Volume 61, Issue 5-6

Pragmatism is usually understood as a philosophy defined through action, but philosophical thought (like reflection in general) is typically contrasted with action. Where do we get the psychic energy for action, if thought is not its effective motor? Affect is the pragmatist answer proposed here. Our passionate nature, our feelings, emotions, or mood provide the dynamic trigger for action, including the action involved in cognition and inquiry. This paper explores the crucial, multiple cognitive roles that affect plays in pragmatism’s three founding fathers, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, but also in Richard Rorty’s contemporary pragmatism. Discussing the different affective terms of “emotion,” “mood” and “feeling,” I show how William James emphasized the distinctive notion of “the strenuous mood” in propounding his pragmatist philosophy and then show how this mood is likewise expressed in the pragmatism of Peirce, Dewey, and Rorty.

Moral modernity, including political modernity, is founded on the series of acts whereby, throughout Europe, torture was banned. Torture became the paradigm of moral injury, of what must never be done to an individual because it is intrinsically degrading and devaluing. The body of the torture victim is the meeting place of state and citizen: either the rule of law recognizes bodily autonomy as its own moral basis - broken laws standing for broken bodies - or the law becomes a vehicle of sovereign authority that knows no limit. Thus, it is the morally charged conception of the rule of law that holds together the ban on torture with the recognition of human dignity: remove the prohibition on torture and neither the liberal state nor modern moral life is intelligible. The connections between the abolition of torture, the rule of law, and the institution of human dignity was forged in the once enormously influential and now virtually unknown On Crimes and Punishments by Beccaria.

This article attempts to present the unity as well as the difference between Hegel’s and Dewey’s social philosophical approaches to struggles for recognition. It argues that interpreting Dewey’s Lectures in China as a commentary on Hegel sheds new light on Dewey’s social philosophy as a recognition theoretical whole. Furthermore, the resulting “experimentalist” account of recognitive relations, norms and values might turn out to present a fruitful perspective in contemporary discussions on recognition.

In this article, I present an attempt to reconstruct de Saussure’s project of semiology from a hermeneutic viewpoint. A particular focus is placed on the distinctiveness of this reconstruction as compared with the two established ways of reading the project - the structuralist and the poststructuralist one. On the basis of a comparative analysis, I argue that by scrutinizing the interpretative reflexivity which de Saussure ascribes to the semiotic systems, one is able to recast the semiological project as a point of departure for developing a hermeneutics of language.

This paper argues in favour of lingualism, i. e., the position according to which thought depends on language. The notion of thought at issue is the one we apply when we understand ourselves as full-blown thinking beings. The argument takes advantage of an idea put forward by Donald Davidson. A modified version of this idea is developed into a comprehensive line of thought, which consists of five steps. The argument from truth claims that the possession of the capacity of thought requires possession of a grasp of the contrast between objective truth and falsehood. The subsequent four part arguments show that we can only conceive of a subject as phylogenetically acquiring a grasp of this contrast, if we conceive of her as acquiring a natural language. The conclusion of this argument implies that attributions of thought to non-linguistic being in contemporary ethology and developmental psychology must be carefully interpreted. They must not be understood as attributions of states we attribute to ourselves when we understand ourselves as thinking beings in the full-blown sense. Instead, the former notions of thought must be understood as technical notions, which are analogues to our ordinary notion of thought.

To explain fundamental aspects of human thinking like its systematicity and productivity we need an account of how thoughts - mental acts and states with propositional content - can ‘consist of parts’ with subpropositional content. Concepts as they are investigated here are nothing but (some of) these ‘parts’ of thoughts. The Representational Theory of Mind (RTM) takes concepts and thoughts to be mental representations - material bearers of content with a syntactic form and a specific content - in a ‘language of thought’. Concepts can then be understood as being literally parts of thoughts just as words are parts of sentences. In this paper I try to develop the main lines of an alternative account of concepts. According to this account - which has been hinted at by Peter Geach and Gareth Evans - concepts are mental abilities that are actualized in mental acts like judgments. I try to show that on this basis systematicity and productivity can be explained without invoking mental representations.

According to ‘conceptual lingualism’, concepts are language dependent in the sense that possessing a natural language is a necessary and sufficient condition for having any concepts. Since concepts constitute thoughts, the latter are also seen as language dependent. Over the last few decades the language dependency of thoughts and concepts has been called increasingly into question. The existence of nonlinguistic thoughts is now widely assumed in the philosophy of mind. In this essay we allow for nonlinguistic thoughts by understanding concepts as specific abilities that can be exercised independently of linguistic abilities. (I) We distinguish between several types of abilities and (II) argue that concepts as a whole are abilities of intelligence exercised in understanding objects, events and situations, without necessarily involving the exercise of linguistic abilities. We claim that understanding can be performed practically, and we introduce the idea of practical concepts to account for practical understanding. In order to demonstrate the use of practical concepts and render them more precise, (III) we apply them to a recent discussion between Hubert Dreyfus and John McDowell concerning the connection between concepts and action.

This paper examines a deeply engrained intuition according to which the relation between concepts and perception is deeply problematic, because - so the intuition goes - our conceptual capacities are constitutively unable to match our perceptual capacities in fineness of grain. After some introductory remarks concerning the concept of a concept (1), I present the intuition and articulate the argument from fineness of grain that the intuition embodies (2). I go on to sketch the conception of a specific type of concept - a phenomenal concept - which is meant to show that the intuition is groundless, since our conceptual capacities are in a sense just as finely-grained as our perceptual capacities (3-5). I defend the conception against two arguments that purport to show that the putative phenomenal concepts would not be concepts at all, since they fail to accord with two necessary conditions on concepts, namely the generality constraint (6) and the shareability constraint (7). I argue that phenomenal concepts on my conception satisfy both conditions.

Dreyfus presents Todes’s (2001) republished Body and World as an anticipatory response to McDowell (1994) which shows how preconceptual perception can ground conceptual thought. I argue that Dreyfus is mistaken on this point: Todes’s claim that perceptual experience is preconceptual presupposes an untenable account of conceptual thought. I then show that Todes nevertheless makes two important contributions to McDowell’s project. First, he develops an account of perception as bodily second nature, and as a practical-perceptual openness to the world, which constructively develops McDowell’s view. Second, and more important, this account highlights the practical and perceptual dimension of linguistic competence. The result is that perception is conceptual “all the way down” only because discursive conceptualization is perceptual and practical “all the way up”. This conjunction of McDowell and Todes on the bodily dimensions of discursive practice also vindicates Davidson’s and Brandom’s criticisms of McDowell’s version of empiricism.

This short text is part of a series of letters from philosophers working abroad. I write about what brought me to Sweden and about what philosophy and academic life are like there, including some reflections on language politics as well as on the situation of women in philosophy and in academia more generally.