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Hans Pedersen, Agency, Freedom, and Responsibility in the Early Heidegger

Rowman & Littlefield, 2020, $36.00 pbk, 158 pp + Bibliography and Index

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Notes

  1. There is an intentional contrast here with Davidson. In Davidson’s terminology, the desire/belief pair that gives the cause of an action simultaneously provides the reason for that action, and is thus a “rationalization”. Pedersen’s “merely” before “rationalization” indicates that the word is being used in its more ordinary sense: the mental states referred to do not present the actual cause of or reason for an action, but merely involve an interpretation of the more fundamental dispositions that give rise to action.

  2. On p. 33 and again on p. 51, Pedersen does try to explain how Golob’s causal factors are different from Davidsonian psychological causes, but Pedersen’s example makes it hard to see what the distinction is supposed to be. An urge caused by the smell of cooking hamburgers would surely be a paradigmatic desire, or pro-attitude in Davidson’s terminology. Pedersen’s response seems to be that he’s already shown that desires are mere reifications rather than actual discrete events; however, if biological urges of the sort at issue here are allowed as causes, then this seems to once again open the door to Davidsonian pro-attitudes.

  3. Megan Altman has suggested to me that this view is not opposed to Pedersen’s, but I am unsure here. He recognizes Heidegger’s view of discourse as “equally fundamental as disposedness or understanding” (p. 64) and notes that deliberation is “built into the structure of human agency at the fundamental level [such that] deliberative and nondeliberative actions share the same basic structure” (pp. 63–64). But he also tells us that “interpretation [which is associated with discourse and deliberation] is the process of further refining and articulating what is already laid out in this initial projection” of understanding (p. 66) and that “deliberation is dependent on the articulation of the situation of action by understanding” (p. 68), which seems to directly contradict the claim that the two are “equally fundamental”.

References

  • Golob, S. (2014). Heidegger on concepts, freedom and normativity. Cambridge University Press.

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Correspondence to Roman Altshuler.

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Altshuler, R. Hans Pedersen, Agency, Freedom, and Responsibility in the Early Heidegger. Hum Stud 46, 635–644 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-023-09673-7

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