Volume 66, Issue 2

The question of the critique of law is at the same time the question of the law – and the right – of critique. For law is itself the first institutionalized practice of critique: an apparatus of normative distinction. This raises the question of whether a critique of law is at all possible. For either the critique of law simply repeats the critique which is enacted by law; but then it is not a critique of law but rather its affirmation. Or it effectively rejects law and overcomes its practice of normative distinction; but then it is not a critique of law but something other than critique. The critique of law is trapped in an aporia. The paper first exposes and then explores a way of overcoming this aporia.

Are we free to act irrationally and evilly? Or are irrational and evil actions just consequences of our incapacity to act morally? The article discusses theses questions by referring to Kant’s practical philosophy. In a first step, I shall address Kant’s thesis given in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals that a free will and a will under moral law be the same. This raises the problem of how it is possible to act immorally. In a second step, I will reconstruct Karl Leonhard Reinhold’s attempt to make freedom to act immorally also viable by conceiving of freedom as a “basic faculty” (“Grundvermögen”). Finally, I argue that Schelling in his Freedom Essay builds on Reinhold, defining freedom as a “vital, positive capacity for good and evil” and making immoral actions comprehensible.

This paper introduces speech acts that I denote as tentative, which means they do not make sense as single propositions. The meaning they make depends on the attempt to formulate something which seems difficult to put in words. There is no finished intention, feeling or idea to be represented; neither can one construct whatever one wants to say. Tentative speech acts make sense by literally speaking into a felt complexity, as Eugene Gendlin demonstrates. What needs to be understood in regards to these speech acts is a development of meaning occurring during the formulation and not the ontological status of inner entities. A happy outcome of tentative speech acts is a clarification of some aspect of a situation, problem, puzzlement or vague idea, at times involving complex implicit contexts, backgrounds and what Dilthey termed “Lebenszusammenhänge”. In order to speak of these kinds of complex points of reference, John Dewey introduced the term of the „quality of a situation“ and Eugene Gendlin the term „felt sense“. The paper explores ways to approach these speech acts and to consider their philosophical relevance.

This article sets out key contributions to the long-running debate about mental disorder from the ordinary language philosophy of the ‘Oxford School’. The distinction between definition and use of concepts underpinning ordinary language philosophy reframes the debate as a debate not just about mental disorder but about disorder in general, bodily as well as mental. The field work of ordinary language philosophy (focusing on the use of concepts as a guide to their meanings) shows that, attempts at elimination notwithstanding, there is an essential evaluative element in the meaning of disorder, bodily as well as mental. The concept of disorder in the debate thus reframed presents a double challenge for analysis: to explain why disorder has evaluative connotations used of mental conditions but descriptive connotations used of bodily conditions. Philosophical value theory, derived by applying ordinary language philosophy to the language of values, provides a rich resource of ideas for meeting this double challenge. It meets the double challenge at the level of theory by allowing both aspects of the double challenge of disorder to be derived from a logical property that disorder shares with all other value terms. It meets the double challenge at the level of practice by supporting the development of a new approach to working with values alongside evidence in healthcare called values-based practice. Ordinary language philosophy, notwithstanding these several contributions, is no panacea. It helps us to make a start, no more and no less, in understanding mental disorder.

Mental disorders have been suggested to differ from somatic diseases because they lack an organic correlate. We show that this argument is both empirically wrong and theoretically irrelevant, because diseases are defined by functional impairments and not biological variation. Due to human diversity, a multitude of functions can be defined, and any selection of medically relevant functional impairments is necessarily value-based. We suggest that such values include individual survival and living in a shared world with others, and that their definition requires public debate and a critical reflection by Philosophical Anthropology. However, the presence of functional impairments that are generally relevant for human life and survival only fulfils the so-called disease criterion, which is necessary but not sufficient to diagnose a clinically relevant malady. This would only be justified if such functional impairments cause individual harm, either because they are accompanied by suffering (the illness criterion) or because they interfere with basic activities of daily living such as personal hygiene and food intake (the sickness criterion of a clinically relevant malady). We apply this theory to mental disorders, conclude that only a fraction of such “disorders” currently listed in international classifications of diseases are clinically relevant mental maladies, suggest focusing on the needs of persons with such maladies and recommend avoiding “pathologization” of human diversity.