www.shockwell.net
Essays and Reviews
Forms not Norms! On Haugeland on Heidegger on Being -- European Journal of Philosophy, 2017
Haugeland and others following him see being as in some way normative for thought and action, and our understanding of it revisable in light of certain kinds of revelatory events (e.g., the appearance of anomalies which show that a basic conceptualization of the laws of physical nature is flawed). Against this I argue that, for Heidegger, being is that which is constitutive for the most basic intelligibility of things, and so figures a priori in any and all thought, experience, and action. It is thus not something we can ever have a perspective on which would allow us to question or revise it (as we can with, e.g., scientific laws). Hence, being figures as form, not norm. This raises the question of what the goal is of the philosopher who seeks to illuminate and articulate being. I suggest it is not a goal to be pursued for any external end, but that, like art, pure mathematics, and other ‘impractical’ human endeavors, it is worth pursuing for its own sake.
Heidegger's Anxiety: On the Role of Mood in Phenomenological Method, Bulletin d’analyse phénoménologique, 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 methodological and “existential” moods, but that there is nevertheless a compelling methodological account of anxiety that can be teased apart from the existentialist one: methodologically understood, anxiety is a self-affected state of the ontologist, one that results from her asking ontological questions of herself, and, by imagining crisis or breakdown, withdrawing from her determinate situation to a position where she can see the form of her own activity as questioner and imaginer. I draw out some consequences this has for how we should understand the place of ontological understanding in living one’s life, and I conclude by briefly showing how my reading helps us see Heidegger as developing key elements in the work of Descartes and Kant.
Basic Problems of Haugeland's Phenomenology, Ergo, 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 shared forms of understanding of those entities, and yet that they be self-critically open to the possibility of needing to revise or reject those forms of understanding. In this essay I argue that, while Haugeland’s account of intentionality sheds much light on empirical thought (thought directed at different kinds of things in the world), it doesn’t address what it takes for thought to intend or think its own form—and so it fails to describe the kind of transcendental thought of which the account itself is an instance. Building on Haugeland’s own rich picture of self-understanding, I show how we can remedy this omission, and that when we do, we see that transcendental thought is performed by each of us as concrete individuals and yet takes place from a perspective outside of, and thus free from, the normative demands and existential situations of our empirical lives. It is thus of at most therapeutic use in them, even as it is valuable for its own sake as an exercise of our finite freedom.
Heidegger on Understanding One's Own Being, New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, 2012
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 upon their constitutive ontological possibilities, I argue that it is this general, ontological structure that Heidegger means to say is at issue for us, and that understanding ourselves in terms of it is a condition of possibility of understanding ourselves as particular individuals faced with the questions of who, how, and whether to be in our respective situations. I then show how this allows us to begin to address Heidegger’s view of the role philosophy plays in an individual’s existence as it makes explicit the ontological structure which they normally only tacitly understand.
Heidegger's Descartes and Heidegger's Cartesianism, European Journal of Philosophy, 2012
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 the compressed discussion in SZ §§19–21. I here show through a careful reading of Heidegger's lectures on Descartes from the years immediately preceding SZ that, while he has sharp criticisms of Descartes and certain ‘Cartesian’ aspects of modern philosophy along the lines commonly recognized, he also aims to disclose what he calls the ‘positive possibilities’ in Descartes and the philosophy he inspired. I detail a number of these and then show that they force us to see Heidegger's own early project as largely unconcerned with dualism and mentalism per se, and much more with questions of the philosophical methodology that gives rise to them. Moreover, I show that a careful reading of Heidegger's treatment of the cogito makes clear that he is no serious way attempting to ‘de-center the subject’ and that the fundamental question of the ‘analytic of Dasein’ is one that takes Descartes as an immediate jumping off point: how can I articulate what I understand myself to be as the general kind of entity I am, and on what besides me does my being depend?
