Fall 2017

Hubert Dreyfus Memorial Conference – Sept. 22-24
All sessions will be held in Tribble Hall DeTamble Auditorium and open to the public.

Friday, Sept. 22

5:00-7:00 p.m. – Wayne Martin (Essex): ‘Fake News? Why is Dan Dennett Telling the Media that He Refuted Bert Dreyfus on AI?’ (Co-authored with Dylan Williams) Commentator: Taylor Carman (Barnard) Chair: Julian Young (Wake Forest)

In an interview with the BBC, broadcast on 4 April, 2017, Daniel Dennett told BBC reporter Jim Al-Khalili that he had, in his very first published paper, refuted Hubert Dreyfus’s claims about the limits of Artificial Intelligence, and that his refutation was subsequently vindicated by, inter alia, the 1997 victory of Deep Blue over Gary Kasparov.   It was not the first time that Dennett had made such a claim.  He also made it in a joint interview with Dreyfus on The MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour in 1997, following the historic match.   At that time, Bert insisted that Dennett was flatly misrepresenting his position.  I propose to review the record to try to determine who was right—or if perhaps they were both wrong.   What was the logical form of Bert’s argument in What Computers Can’t Do, and in his earlier paper on “Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence”?   What was Dennett’s refutation in that early paper?   And what did Dreyfus actually say about chess?

Saturday, Sept. 23

8:30-10:00 a.m. – David Cerbone (West Virginia) ‘Ground, Background, and Rough Ground:  Dreyfus, Wittgenstein, and Phenomenology’ Commentator: Joseph Schear (Oxford) Chair: B Scot Rousse (Pluralistic Networks/Berkeley)

This paper critically examines Dreyfus’s preliminary and fundamental claims about our background understanding of being. Dreyfus ascribes to the background an explanatory role in our ability to make sense of things, while also characterizing it as largely inaccessible to reflective comprehension.  Drawing primarily on some of Wittgenstein’s ideas about explanation and understanding, I offer a more deflationary conception of the background whose residual sense of mystery is largely an artefact of philosophically problematic ways of thinking about meaning.

10:15-11:45 a.m. – Eric Kaplan (CBS/The Big Bang Theory) ‘Faith and Existential Humorism as Contrasting Approaches to Life’ Commentator: B Scot Rousse (Pluralistic Networks/Berkeley) Chair: Edward Pile (Essex)

In this paper I look at Kierkegaard’s approach to comedy and faith as ways of living life as he presents them in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript.  Taking Dreyfus’s account of Religiousness B as a starting out point, I look at Kierkegaard’s somewhat puzzling accounts of what he calls “existential humorism”.  In a move that has attracted little notice Kierkegaard claims that existential humorism is the highest sphere of human existence except for Religiousness B.  After contrasting Kierkegaard’s view of humor and irony with that of Jonathan Lear who, incorrectly in my view, takes Kierkegaard as an ally, I discuss Kierkegaard’s view of the “warrant” of comedy.  I then lay out his argument for why existential humorism is the penultimate sphere of existence — that is, why it gets as close to faith as it is possible to go, but ultimately doesn’t succeed.  This discussion turns out to be important to understanding what exactly Religiousness B is, how it works, and whether is possible to express it.

2:15 – 3:45 p.m. – Charles Spinosa (Vision Consulting) ‘Coping with Time in Organizations: Insights from Heidegger’ Commentator: Bill Blattner (Georgetown) Chair: Iain Thomson (New Mexico)

Conceptions of time and practices for managing time play an important role in both popular management literature and process organization studies.  In popular literature, managers have too little time. In organization studies, managers have multiple time-reckoning practices and experiences of time.  In response, we explicate and defend Heidegger’s account of primordial time to show the inauthenticity of living with either too little time or many alternative temporal structurings.  People are true to primordial (kairotic) time when they face their existential death—the emerging practices that will make their lives meaningless—accept the past emotions that well up on that account and adjust themselves to accept the past and avoid existential death.  They then do what is essential.  Alternatively, taking over other temporal structurings amounts to living as another kind of self-interpreting being—an organization or a tribe—and is inauthentic.  An episode from Steve Jobs’s career illustrates authentic Heideggerian time management.

4:00 – 5:30 p.m. – Iain Thomson (New Mexico) ‘Heidegger on Death’
Commentator: Stephan Käufer (Franklin and Marshall) Chair: Charles Taylor (McGill)

I present a stream-lined and simplified version of the view I developed in “Death and Demise” for Wrathall’s Cambridge Companion to Being and Time.  Explaining Heidegger’s phenomenology of death, I both distinguish it from and connect it to ordinary demise, and say a bit about how the view developed in Heidegger’s thinking.

5:45 – 7:15 p.m. – Mark Wrathall (Oxford) and Patrick Londen (Riverside) ‘Maximal Grip: Dreyfusian Phenomenology and the Space of Motivations’ Chair: David Cerbone (West Virginia)

We want to talk about how Bert Dreyfus shaped the development of a existential phenomenology in the English-speaking world, and we will focus on his appropriation of the idea of a maximal grip in Merleau-Ponty into a central insight into the structure of human existence.

