Peter Fristedt

Philosophical naturalism in the spirit of Wilfred Sellars has historically sought to present a unified picture of the world, in which values, meanings, and minds find a place in the natural universe. But a number of recent thinkers have questioned the very idea of “the world” as a unified whole, arguing instead for disunity in the various discourses human beings use to talk about things. In this article I consider three such pluralist views. First, I take up the work of Huw Price, who combines pluralism and naturalism; then, I look at Markus Gabriel and Raymond Geuss, whose rejection of the ideas of “world” and “worldview” is not tied to naturalist presuppositions. In response to these views, I defend weaker conceptions of “the world” and “worldview,” utilizing Hans-Georg Gadamer's idea of the “medium of language” and making the case for the unifying effects of language across the plurality of discourses.

In this article, I ask whether Korsgaard’s ethics can be reconciled with a hermeneutic understanding of the human subject. Hermeneutics, inspired by Nietzsche, has traditionally been skeptical about the notion that moral principles have authority over us. But Korsgaard’s account of normativity as grounded in self-consciousness and its reflective distance from beliefs and desires is strikingly similar to Gadamer’s description of human beings as distant and ‘free’ from their environment. The question hermeneutics poses to deontology is how a finite subject can be bound unconditionally by principles, when our understanding of them is always historically mediated and partial. I argue that Gadamer’s notion of the subject matter of understanding (the Sache) allows us to see that we understand our principles as interpretations of fully determined principles. What binds us is the principle that we are always revising our way toward, but whose content we never completely determine

This paper considers the challenge to understanding another that comes from the view that language is, in Cristina Lafont’s phrase, ‘world‐disclosing’. If different speakers understand and refer to the world from different holistically structured worldviews, it seems to follow that there can be no mutual understanding unless there is significant overlap between ‘worlds’. Gadamer’s hermeneutics, I claim, blocks this consequence while maintaining that language is indeed world‐disclosing. By holding that language is a medium in which the distinction between interpretation and object of interpretation is paradoxically both maintained and overcome, Gadamer shows us that the interpreter always thinks the object of interpretation as both transcending and immanent in her worldview. Mutual understanding becomes a matter of mutual recognition of such worldview‐(but not language‐) transcendent objects. Truth and meaning may on this view be characterized as ‘objective’, while retaining a significant element of relativity.