•  153
    Heidegger's Descartes and Heidegger's Cartesianism
    European Journal of Philosophy 20 (2): 285-311. 2012.
    Abstract: Heidegger's Sein und Zeit (SZ) is commonly viewed as one of the 20th century's great anti-Cartesian works, usually because of its attack on the epistemology-driven dualism and mentalism of modern philosophy of mind or its apparent effort to ‘de-center the subject’ in order to privilege being or sociality over the individual. Most who stress one or other of these anti-Cartesian aspects of SZ, however, pay little attention to Heidegger's own direct engagement with Descartes, apart from t…Read more
  •  100
    What's Formal about Formal Indication? Heidegger's Method in Sein und Zeit
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 53 (6): 525-539. 2010.
    Against the background of a recent exchange between Cristina Lafont and Hubert Dreyfus, I argue that Heidegger's method of ?formal indication? is at the heart of his attempt in Sein und Zeit to answer ?the ontological question of the being of the ?sum?? (SZ, p. 46). This method works reflexively, by picking out certain essential features of one's first-person singular being at the outset of its investigation that are implicit in the question ?what is it to be the entity I am?? On the basis of th…Read more
  •  59
    Heidegger on Understanding One’s Own Being
    New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy 11 128-143. 2011.
    One of the characteristics that define us as Dasein, according to Heidegger, is that our being is at issue for us. Most readers interpret this to mean that we each, as individuals situated in the world with others, face the questions of who, how, and whether to be within our unique situations. Yet what Heidegger identifies as Dasein’s being is a general structure—care—that is the same for all individuals. Adapting and modifying John Haugeland’s account of understanding as projecting entities upo…Read more
  •  57
    Forms not Norms! On Haugeland on Heidegger on Being
    European Journal of Philosophy 25 (2): 485-511. 2017.
    I begin with a brief exposition of what is positive in Haugeland's interpretation of Heidegger. At the same time, I show how Haugeland subtly shifts the ground so as to make it possible to read into the texts his own idea that being is the entity-beholden, variable, normative basis for ways of life. I then argue that what Heidegger himself says about the being of available (zuhanden) entities, i.e., things of use or equipment (Zeug), doesn’t fit with Haugeland’s normativity-oriented account. I d…Read more
  •  54
    Heidegger, Lafont and the necessity of the transcendental
    Philosophy and Social Criticism 34 (5): 557-574. 2008.
    Cristina Lafont's recent reading of Heidegger offers a powerful formulation of the widespread view that once one recognizes our `facticity' and the role of language in shaping it, there is no room left to talk about transcendental structures of meaning or experience. In this article I challenge this view. I argue that Lafont inaccurately conflates what Heidegger calls our `understanding of being' with that which language discloses. In order to show that the philosophical motivation for this conf…Read more
  •  40
    Lockean Primary Quality Perception Reconstructed
    History of Philosophy Quarterly 24 (3). 2007.
    With the exception of solidity, Locke's list of primary qualities matches his list of ideas of "divers senses," that is, ideas that are perceived in multiple sensory modalities. I argue that for these ideas, the fact that they are robust in our sensory experience in a way that single-modality ideas are not provides the main reason for taking them to be ideas of primary qualities. Solidity, however, is taken as primary because it is ineliminable from experience in a way that other ideas are not, …Read more
  •  39
    Basic Problems of Haugeland’s Phenomenology
    Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 2. 2015.
    John Haugeland aimed throughout his career to determine what it is for an entity to count as having intelligence or thought, and at each stage he developed the idea from the phenomenological tradition that genuine thought requires intentionality. His most mature essay to do this, “Authentic Intentionality,” shows how the intentional directedness of thought requires that thinkers understand themselves as responsive to entities they think about, that they be committed to maintaining the socially s…Read more
  •  20
    This book provides a systematic reading of Martin Heidegger’s project of “fundamental ontology,” which he initially presented in Being and Time (1927) and developed further in his work on Kant. It shows our understanding of being to be that of a small set of a priori, temporally inflected, “categorial” forms that articulate what, how, and whether things can be. As selves bound to and bounded by the world within which we seek to answer the question of how to live, we imaginatively generate these …Read more
  •  8
    Heidegger's Anxiety: On the Role of Mood in Phenomenological Method
    Bulletin D’Analyse Phénoménologique, 12 (1). 2016.
    Heidegger’s early project aims to articulate the form of our being as Dasein, and he says that for this usually hidden form to become accessible, a certain kind of “mood” is required of the philosopher. This “ground-mood” he identifies in Sein und Zeit as anxiety. He also, however, presents anxiety as a mood anyone, philosopher or not, experiences when there is some significant breakdown in the living of her life. I argue here that there are largely unrecognized problems with this conflation of …Read more
  • The Bounds of Self: An Essay on Heidegger's "Being and Time"
    Dissertation, The University of Chicago. 2004.
    Heidegger's Being and Time offers a theory of the self as a finite, temporal entity, charged with the task of determining its own existence. I offer an explication, clarification and partial defense of this theory, in which I argue that it is best understood as a reworking of Kant's account of the finite agent. Heidegger's advance comes in offering a much richer account of the contexts of everyday action and ways in which we are fundamentally shaped by others. He also frees the concept of self-d…Read more