TUCKER MCKINNEY CURRICULUM VITAE Department of Philosophy The College of William & Mary P.O. Box 8795 Williamsburg, VA 23187-8795 twmckinney [at] wm [dot] edu http://wmpeople.wm.edu/site/page/twmckinney/home EDUCATION Ph.D. in Philosophy, University of Chicago, June 2014 B.A. with Honors in Philosophy, summa cum laude, Bates College, May 2005 EMPLOYMENT The College of William and Mary, Visiting Assistant Professor, 2014-present AREAS OF SPECIALIZATION 19th- and 20th-Century European Philosophy, Philosophy of Action AREAS OF COMPETENCE Ethics, Philosophy of Mind, Kant, Ancient Philosophy DISSERTATION TITLE: Heidegger on Human Finitude and Normative Governance COMMITTEE: Robert Pippin (chair), Jonathan Lear, William Blattner (Georgetown University) DEFENSE DATE: May 7, 2014 ABSTRACT In Being and Time, Heidegger expresses the thought that our voluntary activities are distinguished by the fact that they are in each case mine (Jemeinig) and seeks to give an account of what this mineness consists in. On a popular contemporary reading of the text, my activities are mine just insofar as they cohere with and so express a personal style or self-understanding. I argue that this reading fails to countenance the link between mineness and intentionality: for Heidegger, an activity is mine in being governed by my understanding of entities, in what and how they are. I offer a revised account of mineness that recovers this connection. Drawing on Heidegger’s account of the finitude and questionability of human understanding, I argue that my activities are mine in that they are what sustain my comprehending openness to the world. This concept of mineness identifies the common root of rationality and intentional self-knowledge in the selfsustaining activity of understanding being. PUBLICATIONS “‘As One Does’: Understanding Heidegger’s Account of Das Man,” European Journal of Philosophy (forthcoming) “Objectivity and Reflection in Heidegger’s Theory of Intentionality,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association (forthcoming)

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Curriculum Vitae

“Two Forms of Practical Knowledge in Being and Time” In Pragmatic Perspectives on Phenomenology, edit by Čapek and Švec (forthcoming at Routledge) INVITED TALKS AND CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS “Transcendence in Action: Practical Reason and Meaningful Lives” Southwest Seminar in Continental Philosophy, Texas A&M University, May 2016 “Death and Intention” Southwest Seminar in Continental Philosophy, Northern Arizona University, May 2015 “’As One Does’: Truth, Sociality, and the Critique of Public Reason in Being and Time” Southwest Seminar in Continental Philosophy, Colorado College, June 2014 “Transcendence and Freedom: Heidegger’s Formalism of the Will” Southwest Seminar in Continental Philosophy, Texas A&M University, May 2013 Hiram College, May 2013 “Agency and Practical Finitude” Georgetown University, September 2012 “Ways of Being and Dynamic Forms” Chicago Phenomenology Workshop, University of Chicago, April 2012 WORKSHOP PRESENTATIONS “Agency and Practical Finitude: Heidegger’s Anti-anti-rationalism” German Philosophy Workshop, University of Chicago, October 2013 “Formulating Heideggerian Ontological Pluralism” German Philosophy Workshop, University of Chicago, November 2012 “Agency and Practical Finitude” Franke Institute for the Humanities, University of Chicago, April 2012 “Self-Interpretation and the Tragedy of Meaning in Being and Time” German Philosophy Workshop, University of Chicago, March 2012 “Practical Finitude” Contemporary Philosophy Workshop, University of Chicago, February 2012 “Dasein’s For-the-Sake-of-Which and the End of Reasons” Contemporary European Philosophy Workshop, University of Chicago, May 2009 “The Underdetermination of Content in Milikan’s Teleosemantics” Philosophy of Mind Workshop, May 2007 ACADEMIC AWARDS AND FELLOWSHIPS Stuart Tave Teaching Fellowship, Winter Quarter 2013 Division-wide fellowship awarded to four Ph.D. students annually for course design Franke Institute for the Humanities Dissertation Year Fellowship, 2011-12 Stipend, tuition, and logistical support awarded to four Ph.D. students each year in the Division of the Humanities

