The Pittsburgh Kantians: Brandom, Conant, Haugeland, and McDowell on Kant

Over the last thirty years, a group of philosophers associated with the University of Pittsburgh—Robert Brandom, James Conant, John Haugeland, and John McDowell—have developed a novel reading of Kant. Their interest turns on Kant’s problem of objective purport: how can my thoughts be about the world? This paper summarizes the shared reading of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction by these four philosophers and how it solves the problem of objective purport. But I also show these philosophers radically diverge in how they view Kant’s relevance for contemporary philosophy. I highlight an important distinction between those that hold a quietist response to Kant, evident in Conant and McDowell, and those that hold a constructive response, evident in Brandom and Haugeland. The upshot is that the Pittsburgh Kantians have a distinctive approach to Kant, but also radically different responses to his problem of objective purport.

Stance and Being

This essay builds upon Rebecca Kukla's constructive treatment of Dennettian stances as embodied coping strategies, to extend a conversation previously initiated by John Haugeland about Daniel Dennett on stances and real patterns and Martin Heidegger on the ontological difference. This comparison is mutually illuminating. It advances three underdeveloped issues in Heidegger: Dasein's ‘bodily nature’, the import of Heidegger's ontological pluralism for object identity, and how clarification of the sense of being in general bears on the manifold senses of being. It more sharply differentiates Kukla's and Dennett's understandings of stances and the real. Finally, it allows for further development of Kukla's account of Dennettian stances as embodied. These developments show greater complexity than what Kukla calls ‘the wide and counterfactually flexible repertoire of bodily positions’ that make up an embodied stance. They also show how different stances are compared and assessed even though Kukla rightly denies the possibility of a normative or explanatory philosophical ‘meta-stance’.

Beyond Realism and Antirealism ---At Last?

This paper recapitulates my four primary lines of argument that what is wrong with scientific realism is not realist answers to questions to which various anti-realists give different answers, but instead assumptions shared by realists and anti-realists in framing the question. Each strategy incorporates its predecessors as a consequence. A first, minimalist challenge, taken over from Arthur Fine and Michael Williams, rejects the assumption that the sciences have a general aim or goal. A second consideration is that realists and antirealists undertake a mistaken, substantive commitment to a separation between mind and world, which allows them to frame the issue in terms of how epistemic “access” to the world is mediated. A third strategy for dissolving the realism question challenges its underlying commitment to the independence of meaning and truth, a strategy pursued in different ways by Donald Davidson, Robert Brandom, John McDowell, John Haugeland, and myself. The fourth and most encompassing strategy shows that realists and antirealists are thereby committed to an objectionably antinaturalist conception of scientific understanding, in conflict with what the sciences themselves have to say about our own conceptual capacities.

Heidegger’s Sexless Community

Birds do it, bees do it…does Dasein do it? This question is less about whether members of Heidegger’s community have sex and more about whether the notion of sexual difference plays a primordial role in the existential make-up of a community. John Haugeland states, “Dasein is neither people nor their being but rather a way of life shared by members of some community.1” What is shared here is an understanding of being that is, in a certain way, chained to a body that is historically contingent. Does the fact that bodies are sexed say [Sagen/Zeigen] anything about our way of Being? To answer the opening question, according to Heidegger, Dasein doesn’t do it. That bodies are sexed merits no serious analysis, and the act of having sex, despite its being responsible for the infinite propagation of beings (for whom Being is an issue) is of no ontological significance: Ni homme, ni femme- c’est un Dasein. This phrase is a reformulation of Guenther Anders’ statement, “Ni homme, ni capucin- c’est un Dasein”. Neither surrendering to the desires or material concerns of man, nor transcending to the supra-natural world of the divine, Heidegger’s philosophy of Dasein is one of pseudo-concreteness. Dasein is the middleman, forgetful of the milieu4. If ancient metaphysicians forgot the meaning of Being [ϕνσις] by neglecting its duality, Heidegger is equally guilty in overlooking the dynamic unfolding of the dialectic of sex.

Zed Adams und Jacob Browning (Hg.): Giving a Damn. Essays in Dialogue with John Haugeland

Besprechung von Zed Adams und Jacob Browning (Hg.): Giving a Damn. Essays in Dialogue with John Haugeland. Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: The MIT Press 2016.

Constancy Mechanisms and the Normativity of Perception

In “Truth and Rule-Following,” John Haugeland criticizes a wide swath of competing accounts of perceptual representation on the grounds that they cannot make room for the possibility of perceptual states that are functionally right but factually wrong. In this paper, we spell out what we take Haugeland’s criticism to involve by showing how it applies equally well to an account of perceptual representation that was published after Haugeland’s death: namely, the account of perceptual representation offered in Tyler Burge’s Origins of Objectivity (2010).

Giving a Damn

In his work, the philosopher John Haugeland (1945–2010) proposed a radical expansion of philosophy’s conceptual toolkit, calling for a wider range of resources for understanding the mind, the world, and how they relate. Haugeland argued that “giving a damn” is essential for having a mind, and suggested that traditional approaches to cognitive science mistakenly overlook the relevance of caring to the understanding of mindedness. Haugeland’s determination to expand philosophy’s array of concepts led him to write on a wide variety of subjects that may seem unrelated—from topics in cognitive science and philosophy of mind to examinations of such figures as Immanuel Kant, Martin Heidegger, and Thomas Kuhn. Haugeland’s two books with the MIT Press, Artificial Intelligence and Mind Design, show the range of his interests. This book offers a collection of essays in conversation with Haugeland’s work. The essays, by prominent scholars, extend Haugeland’s work on a range of contemporary topics in philosophy of mind—from questions about intentionality to issues concerning objectivity and truth to the work of Heidegger. Giving a Damn also includes a previously unpublished paper by Haugeland, “Two Dogmas of Rationalism,” as well as critical responses to it. Finally, an appendix offers Haugeland’s outline of Kant’s "Transcendental Deduction of the Categories.”

John Haugeland: Dasein Disclosed

Besprechung von John Haugeland: Dasein Disclosed