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Could it be true? Hubert Farnsworth of Futurama is based on Hubert Dreyfus of Berkeley's philosophy department?

Apparently an early writer for the show gave Farnsworth the first name Hubert because he took Dreyfus' courses. But, beyond this particular fact, aren't most of Farnsworth's mannerisms quite similar to those of Bert Dreyfus'?

One sees quite the parallel between Dreyfus' wonderful belief in the merits of phenomenology--not to mention the powerful analyses regarding motility and being in the world in general that he is able to elaborate with its help or through it--and the fun Farnsworth has with his Smell-o-scope. Also, they actually do look pretty similar, now that I think about it...

Here is a great interview with Dreyfus, where he talks about coming from the sciences to philosophy, the work of Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, and teaching (his amazing comments there are in fact probably the least Farnsworthian, who likes to shut himself up in his lab).

Here is a wonderful paper of Dreyfus' on phenomenology in contrast to the (equally wonderful) work of Searle.

And here is a great paper on tele-presence: indeed, if Dreyfus were to go more in this direction, push his thought there, he would end up thinking things similar to Derrida. Cf. his reflections on tele-psychoanalysis in Psyche, volume I, Echographies, and elsewhere. Then again, if you put on anyone's thought you end up with Derrida. Sam Weber (the Derridian) is actually closer to the mark of what Dreyfus there elaborates.

And just for fun is a great picture of Michel Foucault (pictured with students from his philosophy seminar at UC Berkeley, October 1983: the students gave Foucault the cowboy hat as a gift), in an article in which Dreyfus talks about Foucault's visits to Berkeley.

Kant and the world

I wasn't exactly clear or even exactly right in my post below on Kant, when I said that the unity of the perspective from which the manifold is represented as connected is the real place where apperceptive synthesis is at work:

...we have to understand that, for Kant, this is really where the power of representation, the whole process of eventual synthesis and connection of representation, originates and is at work--but not yet as itself. In other words, connection as an act is really located here, in the unity: connection itself just issues forth from this act of unifying that is not yet action, not yet reducible to the power of representation as such.

This is generally in the right ballpark, and that is indeed where I was trying to get us in that post, but this problem, the unity of the manifold prior to representation in apperception, gets complicated and indeed is buttressed by the entire third Critique. 

Do we have reason to believe that this connection is unified simply by the existence of one perspective (speaking loosely, of course) upon the manifold? Or is this unity essentially issuing forth from the nature of the assumption we must make in order to do anything about the nature of the objective world itself? That is, the unity of the manifold must be assumed in an act of judgement regarding it: the unity of our perspective on it is thus dependent on this judgement itself being consistent. It is there that the Transcendental Deduction must find its completion and apperception really find itself issuing forth from a coherent point of view on the world. To support this reading, let's just refer to the famous introduction to the third critique where it specifically mentions the unity of the manifold in apperception with respect to reflecting judgement:

...There is such a manifold of forms in nature, as it were so man modifications of the universal transcendental concepts of nature that are left undetermined by those laws that the pure understanding gives a priori, since these pertain only to the possibility of nature (as object of the senses) in general, that there must nevertheless also be laws for it which, as empirical, may indeed be contingent in accordance with the insight of OUR understanding, but which, if they are to be called laws (as is also required by the concept of nature), must be regarded as necessary on a principle of the unity of the manifold, even if that principle is unknown to us.

-Critique of the Power of Judgement, Guyer and Matthews translation, 67 (5: 179-80), my italics.

The validity of the principle here is what is primarily in question. Indeed, Husserl notes this quite thoroughly in his The Crisis of the European Sciences. We should remark that it is actually quite useful to go there after the third critique, because it is really this problem that leads Husserl to posit the existence of a "life-world." He does not think that the third critique is able to answer this question sufficiently and still posits something about the world apart from any judgement. He must therefore look at the third critique to justify this, and out of it cull a pre-assumed "life world" that Kant fails to address. However, he does not do this to the extent we would wish it to be done. The question gets recasted, in a sense, but never explicitly read back into the place in which it originated, the third critique. Merleau-Ponty is a bit better about this, actually, and addresses specifically Kantian concerns often--turning to him next would be useful. But, frankly, all of phenomenology's concern with worldhood or the life world stems from this basic problem in the third critique. Indeed, Heidegger's assumption of the individuality of Dasein that gets given to me in being-to-death--its mine-ness, that brings Dasein away from a world at the same time as it involves Dasein in it authentically--could be said to stem from this problem, at least in the way it is carried out (and Heidegger indeed refers to the transcendental deduction in Being and Time, and his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics is, after all is said and done, primarily concerned with the role of the third critique in this problem relating to the deduction). Anyway, all I'm trying to do here is redirect some musings earlier: I hope they were not that misleading (and I don't think they were).

Questions on Heidegger and Kierkegaard

On my Kierkegaard post below, a reader (Sean) posted a great comment:

Do you side with Kaufmann or Dreyfus? To what degree is Heidegger indebted to Kierkegaard? Does it really stop at thrown-ness? Or, can you trace all of Heidegger's existentialism back to 'Religiousness A' (a secularized version)? Isn't the real distinction exactly what anxiety reveals, is it the value of finite existence, or does is reveal an infinite - a sort of flipside to finite existence - as well? 

