Nova PhDs

I am not sure if am being particularly sensitive to this issue -- therefore noticing it everywhere -- or if it is becoming a more widespread chat. Speaking of this issue of "situated knowledge", a guest-bloger on Leiter's blog has a post on this. His conclusion about styles is not either original or convincing (BL also put something on same note in the "Comments"). But I found the first paragraph, particularly the idea of "pragmatic encroachment" to be interesting.

if you haven't yet had the chance to take a look at hubert dreyfus' presidential address in the latest apa proceedings, i'd encourage you to do so. it's a very interesting little piece on reconciliations in analytic and continental philosophy, largely by way of merleau-ponty. he deals there with the issue of "embodied coping" in the world, and particularly "master"-level coping.

in doing so, he actually has recourse to a text that some of us know from walter's "phenomgonlogy and the greek" (sic) class: heidegger's lecture course on plato's sophist, and the discussion of phronesis and the phronimos there. dreyfus' argument is that this coping is not conceptual in character, in fact not even unconsciously so. i.e. the master chess player doesn't act according to conceptual rules that have been made unconscious, or even really any rules at all -- instead, she has recourse to, as aristotle puts it in nic. ethics vi, a kind of perceptual nous, an intuitive grasping of the concrete situation we're in. so when the master tries to describe what made her act as she did, she can only reconstruct retroactively a kind of general account, not actually a set of formal rules.

anyway, he actually cites a couple of interesting empirical studies on this front, as well. his claim is that while analytics have (largely) been working on the "upper floors" of conceptuality (he has a nice version of merleau-ponty's critique of intellectualism that he calls the "Myth of the Mental," which he says preys like a vulture on the carcass of the "Myth of the Given,"), phenomenologists have (again, largely) been working on the lower floors of working out a notion of embodied coping. Both, he argues, would benefit from working out more clearly how the upper floors of conceptuality develop out of the lower floors, however.

i'd be curious to hear what some of you think about the article. i do tend to think that one thing he's missing is a more nuanced view of how language factors in to this embodied coping -- he seems to me to be treating this coping as not only a non-conceptual, but even a non-linguistic kind of thing. i think it would also be interesting to bring kant's account of the genius in the Critique of Judgment to bear on this account.