Sunday Sept. 24

8:30 – 10:00 a.m. – Julian Young (Wake Forest) ‘Heidegger, Critical Theory, and the Critique of Technology’ Chair: John Richardson (NYU)

Superficially, there is a strong similarity between the critique of technology provided by Horkheimer, Adorno and Habermas, on the one hand, and Heidegger on the other. The problem of technology, these critical theorists argue, is that the social technology of industrialized modernity has become so all-embracing as to imprison us in, as Weber called it, an ‘iron cage.’ This has reversed the master-slave relation between human being and machine. We are compelled to serve the interests of the economic machine rather than the machine serving ours. The task, then, is to re-establish human freedom by reversing the reversal.

Similarly, it seems, Heidegger argues that the effect of modern technology is to reduce us to ‘human resource’ and thereby deprive us of freedom. Whereas, however, the critical theorists’ ‘freedom’ is clearly ‘freedom of the will,’ Heidegger insists that the important freedom that we have lost has nothing to do with the will. It is, rather, freedom from the one-dimensionality of our technological disclosure of reality, freedom to stand in ‘the free.’ To become fully free in this sense is to become ‘open’ to the ‘wonder that a world worlds, that there is something rather than nothing, that there are things, and we are in their midst.’ To stand in the light of such wonder is, says Heidegger, to become the ‘guardian’ of all natural beings. Critical theory, by contrast, only cares about human beings. It is no accident that no environmental ethics has arisen from either Marxist or neo-Marxist thought.

10:15 – 11:45 a.m. – Taylor Carman (Barnard) ‘Husserl’s Internalism’ Commentator: Charles Siewert (Rice) Chair: Mark Wrathall (Oxford)

According to many scholars, especially those in the tradition of Hubert Dreyfus (myself included), Husserl was a Cartesian thinker committed to (a kind of) internalism, while Heidegger endorsed (a kind of) externalism. Steven Crowell, A. D. Smith, and Dan Zahavi have recently argued, on the contrary, that Husserl was no more an internalist than Heidegger and that Being and Time is best read as an extension or expansion rather than a wholesale repudiation of Husserl’s phenomenological project. Crowell, Smith, and Zahavi can argue as they do only by ignoring glaring textual evidence against their readings of Husserl, misunderstanding basic principles of Husserl’s phenomenology, and finally missing what is even at issue in characterizing Husserl’s theory as (a kind of) internalism. Not surprisingly, they fail to see what is innovative and important in Heidegger’s critique of Husserl.

October 26  – John Bowlin, Robert L. Stuart Professor of Philosophy and Christian Ethics, Princeton Theological Seminary

“Human Dignity and Freedom from Domination: a Thomistic Sketch”

Among Christian theologians and ethicists, human rights and human dignity have fallen on hard times.  Talk of human rights, they say, encourages unwarranted self-regard.  Talk of human dignity tends to be either too abstract and thus morally unhelpful or too determinate and thus exclusionary.

In this paper, I address these worries by considering Aquinas’s account of the natural law, of our status as persons subject to divine rule, of the fact that we are citizens to a sovereign not slaves to master.  It’s this status—citizens of a divine commonwealth—that, for Thomas, accounts for our shared human dignity and gives it normative punch.  By virtue of this political status, this dignity, we have a basic right not to be dominated, a right not to be subject to the arbitrary power of another. I conclude by highlighting the relevance of Thomas’s account for contemporary discourses of human dignity and human rights, both religious and secular.

November 2 – Angela Potochnik, associate professor, University of Cincinnati

“Idealization and the Aims of Science”

Idealizations are assumptions employed without regard to whether they are true and often with full knowledge that they are false. In this talk, I will outline the views set forth in my brand new book of the same name. I first motivate a strong view of idealizations’ centrality to science and diagnose the reason for that centrality. Then I reconsider the aims of science in light of idealization’s centrality. On the account I develop, science does not pursue truth directly, but instead aims to support human cognitive and practical ends. This has implications for philosophical accounts of scientific explanation, how we should think about the relationships among different fields of science, how social and political values influence science, and the nature of scientific knowledge.

November 30 – Anja Jauernig, associate professor of Philosophy, New York University

“Levels of Reality or How to be an Idealist and a Realist at the Same Time ”

Kant calls his ontological theory ‘transcendental idealism’, and presents as one of its central tenets that empirical objects, such as tables and cats, are not things in themselves but mere appearances. But he also expresses his allegiance to what he calls ‘empirical realism’, and asserts that empirical objects are empirically real. Some readers take this to show that by classifying empirical objects as transcendentally ideal Kant cannot mean that they are fully mind-dependent, or that their existence is mind-dependent, in a way comparable to Berkeley’s view. Rather, Kant’s idealism must be weaker, and should be understood as concerning only certain properties of empirical objects, which are otherwise mind-independent. On my view, this ‘tame’ reading of Kant is untenable; he is committed to a strong form of idealism, according to which empirical objects are mind-dependent with respect to all of their properties as well as their existence. The project for this talk is to explain how it is possible for Kant to be both an idealist in this strong sense and an empirical realist at the same time. The key to solving this puzzle lies in recognizing that he is committed to a tiered ontology that comprises different levels of reality.