Jeff Malpas

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.

The work of the philosopher Donald Davidson is not only wide ranging in its influence and vision, but also in the breadth of issues that it encompasses. Davidson's work includes seminal contributions to philosophy of language and mind, to philosophy of action, and to epistemology and metaphysics. In _Dialogues with Davidson_, leading scholars engage with Davidson's work as it connects not only with aspects of current analytic thinking but also with a wider set of perspectives, including those of hermeneutics, phenomenology, the history of philosophy, feminist epistemology, and contemporary social theory. They link Davidson's work to other thinkers, including Collingwood, Kant, Derrida, Heidegger, and Gadamer. The essays demonstrate the continuing significance of Davidson's philosophy, not only in terms of the philosophical relevance of the ideas he advanced, but also in the further connections and insights those ideas engender

This paper advances an account of truth that has as its starting point Aristotle’s comments about truth at Metaphysics 1011b1. It argues that there are two key ideas in the Aristotelian account: that truth belongs to ‘sayings that’; and that truth involves both what is said and what is. Beginning with the second of these apparent truisms, the paper argues for the crucial role of the distinction between ‘what is said’ and ‘what is’ in the understanding of truth, on the grounds that it is essential to the distinction between truth and falsity and, indeed, to the very possibility of any critical assessment of statements. However, this distinction cannot be used to ground any account of truth in terms that refer to anything other than truth—there is thus no relation that underlies truth even though truth may be construed (in a certain limited sense) relationally. Returning to the first point, it is argued that while truth should indeed be understood as belonging to statements, it should not be construed as attaching to ‘propositions’, but to uttered sentences. The account of truth advanced is minimalist, and yet not deflationist; objectivist, and yet not independent of actual linguistic practice.

O lugar comum, no que tange à imagem de Heidegger, é a de um filósofo firmemente enraizado, não na cidade de Freiburg, na qual passou grande parte de sua vida, mas na região rural alemânico-suábia, nos arredores do povoado de Messkirch, onde nasceu. Poderia parecer que a distância entre Heidegger e Benjamin, entre Messkirch e Berlim, ou Paris, não poderia ser maior. Mas até que ponto estão as predileções pessoais de Heidegger pelo provinciano e o bauerlich de fato ligadas às posições filosóficas que ele desenvolveu? Poderia ser este o caso, de que a cidade, talvez ainda mais do que o campo, devesse desempenhar um papel central em qualquer tentativa séria de se pensar até o fim as implicações do pensamento de Heidegger sobre o ser? Esta apresentação investigará como Heidegger se sentiria na cidade de Benjamin, bem como o lugar da cidade no pensamento do próprio Heidegger, com o propósito de lançar luz não apenas sobre o pensamento de Heidegger, mas também sobre o do próprio Benjamin.The commonplace image of Heidegger is of a philosopher firmly rooted, not in the city of Freiburg in which much of his life was spent, but in the Alemannic-Schwabian countryside around the village of Messkirch in which he was born. It would seem that the distance between Heidegger and Benjamin, between Messkirch and Berlin or Paris could not be greater. But to what extent are Heidegger's own personal predilections for the provincial and the bauerlich actually tied to the philosophical positions that he developed? Might it be the case that the city, perhaps even more than the countryside, has to play a central role in any serious attempt to think through the implications of Heidegger's thought of being? This presentation will explore how Heidegger might find himself in Benjamin's city, and of the place of the city in Heidegger's own thought, with the aim of shedding light, not only on Heidegger's thought, but also on that of Benjamin himself

Water, its presence or absence, and the forms in which it appears, is fundamental to any and every place on earth. Indeed, along with soil, air and light, water is elemental to place, and so also to all life and dwelling in place. Moreover, human life is itself essentially determined through its entanglement in place and places, and so is constituted, if indirectly, perhaps, through water and its forms. The centrality of place that I am alluding to here arises out of a conception of the relation between human being and place, according to which who and what we are is fundamentally determined by the places in which we live – and this is so even while places are also shaped by the lives that are formed within them.

Topography or topology is a mode of philosophical thinking that combines elements of transcendental and hermeneutic approaches. It is anti-reductionist and relationalist in its ontology, and draws heavily, if sometimes indirectly, on ideas of situation, locality, and place. Such a topography or topology is present in Heidegger and, though less explicitly, in Hegel. It is also evident in many other recent and contemporary post-Kantian thinkers in addition to Kant himself. A key idea within such a topography or topology is that of triangulation—an idea that appears explicitly in the work of Donald Davidson. Triangulation captures the idea of the topographical domain as constituted through the mutual relatedness of the elements within it, and as only to be understood through the mapping out of such relatedness—in the case of the topographical domain that is the world, through the relatedness of self, other, and thing.

