Existential phenomenologists hold that the two most basic forms of intelligent behavior, learning, and skillful action, can be described and explained without recourse to mind or brain representations. This claim is expressed in two central notions in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception: the intentional arc and the tendency to achieve a maximal grip. The intentional arc names the tight connection between body and world, such that, as the active body acquires skills, those skills are “stored”, not as representations in the mind, (...) but as dispositions to respond to the solicitations of situations in the world. A phenomenology of skill acquisition confirms that, as one acquires expertise, the acquired know-how is experienced as finer and finer discriminations of situations paired with the appropriate response to each. Maximal grip names the body's tendency to refine its responses so as to bring the current situation closer to an optimal gestalt. Thus, successful learning and action do not require propositional mental representations. They do not require semantically interpretable brain representations either.Simulated neural networks exhibit crucial structural features of the intentional arc, and Walter Freeman's account of the brain dynamics underlying perception and action is structurally isomorphic with Merleau-Ponty's account of the way a skilled agent is led by the situation to move towards obtaining a maximal grip. (shrink)

Existential phenomenologists hold that the two most basic forms of intelligent behavior, learning, and skillful action, can be described and explained without recourse to mind or brain representations. This claim is expressed in two central notions in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception: the intentional arc and the tendency to achieve a maximal grip. The intentional arc names the tight connection between body and world, such that, as the active body acquires skills, those skills are stored, not as representations in the mind, (...) but as dispositions to respond to the solicitations of situations in the world. A phenomenology of skill acquisition confirms that, as one acquires expertise, the acquired know-how is experienced as finer and finer discriminations of situations paired with the appropriate response to each. Maximal grip names the body's tendency to refine its responses so as to bring the current situation closer to an optimal gestalt. Thus, successful learning and action do not require propositional mental representations. They do not require semantically interpretable brain representations either.Simulated neural networks exhibit crucial structural features of the intentional arc, and Walter Freeman's account of the brain dynamics underlying perception and action is structurally isomorphic with Merleau-Ponty's account of the way a skilled agent is led by the situation to move towards obtaining a maximal grip. (shrink)

Essays discuss the themes of worldliness, affectedness, understanding, and the care-structure found in Heidegger's work on the nature of existence.

If an economist or an economic historian speaks about ethical or moral problems, one should be suspicious. Karl Popper continually repeated that he did not want to preach, and I believe that his deep-rooted distrust of modern philosophical moralists, who usually preach water and drink cognac, led to his not writing a greater work on ethics. Nevertheless he was a moral person, and perhaps we can learn more about his cosmology, his methodology, and about his philosophy in general if we (...) probe into some of the ethical foundations of his life and his thinking. It may become apparent to you that I do not refer primarily to Popper's Open Society and Its Enemies or other works of his political writings alone. In choosing not to do so, it is my intention to demonstrate that all his thinking is deeply rooted in ethics. (shrink)

A Critique of Artificial Reason Hubert L. Dreyfus . HUBERT L. DREYFUS What Computers Still Can't Do Thi s One XZKQ-GSY-8KDG What. WHAT COMPUTERS STILL CAN'T DO Front Cover.

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction: World, Being, and Style The Work of Art as Manifesting a World The Work of Art as Articulating a Culture's Understanding of Being Heidegger: Artworks as Reconfiguring a Culture's Understanding of Being Conclusion: Can an Artwork Work for Us Now?

This paper discusses the reception and impact of Berger and Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality. The article will, first, address Berger and Luckmann themselves and their approach to the book. In the next part, we will sketch the diffusion of the basic concept of the book. Then we want to show that the reception exhibits a particular open form, which allowed it to disperse into extremely different disciplines not only of the social sciences and the humanities. It is the (...) disciplinary distance in particular that detaches the diffusion of the concept from reference to the book. In the next part, we can see that this detachment leads to the variation of approaches to social construction. Particularly, it is the misidentification with constructivism that leads to misunderstandings, which will then be clarified in contrast to our reconsideration of the basic thesis of SCR. The conclusion will state that Berger and Luckmann’s concept therefore constitutes the common denominator of social constructivist approaches. (shrink)

