Reviews for Intentionality In Husserl And Heidegger, The Problem Of The Original Method And Phenomenon Of Phenomenology

The average rating for Intentionality In Husserl And Heidegger, The Problem Of The Original Method And Phenomenon Of Phenomenology based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-11-24 00:00:00 Dennis Lambert This is a wide-ranging collection of papers, written for this publication, about Wittgenstein's thought and various forms of scepticism. One attribute of philosophical scepticism that makes it both compelling and confounding is its simplicity. Criticizing and exposing flaws in philosophical arguments depends on there being chains of reasoning that can be invalidated, unexamined assumptions that can be exposed and questioned, and so on. Intricacy provides points of attack. But the sceptic's argument seems so simple ' there's little that could be wrong with it, unless it's just ALL wrong somehow. An attractive aspect of Moore's response in "Proof of An External World" is its complementary simplicity. Crispin Wright, in the first chapter of this book, boils Moore's argument down to an "essence" of one premise and one conclusion ' you can't get much simpler than that in a philosophical argument. I find myself rooting for Moore, that, no, the sceptical argument isn't wrong on technical grounds, it's just wrong from the get-go. What Wittgenstein seemed, in my own reading, to be doing was teasing out what about Moore's approach was right, even though his argument itself seems just to ignore the sceptic's point. What many commentators focus on, as do some here (Crispin Wright, Akeel Bilgrami) is that there seems to be something missing, a hidden premise or the like, in Moore's argument. For example, he also needs a premise stating that his perception (and ours) of his hand is reliable. And that premise in turn, in a Cartesian world of privileged internal experiences but doubtful external correlates to those experiences, needs a proof of its own. Back to square one with the sceptical argument. Moore's own response is that he can know some things to be true without having to prove them. That claim is a bit boggling. We want to respond, "Well, but you could be wrong ' that's the whole point ' you don't always know you're dreaming when you dream, are drugged when you're drugged, are being tricked when you're tricked, etc." Bilgrami rightly focuses in on fallibility as a crux of the sceptical argument. No matter what status we conjure for Moore's premise, or for any premise on which his premise further relies, the sceptical argument can always retreat to fallibility. Call the general reliability of our senses anything you want ' a "background" condition, a requirement for the language game of knowledge to function, . . . anything ' the sceptical argument can always come back to the possibility that our senses may be unreliable, even in the general sense. The fallibility trap is stubborn, and I don't see an approach here that truly avoids it. One possible direction, suggested by discussions here about the inability of the sceptic (of knowledge of the external world) to "live his scepticism", is to emphasize how Moore's argument reads as a kind of performance. He holds up his hands, and says while gesturing with one, "Here is one hand . . ." And he gestures with the other, saying, ". . . and here is another." Given the existence of the two hands, we can conclude the existence of an external world. The performance may jerk the sceptic out of a purely philosophical context and back to an ordinary, "real" one. That boundary is much discussed here, although the interpretation of Moore's argument as performance is not. As I said, scepticism here is not limited to traditional scepticism of the Cartesian sort. James Conant's chapter on "Varieties of Scepticism" provides a very helpful distinction between what he calls Cartesian and Kantian varieties of scepticism. The former, of course, derives from Descartes' Meditations and concerns the challenge of doubting, in the best possible circumstances, our ability to bridge the gap between perception and reality ' it concerns the possibility that none of our perceptions are valid with respect to reality. Kantian scepticism (and I think he rightly offers some caveats around his use of the term "scepticism' here) concerns the ability to apply thought, or cognition, to reality in the first place ' it isn't the validity of our experience of the world that is at stake, but our ability to have coherent experiences in the first place. The reason I find Conant's distinction especially helpful is that, as he points out, both Wittgenstein and his commentators move between these two types of challenges, without signaling explicitly that that is what they are doing, or in some cases, even knowing that that is what they are doing. Interpreting Wittgenstein is not easy ' we take for granted that, in On Certainty at least, he is talking about Cartesian scepticism, but the continuities between On Certainty and earlier work bring to bear much that he has said about Kantian "scepticism", specifically about meaning and the possibility of words meaning anything. Keeping in mind Conant's distinction isn't going to make reading Wittgenstein easy, but it will help to keep straight what challenge is being met by what remarks and what challenge isn't even intended to be met by those remarks. Much of the second half of the book takes on yet another traditional sceptical challenge ' "other minds" scepticism". Can we ever be sure that other people have the same sort of inner life, of thoughts, feelings, etc. that we have? Andrea Kern takes a strategy suggested by John McDowell ' what the philosophical sceptic is doing is stepping away from our familiar practices (of ascribing pain or other mental states to others) and asking how we could make such judgements, as if from, as McDowell says, a "sideways" perspective. Now that we have stepped away from the familiar, "normal" cases in which we ascribe those states, they become problematic ' a gap opens between, in the case of mental states, behavior and mental state . We can see the behavior, but we have to infer the mental state. But the behavior, famously, can exist without the mental state existing ' they are logically independent of one another. Hence scepticism regarding the mental states of others. Kern's diagnosis involves questioning whether the gap, which affords the sceptical doubt, is present in the familiar case, or only in the reflection upon it from outside it, and is in fact a product of that reflective distance. If so, the sceptical argument may be valid, but as she says, may just not have the meaning, i.e., the undermining of the familiar practice, that the sceptic thinks it has. Kern's paper begins a string of papers on Cavell's interpretation of Wittgenstein, and Cavell's own extensive thoughts on sceptical problems. Edward Minar's paper on Cavell's treatment of other minds scepticism supports Cavell's claim that sceptical arguments about other minds have some significant differences from sceptical arguments about our knowledge of an external world. In particular, he supports the claim that the other minds sceptic fails to construct a "best case" scenario of knowledge of other minds, akin to Moore's hands argument. Without such a "best case" the sceptic can't generalize his conclusions to a doubt about ALL cases of purported knowledge of other minds. He also supports Cavell's claim that scepticism concerning knowledge of other minds can be "lived", as scepticism about knowledge of the external world cannot. To abandon all claims about external reality renders the subject "insane", and, for that matter, the sceptic is always compelled back to "normal" life, unless insane. Other minds scepticism however, according to Cavell, illuminates something basic to the human condition ' our varying ability to relate to and understand other people. We are constantly subject to misreading, or even withdrawing from relations and understanding. Such is the stuff of tragedy, for Cavell. Marie McGinn and Anthony Palmer take more critical positions toward Cavell's thought in the final two papers, and then Cavell himself responds to all four papers that discuss his work. The aspect of Cavell's thinking that seems most provocative to me is his contention that our primary relationship to reality, the one challenged by scepticism, is not one of "knowing". Kern's argument hit on this with respect to "other minds scepticism", echoing, I think, Wittgenstein's own remarks in On Certainty, to the effect that Moore cannot really be said to "know" the things he lays out as common sense in "A Defense of Common Sense" (e.g., "there are other selves"). We are already with others, and already in the world, before we even start knowing or failing to know. A full elaboration of that position isn't present here, but the discussions of and by Cavell, provide some fresh grist for thinking it through.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-08-07 00:00:00 Scott Jones A great overview, will be reading again