Yvonne Huetter-Almerigi

I investigate Ramberg's attempt to hold rationalism and naturalism in one vision, i.e. his way of holding on to an ideal account of rationality while still subscribing to a substantial form of naturalism. I underline and elaborate on three main threads in Ramberg’s piece "Naturalizing Idealizations: Pragmatism and the Interpretivist Strategy": the consequences of Ramberg’s view for ontology (1), his distinctive conception of rationality (2), and how these first two points account for his definition of philosophy as practice that seeks to investigate not merely the meaning of words, but the meaning of life (3). All three aspects, I argue, hang together and can be entered via Ramberg’s distinctive appropriation and elaboration of Davidson’s anomalous monism and Rorty’s eliminative materialism. As Ramberg shows, both anomalous monism and eliminative materialism appear contentious when viewed through the traditional lens of a dualism between language and world, yet become coherent once Rorty’s “vocabulary–vocabulary” is fully embraced. Once this move has been taken, ontology dissolves into Davidson’s “bland monism” and rationality is fully at the service of our creature-needs - where ‘our’ refers to concrete, finite creatures in concrete and determined environments, who come with this anomaly to be able to hold an infinity of potential projects and to change habits.

This collection honours Bjørn Torgrim Ramberg’s career as philosopher and teacher. The essays touch on both of these features; the philosophical concerns that have motivated Ramberg’s reflections, as well as his guiding role as teacher and mentor for many of the contributors to this volume. Chapters by Sami Pihlström, Robert Brandom, Endre Begby, Jonathan Knowles, Cheryl Misak, Robert Sinclair, Huw Price, Henrik Rydenfelt, Ingvald Fergestad, Torjus Midtgarden, Alan Richardson, Yvonne Huetter-Almerigi, James Tartaglia, Sharyn Clough, Kristian Bjørkdahl, Kristin Gjesdal, Federico Penelas, and Chris Voparil.

Why does the question of compatibility between Brandom’s philosophy and political theory arise in the first place? The considerations addressed are of philological-exegetical (concerning Brandom’s own depiction of his program) and theoretical nature (concerning the compatibility of philosophy and political theory as such). Further, we provide an overview of the articles contained in the special issue, which explore various possibilities and take diverging stances - from analyzing Brandom’s potential contributions to topics and approaches in political theory, to complementing his views, to operationalizing some of his tools, to investigating individual positions of political relevance within his work.

The article examines how the choice of what one takes to be the principle governing language influences theory-making down the road, in particular theories of personhood and emancipatory politics. I contrast Brandom’s rationalist account with Rorty’s meta-normative account and draw on Spivak’s analysis of why the subaltern “cannot speak” to highlight morally and politically relevant blind spots in Brandom’s theory. The line I follow is connected to what I frame as the necessity of normative commensuration in Brandom, contrasted with the possibility of normative rupture in Rorty. By this I mean that Brandom’s conception of semantic normativity lacks the resources to bridge normative gaps and therefore falls short of a key desideratum of many political and moral-ethical theories, namely, the capacity to extend recognition to voices that are not only excluded from the dominant discourse but are not even acknowledged as voices as such, even within potential counter-hegemonic games. In Brandom, personhood comes downstream from being rational, which renders the interpretation of expressions that are not continuous with his rationalist picture of language exceedingly difficult. By contrast, Rorty begins with the presumption of personhood and subsequently seeks to interpret a person’s utterances as serving rational ends, where “rational” is construed more broadly than in the perspectival-cognitive mode Brandom employs. I argue that this personhood-first orientation is essential for accommodating people’s sense that their own point of view matters, and that this requirement follows directly from how one understands language itself.

This article provides a semantic reading of Tracy Llanera's brilliant book Richard Rorty: Outgrowing Modern Nihilism. Llanera is reframing the debate of how to react to the malaise of modern nihilism by proposing a change of metaphor: instead of trying to “overcome” nihilism, we should try to “outgrow” nihilism. This article invites Llanera to shed more light on her project with respect to the semantic categories of realism and representationalism, and with respect to the growing field of conceptual engineering. Can Llanera's project be fruitfully understood as engineering the concepts of “transcendence” and “redemption”? How much of the project hangs on the idea that language does not represent but is rather a tool that helps us fulfill our varying needs? How neat is the entanglement of semantic and existential meaning?

