I'm reading the exchange between Dreyfus and McDowell pointed out by this fine entity. Lots of talk about animals, environments, and worlds, in McDowell's case mediated by Gadamer, who he says is presumably toeing the Heideggerian line. Dreyfus' statements about animals in "The Myth of the Mental" aren't attributed to Heidegger or his followers at all (that I can tell in a cursory check just now); at any rate, neither of them so much as mentions The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, which I would think anyone attempting to enlist Heidegger on his or her side in such a discussion would have to deal with, considering that in the second half he goes on and on and on about animals and persons.
I read part of McDowell's "What Myth?" and part of Dreyfus' "Return of the Myth of the Mental" on the way to, and at, a concert at 21 Grand. A band called Floss played the second slot of three. The saxophonist seemed to be a total hippy/hipster cross and was extremely annoying, though he did hand out free dental floss to everyone (during the set) and gave me a carrot as I exited the building at the end, and swallowed his mic, sitting there with it in his mouth for about a minute, drawing laffs in plenty. (The first band, Weiner Kids, was completely great, childish name notwithstanding.) Despite his having run back behind the stage while the rest of the band played on, returning shirtless, with a thong on over his pants (and it was, to boot, an unattractive thong), wearing boxing gloves, after the concert was over an attractive young woman afforded to him a solicitation for the putting on of moves. Aram Shelton, whose (extremely short) set was much, much better, had instead to endure a painfully awkward conversation with yours truly.
Free carrot! Score.
Given how careful McDowell is to hedge his claims whenever he mentions Heidegger in his responses to Dreyfus (if he's criticizing a position, he's not sure it's Heidegger's; if he's agreeing with a position, he only tentatively calls it Heidegger's), I suspect he might not have read Heidegger all that broadly. Dreyfus seems to abandon the claims about "animal cognition" after the APA address; "Return of the Myth of the Mental" and "Response to McDowell" are about baseball players and doorknobs more than animals. This is probably why the Heideggerian corpus doesn't get probed terribly deeply in this exchange.
Strangely, in footnote 52 of the APA address Dreyfus mentions the environment/world distinction only to dismiss it as not relevant to the question of perception. Apart from that, a search for "animal" in the PDF does show that Dreyfus doesn't attribute his animal arguments to Heidegger; in general he doesn't attribute them to anyone at all.
(hooray! I am a fine entity!)
Posted by: Daniel | October 01, 2007 at 02:21 AM