claims are held together via a neo-Marxian conception of human natural history as the development of humankind through its entanglement with nature. Elements of the ?metabolism of humankind with nature are described.

This essay is a commentary on and critique of the conception of human activity that Robert Pippin attributes to Hegel in his recent book, Hegel's Practical Philosophy. Two principal features of this conception are that it treats human activity as indeterminate and that it construes what someone does and why on a given occasion as depending on social contexts. Pippin suggests that these two features will sound strange to contemporary philosophers. The essay claims, by contrast, that these features will not sound strange to philosophers who advocate one of a small family of other accounts that espouse these two ideas. The essay argues, further, that certain such accounts, namely, ones inspired by Heidegger and Wittgenstein, are more promising accounts of human activity than is Hegel's. The bulk of the essay explores the indeterminacy of activity and the dependency of activity on social context as these are analyzed in Pippin's book and in Heidegger and Wittgenstein

Explaining Heidegger's ideas on spatial phenomena simply and succinctly, this book will be provocative and invaluable to anyone interested in space and spatial theory. The author gives incisive, informative, and compelling analyses of Heidegger's overall philosophy and of his changing ideas about space, spatiality, the clearing, places, sites, and dwelling. This study also charts the legacy of these ideas in philosophy, geography, architecture, and anthropology and includes a bibliography of select works that examine or are influenced by Heidegger's ideas on space.

This book develops an original Heideggerian account of the timespace and indeterminacy of human activity while describing insights that this account provides into the nature of activity, society and history. Drawing on empirical examples, the book argues that activity timespace is a key component of social space and time, shows that interwoven timespaces form an essential infrastructure of social phenomena, offers a novel account of the existence of the past in the present, and defends the teleological character of emotional and ceremonial actions.

This paper combines a phenomenological account of the types of causal transaction found in social reality with a critique of two theories, one structuralist and one Marxist, that contravene it. Part I argues that there are three types of causal transaction in social life in addition to physical causal transactions: people bringing about states of affairs by acting, states of affairs bringing about actions by inducing responses, and entities and states of affairs bringing about what makes sense to people to do by making certain factors determine this. It is also contended that social formations and structures cause actions and other social formations/structures only by way of participating in these types of transaction. The conditions under which this occurs are discussed. Part II criticizes Peter Blau's account of structural effects and Jean?Paul Sartre's version of a materialist theory of history, two theories that either advocate or require causal transactions between social structures/ formations which do not reduce to transactions of the types described in Part I. The paper concludes by suggesting that social entities that make actions possible do not thereby cause them

The essay criticizes an alleged new paradigm for explaining sociocultural change: selectionism. Part one describes the general selectionist explanatory schema, which selectionists claim applies to realms beyond the biological, in particular, the sociocultural. Part two focuses on the way most selectionists, in focusing on cultural change alone, wrongly separate culture from society. Particular atten-tion is paid to the accounts these selectionists offer of human action. Part three fills out a conception of the sociocultural, the need for which is indicated by the arguments of the previous section. Part four then criticizes existing social selectionist accounts of sociocultural change, again focusing on the role of human action. The conclusion is that selectionism does not offer a new explanatory paradigm, but is only a label for a class of accounts that highlight the role of contextualized agency in explaining social change

This essay pursues two goals: to argue that two fundamental types of time—the time of objective reality and “the time of the soul”—meet in human activity and history and to defend the legitimacy of calling a particular version of the second type a kind of time. The essay begins by criticizing Paul Ricoeur’s version of the claim that times of these two sorts meet in history. It then presents an account of human activity based on Heidegger’s Being and Time, according to which certain times of the two types—existential temporality and succession—meet in human activity. The legitimacy of calling existential temporality a kind of time is then defended via an expanded analysis of activity that examines where the two times meet there. The concluding section briefly considers a conception of historical time due to David Carr before showing why history is a broader domain encompassing human activity where the two times meet