What's Formal about Formal Indication? Heidegger's Method in Sein und Zeit, Inquiry, 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’." 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 these features, various further a priori, ontological structures (care and temporality) that constitute one as a first-person singular entity then become accessible. Formal indication is thus formal in two senses: it officially designates or signals certain first-person singular phenomena as the topic of investigation, and it picks out features which define the ontological form of the entity in question. It is thereby the method by which a legitimately transcendental account of our being may be begun to be generated by each of us from out of our factical, immanent existence.
Heidegger, Lafont, and the Necessity of the Transcendental, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 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 conflation is unsound, I also argue that Lafont's own positive theory of meaning itself tacitly assumes a distinction between factical and transcendental, and so rests on exactly what she finds problematic in Heidegger. This still leaves a puzzle as to how factical individuals are actually able to grasp anything transcendental, so I conclude by sketching Heidegger's method of `formal indication', which is meant to show precisely how this can be done.
Lockean Primary Quality Perception Reconstructed, History of Philosophy Quarterly, 2007
With one exception, all of the ideas Locke identifies as ideas of primary qualities are ideas that are “divers senses” or multiple sensory modalities. The exception is solidity, which is an idea he associates only with touch. Drawing on his discussion of Molyneux’s question, and his implicit assumption that there is a unitary ‘I’ in all sensory experience, I argue (a) that what gives us a reason on Lockean grounds for thinking that certain qualities are primary is that they are robust across the senses (at least vision and touch), with the exception of solidity, which is primary because it is both ineliminable from experience and inextricably tied to our experience of the ideas found in multiple senses; and (b) that the primacy of solidity points to the embodied nature of the self who has the experience of the various ideas and locates herself in a unitary space. Though he didn’t quite spell it out in this way, Locke’s account of experience thus has, pace Berkeley, the necessary resources for making fairly strong claims about a reality lying beyond the “veil of ideas.”
Review of C. Perrin's Entendre la métaphysique. Les significations de la pensée de Descartes dans l'œuvre de Heidegger, Revue Philosophique de Louvain, 2015. (Published in French translation by Benoît Thirion; contact me for English original.)
Review of J. Powell, ed. Heidegger and Language, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2014.
Haugeland and others following him see being as in some way normative for thought and action, and our understanding of it revisable in light of certain kinds of revelatory events (e.g., the appearance of anomalies which show that a basic conceptualization of the laws of physical nature is flawed). Against this I argue that, for Heidegger, being is that which is constitutive for the most basic intelligibility of things, and so figures a priori in any and all thought, experience, and action. It is thus not something we can ever have a perspective on which would allow us to question or revise it (as we can with, e.g., scientific laws). Hence, being figures as form, not norm. This raises the question of what the goal is of the philosopher who seeks to illuminate and articulate being. I suggest it is not a goal to be pursued for any external end, but that, like art, pure mathematics, and other ‘impractical’ human endeavors, it is worth pursuing for its own sake.
Heidegger's Anxiety: On the Role of Mood in Phenomenological Method, Bulletin d’analyse phénoménologique, 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 methodological and “existential” moods, but that there is nevertheless a compelling methodological account of anxiety that can be teased apart from the existentialist one: methodologically understood, anxiety is a self-affected state of the ontologist, one that results from her asking ontological questions of herself, and, by imagining crisis or breakdown, withdrawing from her determinate situation to a position where she can see the form of her own activity as questioner and imaginer. I draw out some consequences this has for how we should understand the place of ontological understanding in living one’s life, and I conclude by briefly showing how my reading helps us see Heidegger as developing key elements in the work of Descartes and Kant.
Basic Problems of Haugeland's Phenomenology, Ergo, 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 shared forms of understanding of those entities, and yet that they be self-critically open to the possibility of needing to revise or reject those forms of understanding. In this essay I argue that, while Haugeland’s account of intentionality sheds much light on empirical thought (thought directed at different kinds of things in the world), it doesn’t address what it takes for thought to intend or think its own form—and so it fails to describe the kind of transcendental thought of which the account itself is an instance. Building on Haugeland’s own rich picture of self-understanding, I show how we can remedy this omission, and that when we do, we see that transcendental thought is performed by each of us as concrete individuals and yet takes place from a perspective outside of, and thus free from, the normative demands and existential situations of our empirical lives. It is thus of at most therapeutic use in them, even as it is valuable for its own sake as an exercise of our finite freedom.
