Taylor Carman

In Being and Time Heidegger advances a critique of Husserl's theory of intentionality by arguing that human understanding consists more fundamentally in an orientation toward practical activity than in mere cognition, for example deliberate perception or judgment. Heidegger criticizes Husserl for importing normative concepts drawn from logic into what purports to be a pure, presuppositionless description of consciousness. Above all, Heidegger is critical of the idealized conception of meaning that informs Husserlian phenomenology. The critique put forward in Being and Time consequently rests on Heidegger's own view of the nature of meaning, its role in everyday practice, and its constitution in discourse. For Husserl, just as the notion of the "noema" or intentional content amounts to a generalization of the concept of meaning, so too what he calls the "positing" character of intentionality, that is, its inherent validity claim or presumption of actuality, is a generalization of the semantic concept of illocutionary force, more specifically assertoric force. Heidegger's conception of meaning, by contrast, eschews traditional semantic concepts borrowed from logic, and instead draws on Heidegger's claim that things in the world originally figure into our practical activities not as "occurrent" or object-like but as "available" for use. Practice thus lies at the heart of everyday significance, and it is the expressive-communicative dimension of practice, what Heidegger calls "discourse", that underlies linguistic articulation. Assertion amounts to a derivative mode of discourse, parasitic on pre-predictive forms of expression and communication. The traditional concept of meaning as a discrete occurrent entity rests on an overgeneralization of the logical concept of the truth-valuable content of a proposition or assertion. Heidegger's account of meaning and practice in Being and Time, then, is an attempt to trace the origin of assertions in linguistic practice and to show the impossibility of recapturing the phenomenon of intentionality by appeal to the impoverished concept of meaning drawn from the assertoric paradigm central to the semantic tradition. Finally, I argue that conformism, or what Heidegger calls "inauthenticity", is an unavoidable artifact of discourse, since the ongoing interpretation and reinterpretation essential to discourse necessarily rests on an indifferent normative background underwritten by the anonymous authority of "the one"

Dennett’s eliminativist theory of consciousness rests on an implausible reduction of sensory seeming to cognitive judgment. The “heterophenomenological” testimony to which he appeals in urging that reduction poses no threat to phenomenology, but merely demonstrates the conceptual indeterminacy of small-scale sensory appearances. Phenomenological description is difficult, but the difficulty does not warrant Dennett’s neo-Cartesian claim that there is no such thing as seeming at all as distinct from judging.

This article offers an overview of the structure and significance of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology. Neither a psychological nor an epistemological theory, Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception is instead an attempt to describe perceptual experience as we experience it. Although he was influenced heavily by Husserl, Heidegger, and Gestalt psychology, his work departs significantly from all three. Particularly original is his account of our bodily, precognitive experience of other persons, which he argues is essentially more primitive than any belief or doubt we can raise concerning the contents or even the existence of their minds. I conclude with a discussion of the differences between Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology and Alva Noë's more recent 'enactive' theory of perception.

The terminological boxes into which we press the history of philosophy often obscure deep and important differences among major figures supposedly belonging to a single school of thought. One such disparity within the phenomenological movement, often overlooked but by no means invisible, separates Merleau-Pontys Phenomenology of Perception from the Husserlian program that initially inspired it. For Merleau-Pontys phenomenology amounts to a radical, if discreet, departure not only from Husserls theory of intentionality generally, but more specifically from his account of the intentional constitution of the body and its role in perceptual experience.

Edmund Husserl, the founder of modern phenomenology, always insisted that philosophy is not just a scholarly discipline, but can and must aspire to the status of a ‘strict’ or ‘rigorous science’ (strenge Wissenschaft). Heidegger, by contrast, began his winter lectures in 1929 by dismissing what he called the ‘delusion’ that philosophy was or could be either a discipline or a science as the most disastrous debasement of its innermost essence. To understand what Husserl had in mind, it is important to begin by remembering that the word Wissenschaft has a wider extension than the word ‘science’. German distinguishes the Naturwissenschaften from the Geisteswissenschaften, or human sciences, which Husserl and Heidegger both believed could be perfectly ‘rigorous’ in their own way. Speakers of English, by contrast, tend to draw a threefold distinction among the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities.

This book is probably the best comprehensive treatment of Heidegger’s philosophy of art currently available in English. A little over a third of the volume deals with the most widely read and discussed of Heidegger’s texts concerning art, the 1936 essay, “The Origin of the Work of Art.” The remaining hundred pages or so then go beyond that familiar territory into many other sources, including Heidegger’s lectures on Hölderlin and Nietzsche, his later essays on poetry and language, and his occasional remarks concerning actual paintings and musical and architectural works. Readers who don’t already know will be interested to learn that Heidegger’s comments on contemporary works of art frequently belie his own usual sweeping dismissal of modern art as so much smoothly manipulated technological product. Though he remained preoccupied with what Hölderlin called “the flight of the gods” in modernity and the spiritual “darkening of the world” in the age of technology, Heidegger also expressed admiration for the paintings of Van Gogh, Braque, Klee, and Cézanne, the music of Stravinsky and Carl Orff, the poetry of Rilke, Trakl, Paul Celan, René Char, and Stefan George, and the architecture of Le Corbusier.

