Normative species

Jaroslav Peregrin

Call for Participation
AP in V4 Lecture Series — Analytic Philosophy in Visegrad Countries

Date: 26 November 2025, 4 PM (CET)
Format: Online lecture

Organised by: Matej Bel University in Banská Bystrica, Slovakia, University of Ostrava, Czech Republic, University of Warsaw, Poland, with the support of Visegrad Fund
Project website: https://ff.osu.eu/ap-in-v4/

Jaroslav Peregrin (University of Hradec Králové)
Title: Normative species

Abstract:
My book NORMATIVE SPECIES is about rules, and especially about human
capability to create, maintain and follow rules, as a root of what makes us
humans dierent from other animals. The leading idea is that scrutinizing
this capability is able to tell us who we humans are and what kinds of lives we
live. It elaborates Wilfrid Sellar’s visionary observation that “to say that man
is a rational animal, is to say that man is a creature not of habits, but of rules”;
and it builds on the ideas of Sellar’s and Brandom’s inferentialism, in a novel
naturalistic way.

The main tenet of inferentialism is that our language games are essentially
rule-governed and that meanings are inferential roles. Jaroslav Peregrin sees
the task of reconciliation of inferentialism and naturalism as centered around
the problem of naturalization of rules. He argues that the most primitive form
of a rule is a cluster of normative attitudes. We humans are specic by our
tendency to assume peculiar attitudes to what we do, and to do so in
a specic way, which turns the attitudes into “normative” ones. This
self-reective structure characterizes our ability to build systems of
interconnected rules, which have come to constitute our natural niche.
Furthermore, Peregrin shows how our most important system of rules – that
constitutive of our language – helped to lead us to our current position
of rule-following, ultra-social, rational, and discursive creatures

About the Speaker

Jaroslav Peregrin is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hradec Králové. His research focuses on the intersection of logic and philosophy of language with a special focus on inferentialism. He is the author of Normative Species (Routledge, 2024), Inferentialism: Why Rules Matter (Palgrave, 2014), Meaning and Structure (Ashgate, 2001). 

More information: http://jarda.peregrin.cz/

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