Existential phenomenologists hold that the two most basic forms of intelligent behavior, learning, and skillful action, can be described and explained without recourse to mind or brain representations. This claim is expressed in two central notions in Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception: the intentional arc and the tendency to achieve a maximal grip. The intentional arc names the tight connection between body and world, such that, as the active body acquires skills, those skills are “stored”, not as representations in the mind, (...) but as dispositions to respond to the solicitations of situations in the world. A phenomenology of skill acquisition confirms that, as one acquires expertise, the acquired know-how is experienced as finer and finer discriminations of situations paired with the appropriate response to each. Maximal grip names the body's tendency to refine its responses so as to bring the current situation closer to an optimal gestalt. Thus, successful learning and action do not require propositional mental representations. They do not require semantically interpretable brain representations either.Simulated neural networks exhibit crucial structural features of the intentional arc, and Walter Freeman's account of the brain dynamics underlying perception and action is structurally isomorphic with Merleau-Ponty's account of the way a skilled agent is led by the situation to move towards obtaining a maximal grip. (shrink)

This book is the first to provide a sustained, coherent analysis of Foucault's work as a whole. To demonstrate the sense in which Foucault's work is beyond structuralism and hermeneutics, the authors unfold a careful, analytical exposition of his oeuvre. They argue that during the of Foucault's work became a sustained and largely successful effort to develop a new method - "interpretative analytics" - capable of explaining both the logic of structuralism's claim to be an objective science and the apparent (...) validity of the hermeneutical counterclaim that the human sciences can proceed only by understanding the deepest meaning of the subject and his tradition. (shrink)

In this paper I would like to explain, defend, and draw out the implications of this claim. Since the intentional arc is supposed to embody the interconnection of skillful action and perception, I will first lay out an account of skill.

The Rev’d Roland Allen’s grandson ventures to speculate on the attitudes his grandfather might be expected to have adopted regarding several of today’s controversial issues. After rehearsing briefly Roland’s published and unpublished work, Hubert Allen reviews, both on the basis of Roland’s expressed opinions and by inference from remarks made by him or by members of his immediate family, how he believes his grandfather would have reacted to six matters of current or recent controversy, namely: Modern Translations of the (...) Bible, The Role of Women in the Church, Homosexuality, Ecumenism, Inter-Faith Dialogue, and the proposed Anglican Covenant. (shrink)

McDowell's claim that "in mature human beings, embodied coping is permeated with mindedness",1 suggests a new version of the mentalist myth which, like the others, is untrue to the phenomenon. The phenomena show that embodied skills, when we are fully absorbed in enacting them, have a kind of non-mental content that is non-conceptual, non-propositional, non-rational and non-linguistic. This is not to deny that we can monitor our activity while performing it. For solving problems, learning a new skill, receiving coaching, and (...) so forth, such monitoring is invaluable. But monitoring what we are doing as we are doing it degrades performance to at best competence. On McDowell's view, there is no way to account for such a degradation in performance since the same sort of content would be involved whether we were fully absorbed in or paying attention to what we were doing. McDowell claims that it is an advantage of his conceptualism that it avoids any foundationalist attempt to build up the objective world on the basis of an indubitable Given or any other ground-floor experience. And, indeed, if the world is all that is the case and our minds are unproblematically open to it, all experience is on the same footing. But one must distinguish motor intentionality, and the interrelated solicitations our coping body is intertwined with, from conceptual intentionality and the world of propositional structures it opens onto. The existential phenomenologist can then agree with McDowell in rejecting traditional foundationalisms, while yet affirming and describing the ground-floor role of motor intentionality in providing the support on which all forms of conceptual intentionality are based. (shrink)

In this paper I would like to explain, defend, and draw out the implications of this claim. Since the intentional arc is supposed to embody the interconnection of skillful action and perception, I will first lay out an account of skill.

Human intuition and perception are basic and essential phenomena of consciousness. As such, they will never be replicated by computers. This is the challenging notion of Hubert Dreyfus, Ph. D., archcritic of the artificial intelligence establishment. It's important to emphasize that he doesn't believe that AI is fundamentally impossible, only that the current research program is fatally flawed. Instead, he argues that to get a device (or devices) with human-like intelligence would require them to have a human-like being in (...) the world, which would require them to have bodies more or less like ours, and social acculturation (i.e. a society) more or less like ours. This helps to explain the practical problems in implementing artificial intelligence algorithms. (shrink)

Back in 1950, while a physics major at Harvard, I wandered into C.I. Lewis’s epistemology course. There, Lewis was confidently expounding the need for an indubitable Given to ground knowledge, and he was explaining where that ground was to be found. I was so impressed that I immediately switched majors from ungrounded physics to grounded philosophy.

