Sartre's second century

100 Chapter Seven
"exteriority". To say that human agency finds itself embedded in this form
of exteriority is not only to say that human agency is suspended in its
historical situation, but that a certain kind of exteriority is in fact
constitutive of the historical subject itself. Many of the obscurities and
difficulties of Sartre's later philosophical language can perhaps be traced
back to the effort needed to reconcile the "interiority" of the for-itself s
freedom and the "exteriority" of language and history. Regardless of the
assessment that might be offered regarding the success or failure of
Sartre's efforts, it is important to emphasise that issues strongly analogous
to Sartre's are being increasingly emphasised in much current philosophy
of mind and language, and in a range of related disciplines broadly
devoted to the study of human cognition in recognising that the mind is
more "extended", "external" and "institutional" than much philosophy,
psychology and anthropology had taken it to be—indeed, more central
than the Sartre of Being and Nothingness was able to allow.
Here we briefly note examples of this emphasis. In analytical
philosophy, the thought of the later Wittgenstein has been said to move in
this direction, as is most recently argued in the work of Meredith
Williams. 33 The understanding of mind and language as social, public and
institutional presented in Williams's work contributes a non-Sartrean
vocabulary to the issue of materiality and exteriority in Sartre's sense of
the practico-inert.
Foucault has also exercised a strong influence on analytical thought.
Ian Hacking's recent Historical Ontology, explicitly indebted to Foucault,
is an additional important contribution to understanding the role of history
for language and the "publicness" of the human mind. 34
Recent trends in continental-inspired thought, driven in part by a
renewed interest in Hegelian and neo-Hegelian accounts of mind and truth
as "communal", as reflected in the recent work of Michael Forster and
Terry Pinkard, 35 also provide a non-Sartrean vocabulary focusing on issues
analogous to those raised in Sartre's later philosophy. Finally, similar
themes are reflected in the work of Robert Brandom and its concern with
institutional-cognitive structures, 36 and in Robert Brandom's and John
Haugeland's neo-pragmatic interpretation of the work of Heidegger, 37
Meredith Williams, Wittgenstein, Mind and Meaning: Toward a Social
Conception of Mind.
34 Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology.
35 Michael Forster, Hegel's Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit; Terry Pinkard,
Hegel's Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason.
36 Robert Brandom, Making it Explicit.
37 John Haugeland, "Dasein's Disclosedness".