Jon Cogburn's Blog

Speculative Realism is neither continental nor analytic in the deeper substantive sense

Characteristically nice post about the analytic-continental divide from Graham Harman HERE.

Whenever Harman posts on this issue I find myself agreeing with everything he says. With Harman I think it is much more healthy than not that there are different traditions, and that they remain different

In place of thinking the division should disappear, I would instead make the following claims: (1) an a priori unwillingness from members of one tradition to learn from members of other traditions is problematic, (2) almost equally problematic are people from one camp who are only open to people from the other tradition to the extent that those people articulate views that seem to support those of the supposed pluralist's,* and (3) whatever you think about the different styles, the thinkers covered by continental philosophers should be taught in analytic programs (especially German Idealism and 19th Century more broadly, but also the things Leiter derides).

I should note in passing that one of the things I like about Speculative Realism is that its main practitioners do not embody any of the above vices. Analytic and Continental describe first and foremost training regimes for academic philosophers. But at a certain point you should put on your big boy pants just try to do philosophy, which requires following the muse wherever she wants to take you.

Avoidance of the above vices is not accidental, since Speculative Realists reject two substantive positions at the heart of the most significant continental and analytic philosophers, positions that started with the Positivists and Heidegger, and that rise up zombie-like over and over and over again.

This becomes crystal clear if one realizes that the divide between analytic and continental philosophers is much less philosophically important than a couple of other deeper divisions (1) between anti-metaphysical thinkers and at least anti-anti-metaphysical thinkers,** and (2) between naturalists and non-naturalists.

Weirdly, analytical philosophy's founding sin was combining naturalism and anti-metaphysics and continental philosophy's founding sin was combining non-naturalism and anti-metaphyiscs! But naturalism is false (see Michael Ruse HERE) and anti-metaphysics is incoherent (read the early critics of Kant or Graham Priest for that matter!).

In analytical philosophy anti-metaphysics is where naturalism goes to, if not die, continue some kind of a zombie-like existence. This goes all the way from Marburg School Neo-Kantianism to Robert Brandom, currently holding the office of the last positivist (after Bergmann then Quine and then Rorty before him). Brandom-type Pittsburgh Hegelianiasm, for all of its manifest virtues, almost constitutively returns to the kind of view that Heidegger derides in his very first (emergency war) lectures, of the universe as some valueless hunk with humans (in the guise of social practice) guilding and staining it. This is properly neo-Kantian, not Hegelian, as is the quietistic anti-metaphysics*** that obscures the basic move.

But, on the contrary, in continental philosophy anti-metaphysics comes from the Heideggerian view that science itself is a founded mode over something anti-metaphysics phenomenology reveals to be more originary. So while analytic naturalism leads to anti-metaphysics (because one must deride as meaningless questions that the natural sciences cannot answer), continental anti-metaphysics leads to anti-naturalism.

One is actually tempted to join the two above observations to make the following sort of argument. Analytic philosophy shows that naturalism refutes metaphysics. Continental philosophy shows that the refutation of metaphysics refutes naturalism. Therefore naturalism refutes naturalism.

In any case, I raise my flag with anti-naturalist anti-anti-metaphysicians. We're a tiny minority in both analytic and continental philosophy. With the possible exception of a non-trivial set of Christian apologists (usually working in a dialectical setting horribly tainted by either fideism or its opposition, IMHO), analytical philosophers who are not anti-metaphysicians are almost all naturalists (argument above notwithstanding)! And, with the notable exceptions of the Speculative Realists, Deleuzians, and some other heroic figures, continental philosophy by and large continues to chug along wearing the same old phenomenological straightjacket, with its attendent quietism and other forms of recycled neo-Kantianism. Note that this is perversely a straightjacket that any proper reader of the German Idealists would have thrown off long ago. Well with Quentin Meillassoux and Graham Priest's readings of this tradition,as well as Graham Harman's indefeteagable labor, at least some of us have begun to wiggle our way out of the damned thing.****

[Notes:

*It's very hard not to fall into this trap, perhaps impossible. Some strategies for an analytic philosopher who wants to be a "pluralist": (1) You must, must, must avoid the temptation to use your continental friends to give yourself a patina depth by simply adding a footnote when one of those continental friends tells you that someone you've never read has an idea kind of like yours, (2) You must go to talks about thinkers you don't like and be vigilently open to the idea that informed people of good will disagree with you about your assessment, (3) As much as possible, maintain an active reading life that has nothing to do with whatever current project on which you are working; this helps in all sorts of ways.

**The distinction between anti-metaphysics and anti-anti-metaphysics should not be confused with the distinction between anti-realists and anti-anti-realists. John McDowell is both an anti-metaphysician and an anti-anti-realist. See the next note.

***John McDowell is, like most continental philosophers, actually anti-metaphysical and non-naturalist. Brandom claims to be non-naturalist, but he really is not, at least in the important sense that the early Heidegger adumbrated. This is the entire reason, I think, that Crispin Wright famously put John McDowell down as not really being an analytic philosopher, but (as far as I know) has never said anything remotely similar about fellow Pittsburgh Hegelian Robert Brandom.

****Just because nothing above makes this sufficiently clear- I think Heidegger is one of the most important five philosophers in history and also that Brandom is easily in the top five of living philosophers.]

brief thoughts about the genesis of belief

I have this strange intuition that a lot of confusion in the philosophies of mind and language arises from the fact that representations are used to explain, first, two quite different activities: (1) planning, and (2) correction, and second, two quite different kinds of things: (3) individuals, and (4) groups.

Individual planning that leads to representational explanations occur when, for example, the crow goes offline and then suddenly performs some novel activity, for example bending the paperclip in a way that allows her to unlock the cage. The best explanation is that the crow was running out counterfactuals in her mind, counterfactuals that bear a systematic relation to causal facts in the world (see THIS POST and THIS POST for a link to a relevant discussions). Mark Okrent explains intentionality in this manner, and work on counterfactual and off-line reasoning by others can help fill in the details (my student Joel Okrent and I have just started a paper on this).

Group correction is more complicated. Of course, as Feyerabend said, when conversation breaks down, then we must resort to violence. But the enlightenment ideal that we can adjudicate differences without violence rests on what Crispin Wright calls "cognitive command," the view that when two people are disagreeing, there must be some deficiency in one of them or their environment. In Truth and Objectivity, Wright has a brilliant discussion of how this gives rise to representational pictures.

some background on Harman and Speculative Realism (and cool new book series) [click link for full post]

Graham Harman has the announcement of an Edinburgh University book series on Speculative Realism HERE. His book on Quentin Meillassoux will be the first in the series.

via www.newappsblog.com

affection type problems concerning modality?

It's weird to me how easily the Jacobi and Schultze's noumenal affection problem can generalize.

With Jacobi and Schultze it only concerned applying the category of causality to the thing in itself. Transcendental idealism both prohibits doing this and seems to necessitate it.

But you get a similar problem with causality and the understanding. Kant over and over again uses "imposition talk" (see Bennett's Kant's Analytic, section 38 for a plethora of examples) concerning how the understanding imposes categories on phenomena. But this is really weird, and yields another affection type argument. By transcendental idealism causality is just a relation between phenomena. But if the mind is imposing causality then something like a causal relation must exist between the mind and the phenomena. Since the mind is part of the noumena, we could call this the noumenal imposition argument, exactly analog to the noumenal affection argument (I'm sure Kant actually has more to say about this because it is so close to the way he wants to reconcile free will and determinism; which on some readings do involve a non-temporal kind of causality that determines whole deterministic causal sequences from outside of time).

Likewise, there is an analogous (and to me more interesting) problem about possibility itself. Can  we really make sense of critical philosophy as the transcendental inquiry into conditions of possibility when at the end of the day possibility is nothing more than something imposed by the understanding on phenomena? I think for Kant you get the same kind of issue as the affection and imposition arguments here. [There's also an analogous Priest type argument that John Divers talks about in his fantastic book Possible Worlds.]

Note that all three problems illustrate the Russell Paradox type inconsistent mix of what Graham Priest calls Transcencence and Enclosure. 

With possibility the problem arises for Heidegger too. Next semester I'm going to reread the stuff about possibility (if I remember right, he calls it "founded possibility" or something like that) in Being in Time and explore the extent to which that model of possibility is consistent with his own characterization of what he's doing as a transcendental project.

I'm really interested to study the history of the noumenal affection problem and see the extent to which the original players glommed onto an imposition problem and an analogous problem about modality. I don't think it's an accident that Schopenhauer was Schultze's student and that he has such a rich theory of modality. One of my projects the next four years is to read Schopenhauer the way Harman reads Heidegger, and then apply that to analytic debates about modality. Unfortunately this is going to take a few years of just getting up to speed on background. The stuff with Kant and the affection problem is just laying the groundwork for my next richer engagement with Schopenhauer. I'm starting teaching our early modern this spring, then in spring 2012 I'll teach our Kant and then spring 2013 our 19th Century class on Schopenhauer.

I know that the big project may sound flaky, but it's already in large part yielded a cowritten paper on vagueness that Frankie Worrell and I are presenting at the next Easter APA. I mean, Frankie and I got the idea from working through some Schopenhauer. So I have some evidence that the big project will yield all sorts of cool stuff along the way.

Wolfendale's challenges

I'm moving a comment of Pete Wolfendale from the previous thread to the front, because it raises so many things worth thinking about. And I'm putting my response as the first comment. Here's Wolfendale's comment:

 
Levi: I should point out that most of these claims have been made in more detail in my most recent post (http://deontologistics.wordpress.com/2010/06/15/hijacking-correlationism/) although some of them are backed up in earlier posts which are all linked to. This post also includes a very rough parsing of Meillassoux's argument from facticity if you're interested. However, I'll try to address your points in order, and bring in the relevant arguments without making this comment too long.

1. The idea of translation is a nice metaphor, but that's what it is - a metaphor - and it needs cashing out. The simplest way to cash it out is that the effect the affecting object has upon the affected object is in some way dependent upon the affected object, i.e., that the same object will produce different affects upon different things. However, this is something that everyone accepts, and they can accept it without having to talk about 'real objects' or 'proper being' that withdraws. Maybe you can enlighten me as to the correct stronger way to cash this out, and how this solves any of these issues.

Assuming you can provide an enlightening account of translation, you still have to explain how exactly translation can 'fail', as this is far from obvious. What is it that provides the normative standard for translations? Is it the withdrawn object and its unknowable real properties? If so, how do these actually constitute a standard if they are inaccessible? An inapplicable standard is no standard at all. Moreover, if the withdrawn object sets the standard, the standard cannot be to correctly represent it, as it is by definition unrepresentable, and we can't be bound to do something we can't achieve (ought implies can), unless this obligation is constituted out of some finite achievable obligations.

a couple more from Harman worth archiving

One with important links to Shaviro and Dominic on pantheism and speculative realism HERE. From reading Shaviro's stuff it's clear that Whitehead is now added to the list of great philosophers I need to catch up on in the next decade or so.

