Diminished Rationality and the Space of Reasons

Maura Tumulty

doi:10.1353/cjp.0.0034

Diminished Rationality and the Space of Reasons

Canadian Journal of Philosophy ◽

10.1353/cjp.0.0034 ◽

2008 ◽

Vol 38 (4) ◽

pp. 601-629

Author(s):

Maura Tumulty

Keyword(s):

Human Experience ◽

Donald Davidson ◽

Error Theory ◽

Space Of Reasons

Some theories of language, thought, and experience require their adherents to say unpalatable things about human individuals whose capacities for rational activity are seriously diminished. Donald Davidson, for example, takes the interdependence of the concepts of thought and language to entail that thoughts may only be attributed to an individual who is an interpreter of others’ speech. And John McDowell's account of human experience as the involuntary exercise of conceptual capacities can be applied easily only to individuals who make some reasonable judgments, because conceptual capacities are paradigmatically exercised in judgments. In both cases, we seem forced towards an error theory about any ordinary understanding of impaired human individuals as minded, or as undergoing human experience.

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Charity and grace

Anthropological Theory ◽

10.1177/14634996211057844 ◽

2022 ◽

pp. 146349962110578

Author(s):

João Pina-Cabral

Keyword(s):

Human Experience ◽

Donald Davidson ◽

Human Interaction ◽

Shared Experience ◽

Southern France ◽

Shared Intentionality ◽

Personal Interaction ◽

The Face ◽

Life Itself ◽

Analytical Philosopher

This essay attempts to reconcile charity with grace, the central concepts of two thinkers whose views may seem irreconcilable to many: Donald Davidson, an analytical philosopher and the most distinguished follower of Quine; and Julian Pitt-Rivers, an Europeanist anthropologist, who wrote at length on Spain and Southern France. The latter's historicist exegesis of gracia points to basic aspects of human experience that are also salient in the reduction to basics that Davidson carried out concerning interpretation and truth. For Davidson, in the face of ultimate indeterminacy, interpretation is made possible due to the rational accommodation that charity sparks off. For Pitt-Rivers, gratuity highlights how processes of personal interaction depend on the drawing of shared trajectories: that is, not only do I have to grant others charity to make sense of them, I also have to frame others as subjects with a future by relation to myself as already in existence. The paper proposes that human interaction involves processes of sensemaking that integrate shared intentionality (i.e. the credit with which we respond to the indeterminacy of meaning) with shared experience (i.e. the debt implicit in the ultimate underdetermination of the world's entities). Thus, it brings both concepts together under the label of charis, their common etymological root, suggesting that the dynamic it represents is a broader feature of life itself.

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Capitalism as a space of reasons: Analytic, neo-Hegelian Marxism?

Philosophy & Social Criticism ◽

10.1177/0191453720931918 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 019145372093191

Author(s):

Justin Evans

Keyword(s):

Human Experience ◽

Human Freedom ◽

Large Problem ◽

Myth Of The Given ◽

Space Of Reasons ◽

The Given ◽

Pittsburgh School ◽

The Way

I suggest that we can read Marx in the light of recent analytic, neo-Hegelian thought. I summarize the Pittsburgh School philosophers’ claims about the myth of the given, the claim that human experience is conceptual all the way out, and that we live in a space of reasons. I show how Hegel has been read in those terms, and then apply that reading of Hegel to Marx’s argument that capital is akin to what Hegel called Geist, or spirit. We can understand capitalism as a space of reasons that is contradictory: while the space of reasons is supposed to make human freedom possible, our space of reasons makes freedom impossible. Reading Marx in this way is helpful, because it avoids the flaws of analytical Marxism, existentialism and structuralism. However, it raises a large problem of its own: Can the theory of the space of reasons be applied to a society that is not free of alienation? I argue that it can, but only in ways that would not satisfy the analytic neo-Hegelians themselves.

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