Stanford University
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 1993
New York City, New York, United States of America
  •  235
    Retrieving Realism, by DreyfusHubert and TaylorCharles. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Pp. 184.
  •  12
    On Making Sense (and Nonsense) of Heidegger (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 63 (3): 561-572. 2001.
    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 (Entwurf) is, like the liar's pa…Read more
  •  42
    Heidegger's Philosophy of Art
    Philosophical Review 112 (4): 575-580. 2003.
  •  93
    First persons: On Richard Moran's authority and estrangement
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 46 (3). 2003.
    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 constitut…Read more
  •  589
    Merleau-ponty and the mystery of perception
    Philosophy Compass 4 (4): 630-638. 2009.
    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, w…Read more
  •  47
    Heidegger on Correspondence and Correctness
    Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 28 (2): 103-116. 2007.
  •  118
    Dennett on seeming
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 6 (1-2): 99-106. 2007.
    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 fr…Read more
  •  22
    Sensation, judgment, and the phenomenal field
    In Taylor Carman & Mark B. N. Hansen (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, Cambridge University Press. pp. 50--73. 2005.
  •  292
  •  24
    Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art (review)
    Philosophical Review 112 (4): 575-580. 2003.
    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 occasi…Read more
  • Cambridge University Presscarman, Taylor. 2005.
  •  14
    The Conspicuousness of Signs in « Being and Time »
    Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 22 (3): 158-169. 1991.
  •  20
    Review of Robert J. Dostal (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2002 (10). 2002.
  •  96
    On being social: A reply to Olafson
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 37 (2). 1994.
    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…Read more
  •  12
    Heidegger on Correspondence and Correctness
    Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 28 (2): 103-116. 2007.
  •  205
    The Body in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty
    Philosophical Topics 27 (2): 205-226. 1999.
    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 t…Read more
  •  1
    Phenomenology as rigorous science
    In Brian Leiter & Michael Rosen (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy, Oxford University Press. 2007.
    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 importan…Read more
  •  96
    Heidegger’s Temporal Idealism
    Journal of Philosophy 97 (5): 308-312. 2000.
  •  147
    Heidegger's anti-neo-kantianism
    Philosophical Forum 41 (1-2): 131-142. 2010.
  •  20
    After Modernity: Husserlian Reflections on a Philosophical Tradition (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 59 (2): 550-553. 1999.
    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 advocat…Read more
  •  39
    The Self after Postmodernity (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 52 (1): 175-177. 1998.
    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…Read more
  •  108
    On making sense (and nonsense) of Heidegger
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 63 (3): 561-572. 2001.
    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, for…Read more