One on Williams, Heidegger, and the importance of the R7 thesis HERE. On this point, I think that Williams really is in a dilemma. Either you read Heidegger as affirming Harman's R7 (that the ontological relation between subject and object is not different in kind than that between object and object), or Hermann Phillipse is correct that Heidegger fails to rid himself of the Cartesian problematic, if not the external world then certainly the mind-body problem.

I think the Heidegger of Being and Time is incoherent exactly where Phillipse alleges,so that any consistent reading of the material is going to depart from what Heidegger wrote to some extent. So the question is how philosophically insightful the readings end up being, and on this score Dreyfus, Okrent, and Harman beat everybody else hands down.

[UPDATE: Levi has a reaction post HERE. I know that Allison tries to interpret "empirical realism" more along the lines that Williams does in the comments below. I hope to read Allison's book this year at some point. My point about Schultze, Jacobi, Maimon, and Schopenhauer's gripe is that even if you allow that Kant's version of "empirical realism" somehow recovers common sense (and I think Levi is absolutely correct that it does not), it doesn't really matter because transcendental idealism is *still* incoherent because it simultaneously requires and prohibits causality between things and themselves and phenomena. Moreover, I think that Phillipse and Harman are right that Being and Time is incoherent in the same way (though with Harman, I think that many of Heidegger's insights are really important).

I'm worried my tone in this exchange and the comments below is too testy because all of this has been hastily typed in between kid wrangling. I should just note that smart, informed people disagree about all of this, and more importantly I always find Williams' work on his blog and elsewhere to be worth thinking about.]

[UPDATE 2: Another round (with link to Williams' most recent post) HERE, and a nice reaction from Levi HERE].  Money quote from Harman.

Well, reality is spooky. We’re so stuck in the rut of automatically assuming that thinking = demystifying and demythologizing that we forget things might sometimes be of a more mythic character than we realize. Enlightenment doesn’t just go in one direction, turning spooky depths into easily surveyable surfaces. There are times for that and times for the opposite gesture, just as boxers need to be able to use both hands.

A conviction that this is right is in part why Harman and I take Lovecraft to be as philosophically important a fiction writer as many take Mark Twain or Fyodor Dostoevsky (Neal Hebert and I have one paper  we're shopping around on the metaphysics of magic that crucially uses Lovecraft and Harman has a book on Lovecraft either in the pipeline or forthcoming).

Harman also explains nicely in his post the part of his position that is oddest to me, where presence at hand is thematized as essentially relational and readiness to hand as essentially non-relational. By odd I just mean that this is one place where one could agree with Harman's distinctive radical exteriorization of scheme-content and R7 thesis but still disagree with the specifics of how it goes. I'm not sure where I come down on this. The metaphysics of relations is one of the oldest and most difficult in philosophy (see all the papers about bundle theory versus bare particulars in analytic metaphysics; Harman's view entails a distinctive position on this that deserves to be part of the dialogue).]

syllabus for next semester's grad seminar

I'm teaching the grad. seminar in our M.A. program next semester and I uncharacteristically made the syllabus well before the night before the first day and have put it on line HERE.

I'm desperately trying to get ahead of the schedule this summer so that I can still watch the kids every day in Fall so Emily has a few hours every day to write. In Spring semester it will get easier because Audrey will be a year old and old enough to go to Thomas' Mother's Day Out three days a week from 9:00-3:00. But Fall Semester is going to be a lot of work.

Anyhow, the course should be really cool. Everything is really geared towards getting as clear as possible about what Robert Brandom does and should say about non-linguistic cognition (aphaisics, highly functional deaf adults in parts of the world where there is no sign language, and higher animals). Several times in his two most recent books he just asserts that Parrots are no different from thermostats. The thing is, by his own philosophy he needn't say that. But I don't know if he does have the resources to say the things one should, in light of empirical research into deaf and aphaisic humans. With Alisdair MacIntyre, I think Heidegger's notion of "world richness" is really the place to go, and I want to see how that fits with Brandom's theoretical framework. My suspicion is that Brandom's critique of rational choice theory does not in fact tell against the Heideggerian notion, but I'm not at all sure right now and am really excited about having a chance to read him just in terms of this issue.

[Many, many thanks to Pete Wolfendale for guiding me in this.]

meditations on Harman and transcendental idealism

Sorry the blog is marginal notes on Graham Harman's blog today, but there is a fascinating post HERE in response to Shaviro  post (HERE). [In contrast to Levi, who actually does lots of philosophy via dialogue on his blog, I often use this space to take notes for things I might write about in paper or book form in the future]. Anyhow, here's the relevant bit from Harman.

Here’s one of his key passages:

“In other words: I do not see the point in maintaining, simply because interactions (or relations) are always partial and limited, to therefore hypostasize whatever was not grasped (prehended) in the event of a particular encounter as a shadow object that exists in and of itself apart from the encounter. (Quite ironically, this means that Harman and Bryant are more Kantian than I am — in spite of what I have said on this subject before).”

As for the Kant point, I already agreed with Shaviro last summer that my position is in agreement with Kant’s on the things-in-themselves. It’s the other side of Kant (privilege of the human world relation) which is more dominant these days, and on that point I have nothing to do with Kant. Shaviro knows and concedes this; I’m just adding the clarification for others.

This makes me happy because it fits very well with the way I situate Harman's work in terms of John McDowell's update of Davidson's problematic about the scheme/content distinction. Kant, of course, invented the distinction via his insistence on the hard and fast distinction between intuitions and concepts (he accused both empiricists and rationalists of collapsing this distinction but in characteristically different ways; it's actually not clear that we would differentiate philosophers into empiricists and rationalists had Kant not made this claim).

I realized while reading Tool Being that Harman's radical externalization of the Heidegger Vorhandenheit/Zuhandenheit distinction (where the play between presence at hand and objective presence takes place between objects themselves) could be read as a strategy for radically externalizing the scheme-content distinction. If I understand the Shaviro-Harman debate correctly, the extent to which Harman is a Kantian is actually in virtue of two things: (1) the externalization of scheme-content, and (2) thinking of content in similar ways as a Kantian would think of intuitions (as blind, or empty? I always get that confused).

The second part gives rise to what many regard as the overly Leibnizian weirdness of Harman's views, but I think a lot of people who disagree with that are uncharitable in that they don't recognize the philosophical import of the first point. I mean, you may not agree with the way he works out the insight, but it is a fundamental insight and to work it out in any way at all to the extent he has is important, and should become part of the story of these issues.

I think this is really pretty obvious with some historical background. The major part of Maimon's central importance was that he invented the trope picked up by Fichte, then (arguably) Hegel, and then a lot of phenomenology. This is the radical interiorization of transcendental idealism, where the distinction between appearance and the thing in itself is thematized as being a distinction within the realm of appearance.

Graham Harman turns this upside down (I want to say that Harman is Marx to Maimon's Hegel, but that would be confusing since Maimon ultimately gave rise to Hegel). Instead of radically interiorizing the relation between appearance and thing in itself, Harman radically exteriorizes it. Take whatever it is that is independent of humans in the sense that it existed long before human beings. These things have appearance/reality with respect to each other in precisely the neo-Kantian way Heidegger captures with Vorhandenheit/Zuhandenheit.

Again, whatever you think of the details, the guy gets a spot in dialectical space named after him.

I would be very happy if the dialectic proceeded to where lots of philosophers followed Harman and radically externalize scheme-content, but try to do this with different models of scheme and content. I think that some of the debate in the Object Oriented Philosophy blogosphere is exactly on this point. A lot of the interesting things Levi Bryant writes about can be understood in exactly these terms.

[Two things to think about: (A) And the potential ontological prize is huge. Phenomenology's (broken) promise of dissolving the problems of the external world and the mind-body problem will be redeemed. In this light I disagree with Gary Williams and see Alva Noe's enactivist philosophy of perception as actually being part and parcel of Harman's program. I also disagree with Harman in seeing Dreyfusarian approaches to Heidegger as being part and parcel of the Harman's program. Again, this is because I separate two facets of his program: (1) the radical externalization of scheme/content, and (2) Harman's particular model of scheme and content. Dreyfusarian/pragmatist approaches to Heidegger can be reinterpreted in terms of (1). (B) Maimon in many ways reintroduced Leibnizian tropes into post-Kantian German Idealism. It would be very interesting to compare the pressures for him to do this with the way that Harman's metaphysics ends up recapitulating Leibnizian themes.]

progress on Kant notes and weird issue with Maimon and Heidegger

I've got a good working set of notes both to the Introduction and the Aesthetic now (HERE) that are good enough to help with teaching.

My goal for this summer is just to put in some marginalia to Bennett's two books, and then to take part in Mikhail's Maimon reading group, and maybe get some notes up on him. It will be a couple of years before the Kant notes will be a helpful stand alone resource for anyone interested in Kant, just because it's going to take me that long to get through the secondary stuff and to have anything coherent to say about the first part of the transcendental logic.

Maimon is fascinating for a number of reasons I'm already aware of: (1) his views about infinity, (2) his attempt to push Kant backwards on the absolute distinction between intuition and concepts, and (3) him being the first Kantian to propose that the distinction between appearances and things in themselves should be made in the realm of appearance.

Maimon's move about the distinction being in the realm of appearance is exactly analogous to what some Heideggerians propose to try to read the passages about idealism and realism in Being and Time as consistent (Lee Braver cites people who go this route; I think it's incoherent in the case of Heidegger, but that Maimon's views about infinity and appeal to God render his view considerably more plausible, though still false for reasons that the two Grahams (Priest and Harman) go into).

But, weirdly, I haven't seen any of the high church Heideggerians note that the very same move they attribute to Heidegger was made even before the publication of the third critique by Maimon (and then picked up by the other German idealists) to save Kant from "the affection argument" (the claim that in transcendental idealism causality is simultaneously invoked to explain the relation between things in themselves and appearance and also restricted to just being a relation between appearances). It's a very strange historical blindness for scholars who adopt the pose of taking the history of philosophy more seriously than everybody else (as an analytical philosopher interested in continental philosophy, I've been on the receiving end of that condescension from high church Heideggerians more times than I can remember; in many cases it's been justifiable condescension). I think that maybe Heidegger's own propaganda about his own work being this radical break in the history of philosophy can be pretty devastating to the reading habits of people who take him seriously in that regard (and I say this as someone who places him firmly in the top ten philosophers in the history of philosophy).

Maimon's writing is notoriously difficult, so I'm kind of nervous about showing up to the reading group and having nothing to say. We'll see how it turns out.

Clarification of some remarks I've made about Graham Harman

Anyone who reads the philosophy posts might be surprised about the majority of stuff on which I've published (abstracts of all published work HERE).