The question of sociological truth-finding is posed in the light of the view that logical formalizations, along with other arguments, only acquire relevance in illocutionary contexts, where it is not so much the abstract correctness of a sentence as the stating of it that counts. In order to become a counterfactual an argument requires its antecedent to be recognized as being contrary to the 'facts'. To this extent there is a clear link with 'reality' or with a view of the (...) world that is taken as factually given. Social science develops on the basis not only of generalizations but also of historical facts and political requirements. The question arises: in terms of what world-view or purpose can we unambiguously declare a conditional to be a counterfactual - and a significant or non-trivial one at that? Further, can Elster's clarifications help identify political agents and the proper entities within and through which political action is performed? Finally, the problem-solving capacity of the concept of closeness of one possible world to another or to the actual world, especially with regard to counterfactuals and causality, is questioned. (shrink)

Samuel Todes’s book, Body and World, makes an important contribution to the current debate among analytic philosophers concerning non–conceptual intentional content and its relation to thought. Todes’s relevant theses are: (1) Our unified, active body, in moving to meet our needs, generates a unified, spatio–temporal field. (2) In that field we use our perceptual skills to make the determinable perceptual objects that show up relatively determinate. (3) Once we have made the objects of practical perception determinate, we can make ‘practical (...) perceptual judgements’ about them. Such ‘judgements’ have conditions of satisfaction, but they are non–conceptual in that they are a way of coping with an actual object in this situation, from this point of view, in this light, in this orientation, and so forth. (4) By withholding our activity, however, we can transform our practical perception into a detached, spectatorial perception of qualities that are experienced as independent of the object they qualify. (5) Thanks to our conceptual imagination, we can then treat these qualities as reidentifiable properties of reidentifiable objects that can be entertained by thought. (shrink)

Héritier de l'humanisme de la Renaissance et précurseur du siècle des Lumières, Pierre Bayle est un des penseurs les plus originaux de l'âge classique. Protestant exilé aux Pays-Bas, il est devenu un apôtre de la liberté de conscience, et son activité de philosophe, de journaliste et de savant ainsi que sa vaste correspondance lui ont donné un rôle-clé dans l'évolution de la culture européenne. Conjuguant les approches historique, littéraire et philosophique, les auteurs de ce volume réexaminent la vie et le (...) discours de Bayle, les thèmes de son oeuvre et les modalités de leur diffusion. En mettant l'accent sur les informations fournies par la correspondance et sur le rôle de Bayle dans les débats éthiques et métaphysiques de l'époque, ils étudient: l'activité épistolaire, élément historique déterminant mais aussi métaphore d'un penseur toujours en mouvement; la réflexion philosophique et politique sur la tolérance, la liberté, la justice, la vertu - enjeux actuels, notamment dans le domaine de la laïcité; les tensions irréductibles présentes dans le discours baylien sur la raison et la foi, qui refuse toute simplification. Une riche bibliographie qui répertorie plus de 950 titres parus entre 1900 et 2010 complète ce volume, et donne un aperçu de ces champs de recherche en pleine évolution. La pensée de Bayle a rayonné sur l'Europe classique en contribuant à sa 'crise de conscience'; nous en redécouvrons l'étonnante modernité. (shrink)

Les Presses universitaires de France ont publié, en 1994, une Encyclopédie universelle de philosophie, dans laquelle Hubert Mono Ndjana est présenté comme un spécialiste de la pensée des hommes politiques. Il avait en effet traduit en français Obiang Nguema Mbasogo en 1980 (Un Pari pour la liberté), publié un ouvrage en 1985 sur le chef d'Etat de son pays (L'Idée sociale chez Paul Biya), et deux autres sur la pensée et le pays de Kim Il Sung (Révolution et création (...) et Regard sur la Corée), en 1987. Sa pensée s'est également et abondamment préoccupée de la question du politique et des préoccupations épistémologiques. L'entretien que Jean-Philippe Nguemeta a eu le génie d'initier auprès d'Hubert Mono Ndjana permettra au lecteur d'avoir une vue synoptique de ce philosophe attentif, qui a passé toute sa vie à enseigner, sans négliger les grandes questions de son temps. Un décryptage exhaustif des énigmes de la civilisation, utile pour la culture générale et l'éducation... (shrink)

