Jethro Masís

5 JETHRO MASÍS The Battle of Myths: A Phenomenological Foray Into the Dreyfus-McDowell Debate Jethro Masís Universidad de Costa Rica Abstract In this paper I take stock of the Dreyfus-McDowell debate regarding the classical conceptualism-nonconceptualism distinction. At stake is the fundamental relationship between pre-theoretical experience and the conceptual rendering of it. Can pure intuitive experience be investigated in its immediacy, or is it always pervaded with conceptual mindedness? Is Kant right that intuitions without concepts are blind? If so, isn’t phenomenological philosophy —given its intuitionistic leanings— a fatally flawed endeavor? I shall defend the thesis that phenomenology is both feasible and fundamental as a theory of pre-theoretical experience. However, Dreyfus’s idea that “absorbed coping” is somehow ineffable and mindless altogether will be criticized as nonphenomenological in the final analysis.

Este artículo interviene en la breve polémica entre los filósofos Constantino Láscaris (1923-1979) y Roberto Murillo (1939- 1994) y un grupo de profesores antihegelianos con el fin de exponer la crítica de la ingenua concepción del mundo que formaliza la dimensión profunda de la existencia y que termina por declarar obsoletos la mayoría de los problemas filosóficos que no admiten logización. Ulteriormente, esto nos permitirá dar cuenta de un concepto de la filosofía alternativo, que no desvincula abstractamente a la lógica de la existencia. Se arguye que esta polémica constituye un hito de la historia intelectual costarricense por ser la confrontación entre pensadores deorientación analítica y fenomenológico-existencial, cuyas presuposiciones antitéticas fueron puestas al descubierto por vez primera.

Este artículo presenta las relaciones entre la filosofía y la tecnología en la obra de Philip E. Agre, quien propuso una práctica técnica crítica que incorporase a la investigación tecnológica un examen de las construcciones discursivas que subyacen al proyecto de la inteligencia artificial (IA). Se ofrece una exposición de las ideas heideggerianas que Agre pretende hacer valer en la programación de la acción inteligente de agentes artificiales, si bien ulteriormente se criticará el propósito de programar el comportamiento práctico en el mundo circundante, dado que esto no es otra cosa que lo que Heidegger denominó la construcción técnica moderna del ser humano como máquina. Palabras clave: Filosofía de la ciencia cognitiva - inteligencia artificial - Heidegger - Agre.

Este artículo ofrece una serie de apuntes para una historia de la presencia de la fenomenología y de la filosofía de la existencia en Costa Rica. La referencia a apuntes o anotaciones tiene el propósito de disipar desde el inicio la impresión de que acá se va a ofrecer una valoración exhaustiva de las obras que harán las veces de acervo documental para dicha historia. En vez de eso, se destacarán una serie de momentos y publicaciones que tal vez podrían servir como introducción para un emprendimiento como aquel. Así, lo que se busca es una primera exploración de la presencia de la fenomenología y sus derivas contemporáneas en la filosofía costarricense. Se defenderá la tesis de que tanto la fenomenología como la filosofía de la existencia tuvieron un truncado inicio en la comunidad filosófica costarricense que, de cierta forma, refleja los avatares de la recepción contemporánea de la fenomenología.

This paper deals with prolegomenal stances required for a proper understanding of the paradoxical nature of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit. It shall be argued that Heidegger’s magnum opus does not inquire into the meaning of being in order to render an answer to the so-called Seinsfrage. In fact, several answers have already been given traditionally, which are founded on the being/beings non-differentiation (being as God, substance, nature, subject, will and so forth), that is, being has been turned into a topic whilst it is essentially non-topical, for only an entity can be accounted for as topical or thematic. This is the reason why assessing Heidegger as the ‘thinker of being’ can be misleading, if not overtly wrong, when by this is meant that being be conceived of as something that can be thematized.