I pretty obsessively don't blog about whatever papers I'm working on. For example, I have eight papers under review right now (half of them in S knows that P epistemology), and haven't blogged about any of them. The problem is that in anything at all related to logic some people are really, really good at proving things. I'm not, but I'm still pretty good at coming up with (to me at least) marginally interesting ideas. If I put one of those ideas out there, it is not plagiarism for someone else to come up with the relevant argument. This is so ingrained that I always work in private on coming up with specific arguments, even when logic is not involved. [Side note: I don't recommend this practice at all. It has served me badly professionally, it is much better to get your ideas out there at every stage in presentations and networking. Almost nobody is just going to pick up a published article of yours out of the blue, no matter what journal it's in.]

I've kind of been throwing around in my head a book length project on Graham Harman and trying out some of the constituent ideas here, but my aversion to putting arguments that I'm shepherding to publication (even in a project that is going to take me half a decade, because of all of the history) has made some of these posts a bit cryptic.

Anyhow, I guess a book idea is different from an article, so I'll get over this neurosis briefly enough to write something. I've claimed to see two promising realist traditions in post-Kantian continental philosophy (construed broadly enough to include Wittgenstein, John McDowell, and Graham Priest!) and also claimed that Graham Harman's philosophy represents a culmination of both. But I've not been at all clear about how this works and also left the impression that I think Schopenhauer was not  a transcendental idealist. So here's a very brief overview.

The philosophical project since Kant has been to free ourselves of the problems with transcendental idealism without falling back into the very problems that led up to it (Hume's problematic about deontic and alethic modalities, paradoxes of totality, Berkeley's problematic). We have to get through Kant, not prior to him. So the null hypothesis is a strict division between mind and world, with it being totally unclear what we can claim to know or even say about the world side of this (this latter point against Kant motivated Maimon, Fichte, and Schopenhauer).

There have been two broad ways to get free of this view without returning to a pre-critical metaphysics (and I think a lot of analytical metaphysics is pre-critical in what I mean as a pejorative sense). The first is an outside-in strategy, where you are led to posit a real world precisely because any attempt to come up with a fixed set of categories for the mind (when the mind is doing the work Kant envisioned) is always overturned by things that surprise us. The phenomenology of surprise is evidence that there is something totally beyond the constitutive powers of our mind. Kierkegaard is the patron saint of this strategy and one can read Derrida as a version of it (and I should note that Lee Braver has a mind-blowingly fantastic paper on this). I call it "aporetic realism." [This is a much longer story, but I should also note that another anti-anti-realist strategy of quietism about transcendent reality ("apophantic anti-anti-realism") in common to McDowell, Wittgenstein, and late Heidegger (on some readings) actually leads to aporetic realism. Graham Priest's work shows this.]

The second broad way of getting at the real is an inside-out strategy. Schopenhauer made this strategy both possible and plausible (with Barbara Hanan I see Schopenhauer as in partial, and ultimately unsuccessful, revolt against Transcendental Idealism). Even though he remained a transcendental idealist he gave us enough building blocks to go through Kant to what I'm now calling "pantheistic realism" (terrible title, I'm sorry). In this strategy you take properties associated with the mind in the Kantian tradition and externalize them to the world. For Schopenhauer (in a certain moods and when read with some liberty) the human body is what licenses this. We ourselves experience frustrated will in our body. But this is experience of modal aspects of an object in the world. When will is frustrated something is not possible. So we have a post-Kantian answer to Hume's problematic about alethic modality. Necessity and possibility are, contra Kant, not things added to the world by the mind but really out there in human bodies and other objects.  [This is a much longer story, but I should also note that the other anti-anti-realist strategy of historicism that some people attribute to middle period Heidegger, can be seen as a precursor version of this. One that I think fails, we are moving against anti-realism from the inside out, but all we get to is a community of minds changing in time. And every problem you can raise about the Kantian mind can be raised about a community of Kantian minds.]

Where does Harman fit into this? Well, aporetic realism is constitutively unable to account for different things. It always falls into the real as some kind of spooky undifferentiated other (obviously, this is the view Schopenhauer could never ultimately break free from, though Hanan shows surprisingly that his ethical views do not require it). It collapses back into transcendental idealism in this regard. Pantheistic realism is constitutively unable to accommodate the independence of other objects from Mind, and hence collapses back into some form of idealism.

One of the things that is so fascinating about Harman is that he appropriates Heidegger in a way that allows him to craft a form of realism with the virtues of both aporetic and pantheistic realism, but that by combining the two, avoids the failings of the other. [Related side note: Heidegger owes much more to Schopenhauer than he ever admits; his account of how metaphysics started, his reading of Descartes, and the main Vorhandenheit/Zuhandenheit reversal are all riffs on Schopenhauer's strange form of platonism, his 1919 critique of the neo-Kantians (that gives rise to the Vornandenheit/Zuhandenheit reversal) is similar to Schopenhauer's critique of Kant, and his account of Gelassenheit is very little different from Schopenhauer's ethics]

One of the key ideas in Harman's Tool Being is that Heidegger's phenomenological account of mind and world (forget for now whether "world" really is the world or still a part of mind for early Heidegger; I think Heidegger wrote a lot of incoherent things because of this problem) can be externalized in the inside-out strategy of pantheistic realism. The Zuhandenheit-Vorhandenheit reversals happen whenever two things interact with one another.

This allows Harman's philosophy to satisfy the Realism thesis that he adds to Lee Braver's in his review of Braver's book.

R7 The human/world relation is just a special case of the relation between any two entities whatsoever (from his review of the book and brief note at http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2009/05/16/realism-through-the-eyes-of-anti-realism/#comments). This is contrasted with A7 which would say that the human-world relationship is the ground of all the others.

[For a discussion of Braver's Theses, and how they relate Harman's and Crispin Wright's, go HERE.] 

But wait a minute, how do we know that Harman's philosophy is not vulgar anthropomorphism and as such collapses back into a form of idealism? This is a long story I can't recapitulate here (in part because I'm learning it now as I read his other books), but the way in which Vorhandenheit/Zuhandenheit reversals work allow Harman to recapitulate the strengths of the aporetic tradition. The real always is and always will surprise us with new things that spookily gesture towards a plenitude that transcends what we could shove into our meager conceptual schemes. But since discrete objects are doing this with respect to each other, they do this in a  way that does not force us to posit some undifferentiated other as the real.

Anyhow that's the basic story. (1) Berkelyean arguments applied to perception, deontic and alethic modality, totality, (2) Kant produces transcendental idealism in response. (3) But this doesn't work because he has to claim to know (or say or think) things about the world that by his own philosophy he can't know (or say or think) about it. (4) This motivates apophantic/quietist and historicist anti-anti-realisms. (5) These either collapse back into idealism, or get transformed into the aporetic (Kierkegaardian) and pantheistic (Schopenhaurian) traditions. (6) But the first of these collapses back into transcendental idealism, and the second back into idealism. (7) Harman shows how to combine these two to produce a genuinely novel form of realism that (imho) does not collapse back into idealism and also does not ignore (as most analytical metaphysics today does, I'm sorry to say) the genuine philosophical problems that led to Kantianism.

Part of what makes a great philosopher great is that they drag new histories of philosophy behind them in their wake. One can imagine a world without Kant where the early modern period is not read as consisting in a fight between empiricism and rationalism. One can imagine a world without Carnap where the important task after Kant is not to come up with an account of necessity free from Kant's view of the constitutive powers of the mind. One can imagine a world without Heidegger where Being is not that big a deal. But a great philosopher's books are alike a time machine that reconfigures what came before. Tool Being did this for me and Guerrilla Metaphysics is fleshing out the story. And I should note that my "history" does involve time travel, as late Heidegger and Wittgenstein historicism is part of what motivates Schopenhauer on my view! And then Schopenhauer motivates early Heidegger. I see no problem with this.

Great philosophers also open up new questions because their thoughts have friction with regards to lots of other areas. Which is why something unprecedented has happened with the object oriented philosophy version of speculative realism. Neither Graham nor Levi Bryant have PhD students. Yet some really smart graduate students from around the world have been drawn to their work.

There are lots of questions in these areas that could motivate a Ph.D thesis (honestly I've seen dozens of posts by Levi that could do this). What is a good philosophy of science for object oriented philosophy? What is a good theory of truth for object oriented philosophy (Levi has some great posts on this)? We want to say that special relativity dynamics is more true than newtonian dynamics, but we don't want this to commit us a kind of mechanistic view of the real that gives rise to Hume's problems of deontic modality. How do we accommodate both sets of intuitions? And speaking of deontic modality, what are the ethical and meta-ethical implications of all of this? A recent post by Levi and the ensuing discussion just begins to hint at some of the interesting issues involved.

Anyhow, once I start working on this book in earnest this Summer, expect my blogging about things related to Harman to fall way off. My tendency to separate my writings for publications and blogging is very deeply ingrained at this point. But at least I hope this post explains some of the otherwise cryptic things I've said here and in comments on friend's blogs.

Brandom on (sentient) categorizers versus (sapient) inferers

I worry I'm being terribly obtuse here, but one of Brandom's central arguments totally loses me. Over and over again he contrasts mere classification with inference, claiming the former is not indicative of conceptual mastery while the latter is. This underwrites his dismissal of animals as "merely sentient," as he baldly groups (it should be noted with no citation of any relevant empirical research; see great Wolfendale/Silcox discussion HERE on this issue) parrot and pigeon behavior with that of thermometers and rusting iron, contrasting this with humans who are doing something more.

But when he says what we do that is more it is incredibly paltry, in fact the kind of thing that computer programs also do well. Here's a representative passage from Reason in Philosophy.

One could at this piont throw up one's hands, jettison the functionalist project, and concede that what is missing can only be supplied by invoking intrinsically conceptually contentful states of understanding-something that we concept-mongering sapients have, but that mere sentients such as pigeons do not. But there is an alternative. The rationalist's idea is that what is distinctive of the conceptual is its specifically inferential articulation. For a response reliably differentially elicited by red things to qualify as the application of a concept, it must have the significance of a move in the game of giving and asking for reasons. It must be available as a premise for drawing further conclusions, and be liable to challenge by inferences from premises with incompatible consequences. Grasping the concept red requires practical mastery of its inferential role, as well as its non-inferential role as an appropriate response to certain sorts of stimuli. This means being able to discriminate what follows from it, what it follows from, and what is incompatible with it-endorsing in practice the move from red to colored and from scarlet to red, and treating red as ruling out green. (Brandom 2009, 184)

Chinese room anyone? What am I missing?

Of course, the very highest conceptual ability Brandom writes about in the fantastic Chapter 3 of Reason in Philosophy, the Hegelian/existentialist ability to change concepts and reinvent a history that shows this change to be rational, is something that computers can't do. In fact, the old school of theory revision (where you just have to derive a good consistent subset of an inconsistent theory) is computationally intractable in all sorts of ways. However, these abilities are also the ones that are very, very hard for humans too!

