second year course outlines 2012-2013 - School of Social Sciences ...

Heidegger right to claim that the perception of a chair as hard is really, primarily, the
perception
of it as uncomfortable.
3. Heidegger argues, in §5c(β) that indirect (picture based) accounts of perception are
falsified by
the phenomenology, according to which the perceived is ‘bodily there’. Is he right? He also
argues that they fall down to an infinite regress objection. Is this a convincing argument?
4. Heidegger only mentions sensation in his rejection of ‘indirect’ accounts of perception. Do
you
think that this is right? Is there such a thing as perceptual sensation or can perception be
characterised entirely in terms of intentionality and ‘bodily presence’?
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Lecture 6 (Week 7): Perception II – perceiving and doing (Heidegger)
Required Reading:
Heidegger, M. The Worldhood of the World. In Moran, D. & Mooney, T. The
Phenomenology
Reader. London: Routledge, 2002. [S]
Recommended Reading:
Hall, H. 1993. Intentionality and World: Division I of Being and Time. In C. Guignon, ed.
Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, 1st Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[O]
Further Reading:
Blattner, W. 1999. Is Heidegger a Representationalist? Philosophical Topics 27
Carman, T. 2003. Heidegger’s Analytic: Interpretation, Discourse and Authenticity in Being
and
Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Chs.2-3
Cerbone, D. 1999. Constitution and Composition: Heidegger’s Hammer. Philosophical
Topics
27 (1999) [D]
Christensen, C. B. 1997. Heidegger’s Representationalism. Review of Metaphysis 51 [O]
*Dreyfus, H. 1991. Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time,
Division 1. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, Ch.3-5 [S] [D = Ch.3]
*Moran, D. 2000. Heidegger’s Critique of Husserl’s and Brentano’s Accounts of
Intentionality.
Inquiry 43 [O]
Richardson, J. 1991. Existential Epistemology: A Heideggerian Critique of the Cartesian
Project. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Part I, ‘Everydayness’ [O]
*Soffer, G. 1999. Phenomenologizing with a Hammer: Theory of Practice? Continental
Philosophy Review 32 (1999) [O]
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The Topic
We don’t just think about things and see things, we do things. And, usually, we do things
with
things—we drive in the nail with the hammer, type with the computer, scrub with the brush.
When
we engaged in such activities, how do the objects with which we are engaged appear to us?
Heidegger’s influential answer to this question incorporates his important distinction between
the
ready-to-hand and the present-at-hand, and his claim that the world is, essentially, a
normative,
meaningful structure. It is often presented as an account of our most fundamental relation to
the
world—one which makes Husserlian intentionality possible.
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