This volume presents a selection of Hubert Dreyfus's pioneering work in bringing phenomenology and existentialism to bear on the philosophical and scientific study of the mind. Each of the thirteen essays interprets, develops, and extends the insights of his predecessors working in the European philosophical tradition. One of Dreyfus' central contributions to reading the historical canon of philosophy comes from his recognition that great philosophers help us to understand the -background practices- of a culture - the practices that shape (...) and embody our most basic understanding of ourselves and the things and situations we encounter in our world. Background practices are all too often overlooked completely, or else their importance is misunderstood. Each chapter in this volume shows in one way or another how a broad range of philosophical topics can only be properly understood when we recognize how they are grounded in the background practices that shape our lives and give meaning to our activities, our tasks, our normative commitments, our aims and our goals. (shrink)

From his earliest published work, Mental Illness and Personality (1954), to his last project, The History of Sexuality , Foucault was critical of the human sciences as a dubious and dangerous attempt to model a science of human beings on the natural sciences. He therefore preferred existential therapy, which did not attempt to give a causal account of human nature, but rather described the general structure of the human way of being and its possible distortions. Foucault focused his attack on (...) psychiatry, which claimed to have an explanation of normal and abnormal functioning of the personality modeled on medicine. Freud typified for him this deep mistake which he traced first to the Kantian understanding of human beings as transcendental/ empirical doubles which must think their own unthought, and then later to the gradually developing confessional practices which lead people in our culture to try unsuccessfully to put all their desires into words so as to conform to the norms of psychoanalysis which in turn are based on an account of sexuality as a cause of personality. Foucault proposed his genealogical account of how our culture arrived at this view of man as sexual being as a form of therapy which was to help us free ourselves from this restrictive self- interpretation. Keywords: normal, mental illness, sexuality, psychoanalysis CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Antje Jackelén's book Time and Eternity is a thorough and carefully presented theology of time and, by its very essence, an incomplete and open thought model because time will always be dynamic and relational. This approach is an excellent example for the dialogue between science and religion because it uses resources not tapped in the dialogue so far: hymn-books stemming from Germany, Sweden, and the English-speaking world published between 1975 and 1995. They are taken as resources for a critical investigation (...) on the meaning and importance of the notion of eternity for the interdisciplinary dialogue, which is characterized not as a synthesis but as holding a beneficial tension, or "eutonia." I suggest that this approach can be taken even further by merging it with a model of time developed by the German mathematician A. M. Klaus Müller: The crossing over of time modes in a relational matrix of time also gives clear insights into the time of God not only as futurum —time as extrapolation of the past and present—but also as adventus —time which is to come. (shrink)

Can we accept John McDowell’s Kantian claim that perception is conceptual “all the way out,” thereby denying the more basic perceptual capacities we seem to share with prelinguistic infants and higher animals? More generally, can philosophers successfully describe the conceptual upper floors of the edifice of knowledge while ignoring the embodied coping going on on the ground floor? I argue that we shouldn’t leave the conceptual component of our lives hanging in midair and suggest how philosophers who want to understand (...) knowledge and action can profit from a phenomenological analysis of the nonconceptual embodied coping skills we share with animals and infants, as well as the nonconceptual immediate intuitive understanding exhibited by experts. (shrink)

