Syllabus
1 General Introduction: Primacy of Practice in Phenomenology 2 Things themselves as pragmata - Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, §13, 15 and 16 3 The criticism of the representationalist account of intentionality - Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, chap. 4 "Availableness and Occurrentness", p. 60-87 4 Ruled by the Average - The positive and negative dimensions of our Being-with-others - Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, chap. 8 “The Who of Everyday Dasein”, p. 141-162 5 Overcoming the Average Expertise vs. everyday intelligibility - Hubert Dreyfus,“Could anything be more intelligible than everyday intelligibility?“ in: Appropriating Heidegger, p.155-74 6 Heidegger and American Pragmatism - William Blattner, "What Heidegger and Dewey Could Learn From Each Other.” Philosophical Topics 36 no. 1 (2008): 57–77. 7 Karel Kosík´s critical assessement of Heidegger´s analysis of preoccupation - The primacy of practice as the common grand scheme in both Heidegger and marxism - Karel Kosík - Dialectics of the Concrete - chap. II 8 Absorded coping vs.
Conceptual Thinking in Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty - Merleau-Ponty - Phenomenology of Perception – chap. „The spatiality of my own body“ 9 Merleau-Ponty´s insights into the pragmatic dimensions of language, perception and intersubjectivity - Hubert Dreyfus - "A Merleau-Pontyian Critique of Representationalist Accounts of Action" 10 Situated Acting and Absorbed Coping - Komarine Romdenh-Romluc - "Thought in Action" 11 The Primacy of Practice in Jan Patočka´s Phenomenology - Jan Patočka, "Afterword to the first French Translation in The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem", Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2016.
Annotation
The aim of this course is to extract and assess the pragmatic theses that are present in the phenomenological works of M. Heidegger, M. Merleau-Ponty and J. Patočka. We will read and critically assess both primary texts and several pragmatic readings of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, while focusing on the following themes as possible justifications for speaking about the pragmatic turn in phenomenology:
- the primacy of the practical over theoretical understanding
- criticism of the representationalist account of perception
- analysis of truth claims within the context of social and cultural practices
This course is oriented towards students in philosophy (both Czech and Erasmus).