Stance and Being

Abstract

AbstractThis essay builds upon Rebecca Kukla's constructive treatment of Dennettian stances as embodied coping strategies, to extend a conversation previously initiated by John Haugeland about Daniel Dennett on stances and real patterns and Martin Heidegger on the ontological difference. This comparison is mutually illuminating. It advances three underdeveloped issues in Heidegger: Dasein's ‘bodily nature’, the import of Heidegger's ontological pluralism for object identity, and how clarification of the sense of being in general bears on the manifold senses of being. It more sharply differentiates Kukla's and Dennett's understandings of stances and the real. Finally, it allows for further development of Kukla's account of Dennettian stances as embodied. These developments show greater complexity than what Kukla calls ‘the wide and counterfactually flexible repertoire of bodily positions’ that make up an embodied stance. They also show how different stances are compared and assessed even though Kukla rightly denies the possibility of a normative or explanatory philosophical ‘meta-stance’.