Pollitt and Bouckaert and their neo-Weberian state (NWS) have been chosen as the subject for this essay because the book has become a standard work in the public management movement. It is frequently cited and has been re-published in multiple editions (most recently in 2017). The authors also refer explicitly to Max Weber.This contribution seeks to draw attention to three important aspects, which inevitably overlap with one another:1. There is no Weber in the neo-Weberian State (introduction, 1; section II). Pollitt (...) and Bouckaert fail to grasp that Weber’s understanding of the state [the state as an “institution” (Anstalt); and the state as an “idea of validity” (Geltungsvorstellung)] is not identical to his ideal type of modern bureaucracy; it is the features of the latter on which they draw. The ideal type is a standard measure constructed in order to establish how close any concrete, given instance of bureaucracy comes to it (introduction, 3). Meanwhile, the “neutral official” insisted upon by Weber has “taken their leave” in Germany from important positions (section III, 3). Furthermore, Weber did not address those structures and processes internal to the administration which are precisely the object of interest for the new public management reformers. Weber’s lack of interest arises from the fact the members of anAnstalt, whether it is the state or the Church (WuG, § 15, no. 2), are subject to imposed orders (oktroyierte Ordnungen) and, as such, do not enjoy the “right to have a say”. Scharpf (1973a) was the first to pay particular attention to the problems brought about by specialisation and by the division of labour within the administration that are responsible for an incremental form of politics (section III, 3); even if he later ascribes advantages to the combination of “negative” and “positive coordination” (Scharpf 1991: 18ff.).2. The “legalistic culture” that characterises Germany will be considered in a more differentiated way, drawing on empirical studies which provide information, for example, on how laws (i.e. programmes)actuallyoriginate inside the ministerial apparatus (introduction, 2; section III, 2 and 3) or how use is made of the power of authority (Weisungsrecht) in practice (introduction, 2; section III, 2 and 3), even when, formally, it claims to have validity (section III). In this way, only empirical studies (Benz 1994; Bohne 1981; Dose 1997; Dose/Voigt 1995; Treiber 2007a) prove that the administration that implements laws has often, in practice, become a “negotiative administration” (introduction, 2). Such a phenomenon as a “co-operative administration”, which negotiates rather than rules, is a “foreign concept” in Weber’s discussion of the state and modern bureaucracy. Scharpf’s (1970) comparison between constitutional governance in Germany and legal relief in America is enlightening when it comes to the meaning of the constitutional state (Rechtsstaat) (introduction, 2; section III); the same applies to his discussion of the failed federalist reforms, which sought, among other things, to mitigate, if not entirely eliminate, the opportunities for blockades provided by political entanglement (Politikverflechtung) (section III). Neither was it possible to realise long overdue proposals to reform administrative law (Verwaltungsrecht) (section III, 1), which involved weakening or removing altogether three important assumptions in the dominant administrative doctrine (the “dogmatic normality”) and which also included the ambitious intention for the law to achieve tangible impact (Hoffmann-Riem 1994). Nonetheless, while no-one would dispute that reform of the federal government and administration remained “on the agenda” (Scharpf 1991, Mayntz/ Scharpf 1973), the priorities of such a reform were, and still are, different to those of new public management reform [the key terms here arePlanung(“planning”) and the term that replaced it,Steuerung(“management”)]1.3. Pollitt and Bouckaert ascribe to the neo-Weberian state extremely varied functions without providing any (theoretical) basis for them. In this way, the notion of public management reform that they present acquires the status of a “reformist philosophy” (introduction, 3; section IV). See Scharpf (1991) for a theoretically well-founded argumentation on the State’s ability to act in our days. Scharpf’s essay will be discussed briefly (section IV).ConclusionThere is no Weber in the neo-Weberian state. According to the discussion presented here, the neo-Weberian state can only mean: how would a modern state constituted by Weber look today? (shrink)

Husserl and Searle agree that, for a bodily movement to be an action, it must be caused by a propositional representation. Husserl's representation is a mental state whose intentional content is what the agent is trying to do; Searle thinks of the representation as a logical structure expressing the action's conditions of satisfaction. Merleau-Ponty criticises both views by introducing a kind of activity he calls motor intentionality, in which the agent, rather than aiming at success, feels drawn to reduce a (...) felt tension. I argue that Searle can account for Merleau-Ponty's kind of coping only by broadening his notion of propositional representation to include indexicals, but that, in so doing, he covers up the way representational intentionality depends upon motor intentionality. (shrink)

In previous work I urged that the perceptual experience we rational animals enjoy is informed by capacities that belong to our rationality, and - in passing - that something similar holds for our intentional action. In his Presidential Address, Hubert Dreyfus argued that I thereby embraced a myth, "the Myth of the Mental". According to Dreyfus, I cannot accommodate the phenomenology of unreflective bodily coping, and its importance as a background for the conceptual capacities exercised in reflective intellectual activity. (...) My paper responds to this accusation. Dreyfus misreads my invocation of Aristotle, and is thereby led to suppose, wrongly, that I conceive rationality as detached, brought to bear on practical predicaments from a standpoint other than one of immersion in them. I urge that even unreflective bodily coping, on the part of rational animals, is informed by their rationality. Dreyfus mentions Heidegger’s distinction, which is picked up by Gadamer, between being oriented towards the world and merely inhabiting an environment. But he sets it aside, whereas it is crucial for the issue between us. Engaged bodily coping involves responsiveness to affordances, and responsiveness to affordances on the part of rational animals belongs to their relation to the world. I explain how the idea that conceptual capacities are actualized in our perceptual experience is connected with the thought that our perceptual experience opens us to the world. Finally, I suggest that the real myth in this area is the conception of rationality underlying Dreyfus’s resistance to my picture. (shrink)