So Brandom seems to either have to say that a simple expert system programmed in LISP or PROLOG is sapient, or to hold that only philosophers are sapient. Something's gone wrong.

Right after the above quote Brandom writes,

(Indeed, the considerations advanced by the pragmatist can be seen to be subsumed by those advanced by the rationalist, for the inferential role of a claim or concept includes its service as a premise in practical inferences: those whose conclusions are intentional actions.) (ibid)

Richard Dreyfus would strongly beg to differ here (and What Computers Still Can't Do should still be required reading). His Heideggerian critique of linguaform explanations just is a critique of this kind of assurance. I think it is here that Brandom goes wrong, and this Summer hope to show so with a paper on Heideggerian world-richness how this works (see my earlier post HERE on how this will go; I've also got to read Okrent's fascinating new book while doing this).

[Addendum: the same article has a very nice discussion of how "the generality problem" for epistemic reliabilism and "the disjunction problem"/gavagai issue play out, but again Brandom almost constitutively deals in false dichotomies whenever animals come up. He acts as if the disjunction problem (i.e. "is the frog responding to flies or moving dots") occurs only when we try to attribute conceptual mastery to animals, but that inference solves the problem for us, e.g.

What picks out one kind of thing as what is being reported to is a matter of the inferential commitments that response is involved in. These inferential consequences of going into a state make it clear that what is being classified is something outside the system. They are what determine that a physicist is reporting the presence of a mu meson in a bubble chamber, and not simply a large hook-shaped pattern. For the consequences of classifying something as a microscopic mu meson are quite different from those of classifying something as a macroscopic hook-shaped trace. It is the lack of such consequences that makes Dretske's dual thermometer liable to a disjunctive proximal interpretation (ibid, 195)

But surely it is not too science fictiony to imagine an alien race with a more intensionally rich idiom for whom our physicist's mu meson is just as crude as the frog's fly or moving spot, that is where the reactions to the mu meson are reactions to two different things that co-occur enough for it to work for human physicists.

And we don't have to go to aliens, normal human expertise do this, think if the experts' jadeite and nephrite to the non-experts jade (which is correctly applied either to jadeite or nephrite). And I'm sure we seem incredibly naive to our dogs in terms of how we differentially respond to smells.

Again, Brandom treats something that admits all sorts of degrees as if it were an on-off switch. I'll just reiterate that I think that this is a function of the way he is slighting "pragmatist" explanations, and that one can make sense of intensional richness entirely in terms of practical means-ends behavior.

Again, there are adult humans who are entirely non-linguistic (being born deaf and never having learned a language) who are migrant farmers. These people have been studied. They certainly can differentiate barn facades from real barns, and the abilities that make that possible for them interact with possible courses of action in all sorts or ways relevant to attributing to them conceptual mastery. Or consider a severe aphasic who only retains the word "red" but whose behavior makes it clear she grasps the relevant concept. As far as I understand him, Brandom is stuck a priori saying these things aren't possible. But they are actual, so of course they are possible. Again, I think the solution is to work out Heidegger's notion of world richness along early Heideggerian lines.]

[ADDENDUM TO THE ADDENDUM:

Here's another one from the next essay, which presents itself as advice to cognitive scientists, (without citing any actual cognitive science).

We might train a parrot reliably to respond differentially to the visible presence of red things by squawking "That's red." It would not yet be describing things as red, would not be applying the concept of red to them, because the noise it makes has no significance for it. It does not know that it follows from something's being red that it is colored, that it cannot be wholly green, and so on. Ignorant as it is of those inferential consequences, the parrot does not grasp the concept (ibid. 204).

Does Brandom mean to say that speakers of language with impoverished color words relative to ours (there are plenty of languages with only two, three, or four color words), do not grasp the concept of Red because they don't conclude that red things aren't green? This would be puerile, and really just be the result of individuating content too finely, with the result being that  people with different beliefs end up having different concepts automatically.

So I guess it's that the parrot makes no conclusions from her labeling something red. But Brandom and Sellars include "practical inferences" and clearly the Parrot will manifest all sorts of these. So does he just have a catastrophically empirically ill informed picture of bird cognition?

Weirdly, on the next page he says that one can stretch the word "conceptual" to include animals and computers, but that such things still don't have "genuinely descriptive-concepts" as if the distinction between being descriptive and not descriptive was clear. But then he makes the distinction in terms of drawing inferences in the first case and not the second. Does he mean inferences in natural language? Then aphasics and adult deaf non-language users have no concepts! So does he allow that practical inferences could be sufficient? Then he has to admit that there is continuum with higher animals such as parrots, dolphins, chimps, etc. closer to the average human. But he refuses to do this. Again, I'm not sure if this is just because he hasn't studied any of the empirical research about animal cognition, or what.]

really first rate review by Ned Block and Phillip Kitcher (hat tip Brian Leiter)

The review is HERE.

Block and Kitcher's piece is not just great because it exposes just how bad Jerry Fodor's recent arguments concerning natural selection are. It also explains really clearly a lot of interesting philosophical issues concerning natural selection. Here is a fantastically clear discussion of how to test whether the property of having more black wings for moths in industrial England is a free rider or a trait that increases selective fitness.

Enter Gould and Lewontin. Maybe moth coloration is a spandrel, and some other property of the moths is both relevant to their proliferation and correlated with their color. For example, evolutionary biologists have observed that moths usually rest by day on the undersides of branches rather than on the trunks of trees. So is the familiar black-as-camouflage story really true? Perhaps a characteristic of the larvae of melanic moths makes them more likely to survive. Or perhaps melanic moths have a tendency to move around less at night, which makes them less vulnerable to being eaten by bats (who care nothing for color). These are interesting alternatives to the familiar story, and the causal hypotheses they introduce can be tested in obvious ways: by examining the rates of larvae survival or by investigating nocturnal motions of moths. And this is what biologists have done. Concerned that an apparent adaptation (a camouflaging color) may be a side effect, they have looked for correlated traits that might figure in some alternative process that would culminate in greater representation of the melanic moths. Despite some controversy in the 1990s, the traditional story seems to be standing up well.

This leads to a discussion that can help with a really nice explanation of Heideggerian "world-poorness" in terms of the "disjunction problem" (that Fodor and Piatelli-Palmarini wrongly take to undermine evolutionary explanations). [Also note that MacIntyre's Dependent Rational Animals has a great discussion of world-richness and argument that Heidegger was wrong to treat it as an on or off phenomena that higher animals lack.]

What exactly could this trait be? One possibility, suggested by remarks in some of Fodor’s previous writings, would be that there are two different properties: being black, on the one hand, and matching the environment on the other. Is there a fact of the matter as to which of these causes the reproductive success?

There are two ways to interpret the question, and each one has a good answer. The first focuses on the specific environments in which melanic moths are selected: the woods that have suffered from industrial pollution. In these environments, being-well-camouflaged and being-black come to more or less the same thing. In a polluted environment, a black moth matches the surroundings better than a lightly speckled moth. The result is less predation and hence increased survival and procreation. Biology focuses on the process, and biologists are quite willing to identify how selection is acting by picking out any feature of the organisms that is central to the process. So if you are focused on this specific environment, then it is a matter of indifference whether you talk of selection for black color or for camouflage or for decreased predation. Among these options, you can talk as you like. Any of them will distinguish the selection process of the traditional industrial-pollution story from the potential rivals, such as larval resilience, or lower nocturnal mobility.

A second interpretation would consider all the woody settings in which the moths can be found. Speckled moths will be at a disadvantage if they rest on polluted trees (they will be picked off more easily), and melanic moths will be similarly vulnerable in unpolluted surroundings. Biologists can test and confirm these causal facts, and can report their conclusions by finding that, across the whole spectrum of environments, matching the color of the trees causes increased reproductive success. Of course, saying that accords perfectly with, and generalizes in a particular direction, the thought that, in the polluted woods, being black causes a moth to match its environment better. There are no great mysteries, no inscrutable distinctions between spandrels and properties selected, no general troubles about distinguishing between the causal powers of correlates.

Block and Kitcher go on to show that the arguments Fodor and friend muster are really just general arguments that if valid, would lead to skepticism about any causal claims both in any area of science and in normal descriptions of the world outside of science. But of course they purport to be establishing something special about evolutionary explanation.

Anyhow, it's Block and Kitcher's piece is one of the best pieces of public philosophy I've read. Here's another bit again relevant to the issue of world-richness,

A different example (due to the philosopher Elliott Sober) can offer further clues to the ways in which the authors inflate the position they attack. Sieves are very simple selection devices. Imagine a sieve with a mesh that will allow balls with radii of one inch to fall through, but that will retain those that are even a tiny bit larger. Suppose that balls with several different radii—one inch, two inches, three inches, and four inches—are placed in the sieve. The one inch balls are blue, while the larger ones have different colors. The blue balls fall through, and the others remain. In one sense the sieve has “selected” the blue balls, although it has not “selected for” being blue. That is because size not color is what matters to the transmission. Using the language Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini employ, we might say that the property of having a particular color (blue) is a spandrel or free-rider.

Yet we might divide the properties up more finely. The balls with radius one inch have a diameter of two inches, a circumference of 2π inches, a cross-sectional area at the equator of π square-inches, a volume of 4π/3 cubic inches, etc., etc. Lots of geometrical properties are correlated—indeed perfectly so. Which of these properties caused the balls to fall through? The question is idle. A person could select for radius rather than diameter, but the sieve cannot. Yet that makes absolutely no difference to the judgment originally made: the sieve selects for size, rather than for color. To recur to the language of indeterminacy, there is a determinate matter of fact as between color and size but not as between radius and diameter.

. . . .We can know the fact that the sieve selects for size rather than color without the presence of any actual environments in which size and color are not correlated because we understand the causal mechanisms: we know what would have happened if size and color were de-correlated in this device, namely, there would still be selection for size rather than color. A real causal difference is a feature of the world that can be investigated in different ways, for example, by looking at mechanisms; by considering real cases of de-correlation; or by looking at cases where the selection pressures are slightly different, such as unpolluted environments in which light moths are at a disadvantage. The way evolutionary biologists think about causation allows for the discussion of causal process in any of a number of ways—even those strange ways that invent peculiar properties. Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini almost grasp this point where they discuss the “prima facie” plausibility that polar bear color is a result of selection for matching the environment rather than selection for whiteness, a difference that, as we saw in the analogous case of the moths, can be real and can be investigated.

They conclude by discussion the nature of intensionality to rebut the claim that evolutionary explanations are intensional (in Frege's sense).

I would like to think through what Block and Kitcher says just because the teleo-semantics (and part of the friendly-to-animals part of the Heideggerian) tradition grounds intensionality in practical reasoning, that is then explicable in something like evolutionary terms.

