CFP: Naturalism and Normativity in Hegel's Philosophy

Naturalism and Normativity in Hegel’s Philosophy

Guest Editor:

Guido Seddone (University of Parma)

Confirmed contributors: 

Antón Barba-Kay (The Catholic University of America, Washington D.C.)

David Ciavatta (Ryerson University, Toronto)

Katerina Deligiorgi (University of Essex)

Elena Ficara (Universität Paderborn)

Dean Moyar (John Hopkins University, Baltimore) 

Terry Pinkard (Georgetown University, Washington D.C.)

Clinton Tolley (UC San Diego) 

For any query please use the following address: [email protected]

Deadline for submission: 10-31-2018

Notification of acceptance: 01-31-2019

Description:

The aim of this special issue is to tackle Hegel’s approach to the constitution of the normative on the basis of natural premises and to investigate his original version of naturalism. In the ambit of the American analytical philosophy, scholars like Sellars, Brandom and McDowell have already pointed out that Hegel’s thought is based on the inferential analysis of the logical and pragmatic elements constituting the mind, reason, self-consciousness and the normative. More recently authors like Terry Pinkard, Michael Thompson and Robert Pippin have highlighted that the Hegelian philosophy leads to the investigation about the natural requisites and premises of the cognitive and intentional stances, pinpointing that a naturalistic method of scrutiny is in play. Hegel’s naturalism is therefore a novel version of naturalism enhancing our understanding of the cognitive, intentional and social human dispositions by addressing their dependence on natural elements like life, desires, instincts and perception. As a naturalist Hegel claims that philosophy deals with natural entities and that the occurrence in human life of non observational entities like mind, cognition, self-consciousness, etc. has to be explained as emerging from and depending on natural requisites that the empirical sciences can directly observe like organic and biological properties. The domain of the normative is, following Hegel, constituted by means of the self-conscious life, namely the capacity to articulate concepts and to constitute a social dimension based on norms and interpersonal interaction. Self-conscious life and the normative, namely the domain of freedom and autonomy, are not explained in his thought as irreducible to and independent from nature understood as the domain of causality, but rather as elements proper of a natural substratum with which they establish a mutual dependence. Briefly illustrated, his naturalism consists in keeping the difference between the normative and nature and, nonetheless, avoiding any sort of dualism or unsolvable contrast between them. The advantage of this approach is explaining these two ambits as reciprocally dependent: self-conscious life does not originate by the separation from nature, but rather by establishing and understanding its own bonds and dependence to nature. In contrast to other more naive versions of naturalism, which separate mind from nature by underlining the former’s emergent character, Hegel’s one maintains that the relation nature-mind is based on the mutual dependence between these two ontogenetic factors of human life and that the cognitive and social dispositions originate from the naturalization of logical and inferential categories of thinking. Consequently, understanding the normative requires a naturalized approach to the cognitive and social aspects constituting what Hegel calls Geist, namely the normative substance subjected to a historic evolution and deployed for explaining the logical structure of human civilization. Finally, this special issue intends to account for the naturalistic premises of normativity in order to extend our understanding of the philosophical category of naturalism and to enhance the comprehension of normativity from a naturalized perspective.

Contributions addressing the following topics are welcome:

Self-conscious life and normativity

Normativity and recognition

Free will

Continuity between life and mind

The constitution of self-consciousness from natural premises 

The relation between the individual organism and its genus (Gattung)

The relation between the propositional content of the normative and the social interaction.

Does the notion of freedom belong to the normative or is it a regulative contentless notion?

Interdisciplinary aspects related to neuroscience, philosophy of biology and evolutionary psychology.

Articles must be written in English and should not exceed 8000 words.  For the presentation of their articles, authors are requested to take into account the instructions available under Information for Authors. Submissions must be suitable for blind review. Each submission should also include a brief abstract of no more than 250 words and four keywords for indexing purposes. Notification of intent to submit, including both a title and a brief summary of the content, will be greatly appreciated, as it will assist with the coordination and planning of the special issue.

- This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation

programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 704127 -