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TEACHING EXPERIENCE PRINCIPAL INSTRUCTOR Philosophical Problems: Self-Knowledge, The College of William & Mary, Spring 2016 What Are We?: The Human Self, The College of William & Mary, Spring 2016 Meaning in Life, The College of William & Mary, Fall 2015, Spring 2016 Ethics, The College of William & Mary, Fall 2015 Kant and His Successors, The College of William & Mary, Spring 2015 Introduction to Philosophy: Meaning in Life, The College of William & Mary, Fall 2014, Spring 2015 Introduction to Philosophy, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Fall 2013 Philosophical Perspectives I (Ancient Philosophy and Literature), University of Chicago, Fall 2012, 2013 Kierkegaard and Nietzsche: Character, Agency, and Fate, University of Chicago, Winter 2013 Junior/Senior Tutorial: Reasons and Causes, University of Chicago, Fall 2009 BA SEMINAR PRECEPTOR, 2012-13 Led year-long workshop for Philosophy majors writing B.A. Theses COURSE ASSISTANT: Aristotle on Practical Wisdom (Müller), Spring 2014 Introduction to Philosophy of Science (Callard), Winter 2014 Introduction to Scientific and Technological Change (Wimsatt), Spring 2011 Elementary Logic (Davey), Fall 2010 Rationality (Bridges), Spring 2009 Introduction to Metaphysics and Epistemology (Haugeland), Winter 2009 Non-Deductive Inference (Davey), Fall 2008 Darwin (Richards), Fall 2008 Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (Benoist), Spring 2008 Evolutionary Theory and its Role in the Human Sciences (Richards), Winter 2008 HUMANITIES CORE WRITING INTERN Led small group seminars and conducted individual meetings covering all aspects of academic writing in conjunction with Humanities Core courses Philosophical Perspectives-III (Modern Moral Philosophy), Spring 2008 Philosophical Perspectives-II (Early Modern Philosophy), Winter 2008 Philosophical Perspectives-I (Ancient Philosophy and Literature), Fall 2007 READING GROUP LEADER, HEIDEGGER’S BEING AND TIME By undergraduate student request, co-organized a year-long, bi-weekly reading group without pay, 2007-8 and 2012-2013

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Curriculum Vitae

SELECT COURSES PREPARED TO TEACH INTRODUCTORY Introduction to Philosophy Human Nature Introduction to Ethics Ancient Philosophy Existentialism Philosophy of Mind Philosophy of Science

ADVANCED Phenomenology 19th Century Philosophy Artificial Intelligence & the Philosophy of Mind Self-Knowledge Kant’s Critical Philosophy Kierkegaard and Nietzsche

Practical Reasoning Embodiment and Psychological Explanation Reasons and Causes Heidegger’s Being and Time Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT Workshop on Course Design, University of Chicago, Summer 2012 Seminar on Course Design, University of Chicago, Winter 2012 Workshop on Teaching in the College, University of Chicago, Fall 2009 Pedagogies of Writing, Summer 2007 PROFESSIONAL SERVICE Conference Co-organizer (with Katherine Withy), Chicago Phenomenology Workshop, April 2012 Graduate Student Representative to the Philosophy of Science Search Committee, 2011 Conference Co-organizer (with James Conant), Mind, Meaning, and Understanding: The Philosophy of John Haugeland, June 2010 Philosophy Department Library Co-Coordinator, Summer 2007 Inventoried and re-catalogued the department’s graduate student library in a new automated database. GRADUATE COURSEWORK * indicates course audited. HISTORY OF GERMAN PHILOSOPHY Heidegger’s Being and Time (Haugeland) Husserl on Intentionality (Benoist) Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (Beere) Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Forster) Practical Reason (Engstrom)* PHILOSOPHY OF MIND AND ACTION Intentionality (Bridges)* Philosophy of Mind Workshop (Bridges/Finkelstein) Action and Perception (Pippin / Conant)

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Curriculum Vitae

PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Philosophy of Science (Davey) Philosophy of Physics: The Arrow of Time (Davey) History and Philosophy of Set Theory (Tait) Philosophy of Social Science (Wimsatt)* ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY Plato’s Republic I and II (Lear) Aristotle’s Metaphysics Gamma (Malink)* HISTORY OF ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY Resemblance and Family Resemblance: Goethe, Galton, and Wittgenstein (Conant/Snyder) Austin (Cohen)* Wittgenstein (Finkelstein)* Frege (Kremer)* REFERENCES Robert Pippin Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor of Philosophy University of Chicago [email protected] (773) 702 5453 Jonathan Lear John U. Nef Distinguished Service Professor of Philosophy University of Chicago [email protected] (773) 702 8407 William Blattner Professor of Philosophy Georgetown University [email protected] (202) 687 4528 TEACHING REFERENCE Jason Bridges Associate Professor of Philosophy University of Chicago [email protected] (773) 834 8191