I would like to argue that there are degrees of intensionality, so Block and Kitcher go a little bit off in stating that evolutionary theory is extensional simpliciter. They argue in this manner:

To see why, consider the notion of causation. If decreasing temperature causes freezing and decreasing temperature is the same property as decreasing mean molecular kinetic energy, then decreasing mean molecular kinetic energy causes freezing. The causal powers of a property—temperature, say—do not depend on how we refer to it or think about it. In that respect, causation is extensional.

But if causation is extensional, then so is selection-for, since selection-for is a causal idea. Consider, once again, the sieve and the balls. The balls that are blue and small fall through, leaving the larger (and differently colored) spheres in the sieve. What is causally responsible for the blue balls passing through the sieve is that they are small, not that they are blue; what is selected for is smallness, not blueness. In sum: being small is the cause, just as being black is the cause of the moths’ reproductive success rather than (say) correlated nighttime lethargy.

They are surely right about this, but something like intensionality comes up when we realize that properties that co-substatutibility in causal explanations is a function of background environment. There own example is like this. Mark Wilson shows that there are all sorts of environments where mean kinetic energy and temperature do not co-substitute (in a solid, for example).

Of course Block and Kitcher are correct that this has nothing to do with "how we think or refer about it." Either the property is adaptive or not in a background environment, and there is a fact of the matter about what properties will count as co-extensive in that environment. Nonetheless, the failure of substitutivity as we change environments is a lot like intensionality.

This does not undermine evolutionary theory, but I think it is an important part of the teleo-semantics story (ultimately analogous to Heidegger's characterization of reference as fundamentally non-linguistic, holding between one act done and another act that the first is done for). Substitution success and failure happen non-linguistically in the natural world and also in a prelinguistic world of practical activities.

Anyhow, the article concludes with:

Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini take the role of philosophy to consist in part in minding other people’s business. We agree with the spirit behind this self-conception. Philosophy can sometimes help other areas of inquiry. Yet those who wish to help their neighbors are well advised to spend a little time discovering just what it is that those neighbors do, and those who wish to illuminate should be sensitive to charges that they are kicking up dust and spreading confusion. What Darwin Got Wrong shows no detailed engagement with the practice of evolutionary biology, nor does it respond to the many criticisms that have been leveled against earlier versions of its central ideas. In this latter respect, the authors resemble the creationist debaters who assert that evolution is incompatible with the second law of thermodynamics, hear detailed refutations of their charge, and repeat their patter in the next forum.

We admire the work that both Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini have produced over many decades. We regret that two such distinguished authors have decided to publish a book so cavalier in its treatment of a serious science, so full of apparently scholarly discussions that rest on mistakes and confusions—and so predictably ripe for making mischief.

And a reader comments,

jerry fodor has been making the same mistake about 'selection-for' for at least 2 decades now. just ask ruth millikan! (i am not ruth millikan, by the way)

thanks to block and kitcher for the excellent review.

I would add to this Fodor's writings on lexical semantics, prominently in Concepts: What Cognitive Science Got Wrong. Read Pustejovsky's devastating take down HERE (or on googlebooks HERE). The weirdest thing to me was that Fodor and Lepore's proposal for a successor theory was already a part of generalized quantifier theory (started by Montague, then developed in Barwise and Cooper's seminal paper, now part of the canon) and really properly speaking compositional and not lexical semantics (though, unlike generalized quantifier theory, Fodor and Lepore had no suggestion about how semantics/syntax interface would be handled, so they really weren't properly speaking offering a theory in any case).

What is in common to the misplaced attacks on both empirical work in semantics and biology, as well as his arguments for crazy forms of innateness, is that Fodor seems to have abrogated to himself the job of being Noam Chomsky's philosophical hit-man. Chomsky has for decades made oracular statements on all three of these issues (anyone remember "I languages versus E languages"?), and Fodor offers up crappy arguments trying to legitimate them. On the innateness issue, Chomsky approvingly notes Fodor's belief that we have an innate concept of CARBURETOR in his piece that Martinich has put in the recent edition of his philosophy of language anthology. So Chomsky at least approves of the service.

Schopenhauer to the rescue in a neat issue raised by Austin and Harman

There's an interesting exchange between Michael Austin of Complete Lies (HERE) and Graham Harman (HERE). Both are really clear, so I'll just quote the relevant parts.

Both Graham and Levi say that objects can't be simply nothing more than their relations or else change is impossible, so Graham (I'm not sure how Levi does this, so I'll speak only of Graham here) takes the position that we need some substance-like-thing, that is, substance that is not inalterable or eternal, but some dark untapped core at the heart of things in order for there to be potentiality and change (while saying also, like Leibniz, that finite things contain infinity or maybe it's closer to Nicholas of Cusa's "relative infinity...") Graham also says that it is this problem that causes Latour to move to his talk of plasma, which approaches monism or at least quasi-monists like Deleuze and Bergson, essentially the idea of an infinite reserve underlying all objects). It seems to me though that another option besides positing infinity either within all objects, or underlying all objects, is to work with an idea of drive, will, or conatus. In this way, I think you get a model of change which better reflects reality. I suppose this is the option I've chosen to explore, which is why I tie myself to the vitalist tradition so strongly, since they, along with certain neo-Platonists (the ones who claim the world-soul to be more primary than the divine intellect) and voluntarists also seem to make this move, or at least a similar one. I'm hoping to write more about this tradition soon.

Harman responds-

The reason I’m never sympathetic to calls for conatus is that they seem to me to amount to a vis dormitiva. “Objects change by means of a changing force.” “Objects change by means of appetite.” “Objects change by means of drive.”

In all of these cases, it would need to be shown where this supposed drive for the new is inscribed in what the thing is now.

Harman's response is really interesting. I want to say that the figure they are both leaving out is Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer doesn't get enough credit for being the first "philosopher of the body" (usually Merleau-Ponty is cited as the forefather of embodied cognition), and the relevance of his discussion of body for the realism anti-realism debate is really quite big, in part because it provides an answer to Harman's challenge, one structurally isomorphic to Harman's own position.

Harman radically externalizes Kant's scheme-content distinction (as this distinction occurs in Heidegger's Vorhandenheit/Zuhandenheit reversal, which Kant himself prefigured in his critique of Hume). Epistemically, attempts to get at reality in itself always involve abstracting away from what our conceptual schemes add, but when you do this enough the reality disappears. If one thinks that that is all the metaphysical story, then one ends trying to defend some form of transcendental idealism. But Harman radically externalizes this by presenting a metaphysics where our the Kantian subject-object epistemic situation is just an instance of fundamental processes that occur whenever two objects interact (this may seem weird, but it does a lot of philosophical work).

I think Schopenhauer is doing something exactly analogous with the bodily experience of will. One way to approach the Kantian problematic is via Hume's problematization of necessity, alethic necessity in the case of causality and deontic necessity in the case of value. In both cases Hume gives you a valueless world where causality and norms are somehow added by the subject. Kant argues that this isn't possible, that the very idea of a purely actual world doesn't make sense. For something to be a cat actually is in part for it to have a bunch of counterfactual properties (again, this is the predecessor of Heidegger's Vorhandenheit/Zuhandenheit reversal). The problem for Kant then is to explain where necessity comes from (Heidegger in 1919 notes that Kantianims (through the Southwest School) has led to the repeating of exactly what Hume was doing; so he radicalizes the initial anti-Humean move in Being and Time).

Schopenhauer can be understood as answering this question in a way analogous to Harman. The body is an object in the world, and it experiences frustration when the will is blocked. But this is an experience of something not being possible. From "not" and "possible" you can get necessity, as what is necessary is just that which is not possible not to obtain. But then, like Harman, Schopenhauer suggests that this is not merely epistemic, but rather metaphysical, and the thing our body experiences with frustrated and successful will is taken to be an instance of something pervasive in the universe. But then the Kantian problematic, of answering Hume's challenge about necessity, can be answered in a realist manner.

If we just have a root experience of frustration, then I don't think this is a case of dormitive virtue, any more than the epistemic basis of Harman's move (and the basis does *not* make either correlationist in Meillassoux's sense).

So I think both that Austin is correct and that Harman's challenge can be answered.

Incidentally, I should note that: (1) the late Heidegger adopts a number of Schopenhaurian themes in precisely around this area, and for similar reasons as I've discussed above (Dale Jacquette has gone over some of this), and (2) I've long thought that Schopenhauer deserves pride of place among continental realists, and should be considered perhaps the founding figure of the Speculative Realist tradition. The other tradition of continental realism starts with Kierkegaard and goes through Derrida (on a realist reading of him) and stresses how aporia and radical surprises impinge upon the phenomenal realm (of course, elements of late Heidegger here too). Lee Braver has a fantastic essay on this tradition. I would call the Schopenhaurian vein the Speculative Realist tradition (for obvious reasons, though this is unfair to Brassier) and the Kierkegaardian one the A-poretic Realist tradition.

From Heidegger's Preface to Richardson's Through Phenomenology to Thought

I'll have more about this later today. I think it is a schocking confirmation of what I put forward in THIS POST, though I now realize (after some helpful input from my colleague, and the person who has been teaching me Heidegger this last year, Francois Raffoul) that the story is much more complicated than what I presented there. Anyhow, here's the quote.

One need only observe the simple fact that in Being and Time the problem is set up outside the sphere of subjectivism - that the entire anthropological problematic is kept at a distance, that the normative issue is emphatically and solely the experience of There-being with a constant eye to the Being-question - for it to become strikingly clear that the "Being" into which Being and Time inquired can not long remain something that the human subject posits. It is rather Being, stamped as Presence by its time-character, [that] makes the approach to There-being. As a result, even in the initial steps of the Being-question in Being and Time thought is called upon to undergo a change whose movement cor-responds with the reversal.

Later today or tomorrow I'll do another post with how I think the standard story of "the turn" is actually consistent with what I posted earlier. Basically, both come from Heidegger accepting Schopenhaurian anti-Kantian affection arguments, one with respect to the thinker (this ends up being the standard view), and another with respect to external reality (this is the view I defended in the earlier post, which Heidegger accepts in the above quote).

brief note on my take on Heidegger and realism/anti-realism (hat tip Lee Braver, Graham Harman, Herman Philipse, and Gary Williams)

Gary Williams has a post HERE about an MA thesis on Heidegger and realism/anti-realism debates that raises a number of interesting questions and has provoked me(which is a good thing in philosophy) to write one more thing about this here. I haven't seen the view below expressed in the literature, but I would be surprised if someone didn't already hold it. Probably it is closest to Graham Harman, who also takes Division 1 of Being and Time to be incoherent in exactly the way that I do [And Graham's Tool Being, which can be ordered from Open Court's web site HERE where there are affordable copies, is indispensable for two reasons: (1) it shows just extraordinarily important a metaphysician Heidegger is if you resolutely kick out the idealist/correlationist strands in Being and Time, and (2) it has a very nice discussion of how Harman's interpretation jives with other main interpretations of Heidegger on these issues.]

