Argumenta – Journal of Analytic Philosophy

The paper is a critical analysis of Hubert Schwyzer’s idea of meta-institutional concepts. First, I isolate a presupposition in Schwyzer’s example of chess as ritual. I then show how Schwyzer’s idea of meta-institutional concepts is far from being the endgame in the research on levels of institutionality. In fact, we can iterate on meta-institutional concepts. Schwyzer’s idea has to face an infinite regress. I try to avoid such a regress by introducing the concept of technical end of game. A game defines its own terminal status. People playing the game…

Social objects originate from constitutive rules. But there are two ways of explaining the relationship between them. I call them “Manifest Image” and “Deep Image”. The former depends on Searle’s interpretation of social reality and it is based on collective intentionality; the latter is the one I support and it is based on documentality. Indeed, recordings and documents are sufficient to explain how and why social world exists. There is no need to use such a vague notion, as that of collective intentionality, in order to give a useful account…

This paper develops an argument which seems to yield a set of a priori rules—rules which are constitutive of, but not normative for, thought and experience. I contrast the resulting Kantian sense of a priori truth as independent of all experience, because presupposed by it, with the use Searle makes of a priori truth by stipulation or definition. By focusing on the a priori rules of thought and experience we can make good on the sense of constitutivity that Searle had in mind in his early work. By virtue of…

The aim of this paper is to shed some light on the issue of how we can understand constitutive rules as being in force for participants S in some rule-constituted practice. We take a look on complicated team-games that are broadly conceived as model example of rule-constituted practices. We claim that rules of games are dependent on mental states of participants in that practice. More precisely, they are in force for the participants S of such games if these participants jointly meet the following conditions: (1) every S has a…

Focusing on Hegel’s engagement with Kant’s theoretical philosophy, the paper shows the merits of its characterisation as “completion”. The broader aim is to offer a fresh perspective on familiar historical arguments and on contemporary discussions of philosophical naturalism by examining the distinctive combination of idealism and naturalism that motivates the priority both authors accord to the topics of testability of philosophical claims and of the nature of the relation between philosophy and the natural science. Linking these topics is a question about how the demands of unification—imposed internally, relative to…

The preface to the second edition of Hegel’s Science of Logic is crucial for understanding the idea of Hegel’s logic. It is an important text because what Hegel writes is not an idiosyncratic view about logic, but rather something universally true about the object, scope, and nature of logic. Something that can genuinely dialogue with more recent, and perhaps more sophisticated, accounts of logic. One central aspect of Hegel’s argumentation in the preface is the idea that logic is natural. In this paper, I focus precisely on this aspect, addressing…

It is argued that one of Hegel’s main strategies in overcoming the opposition between nature and spirit is to recognize a realm of “spiritualized nature” that has a distinctive ontological character of its own, one that, though it is rooted in nature, must be understood in essentially historical terms. It is argued that for Hegel the activity of work is premised upon a commitment to the independent standing of such spiritualized nature and its historical character, and a detailed reading of Hegel’s account of the slave’s work in the Phenomenology…

In this paper I attempt to move the discussion of Hegel’s naturalism past what I present as an impasse between the soft naturalist interpretation of Hegel’s notion of Geist, in which Geist is continuous with nature, and the opposing claim that Geist is essentially normative and self-legislating. In order to do so I suggest we look to the question of value which underlies this dispute. While soft naturalists seek to make sense of value as arising from material nature, those who support the autonomy thesis propose that value is something…

Most contemporary accounts of naturalism specify, as one of its necessary conditions, a community within which agents can take themselves to be adequately answerable for and responsible to the norms of autonomous practical reason. But what would it mean to succeed in giving an account of naturalism, absent such social conditions? What does it mean to think about naturalism from a position of relative alienation? My contention is that this incongruity between philosophy and the form of life sustaining it is already present within Hegel’s thought, and that it should…

This paper shows how Hegel transforms Kant’s Fact of Reason argument for freedom, and in particular how Hegel takes over the role of experience and death in Kant’s “Gallows Man” illustration of the Fact. I reconstruct a central thread of the Phenomenology of Spirit in which Hegel develops his view of freedom and practical rationality through a series of life and death experiences undergone by “shapes of consciousness”. While Hegel views his fact of reason as a result of a developmental process rather than as an immediate brute fact, the…