Intentionality and Representation in the dialogue between Dreyfus and Searle

Abstract

Dialogue between Dreyfus, as the biggest American commentator of Heidegger and Merleau- Ponty, and Searle, as one of the biggest analytic philosophers, started at the seventies. According to Searle, phenomenology is superficially and blind and has systematic errors. Additionally, in his view the concept of non-representational intention as center of Dreyfus’s phenomenology is inconsistent. But, in our opinion, Dreyfus introduces a consistent concept of non-representational intention, and proposes that Searle does not have a sound understanding of phenomenology. Dreyfus draws a distinction between two interpretations of Searle: Searle as phenomenologist and Searle as analytic philosopher. Dreyfus believes Searle’s approach as a phenomenologist is wrong because ignores non-representational intention; He also criticizes Searle’s approach as analytic philosopher because this approach accepts causality for an abstract structure. However, we believe that Dreyfus himself fails to go beyond the subject-object dualism. Moreover, we show in this paper that introducing non-representational intention is not sufficient for rejecting Descartes dualism.

Keywords

• Intentionality
• Representation
• Phenomenology
• Analytic philosophy
• Dualism