One big problematic concerns whether Being and Time era Heidegger faces what Herman Philipse ("Heidegger's "Scandal of Philosophy": The Problem of the Ding an Sich in Being and Time," in Crowell and Malpas' Transcendental Heidegger) characterizes as Heidegger's own problem of the external world. Williams correctly adduces prima-facie evidence that Heidegger does not, as Philipse's view involves him in a pretty simple contradiction, which would lead us to conclude that Heidegger was a fool.

For what it's worth, I think Philipse is correct that Division 1 of Being and Time is incoherent on this very issue, attempting to debunk the problem of the external world while being committed to a form of neo-Kantianism through phenomenology that clearly gives rise to just this problem. Moreover, if you look at where Being and Time sits with respect to all of his other lectures this is not that mysterious. In Heidegger's fantastic 1919 emergency war lecture (printed as Towards the Definition of Philosophy) he is responding to Rickert and Windelbaud and critiques Southwest school neo-Kantianism with the first version of the Vorhandenheit/Zuhandenheit reversal that then shows up in the fantastic "first draft" of Being and Time, History of the Concept of Time (still explicitly referencing neo-Kantians there) and then forms the basis for Division 1 of Being and Time (with the reference to his neo-Kantian teachers removed). This aspect of Heidegger leads directly to the dissolution of the problem of the external world, as the very problem is shown to arise when Vorhandenheit/objective presence is wrongly taken to be in some sense basic, with the relational/valuative/modal realm of Zuhandeheit somehow added to that with the mind (and it should be noted that this reversal is actually Kantian in origin, since it is the basis of Kant's critique of Hume; Heidegger takes it much further though, with Hume's problematic re-appearing for Kant; also note that here is one of the many places Heidegger is very similar to Schopenhauer!).

However, between the 1919 lectures and History of the Concept of Time, you get all this Husserlian stuff from Heidegger where he's trying to be a good phenomenologist, much of it (IMHO) so inestimably awful (e.g. The Phenomenology of Religious Life) that I have to think there's a reason Heidegger himself didn't publish this stuff. The phenomenology presupposed in much of this work just is the kind of neo-Kantianism that Heidegger was overturning with the Vorhandenheit/Zuhandenheit reversal.

These two strains come together in Being and Time (which was written very quickly) to give us both a correlationist/idealist strand rooted in the centrality of the supposed phenomenological method where Dasein is equated with humanity and Being rooted in Dasein, and a radical anti-correlationist strand which actually gives you enough material to radically critique phenomenology (see Dermot Moran's chapter on Heidegger in the excellent Introduction to Phenomenology). The incoherence of these two strands come together when Heidegger says things like stars can exist (exist!) without being (the problem of being is how anything can exist at all).

Now I don't think this makes Heidegger a fool. By Being and Time he just wasn't able to square his commitment to the phenomenological method with his deep (Schopenhaurian) insight into how Kant's critique of Hume ends up undermining Kantianism. But this isn't even the end of the story. The "turn" after Being and Time I think is partly motivated by this very problematic. Division 2 of Being and Time attempts to give the constitutive structure of the human mind in a pretty straightforward neo-Kantian way. And Heidegger progressively drops this kind of thing all-together in what people characterize as an anti-humanism.

I don't think Heidegger was a fool (well at least not when thinking about ontology). I think the later "anti-humanism" was an attempt to remain true to both his debunking strategy with the problem of the external world and to phenomenology, and one that does the job. The turn in part is motivated by the fact that Being and Time fails in this regard. The problem arises in Being and Time because we are still thinking in a Kantian manner of the human mind being some kind of machine that organizes and structures reality via its conceptual scheme (see the discussion of "Active Knower" in Braver's excellent A Thing of this World on this very point). Division 2 was the story of how this worked. But once you give up this aspect of neo-Kantianism, then you really can't even pose a lot of the realism/anti-realism issues in terms of whether or not the world is dependent upon such a mind. And it works, if you follow Heidegger into the anti-humanism, you really can deconstruct the issue.

So, now viewing Division 1 of Being and Time as incoherent on this point does not make Heidegger a fool. The incoherence is part of his life-long project of reconciling phenomenology with his brilliant early Schopenhaurian anti-Kantian insight, one that gave rise to the later period where he himself rejected the model of the human mind that gives rise to the problem.

some connections between Schopenhauer and Heidegger

Somebody has to have remarked on this before, but a lot of the famous Heideggerian moves are prefigured pretty strongly in Schopenhauer.

Schophenhauer takes the realm of representation to be governed by the principle of sufficient reason, and to be inherently relational. We can however abstract from this to the realm of Ideas/Forms, but when we do so our subjectivity is completely absorbed into that realm.

Heidegger takes the realm of Zuhandenheit (readiness to hand, tool-being) to be inherently relational. We can however abstract from this to get to the realm of Vorhandenheit (objective presence) to the realm of things that persist self-identically over time. I would bet a decent sum of cash that Heidegger presents Plato's theory of the forms (I need to ask some friends if this is right) as being a paradigm instance of this kind of abstraction. If so, then Heidegger's innovative reading of the history of philosophy is just a part of Schopenhauer's philosophy. In this light the early Heidegger's genius might have just been: (1) characterizing the relational realm as also modal and valuative (I don't know to what extent Schopenhauer does this), and (2) seeing all traditional ontology, in particularly the Cartesian metaphysical physics, as an instance of the Schopenhauerian reading of Plato.

There may also be some similarities with the late Heidegger's subsumption of the self and Schopenhauer's two modes of subsumption (artistic genius and aescetic renunciation). At the very least these are worth comparing, given the other similarities.

I remember somewhere Heidegger saying contemptuous things about Schophenhauer, but it would be too easy to conclude too much from that. (1) He said contemptuous things about Husserl, and some have argued that this is the narcissism of small differences (also see this book by Burt Hopkins). (2) The neo-Kantian genesis of Heidegger's thought is something people are taking into account much more these days; but I think we still too easily forget that the "back to Kant" movement (first with the Marburg School of Cohen et. al., then with the Southwest School of Heidegger's teachers) was in part the result of Schopenhauer winning the argument against Hegel. For example, it was Schopenhauer who convinced publishers to re-print the first edition of Kant's First Critique. So while this is really speculative, I think Heidegger's anti-Schopenhauer comments could also be the anxiety of influence.

Finally, it would be interesting to compare Schopenhauer's arguments for Platonism with Graham Harman's neo-Heideggerian arguments for substance. Both are motivated by a critique of the idea that we have relations all the way down. Schopenhauer thought that scientific understanding was intrinsically relational and dispositional all the way down (which is still a respected position in metaphysics), which is in part why he brings in the forms as something non-relational. This may tie nicely to Harman's critique of scientism too.

[Addendum: Oops, I see that Dale Jacquette raised this issue in an intersting way in his 2005 Schopenhauer book. Google books has the relevant passage HERE.]

Idea I'm Pursuing

My big idea (which I'm sure must have occurred to others) is that many problems of reference just are linguistic analogs to the problem of the external world, and that Division 1 of Being and Time is structured to try to dissolve these problems. The big philosophy of language punch-line in Section 33 is “Statement is a pointing out which communicates and defines” (then you get some more stuff leading up to and including 44). Each of these three concepts (pointing out, predication, communication) is built up in earlier sections from non-linguistic modes. So 17 and 18 (on reference) provide the non-linguistic materials for characterizing pointing out, 25-27 (on the they) provide the non-linguistic materials for the characterization of communication, and 31-32 (on understanding and interpretation) provide the non-linguistic materials for the characterization of predication.

Making this work requires reading Being and Time along Harmanian lines though, in the first place because Heidegger's dissolution of the problem of the external world is thoroughly unconvincing unless you follow Harman and de-emphasize Dasein in your interpretation of the tool/broken-tool dichotomy.

The part of this that's cool is you can tie it to a lot of contemporary debates in analytic philosophy of language. The part that may not be cool is that a lot of Derrida may end up coming across as thoroughly retrograde, a linguistic Cartesian who can't get to reality and who has ignored the early Heidegger's way out of the prison.

All of this may go out the window once I've gotten a good grip on Braver's A Thing of This World, which has a very plausible interpretation of Heidegger leading up to Derrida. We're going to do an on-line reading group of it starting June 15th. I'll announce it in a seperate post soon.

last note on Rickert for a while

A few more brief notes about Heiddegger's 1919 thoughts on Heinrich Rickert.

(1) It's weird how much German philosophers used to be so worked up about how to construe the difference between the natural (physics, etc.) and human/cultural/mental sciences. I think that scientific psychology was causing worry at this time about which side of the fence it would go on, and that the first volume of Husserl's Logical Investigations (on psychologism) was a brief about this. Kant himself argued that there could be no scientific psychology! (I don't have the citation; Gardner's The Mind's New Science discusses the Kantian argument.) For the second kind of science, Rickert uses the word Kulturwissenschaft, instead of the traditional Geisteswissenschaft (which translates as "science of the mind" or "science of the spirit"). Maybe he does this because there is already a natural scientific psychology at the time he was writing.

In the 1919 lecture Heidegger attributes an interesting view to the Rickert of Kulturwissenschaft und Naturwissenschaftt. According to Heidegger's Rickert, natural sciences attempted to discern general laws while historical sciences attempt to discern particular facts.

Thus, according to Rickert, all the natural sciences--among which he counts psychology--are generalizing; they consider empirical reality in its ultimate and most universal characteristics (laws of motion). The cultural sciences, by contrast are individualizing; they consider empirical reality in its individuality, peculiarity and uniqueness. And these are known through their relation to a (cultural) value which itself has the character of universality (26).

This is the first time we get Heidegger attributing to Rickert a scheme-content distinction where the scheme is adding value to something that is not normative.

I haven't read the Rickert yet (and Mikhail Emelianov notes that two out of print English language versions of Der Gegenstand der Erkenntnis are on Googlebooks), but it amazes me how similar the view attributed by Heidegger is to Donald Davidson's views about the essentially normative nature of human interpretation, which Davidson contrasts with the causal nature of the natural sciences. In the context of Heidegger it will be interesting to reread his many comments about "the historiology of history" in terms of the manner in which Rickert set up the distinction.

(2) One of the many acute critiques in J.L. Austin's Sense and Sensibilia is of A.J. Ayer's views concerning what makes one experience more realistic than another. Ayer realized that phenomenalism has a really difficult time explaining this. If what we perceive are phenomenal contents at best caused by an unperceivable reality then what does it mean to say that my perception that the straight stick in water is bent is merely illusory? Ayer says that less illusory, truer, or more realistic beliefs formed from perceptions are those that yield better predictions of future phenomena. So my belief that the coin is round allows me to predict all the different elliptical ways the coin will appear to me when it or I move. My false belief that it is elliptical will not.

