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33Joseph K. Schear (ed.) , Mind, Reason, and Being-in-the-World: The McDowell-Dreyfus Debate . Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 34 (3-4): 167-170. 2014.Here I review the essays by McDowell, Dreyfus, and many others edited by Schear for "The McDowell/Dreyfus Debate". Topics include the relation between conceptuality and "non-conceptual content", the role of embodied coping in human life, the extent of continuity and discontinuity between humans and other animals, and the legacies of German Idealism and phenomenology.
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523Resisting the Disenchantment of Nature: McDowell and the Question of Animal MindsInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 55 (2): 131-147. 2012.Abstract McDowell's contributions to epistemology and philosophy of mind turn centrally on his defense of the Aristotelian concept of a ?rational animal?. I argue here that a clarification of how McDowell uses this concept can make more explicit his distance from Davidson regarding the nature of the minds of non-rational animals. Close examination of his responses to Davidson and to Dennett shows that McDowell is implicitly committed to avoiding the following ?false trichotomy?: that animals are…Read more
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32A Precis of Intentionality and the Myths of the GivenInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 24 (4): 547-551. 2016.This precise provides an synopsis of my book "Intentionality and the Myths of the Given" (Routledge 2014). I describe the problem of intentionality in terms of the need to (1) do justice to both discursive intentionality (the intentionality of 'sapient' thought and talk) and somatic or bodily intentionality while also (2) avoiding the various Myths of the Given, including the epistemic and semantic Myths. I locate an early version to accomplish this project in C. I. Lewis. The argument shows why…Read more
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83Nietzsche’s DaybreakEpoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 13 (1): 81-100. 2008.Any interpretation of Nietzsche’s criticisms of morality must show whether or not Nietzsche is entitled both to deny free will and to be concerned with furtheringhuman freedom. Here I will show that Nietzsche is entitled to both claims if his theory of freedom is set in the context of a naturalistic drive-psychology. The drive-psychology allows Nietzsche to develop a modified but recognizable account of freedom as autonomy. I situate this development in Nietzsche’s thought through a close readin…Read more
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59Response to ‘Somatic Intentionality Bifurcated: A Sellarisan Response to Sachs’s Merleau-Pontyan Account of IntentionalityInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 23 (4): 562-565. 2015.Christia (2015) argues that my criticism of Sellars -- that for Sellars, all intentionality is what I call "discursive intentionality" -- relies on a misunderstanding of Sellarsian intuitions (see Sachs 2014). Here I respond to Christias by pointing that that while is correct that Sellars has a distinction between full-blown linguistic intentionality and perceptual takings, Sellars's theory of perceptual takings cannot do justice to the figure/ground structure of embodied perception stressed by …Read more
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488Discursive and Somatic Intentionality: Merleau-Ponty Contra 'McDowell or Sellars'International Journal of Philosophical Studies 22 (2): 199-227. 2014.Here I show that Sellars’ radicalization of the Kantian distinction between concepts and intuitions is vulnerable to a challenge grounded in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment. Sellars argues that Kant’s concept of ‘intuition’ is ambiguous between singular demonstrative phrases and sense-impressions. In light of the critique of the Myth of the Given, Sellars argues, in the ‘Myth of Jones’, that sense-impression are theoretical posits. I argue that Merleau-Ponty offers a way of understan…Read more
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367Rorty's Debt to Sellarsian MetaphysicsMetaphilosophy 44 (5): 682-707. 2013.Rorty regards himself as furthering the project of the Enlightenment by separating Enlightenment liberalism from Enlightenment rationalism. To do so, he rejects the very need for explicit metaphysical theorizing. Yet his commitments to naturalism, nominalism, and the irreducibility of the normative come from the metaphysics of Wilfrid Sellars. Rorty's debt to Sellars is concealed by his use of Davidsonian arguments against the scheme/content distinction and the nonsemantic concept of truth. The …Read more
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