Jo-Jo Koo

Joseph Rouse is one of the most distinctive and innovative proponents of practice theory today. This article focuses in section I on two extended elaborations with systematic intent from Rouse’s corpus over the last two decades regarding the nature of practices, highlighting in particular his arguments for why practices must be normatively understood. Toward this end, this article explains why Rouse argues that we need to bring about something like a Copernican revolution in our understanding of the intrinsic normativity of practices as an essentially interactive, temporal, contestable, and open-ended process that is constitutively complex and dynamic. In section II, this article then examines some commonalities and apparent divergences of Rouse’s practice theory from the existential phenomenology of the early Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. The article draws to a close by considering two apparent divergences between Rouse’s conception of practices and existential phenomenology: (1) the degree of compatibility between the claim of existential phenomenology to reveal necessary enabling (or "quasi-transcendental") background conditions or structures of the meaningfulness of our lived experience and Rouse’s normative conception of practices; and (2) the compatibility of "quasi-transcendental" constitution, as this is at work according to existential phenomenology, and Rouse’s argument that it is wrong to understand practices as exclusively centered on the activities of human beings.

This chapter provides an interpretation of the early Heidegger's underdeveloped conception of the undistinguishedness (Indifferenz) of everyday human existence in Being and Time. After explaining why certain translation choices of some key terms in this text are interpretively and philosophically important, I first provide a concise argument for why the social constitution interpretation of the relation between ownedness (Eigentlichkeit) and unownedness (Uneigentlichkeit) makes better overall sense of Heidegger's ambivalent attitude toward the social constitution of the human being than the standard existentialist interpretation of this relation. I then proceed to the heart of this chapter, which develops his inchoate conception of the undistinguishedness of everydayness by arguing that it specifies the third distinctive mode of concrete human existence in addition to ownedness and unownedness (qua disownedness). Accordingly, I show how unownedness is actually a generic phenomenon with two distinct species, namely, undistinguishedness and disownedness, which are at once closely related to, but also differ in significant respects from, each other. Consequently, instead of taking for granted a one-dimensional and mutually exclusive opposition between "authenticity" and "inauthenticity", I argue that we should adopt a two-dimensional and more nuanced understanding of the relations among undistinguishedness, disownedness, and ownedness that intersects with Heidegger's underappreciated distinction between genuineness and ungenuineness. After raising and replying to some objections to this interpretation of undistinguishedness, I conclude this chapter by briefly sketching three of its philosophical consequences and pointing out its potential as an important resource for contemporary (critical) social theories.

A contested but familiar understanding of Wittgenstein’s remarks on rule-following is that he argues for a communitarian or social account of normativity in his later philosophy. This has come to be called the “community view” of rule-following in the literature. According to this view, the normative bindingness of rules or norms on one’s actions must have a social basis, which is often thought to consist in other people’s checking and assessments of the correctness of one’s rule-following. Michael Luntley has recently mounted a forthright critique of the “community view”, arguing that it is either question-begging or redundant as an account of normativity. If his line of criticism of the “community view” is cogent, its devastating conclusion is that the communitarian or social account of normativity is wrong. If so, the normativity of the meaning of linguistic entities like words, and (for that matter) of nonlinguistic entities like signposts or hammers, could not be fundamentally socially constituted.

I will argue in this paper that while Luntley’s powerful critique of the orthodox understanding of the “community view” of normativity is convincing, it does not apply to an alternative understanding of the social basis of normativity that most communitarian readers of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (PI) have overlooked or underemphasized to their detriment. On this alternative view, the social basis of normativity does not fundamentally consist in other people checking and sanctioning the correctness of one’s rule-following, but in the fact that we have each learned through training, starting from a very young age in our lives, how to correctly and incorrectly perform “bedrock” actions and activities, i.e., those that are correct and incorrect without justification (PI §§198, 201, 211, 217-19, 241-42, 289). Although such learning surely begins through interactions with others (e.g., parents and other caregivers), the point of these interactions is not justificatory but instructional, in a distinctive sense to be explained in this paper. The philosophical claim, then, is that the social basis of normativity consists in learning the correct uses of words and things through training, not fundamentally in the interpersonal checking of such uses by others. If this is right, those who defend the “community view” of rule-following will need to significantly alter their understanding of it.