Heidegger on Understanding One's Own Being, New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, 2012
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 upon their constitutive ontological possibilities, I argue that it is this general, ontological structure that Heidegger means to say is at issue for us, and that understanding ourselves in terms of it is a condition of possibility of understanding ourselves as particular individuals faced with the questions of who, how, and whether to be in our respective situations. I then show how this allows us to begin to address Heidegger’s view of the role philosophy plays in an individual’s existence as it makes explicit the ontological structure which they normally only tacitly understand.
Heidegger's Descartes and Heidegger's Cartesianism, European Journal of Philosophy, 2012
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 the compressed discussion in SZ §§19–21. I here show through a careful reading of Heidegger's lectures on Descartes from the years immediately preceding SZ that, while he has sharp criticisms of Descartes and certain ‘Cartesian’ aspects of modern philosophy along the lines commonly recognized, he also aims to disclose what he calls the ‘positive possibilities’ in Descartes and the philosophy he inspired. I detail a number of these and then show that they force us to see Heidegger's own early project as largely unconcerned with dualism and mentalism per se, and much more with questions of the philosophical methodology that gives rise to them. Moreover, I show that a careful reading of Heidegger's treatment of the cogito makes clear that he is no serious way attempting to ‘de-center the subject’ and that the fundamental question of the ‘analytic of Dasein’ is one that takes Descartes as an immediate jumping off point: how can I articulate what I understand myself to be as the general kind of entity I am, and on what besides me does my being depend?
What's Formal about Formal Indication? Heidegger's Method in Sein und Zeit, Inquiry, 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’." 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 these features, various further a priori, ontological structures (care and temporality) that constitute one as a first-person singular entity then become accessible. Formal indication is thus formal in two senses: it officially designates or signals certain first-person singular phenomena as the topic of investigation, and it picks out features which define the ontological form of the entity in question. It is thereby the method by which a legitimately transcendental account of our being may be begun to be generated by each of us from out of our factical, immanent existence.
Heidegger, Lafont, and the Necessity of the Transcendental, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 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 conflation is unsound, I also argue that Lafont's own positive theory of meaning itself tacitly assumes a distinction between factical and transcendental, and so rests on exactly what she finds problematic in Heidegger. This still leaves a puzzle as to how factical individuals are actually able to grasp anything transcendental, so I conclude by sketching Heidegger's method of `formal indication', which is meant to show precisely how this can be done.
Lockean Primary Quality Perception Reconstructed, History of Philosophy Quarterly, 2007
With one exception, all of the ideas Locke identifies as ideas of primary qualities are ideas that are “divers senses” or multiple sensory modalities. The exception is solidity, which is an idea he associates only with touch. Drawing on his discussion of Molyneux’s question, and his implicit assumption that there is a unitary ‘I’ in all sensory experience, I argue (a) that what gives us a reason on Lockean grounds for thinking that certain qualities are primary is that they are robust across the senses (at least vision and touch), with the exception of solidity, which is primary because it is both ineliminable from experience and inextricably tied to our experience of the ideas found in multiple senses; and (b) that the primacy of solidity points to the embodied nature of the self who has the experience of the various ideas and locates herself in a unitary space. Though he didn’t quite spell it out in this way, Locke’s account of experience thus has, pace Berkeley, the necessary resources for making fairly strong claims about a reality lying beyond the “veil of ideas.”
Review of C. Perrin's Entendre la métaphysique. Les significations de la pensée de Descartes dans l'œuvre de Heidegger, Revue Philosophique de Louvain, 2015. (Published in French translation by Benoît Thirion; contact me for English original.)
Review of J. Powell, ed. Heidegger and Language, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2014.