You may remember that, last October, John posted something about Hubert Dreyfus's 2005 Presidential Address to the Pacific APA
(see here). In the ensuing discussion, I mentioned that I had been working on the issues discussed in that piece, and that I do not exactly agree with Dreyfus's use of Merleau-Ponty. Well, I continued with that work, and have had a paper dealing with these issues, titled "Is Coping Nonconceptual?: On Merleau-Ponty, Dreyfus, and McDowell," accepted to the 07 Central APA.
The basic argument of the paper is that Dreyfus misrepresents Merleau-Ponty's philosophy in his attempt to use Merleau-Ponty against McDowell, and that Merleau-Ponty's thought is actually fairly close to McDowell's in certain crucial respects. The bulk of the paper deals with the former point, while the latter is more or less only suggested (one way I think the link can be drawn between Merleau-Ponty and McDowell is to investigate the ways/senses in which each is an Hegelian)...
Click here to read the abstract I sent with the submission:
Does Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology matter to the recent debates concerning nonconceptual content? For some this debate provides fertile ground for combining phenomenology and analytic philosophy. For example, Hubert Dreyfus has invoked Merleau-Ponty when attacking John McDowell for falling into a “Myth of the Mental” by assuming that all experience is conceptually articulated. While I think Dreyfus is right to inject Merleau-Ponty’s thought into current debates, he is wrong to put Merleau-Ponty with the supporters of nonconceptual content. While there are important differences between Merleau-Ponty and McDowell, I want to argue that Merleau-Ponty would agree with the spirit of McDowell’s views. To develop this argument, I will first discuss ways Phenomenology of Perception is used to support the nonconceptualism, and then show how it might plausibly be aligned with McDowell’s work. In the end, I think we would do well to see Merleau-Ponty and McDowell as broadly Hegelian allies.
For NovaPhD's authors, I have uploaded the whole paper to the "files" section on the blog administration page (it is called "07centralapasub.doc, and can be seen on the "rename/delete files page) . I don't really expect you guys to read it, but if you have some time to kill, I would love to hear what you think...
In any event, thanks to John and NovaPhDs for providing the impetus for the paper!