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Curriculum Vitae

DISSERTATION SUMMARY My dissertation addresses the link between two characteristics of voluntary activity of perennial importance to our understanding of mind, action, and ethics: first, that what we do voluntarily, we do under the auspices of the reasons we take to bear on our situation; and second, that we normally know, non-inferentially, both what we do and why. The coincidence of reasons-sensitivity and noninferential self-knowledge encourages the intuition that an activity is voluntary when it transpires because of the agent’s self-apprehension of her rational circumstance. But even if this intuition is rightminded, the sense of the ‘because’ linking apprehension to act remains elusive. If the ‘because’ is understood to connote efficient causation, the intuition is belied by the vast range of voluntary, ‘selfconscious’ acts that are performed absent-mindedly and by the regress that ensues if every voluntary act must be premeditated. On the other hand, if the ‘because’ is understood teleologically, the intuition seems to give an exaggerated normative role to agents’ self-conceptions and consigns the mechanisms underlying reason-governedness to obscurity. My dissertation argues that we can find resources for better comprehending the ‘because’ linking self-apprehension to voluntary activity in an unlikely-seeming source: Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. I develop a new reading of Heidegger’s phenomenology of Dasein, on which this phenomenology illuminates the ‘because’ of reasonsexplanation by locating the common root of rational-guidance and self-awareness in the activity of sustaining one’s openness to the world. I am not the first to claim that Heidegger’s phenomenology illuminates our capacity for activity that is governed by reasons and characterized by self-apprehension. Readers like Dreyfus, Crowell, and Okrent have maintained that Heidegger offers an explanation of these phenomena that depends upon characterizing our activity as self-interpreting. On these readings, Heidegger claims that agency possesses the distinctive metaphysical status of being at issue for itself in its identity. Our voluntary acts can be intelligibly governed by reasons, and represent a form of self-apprehension, just because they amount to our effort to work out, and live up to, the standards which govern who we are. Despite its enormous influence, I argue that this reading implies two consequences that would be fatal to Heidegger’s project. In the first place, the interpretation condemns Heidegger to an account of volitional concepts that proves to be viciously circular, since it suggests that, to explicate the possibility of intentional effort in general (e.g. trying to hammer), we must appeal to a further instance of the same (e.g. trying to be a carpenter). Secondly, the account severs the vital connection between agency and being that secures the methodological integrity of Heidegger’s work. If we construe our voluntary acts as aiming only, or primarily, to settle the question of the identity of their agent, we render it mysterious why, as Heidegger believes, we should look to agency to illuminate the question of the sense of being in general. I seek a revised account of Heidegger’s theory of agency that can make sense of that connection. I locate the starting point of Heidegger’s account of agency in two surface-level observations about agency’s exercise. The first is that every exercise of our agency essentially amounts to an attempt, on the part of the agent, to claim an understanding of the being of some object or objects. The second is that there is no single form in terms of which we can understand the relationship between our activities and the being of entities: for there are many senses of ‘being’ which we purport to be responsive to, and many ways in which our activities purport to embody that responsiveness. These two characterizations provide us with an alternative way to understand the sense in which agency is “at issue” for itself. According to the first, voluntary activity is distinguished by the way it puts forth a claim about being, i.e., about what there is. But since, as the second observation suggests, we lack an understanding of what unifies the sense of being in general, the extent to which the claim of any of our activities really pertains to being is ineluctably questionable. Hence, Heidegger characterizes 6

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Curriculum Vitae

voluntary agency as plagued by a fundamental anxiety about its own ability-to-be what it is. On the basis of this anxiety, sustaining the claim to agency becomes a task and a problem that an agent’s activities must somehow seek to resolve. I show that, on Heidegger’s account, our activities can and do serve to sustain our claim to possessing the capacity to understand being, even as the unified sense of being remains elusive. This is because, even in their anxiety, our activities often manifest a recognizable competence at dealing with particular entities in local contexts. Though we are unable to articulate how these local contexts participate in the broader unity of being-in-general, the way in which we navigate them positively links us to that broader context and allows us a claim, however defeasible, to openness to it. I argue that the local and general contexts are linked, for Heidegger, by the concept of attunement. Traditionally glossed as a primitive, felt sense of how the entities and circumstances that we confront matter, I argue that attunements play a more substantial functional role. Specifically, the attunement of a particular interpretive act represents the pointer that act provides toward the requirements of sustaining one’s claim to understanding being-in-general. The way in which an entity—such as a threatening object—matters to us corresponds to the difference that entity makes to determining what activities will, and will not, sustain a comprehending openness to one’s circumstances. Hence, in being attuned, the capacity to understand being becomes self-sustaining in a particular sense: we sustain our defeasible claim to possessing this capacity only by ‘following through’ on the individual acts that constitute its exercise. As I read him, Heidegger’s approach attempts to reconcile two points of view for understanding the reason-guidedness of agency. On the one hand, Heidegger’s conception of agency as a self-sustaining capacity invokes an Aristotelian framework for understanding agency’s distinctive self-movement. On the other hand, Heidegger’s emphasis on the ‘anxiety’ that mediates the activity of selfmaintenance recalls the Kantian emphasis on the first-personal acknowledgment of normative force As a result of this synthesis, I argue that Heidegger offers us an understanding of the efficacy of the normative within human life superior to that of his neo-Aristotelian and neo-Kantian contemporaries. The former, drawn to conceive of the influence of rational norms by appeal to a description of the normal operation of the human intellect, conceptualize well the causal efficacy of reasons in guiding human conduct, at the expense of the generality and modal force of their authority. The latter, drawn to conceive of rational norms as descriptions of ideal relations among propositions, grasp the normativity of reasons at the expense of their efficacy. Heidegger’s account allows us to see how reasons can cause behavior in virtue of their normative force, by locating a convergence of the causal and normative in the activity of sustaining a comprehending openness to the world.

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