Heidegger says that Rickert's view in Der Gegenstand der Erkenntnis is motivated by this very problematic. [Before citing the Heidegger below, I must point out that in a lot of the Summer Session 1919 lecture, it's difficult to discern which views Heidegger is attributing to Rickert and which are his own. I assume in the context of the lecture there was no problem since his students were reading Rickert's books. But it makes it frustrating to attempt to discern just how much of Rickert does he agree with in this essay.] Anyhow, I take the following indented quote to be something he's attributing to Rickert. A page earlier he quotes Rickert explicitly saying "Not through representation, but through affirmation or denial, can the knowing subject gain what it seeks with knowledge" (139). But here's the interesting bit from Heidegger:

Knowledge cannot be representation, for there is no independent something towards which representations can direct themselves. If all Being is content of consciousness, how can there be an original which representations are supposed to copy?

Above all, so long as one regards knowledge as representation, an element which necessarily belongs to the concept of knowledge is not present: the knowing subject. For things like representations are objects and the standpoint of knowledge as representation has to do not with a relation between subject and object, but with a relation between two objects, a relation which becomes quite incomprehensible as knowledge, for a subject is required that ascertains this copying of things by representations--and this knowledge cannot itself be a representation (139-140)

Heidegger goes on to say that the same problem besets Aristotle, even though his representations were something in the mind. This is historically fascinating in its own right, as some of Heidegger's critique of Descartes in Being and Time as well as the argument in section 2 of On the Essence of Truth make the very point he's attributing to Rickert here.

(3) Heidegger represents Rickert as reacting to the problem by holding that an "ought" independent of the subject must come into play.

Rickert considers it one of the 'most valuable insights of recent logical and phenomeonlogical research' that to representations an 'element is added' which does not have the character of a representation. This 'factum' is not sufficiently appreciated in its implications (140).

But as Heidegger goes on to discuss, for Rickert, the very thing that is added is value. And here we get the picture that Heidegger turns upon its head. As I argued in the previous post, the first time this is turned on its head was in the lecture just previous to this one, the 1919 Emergency War Semester seminar. In this context it is absolutely essential to realize that Heidegger in Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity Heidegger considers "use" to be an instance of value. So inverting Rickert gives rise to the "pragmatist" strains central (even on Harman's interpretation central as key instances of the universal tool/broken-tool modes) in Being and Time.

Concluding Thoughts- The full discussion is very difficult without also closely reading Rickert's text (which I hope to do in the next few years), but I think Heidegger drew three correct points and one bad conclusion from his critique of his teacher: (a) that representationalism is deeply problematic, for the reasons Rickert gives (as noted, repeated by Heidegger), (b) that Rickert's solution that value is added to a non-valuative given is mistaken, (c) that inverting this very solution reveals the cardinal sin of historical ontology, and (d) that Rickert's view that something outside the subject must be added is mistaken. I think it is possible that "(d)" gives rise to the unstustainable (transcendentally idealist in an incoherent way) privileging of Dasein in Being and Time. [Pace Heidegger, rocks and alligators understand their being just fine, or at least as well as hut-dwelling peasants and philosophy professors.] Though that may also be just from the continuing nefarious influence of Husserl, to some extent expunged by (a)-(c) which he goes on to use to criticize phenomenology.

Finally, I should note that my brief on the primacy of Rickert and secondary importance of Husserl for Heidegger is not meant to be earth-shattering news. I would be astounded if good scholars hand not already argued as much (and I know Friedman shows respects other than the above in which Heidegger both follows and responds to Rickert). This being said, every one of the introductions to Heidegger's thought I have read at this point slight Heidegger's engagement with his teacher and habilitation adviser Rickert. You get a story of Husserl proposing this radical new thing and Heidegger bravely following the method, critiquing its claim to presuppositionlessness and out of the blue pushing for the primacy of practice over theory.

Heidegger-as-partially-lapsed-Husserlian is the cartoon version that most Americans interested in these issues hold. Of course simplifications such as this are always necessary, but I think this one does more harm than good just because contemporary analytic and continental philosophy just is a set of footnotes to Kant; you can't understand great thinkers like Heidegger or Carnap or Kripke unless you are very clear about the senses they are working out of the space generated both by the failures of transcendental idealism and Kant's appraisals of the problems that initially gave rise to it (and this is not just a matter of what any of these thinkers themselves thought about Kant).

Oh well, I'll get off my soapbox now and get back to grading final essays.

correction to earlier post, and new data point re: Rickert and Heidegger

To a some derision I earlier noted that it was weird that Heidegger is so rarely properly situated in the Neo-Kantian milieu, especially since his ideas are easy to motivate in reference to Hume.

On what the earlier post got wrong- I referred to Rickert as a Marburg School Neo-Kantian (the school founded by Cohen, who inspired both Cassirer and Vaihinger, and which was virulently attacked by the Nazis as Jewish Philosophy). But Rickert and Windelband were members of the Southwestern School. Michael Friedman's A Parting of the Ways explains the disagreement between Carnap and Heidegger actually as being rooted in the difference between Marburg School and Southwestern School neo-Kantianism.

On what the earlier post got right- I just received a copy of Heidegger's very first set of published lectures, the Emergency War Semester seminar of 1919 and the Summer seminar after that (published as Towards the Definition of Philosophy). The Emergency War Seminar begins with a discussion and critique of Rickert. The first half of the Summer lecture series is on Windelbaum and the second half is entirely on Rickert. So the very first lecture series Heidegger ever gave was on southwestern school neo-Kantianism. (Friedman does not cite the 1919 lecture.)

In any case, from what I've read so far, I think my original claim that Heidegger's critiques of Husserl are the result of applying a prior critique of Rickert is amply verified by the 1919 lecture. Heidegger is Marx to Rickert's Hegel, turning him on his head. Only then does he work that original insight out in a phenomenological context (and the Rickertian theme is why it is no accident that Husserl dismissed Being and Time as "anthropology"). The essential sections leading to Heidegger's tool-being critique of objective presence in Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity, History of the Concept of Time, and Being and Time (I give citations in this post) all concern turning on its head Rickert's view of value as something added on to something that is objectively present, though Rickert is only cited in the version of the discussion in History of the Concept of Time.

This issue is raised in reference to Rickert by Heidegger early in the 1919 lectures. The first big claim is the following

The selection, therefore, which stands under the criterion of the ideal aim of universal valid (true) thought, presupposes the givenness of that which can be selected and teleologically evaluated. Teleologial-axiomatic grounding would lose all sense without a pregiven chooseable and assessable something, a what. (33)

But then when we exam this given, we find out that it is already in the realm of values.

But is every value given to me as an ought? Clearly not. I experience value-relations without the slightest element of ought being given. In the morning I enter the study the sun lies over the books, etc., and I delight in this. Such delight is in no way an ought 'delightfulness' as such is not given to me in an ought-experience. I ought to work. I ought to take a walk: two motivations, two possible kinds of 'because' which do not reside in the delightful itself but presuppose it. There is, therefore, a kind of lived exprience in which I take delight, in which the valuable as such is given. (37)

This is the very office of the discussion of the table in Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity and which becomes the hammer of Being and Time. In this lecture you next get a discussion of 'worth-taking.'

It is one thing to declare something as a value, another to take something as a value in a 'worth taking''. The latter can be characterized as an originary phenomenon of origin, a constituting of life in and for itself. The former must be seen as derivative, as founded in the theoretical, and as itself a theoretical phenomenon dependent on lived life in itself. (38)

I think this is the first time Heidegger makes the primary philosophical point he always makes, his argument that, contrary to the entire philosophical tradition, (what will become) Zuhandenheit (handiness/readiness-to-hand) is prior to Vorhandenheit (objective presence/presence-at-hand). Again, he does this in 1919 entirely in response to his teacher Rickert. Then in the next half of the lecture he works this out with in the context of examining human experience ("phenomenology"), e.g.

What do 'I' see? Brown surfaces at right angles to one another? No, I see something else. A largish box with another smaller one set upon it? Not at all. I see the lectern at which I am to speak. You see the lectern, from which you are to be addressed, and from where I have spoken to you prviously. In pure experience there is no 'founding' interconnection, as if I first of all see interseting brown surfaces, whic then reveal themsevles to me as a box, tehn as a desk, then as an academic lecturing desk, a lecturn, so that I attach lectern-hood to the box like a label. All that is simply bad and misguided interpretation, diversion froma pure seeing into the experience. I see the lectern in one fell swwoop, so to speak, and not in isolation, butas adjusted a bit too high for me. I see--and immediately so--a book lying upon it as annoying to me (a bookk, not a collection of layerd pages with black marks strewn upon them, I see the lectern inan orientation, an illumiination, a background. . .

. . .In the experience of seeing the lectern something is given to me from out of an immediate environment [Umwelt]. This environmental milieu (lecturn, book, blackboard, notebook, fountain pen, caretaker, student fraternity, tram-car, motor-car, etc.) does not consist just of things, objects, which are then conceived as meaning this and this; rather, the meaningful is primary and immediately given to me without any mental detours across thing-oriented apprehension. Living in any environment, it signifies to me everywhere and always, everything has the character of world. It is everywhere the case that 'it worlds' [es weltet] which is something different from 'it values' [es wertet]. (57-58)

So, again, first he puts Rickert's view on his head, then he applies that to phenomenological claims about human experience.

In any case I'm going to read this lecture deeply and also re-read Friedman's book (I casually perused it on a Friedman kick right after graduate school). Friedman shows what Heidegger kept from the Southwestern school. I'm really depressed by how bad my German is. Neither Rickert's Kulturwissenschaft und Naturwissenschaft nor his Der Gegenstand der Erkenntnis: ein Beitrag zum Problem der philosophischen Transcendenz are translated into English. The first isn't even available on Amazon in German.

Why is Hume Never Used in Explaining Heidegger? A Theory which Ends up Blaming the Nazis for the Analytic/Continental split.

It's shockingly weird to me that none of the secondary sources I've read on Heidegger motivate his thinking in terms of Hume's problematics about causality and necessity.

In the two lecture series that led up to Being and Time (Ontology: Hermeneutics of Facticity and History of the Concept of Time) Heidegger introduces what will become his tool-being analysis specifically in terms of the neo-Kantian view that "value" (I don't have the German versions of these texts yet, so I don't know what the German word is) is something added on top of an experience already given. In History. . . he attributes this view to the Marburg School [Note: this is mistaken I should have written "Southwestern School," see newer post here) neo-Kantian (and director of his thesis!) Rickert. He also spiels "value" as "usefulness."

So here's a narrative. Hume raised skeptical doubts about causality and necessity. Kant said that these things are added by the mind to the phenomena, and this thought was articulated in a certain way by Marburg school neo-Kantians. Heidegger's tool-being analysis first and foremost just flips this on its head. Simply done, one would say that our pre-thematic engagement with modally rich usefulness (including what in Being and Time becomes known as  "thrown possibility") are primary, and the modally poor phenomenal experience Hume talks about is something that is abstracted from this.

