Mark Okrent
Professor of Philosophy
73/75 Campus Avenue, Room 2
207.786.6309
mokrent at bates dot edu
Ph.D., M. Phil., Yale University, 1972.
B.A., Reed College, 1968.
All of my work relates to issues concerning intentionality. In virtue of having which kind of property does a state, event, or act count as being about or directed towards something? Is being about something an intrinsic property of an individual event, state, or act, or is it a relational property? If the later, does it involve a relation between the individual with the intentional character and what it is about or directed towards, or a relation between or among that individual and some other entities? What is the importance and role of the agent of the intentional act or the subject of the intentional mental state? Is the directional character of overt action derivative from the intentional character of the mental events (e.g., the beliefs and desires) which explain those acts, or does the intentional character of those mental events derive from the relation between those events and the teleological character of the actions which they help to explain? In working on these issues I tend to derive insights from two sources, the pragmatic tradition in American philosophy that I see culminating, (after assimilating the techniques of classical analytic philosophy), in the work of Donald Davidson, and the German transcendental tradition, that I see culminating in the early work of Martin Heidegger.
Representative Publications:
- Rational Animals: The Teleological Roots of Intentionality, (Ohio University Press, 2007)
- Heidegger's Pragmatism: Understanding, Being, and the Critique of Metaphysics, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).
- "The 'I Think' and the 'For-the-Sake-of-Which'," in Heidegger and Transcendental Philosophy, ed. S. Crowell, (Cambridge:
Cambridege University Press, in press).
- "How Transcendental Philosophy Becomes Pragmatic," in From Kant to Davidson: Philosophy and the Idea of the Transcendental,
ed. J. Malpas, pp122-138, (London: Routledge, 2003).
- "Heidegger and Korsgaard on Human Reflection," in Philosophical Topics, Volume 27, Number 2 (Fall, 1999), pp. 47-76.
(Published March 2001.)
- "Intending the Intender: Or Why Heidegger Isn't Davidson," in Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity: Papers Presented in Honor
of Hubert Dreyfus, ed. M. Wrathall (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 2000).
- "Verso una teoria pragmatica del contenuto," translation of "Towards a Pragmatic Theory of Content," in Il Neopragmatismo,
ed. G. Marchetti, (LaNuova Italia, Firenze, 1999).
- "Why the Mind Isn't a Program (But Some Digital Computers Might Have a Mind)," The Electronic Journal of Analytic
Philosophy,
Issue 4 (Spring, 1996)
- "Teleological Underdetermination," American Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 28, Number 2 (April 1991), pp.147-155.
- "Individuation and Intentional Ascriptions," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume L, Number 3 (March, 1990), pp.
461-480.
- "The Metaphilosophical Consequences of Pragmatism," in The Institution of Philosophy, edited by A. Cohen and M. Dascal, (La
Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1989), pp. 177-198.
- "Relativism, Context, and Truth," The Monist, Volume 67, Number 3 (July, 1984), pp. 341-358.
- "Hermeneutics, Transcendental Philosophy, and Social Science," Inquiry, Volume 27, Number 1 (March, 1984), pp. 23-49.