1 Introduction

In my contribution to this volume (Noë this collection), I seek to bring out the truth in intellectualism. The intellectualist is right, I concede, that understanding is at work throughout the domain of agency—whereever we can talk of perception, or thinking, or action. Understanding is pervasive. The trouble with intellectualism, I argue, is that it cleaves to an unrealistic conception of what is demanded for understanding to come into play. I particular, it adheres to an over-intellectualized conception of understanding, according to which an action, or a perception, can be conceptual only if it is guided, as it were from above, by explicit acts of judgment. In my target paper I also criticize anti-intellectualist views, such as that of Dreyfus, for failing to break with intellectualism; such views reject the pervasiveness of the understanding because they accept the intellectualist’s hyper-intellectualized conception of what understanding is and because they find it implausible that our experiential or cognitive lives are intellectual in this way. In this brief reply to Kyselo’s excellent commentary, I would like to say something about what the anti-intellectualism of the sort I criticize in the paper gets right. I now want to try to bring out the insight in anti-intellectualism.