Theories of collective intentionality are a currently fashionable way of analyzing the nature of human sociality or collective phenomena in contemporary analytic philosophy. Three of its most prominent proponents are Margaret Gilbert, Raimo Tuomela, and John Searle. Despite their current popularity, however, I argue in this paper that they are each faced with different problems of circularity within their frameworks of analysis. If so, this result should lessen the appeal of theories of collective intentionality as adequate accounts of the nature of human sociality or collective phenomena.

In her book about the linguistic turn in hermeneutic philosophy, Cristina Lafont argues that the so-called expressivist conception of language like that of Humboldt (and other philosophers in the German expressivist-hermeneutic tradition) threatens the objectivity of the world by emphasizing the role of language in constituting and disclosing the world. Specifically, she argues that expressivist philosophers of language are all ultimately committed to some pernicious form of linguistic idealism and relativism.

In this paper I first present Humboldt’s reflections on language and give some textual evidence for why he is often read—mistakenly in my view—as a linguistic idealist and relativist. Second, I will briefly sketch Lafont’s charge of linguistic idealism and relativism against Humboldt. Third and finally, I will show how she misunderstands Humboldt’s expressivist conception of language and world by connecting my response to her criticisms with an argument that originates in a different philosophical tradition, namely, Donald Davidson’s argument that successful linguistic communication does not require the sharing of explicit rules or conventions that govern in advance the use of words.

Is a philosophical conception of human nature still possible in light of the fallibilistic and postmetaphysical sensibilities of our time? I will argue in this paper that a philosophical anthropology, broadly understood, is indeed feasible, but only if it abides by certain basic constraints.

First, a viable philosophical anthropology must be transcendental. But the justification of this constraint on the viability of philosophical anthropology requires in turn a necessary reconception of the idea of the transcendental. Specifically, justifying this thesis requires that we exemplify, paradoxically perhaps at first glance, the legitimacy and use of various transcendental arguments in 20th century analytic and continental philosophy that nevertheless detranscendentalize the status of the subject as the ultimate origin and source of the intelligibility of the relation between self and world. We must in this respect think with Kant against Kant (to use an overused but catchy phrase in German philosophy).

Second, a viable philosophical anthropology is only possible on the basis of the distinction between first-order and higher-order conceptions of human nature. Roughly, first-order conceptions of human nature investigate human beings in terms of some putatively adequate set of first-order features or properties that all human beings exhibit (e.g., world religions, the Hobbesian state of nature, sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, etc.). By contrast, higher-order conceptions of human nature argue that the attempt to provide any first-order account of human nature is doomed to fail in principle on account of a fundamentally impoverished and hence flawed understanding of what it is to be human. Rather, any viable philosophical anthropology is, at the very least, only possible at the meta-level (the second-order level) and metameta-level (the third-order level). Although Rousseau elaborates already in the "Discourse on the Origins of Inequality" the unavoidable problems with any first-order conception of human nature, the lesson that he teaches us there about the constraints on any account of human nature has unfortunately still not been fully appreciated today.

Third, any viable philosophical anthropology must take into account the way in which our constitution as linguistic animals is central to human nature. The justification of this constraint requires outlining the way in which our linguistic existence opens up the distinctive way in which both human self-understanding and its understanding of the world are at once enabled and constrained by our existence and movement within the linguistic dimension. Finally, I will attempt to show the mutual presupposition/implication of these three theses regarding human nature. In other words, the claim is that they must come as a package; commitment to one of the theses entails commitment to the other two, and vice versa.