Skip to main content

Contra Heidegger, or at least Dreyfus's version of Heidegger's version of substance

Substance seems to Dreyfus to be something we must disengage from in order to think about.  Hence we lose that initial engagement in the world.  To talk of substance, therefore, is to instrumentalize one's world and to constitute dualities (such as inner/outer) that divorce us from being.

I propose that substance is best understood by reflecting on a word that Aristotle was fond of using:  entelecheia (a word that conveys how something is continuously acting for a goal--a goal not extrinsic to its own activity but rather is for the sake of being active).  Entelecheia is a philosophical world used to describe how we act when engaged in the world.  Yet Arisotle uses it to describe substances.  The prime instance of substance, therefore, is a human being practically engaged.  Not a flat substratum thing, but a striver.  One who (on a good day) seeks to be fully alive.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

P F Strawson's Freedom and Resentment: the argument laid out

Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson.  He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal.  My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this.  I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one. In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true.  Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist.  In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Daniel Dennett, disqualifying qualia, softening up the hard problem, fullness of vacuity, dysfunctional functionalism

Around track 2 of disc 9 of Intuition Pumps , Dennett offers what I would call an argument from vacuity.  He argues that David Chalmers unwittingly plays a magic trick on himself and others by placing a set of issues under the one umbrella called the "hard problem of consciousness." None of these issues is really , in Dennett's opinion, a hard problem.  But in naming them thus, Chalmers (says Dennett) is like a magician who seems to be playing the same card trick over and over again, but is really playing several different ones.  In this analogy, expert magicians watch what they think is the same trick played over and over again.  They find it unusually difficult to determine which trick he is playing because they take these performances as iterations of the same trick when each is  in fact different from the one that came before.  Furthermore, each of the tricks that he plays is actually an easy one, so it is precisely because they are looki...
Post a Comment
Read more

naturalism (or rather, anti-supernaturalism) and preternaturalism

I will use the term "preternaturalism" to designate a willingness to posit causes that are less than divine but which stand above and beyond those observable ones we see operating within the laws of nature. A naturalist might oppose theistic arguments from miracles or design by arguing for the possibility of preternatural causes.  Such an argument, however, would bring us back to Zeus and Hera, tree nymphs and  the like: a supernatural explanation would, by contrast, be more conducive toward a scientific approach to nature (i.e., positing only laws that are falsifiable when doing science).
Post a Comment
Read more