Oars sweep against resisting calm, the arc of their pull marking out a disturbance that clusters round each bite of the blade, their swing marking a measured passage across the lake’s expanse. The oars’ rhythmic movement, their muffled thudding resounding in the wooden curve of the hull whose upturned vaulting duplicates the sky’s own arch, reverberates in two realms, under air and above water, connecting at the same time as it disrupts. The movement of the oar, and of the boat, is also the movement of the oarsman, the strength of arm and shoulder at one with the outstretched oar, reaching, grasping, pulling, releasing, and reaching again. A horn challenges the expectant quiet of the sky, a shotgun shatters it, the sounds repeating themselves in rolling waves, re-enacting a ritual long past, subsiding back into heavy stillness. The sound of the horn announces an arrival, declares an audience, proclaims an event – the gunshot commands it. In this place, in which the very light has the character of an immersive medium, in which the earth beckons toward its green embrace, one watches for the appearance, the imminent presence, of a hidden majesty, a concealed wonder, a secret – one that does not reside only in what is awaited, but in the place itself.

According to Quine the inscrutability of reference leads to ontological relativity, or, as Donald Davidson calls it, relativity of reference. Davidson accepts both inscrutability and the indeterminacy of translation which it grounds, but rejects any explicit relativity of reference or ontology. The reasons behind this rejection are set out and explained. Explicit relativization is shown to be at odds with indeterminacy. Some notion of the relativity of reference (or, more generally, interpretation) is nevertheless shown to be both possible and necessary. It is, however, a relativity which is compatible with commensurability — the idea of absolute incommeasurability is ruled out along with the realist ideal of universal commensuration — as well as with indeterminacy. The indeterminacy thesis itself undergoes some slight elaboration, particularly in respect of the notion of empirical equivalence. In general the resulting account is one which retains both the absolute character of truth and some sense of the relativity of ontology against the background of Davidsonian holism.

“In space”, declared the posters for the 1979 movie Alien, in a deliberately disconcerting juxtaposition, “no-one can hear you scream.” Yet even the space that lies beyond the earth is not utterly silent – stars and planets themselves produce sounds that radiate through the rarefied gases lying between them, although the wavelengths produced lie far beyond the range of human hearing. There are, then, not even in the spaces between the planets and the stars, any truly silent spaces, and merely to be present in a space, no matter the nature of the space in question, is already to disturb that space in multiple ways – such disturbance typically being manifest acoustically no less than visually. Yet often we tend to conceptualise space and spatial presence in terms that actually give priority to the visual over the acoustic, and even to neglect the spatial character of the acoustic altogether. A classic example of this is to be found in the work of the British philosopher Peter Strawson who famously proposed, as a kind of thought-experiment, the idea of what he called a ‘No-Space world’ that was constituted in purely auditory terms, and was for just this reason taken to be a non-spatial world. 1..

SummaryIn Davidson's Theory of radical interpretation the principle of charity plays a crucial role. However the principle is the subject of widespread misunderstanding. The author attempts to provide an overall account of the principle and in doing so details some aspects of the holism which characterises the Davidsonian approach to interpretation. Charity is shown as inseparable from that holism. Two aspects of the principle are distinguished and some objections to the principle are also considered

To what extent is our being as social creatures dependent on our having a grasp of sociality? Is a purely solipsistic space, a space that can be grasped without any grasp of the existence of others, possible? These questions are examined and the possible connection between space and sociality explored. The central claim is that there is indeed an intimate relation between the concept of space and the idea of the social: that any creature that has a grasp of the concept of space must also be a creature that has a grasp of sociality in the sense of having a grasp of itself as one creature existing alongside a multiplicity of other creatures.

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

Recent philosophy has seen the idea of the transcendental, first introduced in its modern form in the work of Kant, take on a new prominence. Bringing together an international range of younger philosophers and established thinkers, this volume opens up the idea of the transcendental, examining it not merely as a mode of argument, but as naming a particular problematic and a philosophical style. With contributions engaging with both analytic and continental approaches, this book will be of essential interest to philosophers and philosophy students interested in the idea of the transcendental and the part that it plays in modern and contemporary philosophy.

This chapter attempts to examine nostalgia as both a mood or disposition in general, and as a mood or disposition that is characteristic of philosophical reflection. Nostalgia is a combination of the Greek nostos, meaning home or the return home, with algos, meaning pain, so that its literal meaning is a pain associated with the return home. Part of this inquiry will involve a rethinking of the mood of nostalgia and what that mood encompasses. Rather than understand the nostalgic as characterized solely by the desire to return to a halcyon past, it is explored through the connotations suggested by its Greek etymology as precisely a longing for the return home—a return that cannot be achieved—a form of homesickness, and so as unsettling rather than comfortable, as bringing with it a sense of the essential questionability of our own being in the world.

Both Kant and Davidson view the existence of mental states, and so the possibility of mental content, as dependent on the obtaining of a certain unity among such states. And the unity at issue seems also to be tied, in the case of both thinkers, to a form of self-reflexivity. No appeal to self-reflexivity, however, can be adequate to explain the unity of consciousness that is necessary for the possibility of content- it merely shifts the focus of the question from the unity of consciousness in general to the unity of self-reflexivity in particular. Through a comparison of the views of Kant and Davidson on these matters, the nature of the unity of consciousness is explored, in relation to both the idea of the unity of the self and the unity that would seem to be required for the possibility of content. These forms of unity are seen to be indeed connected, and to be grounded, in Davidson and perhaps also in Kant, in organized, oriented, embodied activity.