The Situated Body (Janus Head)

The latest edition of Janus Head (9/2) is on the situated body with contributions by Shaun Gallagher, Jonathan Cole, and Andy Clark, among others. Some good ideas from various perspectives for those who are interested in the question of the body.

Don't forget to take a look at the book reviews section which includes works like Andy Clark's Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again, Antonio Damasio's The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, and Jaegwon Kim's Mind in a Physical World: An Essay on the Mind-Body Problem and Mental Causation. Also take a look at the available Symposia.

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Genes Cannot Debunk Heidegger

An interesting quote from a review of Bill McKibben's Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age:

It might be possible someday, using genetic engineering, to give a child a brain smart enough to understand why Heidegger is wrong, but there is no getting around the fact that he will have to undergo the experience of learning about Heidegger first. There are no genes for Heidegger debunking.

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Three Good Dreyfus Works

Recently Hubert Dreyfus published a paper in Philosophical Psychology 20/2 (2007), 247-268, titled "Why Heideggerian AI Failed and How Fixing it Would Require Making it More Heideggerian." It can be found online here. It is an excellent summary of Dreyfus' thinking on this topic that also takes into account more recent work, like Michael Wheeler's Reconstructing the Cognitive World.

Another is an interview for Conversations with History titled Meaning, Relevance, and the Limits of Technology. The text can be found in the previous link and the interview can be found here.

The last is Dreyfus' Presidential Address to the American Philosophical Association, Overcoming the Myth of the Mental: How Philosophers Can Profit from the Phenomenology of Everyday Expertise. This is a good defense of the relevance of phenomenology to modern philosophy. Enjoy!

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