Calvin Schrag’s Self after Postmodernity is a trim but ambitious book. In it Schrag sets out to correct, or at least to temper—sometimes seemingly to appease—what he regards as the excesses and distortions arising from contemporary assaults on the concepts of selfhood and subjectivity, arising particularly from recent French philosophy. In so doing, he tries to articulate a response to the problem of modernity as framed by Weber and Habermas, that is, in terms of the increasing mutual alienation of the cultural spheres of science, morality, and art. To these three Schrag adds a fourth, religion, and doing so affords him repeated—though not always fruitful—digressions into Kierkegaard’s account of the aesthetic, ethical, and religious stages of existence.

Frederick Olafson criticizes Hubert Dreyfus’s interpretation of BEING AND TIME on a number of points, including the meaning of being, the nature of intentionality, and especially the role of das Man in Heidegger’s account of social existence. But on the whole Olafson’s critique is unconvincing because it rests on an implausible account of presence and perceptual intuition in Heidegger’s early philosophy, and because Olafson maintains an overly individuated notion of Dasein and consequently a one-sided conception of the role of das Man. Unfortunately, since Dreyfus confines his commentary exclusively to Division I, he in effect forgoes any attempt to explain how das Man might be understood as playing the simultaneously constitutive and destructive role Heidegger evidently envisioned for it. I conclude by arguing that the conformity and the conformism represented by das Man are bound together by Heidegger’s notion of standoffishness (Abständigkeit).

This 2003 book offers an interpretation of Heidegger's major work, Being and Time. Unlike those who view Heidegger as an idealist, Taylor Carman argues that Heidegger is best understood as a realist. Amongst the distinctive features of the book are an interpretation explicitly oriented within a Kantian framework and an analysis of Dasein in relation to recent theories of intentionality, notably those of Dennett and Searle. Rigorous, jargon-free and deftly argued this book will be necessary reading for all serious students of Heidegger.

After Modernity is a collection of fifteen short essays, ten of them previously published elsewhere, centering around interpretations of Husserl and applications of his phenomenology to large philosophical problems concerning time and the self. The volume is held together loosely by the author’s answer to the crisis of modernity, a crisis consisting in the apparent hopelessness of grounding norms in superworldly Platonic forms or the rational subject posited by Descartes and Kant. Mensch advocates returning to an Aristotelian position according to which “time is dependent on being” and “the subject is constituted by the world”. For Mensch, “it is precisely modernity’s attempt to understand temporalization as a subjective process which is the crucial error”. Far from abandoning the modern preoccupation with subjectivity, then, Mensch simply wants to deny that the subject dictates the terms of its own relation to the world. His response to the crisis of modernity therefore consists in a conception of what in the final chapter he calls “post-normative subjectivity.” The book also includes discussions of Plato, St. Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, radical evil, Sartre’s conception of the self, John Searle and artificial intelligence, Nietzsche and Darwin, and finally multiple personality disorder.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was described by Paul Ricoeur as 'the greatest of the French phenomenologists'. The essays in this volume examine the full scope of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy, from his central and abiding concern with the nature of perception and the bodily constitution of intentionality to his reflections on science, nature, art, history, and politics. The authors explore the historical origins and context of his thought as well as its continuing relevance to contemporary work in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, cognitive science, biology, art criticism and political and social theory. What emerges is a fresh image of Merleau-Ponty as a deep and original thinker whose philosophical importance has been underestimated, in part owing to the influence of intellectual movements such as existentialism and structuralism, into which his work could not be easily assimilated. New readers will find this the most convenient and accessible guide to Merleau-Ponty currently available.

Richard Moran's Authority and Estrangement offers a subtle and innovative account of self-knowledge that lifts the problem out of the narrow confines of epistemology and into the broader context of practical reasoning and moral psychology. Moran argues convincingly that fundamental self/other asymmetries are essential to our concept of persons. Moreover, the first- and the third-person points of view are systematically interconnected, so that the expression or avowal of one's attitudes constitutes a substantive form of self-knowledge. But while Moran's argument is wide-ranging and compelling, he relies throughout on an overly intellectualized conception of first-person attitudes as attitudes of reflection or deliberation. That conception is at once implausible and unnecessary to the main current of his argument, whose goal is to demonstrate that our self-conception as persons depends on both the distinctness and the interconnectedness of our first- and third-person perspectives on ourselves.

Herman Philipse’s Heidegger’s Philosophy of Being is an attempt to interpret, analyze, and ultimately discredit the whole of Heidegger’s thought. But Philipse’s reading of the texts is uncharitable, and the ideas he presents and criticizes often bear little resemblance to Heidegger’s views. Philipse relies on a crude distinction between “theoretical” and “applicative” interpretations in arguing that Heidegger’s conception of interpretation as a kind of projection is, like the liar’s paradox, formally self-defeating. But even granting the distinction, the charge of reflective incoherence is fallacious and question-begging. Finally, Philipse advances the astonishing “interpretive hypothesis” that the seemingly morbid existential themes in Being and Time were part of a deliberate “Pascalian strategy” to win converts to Heidegger’s own idiosyncratic “postmonotheist worship of Being.” In short, notwithstanding its nearly comprehensive coverage of Heidegger’s works, the book does not represent a sufficiently serious effort to understand the complexities and obscurities of Heidegger’s thinking.