Of course the interplay between handiness and objective presence becomes a lot more complicated in Being and Time, so much so that I don't think at the end of the day there is ever a phenomenal experience like Hume's (and Heidegger got this part from Husserl). But the fact is Hume motivated Kant and Rickert motivated Heidegger. And,in addition to being true, the philosophical story makes a lot more sense in terms of this.

So why is the story never told this way?

1. I think it's primarily due to anti-semitic academic politics during the Nazi era. Marburg school neo-Kantianism was considered Jewish in the Third Reich because of prominent members such as Cohen who were Jewish. Friedman's A Parting of the Ways goes into this some with reference to allegations (which he takes to be implausible) about Heidegger's relation to them in this very regard. Of course Heidegger also removed Being and Time's dedication to the Jewish Husserl in 1940, but Phenomenology had by then caught on all over the world, so despite the removal everybody still saw Heidegger as responding to Husserl and passed over his relationship with Rickert. But Marburg school neo-Kantianism never did spread prior to the Third Reich, so after it was suppressed by the Nazis in the Riech nobody abroad would view Heidegger in that light. Yes Heidegger worked for Husserl and eventually got his seat, but he was Rickert's student before that and he wrote his first thesis under him. And it's the Marburg school neo-Kantian Rickert he's responding to while making his key Zuhandenheit/Vorhandenheit inversion, the move most people take to be the key to all his thought. Though he only explicitly cites Rickert in History of the Concept of Time the exact same point about value not being added to the phenomena by the subject is stated in the relevant places in both Being and Time and Ontology: Hermeneutics of Facticity. So I think there is a very real possibility that the Nazi's successful suppression of Marburg has radically effected how we tell the story from Kant to Heidegger, and as a result profoundly effected the history of analytic and continental philosophy (see points 3 and 4, below).
2. Heidegger's historical lectures (starting with The Basic Problems of Phenomenology) are taken too seriously as an account of the dialectical landscape leading up to Being and Time. (2a) Most of these were written under the Nazi boot, both when he was wearing a couple of those boots (aligning your philosophy with politics will effect what you say) and when it was to some extent on his neck (and having uniformed agents in your classes, reporting back what you are saying, will also effect what you say). (2b) Heidegger's history tell us more about Heidegger's thought at the time he wrote the history than about either the historical figures or Heidegger's other works. This is pretty normal when great philosophers (e.g. Kant, Hegel, Russell) write about great philosophers (including, and especially, themselves). (2c) The phenomenology trope that we are in some kind of important intellectual epoch requiring resolutely new-fangled philosophy has never led to very good history of philosophy (consider the glut of really bad exercises in "rethinking" today) considered as history.
3. Analytic philosophy's greatest success probably involves giving humanity a much deeper understanding of the concept of necessity (the dialectic from logical positivist necessity=provability through Kripkean semantics to the contemporary standoff between realist Lewisians and Plantinganians, Dummettian positivist/neo-Kantian holdouts, and people who still have neo-Quinean worries today). Once you start to see Heidegger as motivated by the Hume-Kant problematic of necessity, then intellectual honesty forces you to hook his thinking up with this body of thought, and forces you to among other things learn Kripke's basic completeness proofs for modal systems. None of this is possible for people who have cartoon views about "analytic philosophy."
4. "Continental philosophy"'s greatest successes arguably involves developing an entirely different part of the Kantian heritage, that is the the problem of idealism and the connected problems of knowledge of totalities that Kant discussed in the Dialectic. So it makes sense to situate Heidegger with respect to this story of where we've gone from Kant. But since Hume's wake-up call has little to do with these issues, one might not think of Heidegger as having been motivated by the neo-Kantian response to Hume. [This latter tradition (which resonates strongly in Dummett, MacDowell, and Graham Priest in analytic philosophy) is why I'm reading Lee Braver's A Thing of this World this summer. Actually, me and Mikhail from Perverse Egalitarian are going to help host an on-line reading group on it starting in June. Official announcements to come.]

One part Brandom, one part Wittgenstein, two parts Heidegger

I think that Brandom on the philosophical significance of Kant is really interesting (for what that's worth), but his Wittgenstein eludes me. For example, on page 160 of Articulating Reasons, he writes:

As the later Wittgenstein puts the point, only the utterance of a sentence makes a move in the language game. applying a concept is to be understood in terms of making a claim or expressing a belief. The concept concept is not intelligbe [sic] apart from the possibility of such application in judging.

I always thought the role of the primative language games ("Block!") in the early part of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations was precisely to deny this point. "Block!" is indeterminate in force. Is the person uttering it in effect uttering an assertion that the ostended thing is a block or is he ordering the someone to hand him the block.

This is not trivial. In Chapter 3 Brandom improbably wants to understand desires as resulting from sets of practical inferences that take as an input beliefs and give as output actions. You can triangulate to understand desires in this manner.

But the much more plausible Wittgensteinnian/Heideggerian line is to utilize the two other angles of the triangle as being primordial or "historically necessary" in the sense described below. That is take proto- or (in Heideggerese) "originary" belief attribution to be the result of desire/action pairs. This is important in part because: (1) it makes sense of how human highly functioning non-language users (severe aphasics and deaf people who are never taught languages), and (2) it makes sense how having beliefs is not an either-or phenomena, but admits grades of intentionality between what children and animals and fools (with respect to some subject matter) possess and what experts possess. So you don't fall into the Descartes/Chomsky/Fodor trap of not being able to explain the development or evolution of language without implausible a priori knowledge and/or vivisection.

Heidegger's analysis of broken tools is incredibly important here. At least on the Okrentian "pragmatist" readings of Heidegger, we start with a base non-linguistic understanding (I think this is what Heidegger means by the "hermeneutic as-structure," but I may be off base here) of means-ends activity and the way the world is structured to permit this (Alva Noe's work on perception is highly relevant here). From this we can make sense of desires leading to action. How do we get to contentful belief then? Or rather, how do we get to the content of belief? By seeing what happens when things go wrong, when the desires do not lead to the right kind of behavior. My belief that this is spoiled is a function of my not eating it even though I am hungry. On this view, the most basic kinds of beliefs are such that their content is a function of a set of counterfactual "desire-action" inferences (I think that Stalnaker's original "Assertion" two-dimensionalism can developed fruitfully to make sense of this, but that is a long story).

The claim is not one of logical necessity, that all beliefs are functions of broken tool desire-action inferences, but rather what the aesthetician Stephen Davies calls "historical necessity" (which is the same status Brandom gives to internalist justification). The claim is that functioning language require a stock of broken-tool type "desire-action" determined proto-beliefs. Of course things like logical compositionality and norms of communication alter the landscape, in both cases by forcing us to treat vague phenomena as if they were precise (here's where Rorty's claim that a disagreement in meaning is just an agreement not to argue any more does a tremendous amount of work).

In the denigrate-the-animals section of the introduction to Articulating Reasons Brandom is explicit about his disagreements with Heidegger. But I think that the late Wittgenstein is much more on Heidegger's side than Brandom's.

A serious plea for help about Heidegger

I realize that I may have in effect cried wolf one too many times with this post, but I'm being serious here.

(1) I think that part of the importance of Dreyfus and Harman are that they represent poles in how to deal with Heidegger's lingering neo-Kantianism.

For the Dreyfusarian you just take the analysis of Dasein to be an understanding of how the human mind works in an embodied, embedded, non-computational manner. Vast swaths of metaphysics, including debates about naturalism, are left alone on this interpretation. You are not getting the full Heidegger, but at least you are not getting commitment to transcendental idealism.

Harman does the exact opposite, taking seriously the parts of Heidegger that are moving away from neo-Kantianism, letting the analysis of worldliness not just be understood as part of an analysis of Dasein, but rather an understanding of the way the world is in itself. This gives you the metaphysics of tool-being. [Note: I've just started reading Harman, so I may be bungling this.]

The thing is, both Dreyfus and Harman tend to drive a certain kind of philosopher batty (see earlier rant HERE). I wonder if this is the very reason. Both in their own way reject the transcendental idealist aspect of Heidegger, incidentally (or perhaps not so incidentally, but even as a result of doing so) in ways that place Heidegger in the same dialectical space as a lot of contemporary analytic philosophy.

For anyone reading this, what are the best "High Church Heideggerian" attempts to grapple with how to deal with the transcendental idealist aspects of Heidegger's thoughts? I don't mean just historical accounts of its genesis (I'm reading Kisiel's excellent work right now about that). I mean attempts to discern to what extent this is a problem, and attempts to provide a dialectical space whereby one could move beyond it and keep the rest of Heidegger, a dialectical space in which the Dreyfusarian and Harmanian responses would be situated (again, for all I know, Harman already does this, in a few months I'm reading his books).

(2) The only other thing where I find myself disagreeing with Heidegger is the way he uses the word "being" (I know, I know, "You, Carnap, and everyone else pal.")

As far as I can tell, Heidegger equivocates between two distinct notions in discussing the being of beings: (a) things' essences, and (b) that which renders things actual as opposed to merely possible. This is really transparent in Section 20 of Being and Time. Heidegger discusses the three different kinds of essences Descartes posits for humans, material objects, and God and then notes that Descartes does not discuss whether or not being itself has a unified meaning.

Now on the traditional view of a kind of essence, a thing ceases to be when it loses its essence (i.e. for the Cartesian a person would truly die if they were to permanently cease thinking). So there is clearly a connection. But Heidegger's two senses of being are not the same. Possible and non-actual objects that don't exist still have essences (remember that Heidegger himself says Kant is wrong to take being not to be a predicate, so possible non-actual objects that lack the predicate of existing are fine for Heidegger).

Assuming that this is really an equivocation, I'm not sure that anything of import hangs on it (unlike the issue with lingering transcendental idealism). Though maybe something does. Is it possible that Heidegger gave up on Being and Time precisely because its successful explanations all concern being in the first sense (essence), when he wanted to be able to say something about being in the second sense (actuality)?

In addition, exactly as with the case of recovering Heidegger's insights in light of the detritus of neo-Kantianism, clarity might again require adopting a non-Heideggerian idiom: presenting his views in terms essence/accident and actuality/potentiality instead of "being."

I'm on much shakier ground with this claim about an equivocation than with the neo-Kantian problem. As with the above, any insights into this would be very much appreciated.

proposal for a new history of philosophy

I'd like to write a history of philosophy with the organizing thematic component being what philosophers have said about tables.

Russell's discussion about the table in his Cambridge office in The Problems of Philosophy contrasts beautifully with Heidegger's discussion about the table in his home in the lecture series: Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity (which then evolved in History of the Concept of Time and then into the canonical hammer discussion in Being and Time). This contrast alone handles the problem of the external world as well as a decent amount of Dreyfusiana philosophy of mind.

This would only work if Plato talked about tables. Did the ancient Greeks even have tables, or did they just eat off of their bellies like otters?