I was prompted to respond with the following, which is way-too-long--especially for a real non answer! Hopefully others have something to say besides this--which I invite you to do! Please excuse typos, etc:

The relationship of Heidegger to religion is a tricky one. This precludes it being any mere "secularized version" of a text of Kierkegaard. Furthermore, this would have to deal with how, for Heidegger, Kierkegaard relates to the Aristotelian structure of being-in-the-world and the rereading of Aristotle more generally that occurs in Being and Time, which is not an easy relation to figure out. In "The Hermeneutics of Facticity," an pretty early course (1924) Heidegger is outlining much of what will become Being and Time in its basic approach to interpretation, and he there cites Kierkegaard as prominent in the sense that it inspires his hermeneutical or interpretative task or way of getting at being. I think revisiting this nexus would probably give us some directions in conceiving *exactly how* Heidegger is thinking about Kierkegaard: one could say that the interpretative method that Husserlian phenomenology gets modified into would have to be conceived as more Kierkegaardian. In other words, it is obvious Heidegger is indebted to Kierkegaard massively--the real question is how. This is all one possibility--I'm really saying that I have no clue, and thus your question opens up a great avenue to pursue. Do you have any idea?

As to Kaufmann or Dreyfus, I'm not so familiar with the arguments of the former relating to Kierkegaard and their opposition to Dreyfus' readings: I think Dreyfus has a great interpretation of Kierkegaard though, and though I haven't listened yet to his lectures on death, guilt, and resoluteness in the Heidegger course this semester, I plan to--they should localize at least some of these problems within the Heidegger. I will say that I think Dreyfus is a little too quick perhaps to characterize Kierkegaard as merely the "existential" influence of Heidegger, as if all of Heidegger's concern with death and guilt were to stem from a concern that is able to be distinctly separated from his more Aristotelian concern in Division I. I'm not the first to criticize him in this way though: Blattner is the best at it, though perhaps going too far in the other direction and making the concerns of temporality and finitude (finitude being really what death is all about for Heidegger), the sole organizing theme of the book. Heidegger sees being as finite, and this is probably one of the central theses of the book: furthermore, he sees Aristotle saying the same thing long ago. He must elaborate how this is able to be so--and so that leads him to posit a Division I that will merge with the concern of Division II, death etc.

Kierkegaard figures there also because he breaks with Hegel--that should be noted. Hegel is Heidegger's archenemy--so anyone able to say that there is a nothingness and a freedom in nothingness, a possibility for a finite subject to relate to infinite possibility (whether God or not), possibility en abyme (as Derrida likes to say) or, conceived probably less rigorously, as drive and repetition of desire (which Lacan says and this is how I formulate it above), would not escape him in his reading of Aristotle. A great helpful book on this is actually Levinas' God, Death and Time--it is really clear and outlines certain concerns about infinity and finiteness in Heidegger and elsewhere that you touched on. Whatever you think of him, too, reading the section on Kierkegaard in The Gift of Death by Derrida is helpful, because he outlines pretty much a standard reading of the suspension of the ethical in relationship to death and shows how at this point one can relate it to concerns of finiteness and infinity. But I'm talking too much--what do you think?

One more thing... with regard to thrown-ness... of course it doesn't stop there, but I think that's the structure that is the best to think about with all this Kierkegaard stuff (as I say in later posts, though unsuccessfully--I stopped all this because it was getting too tough to think)... the real question is how this possibility beyond possibility that is experienced in the dread of nothingness *already exists or is factical* in Dasein. How possibility or futurity (to talk about it in temporal terms) is already within Dasein so that Dasein is thrown back upon it in its existence, so that it is thrown back upon its factical existentiality in its being-existential or projecting itself forward into nothingness, how projecting oneself forward into nothingness is throwing oneself back to the fact of one's nothingness (this all takes place in some remarks on nothingness that are really weird in Being and Time and have a lot to do with Hegel)--this relay, when conceived with respect to its facticity, is the real tough thing to think. Projection is easy--thinking facticity is the real tough stuff. And to Dreyfus' immense credit (I don't know how many people congratulate him on this--but everyone taking his course or exposed to his writings probably should, it is so so vital for understanding anything in Being and Time), this is what he thinks best and why he lays so much emphasis on Division I: it's there that we get a structure that is somehow, in its being structureed that way, already there (da), albeit falling and distracted, etc. This might answer your last question--why I actually don't think that it is so much about the what anxiety reveals. It is about the nature of this revealing as such that is the key for Heidegger. Others like Levinas will change what is revealed and then go back and read it into the structure of Dasein that Heidegger elaborates and show how it cannot be that way (this is what he does in the book I referred you to--but of course not with the rest of his philosophy, which is much more thought out [precisely with regard to what facticity would then have to be] than this one lecture). But for Heidegger, finitude or infinitude would have to announce itself before it is revealed in the revealing itself--the real trick is not deciding then whether revealing that is done in Dasein is finite or infinite, but by trying to let Dasein itself point the way towards answering this, which only then will take us to what is revealed. This leads, however, to the hermeneutic circle Heidegger points out famously. But, again, this is all too much: I'll post this as a separate new post, so it might be easier to find--and also so that others can perhaps get in on what you asked!