ABSTRACT Conceptual engineering takes a distinctively normative and reconstructive approach to our conceptual repertoire. This approach is congenial to the ideas defended by philosophers belonging to the multifaceted tradition of American and Cambridge Pragmatism. This special issue is devoted to the investigation and development of these connections. Our introduction maps some of the historical and theoretical entanglements between the two fields and gives a short overview of the contributions to the special issue.

The article reveals the pragmatic implications of Herman Cappelen’s account of ‘topics’ in his contribution to the conceptual engineering literature. I show that Cappelen’s introduction of the category of ‘topics’ serves the pragmatic goal of having a convenient handle to account for ‘continuity in revision’, and that his general insistence on ‘continuity’ is motivated morally and strategically. In asking what accounts for continuity, Cappelen’s ‘topics’ are not defined by content or any other fixed set of rules or criteria. Topics are metaphysically lightweight and defined pragmatically and as we go: speakers talk about the same topic when we (and they) attribute that they do. But why should we do that? Why should we aim for continuity and why should we think it is possible in general? I contrast Cappelen’s insistence on continuity with Rorty’s appeal for discontinuity, and trace both of their positions back to their respective moral background assumptions and their assumptions about what communication is (and is for) and, in turn, what philosophy is (and is about). Further, I question the role the ‘continuity’ claim plays in the current redefinition of linguistic philosophy after the ‘death of the linguistic turn’.

The article tackles two of the main points of Michael Hampe's book "Die Dritte Aufklärung" (The Third Enlightenment): 1. Hampe's version of the classical liberal paradoxon (how much violence is allowed in order to maintain the non-violence-vote?). 2. Hampe's definition of cruelty and violence and his ideas on how to avoid them. Regarding 1., I counter Hampe's vote for tolerance regarding lifestyles by insisting on the importance of a unified or at least always partially converging reality, that we all inhabit commonly. This allows for a different, though not less rigorous, evaluation of the use of violence against, in Hampe's case, the "enemies of enlightenment". Regarding 2., I argue that cruelty should not be relegated to the realm of physical violence only but include the subtle humiliations that stem from crushing people's ways of attributing existential sense to their lifes, i.e. their sets of interconnected beliefs and desires. Hampe is voting for more rationality and Bildung in order to counter the post-truth-plight. I agree on the need for rational practices but think that the creation of a common imaginary is equally important and that this is possible only if it includes equal opportunities and hence the redistribution of wealth. Where Hampe thinks that we are in need of a Third Enlightenment, I argue that the last Enlightenment has not kept its promise of emancipation because most people's desires for autonomy are still waiting to be backed up by reality.

There is a famous puzzle in Rorty scholarship: Did or did Rorty not subscribe to a form of realism and truth when he made concessions regarding objectivity to Bjørn Ramberg in 2000? Relatedly, why did Rorty agree with Ramberg but nevertheless insist upon disagreeing with Brandom, though large parts of the research community hold their two respective requests for shifts in Rorty’s stance to be congruous? The present article takes up the discussion and tries, for the first time, to make sense of Rorty’s insistence that there is a difference between Brandom’s notion of “made true by facts” and Ramberg’s notion of “getting things right” by showing that Ramberg’s appropriateness-conditions are fully compatible with Rorty’s revised interpretation of Davidson’s concept of “triangulation,” whereas Brandom’s inferential “made-true-by-facts”-language game is not. The reason why Rorty agrees with Ramberg but not with Brandom, I argue, is that Brandom’s contemporary concept of objectivity, as developed in his contribution to the debate and in his Making It Explicit, works with a scheme-content distinction, whereas Ramberg’s Davidson-based version does not. As many of his critics suppose, Rorty’s concession to Ramberg entails a substantive revision of Rorty’s position, not just a clarification. However, this new position is not in conflict with Rorty’s most important commitment, namely his anti-authoritarianism. The revised account still does not bind him to the forms of realism and truth that his critics favor. The article explains to which forms of realism and truth Rorty’s concessions to Ramberg commit him instead.