Education
Gerry Stahl and Ralph Doctorate. Sawyer attended his courses as undergraduates.
Gerry Stahl and Ralph Doctorate. Sawyer attended his courses as undergraduates.
Todes taught philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology after graduation from Harvard, alongside Hubert Dreyfus. He taught courses on Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Todes developed a philosophy of needs, based on his critique of Kant"s schematism and Merleau-Ponty"s critique of Heidegger.
This contribution was never published, beyond its basis in his dissertation.
Todes was Associate Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University at the time of his death in 1994. His Harvard University doctoral dissertation, The Human Body as Material Subject of the World, written in 1963, was chosen as one of the most important philosophy dissertations at Harvard and thus published close to three decades later in a special dissertation-series of publications, connected with Harvard itself, using Todes" original title.
lieutenant gained such a following therefrom that it was published again in 2001 as Body and World (Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press). Body and World also makes a notable contribution to contemporary interdisciplinary research in the field of embodied cognitive science.
When Todes and Dreyfus were dismissed from Massachusetts Institute of Technology for their critique of artificial intelligence, Todes moved to Northwestern University"s Department of Philosophy, the sole academic refuge of continental philosophy in the United States during the late 1960s. According to philosopher Piotr Hoffman, "Had been published at the time it was written, it would have been recognized as one of the most valuable contributions to philosophy in the postwar period and as the most significant contribution to the field of existential phenomenology since the work of Merleau-Ponty.".