This paper deals with Daniel Dennett’s well-known charges against phenomenological philosophy as an endevour to restore the rights of introspection: that is, the attempt, albeit doomed to failure, to contribute to the science of the mind from a purported incorrigible, ineffable and ‘subjective’ (interpreted as ‘private’) first-person perspective. According to Dennett’s heterophenomenology, only a strict third-person method is possible when it comes to the scientific study of the mind. I will dispute Dennett’s method in order to do both: correct Dennett’s caricaturization of phenomenological philosophy as naïve introspection and offer not only a clarification of phenomenology’s true aims and scope, but also a case in which phenomenology will stand as a crucial option in the new studies of the mind, under the sigh of fresh air that can be found in the new approaches to cognitive science (the so-called 4EA approaches: embodied, embedded, extended, enacted, affective). By way of introducing the concept of ‘phenomenological skillful-coping,’ an affirmative respond to Dennett’s own question shall be given: “Is there anything about experience that is not explorable by heterophenomenology? I’d like to know what.” The answer to Dennett should be firm: Yes there is! No less than the most basic non-theoretical, non-representational, embodied and embedded, human experience or coping.

This paper is a commemorative contribution on the occasion of the eight decades that have already elapsed since the publication of Sein und Zeit (1927), the work by Martin Heidegger which perhaps has become in the meantime – considerating the enormous scope of its contemporary influence – the most important philosophical treatise of the 20th century. One must draw attention to the fact that it is not purported an elaboration of the work’s reception, which can be almost imposible to embrace in its entirety for it can well be structured in several phases. There is rather an introductory approach to the manuscript’s history before its publication; purpose that can be seen as a more concrete and less ambitious goal in comparison to the main one, which is nothing but to outline the work’s central topics and the pretentions that it has pursued and carried out.

In its two parts, this study intends to reconstruct with some detail the fiasco of the Artificial Intelligence research project and the devastating critique carried out against it by Hubert Dreyfus in his magnum opus What Computers Still Can’t Do (1972, 1979, 1992). Part of these consequences is the emergence within this specialized field of a group of scholars who have called themselves ‘Heideggerian’. This definition shall be dealt with and criticized in the second part of this study. In this first part, we go on to analize (i) the bizarre dreams and false expectations of AI researchers, and (ii) Dreyfus’ own criticism and its definitive thrust of phenomenological nature.

This paper deals with prolegomenal stances necessary for a proper understanding of the paradoxical nature of Heidegger’s Being and Time. It shall be argued that Heidegger’s magnum opus does not inquire into the sense of being in order to render an answer to the so called Seinsfrage. In fact, several answers have already been given traditionally, which are founded on the being/entity indifferentiation (being as God, substance, nature, subject and so forth), that is, being has been turned into a topic, whilst it is essentially non-topical, for only an entity can be accounted for as topical or thematic. This is the reason why assessing Heidegger as the “thinker of being” can be misleading, if not overtly wrong, when by this is meant that being be conceived of as something that can be thematized.

This paper attempts to exhibit the young Heidegger’s academic and personal thinking path which stems from the two university dissertations (1913 and 1915 respectively) and ends up leading to his first lecture at the University of Freiburg on the determination of philosophy (1919). It is purported in the first place to render an account of the personal circumstances that convinced Heidegger of modifying his own early purposes of becoming a priest, then a theologian and finally a confessional Catholic philosopher by means of an examination of the philosophical themes which motivate his early work (Neokantianism, medieval speculative grammar and Husserlian phenomenology). In the second place, an attempt is made in order to consider Heidegger’s first Freiburg lecture in which the young philosopher intends the enterprise of undermining the primacy of the theoretical and in which he launches a series of remarkable objections (of hermeneutical nature) against Husserlian phenomenology.

This paper attempts to show how Heidegger’s question concerning the sense of being implies not only the so called ‘hermeneutical transformation of phenomenology’, but also and most importantly what one might call a ‘phenomenological transformation of phenomenology’. This latter transformation, which amounts to the former, can be conceived of as a Heideggerian confrontation regarding the conception of phenomenology coined by Husserl by means of a discussion of the phenomenality of the phenomenon and thus of the fundamental maxime toward which the phenomenological enterprise —at risk of endangering its original (Husserlian) nature notwithstanding— must lead its efforts.