Topic / Program

Human beings, so it seems, are normative beings. They find themselves to be oriented in relation to norms and rules, in light of which they justify and criticize their doings and activities. Since antiquity, the terms 'norma' and 'regula' designate that which governs the difference between right and wrong. And modern philosophy, in a variety of ways, has followed Kant in holding the view that human agency, knowledge, and thought - and only these - take place essentially within a context that is intelligible as right or wrong. Accordingly, there has been the hope in many areas and traditions of philosophy to try to understand and explain, with the aid of the concept of normativity, the difference between nature and culture, a realm of causality and a realm of freedom, and the physical and the mental.

What does it mean, however, to be subject to norms? From where do norms draw their force to bind us? How should the relation between normativity and nature be conceived? In short: What is normativity? The 11th International French-German Philosophy Colloquium seeks to address these questions. It aims to clarify and express, as a desideratum, a basic or generic concept of normativity that is applicable prior to any division of philosophy into its theoretical and practical aspects. For while norms are commonly and typically understood to be of practical (e.g., moral, legal, or political) relevance, they are also central to the explication of what is involved in knowing, understanding, and articulating something linguistically.

The Colloquium seeks to solicit systematic contributions from as many philosophical strands of discussion as possible. One example would be variations of a normative pragmatism (e.g., Brandom), based on the works of authors like Dewey, Heidegger or Wittgenstein, that conceive norms as constituted in the performances of linguistic and non-linguistic practices in the course of understanding. Another example would be Aristotelian approaches (e.g., McDowell or Foot) that attempt to undermine the basis of the Kantian tendency to conceptually separate normativity and nature and in so doing reestablish a non-dualistic conception of natural norms and normatively contentful (second) nature. Other possibilities that could figure as points of reference for the Colloquium are existentialist positions that appeal to the concepts of authenticity and choice (e.g., Kierkegaard or Sartre). Last but not least, reflections upon norms and rules that come out of the hermeneutical and phenomenological tradition are also importantly relevant: The unavailability and inexhaustibility of the normative are emphasized in this connection, where concepts like those of appropriateness and tradition (Gadamer), responsibility (Lévinas), and justice (Derrida) stand in the foreground.

The Colloquium wishes also, however, to bring these philosophical strands and traditions into fruitful confrontations with influential anti-normative positions that extend from Humean conceptions of reason to contemporary forms of naturalism in the philosophy of mind and language. In addition, some structuralist philosophies and those that build upon the work of Foucault and Bourdieu have implicitly or explicitly articulated positions that seemingly oppose a normative understanding of language and society. The Colloquium openly welcomes contributions that represent skeptical positions in the face of the idea of a normative conception of mind and language.

The question concerning norms and normativity is without doubt not familiar to the same extent in all philosophical traditions. Indeed, questions of normativity hardly figure, at least not as an explicit topic of discussion under that label, in the phenomenological and neostructuralist debates that take place in French-speaking contexts. For this reason the French title of the Colloquium in 2005 is formulated differently in comparison with its German and English counterparts. In the spirit of sustaining the French-German dialogue in philosophy, the Colloquium aspires to articulate the differences of various philosophical traditions with regard to the question of norms and normativity and to bring them into systematically fruitful confrontations.


Program

Program as PDF-Download


Lundi, 18 juillet 2005

Die soziale Begründung des Normativen
Hans Bernhard Schmid (St. Gallen): Die Fundierung sozialer Normativität im Gemeinschaftshandeln
Benjamin Trémoulet (Paris/Stony Brook): Normalité et normativité : le sens commun selon Kant
Barbara Fultner (Granville): Linguistic Practice and Social Norms

Diane Perpich (Clemson): New Kantians: Korsgaard, Habermas and Lévinas on Language and Normativity
David Lauer (Berlin): Die Bedeutung der Liebe. Semantische Normativität, soziale Praxis und existenzielle Festlegung


Mardi, 19juillet 2005

Normativität, Erkenntnis und Ästhetik
Raffaela Giovagnoli (Salerno): Normativity and the Space of Reasons
Chris Doude van Troostwijk (Amsterdam): Point de vue. Sur la souplesse de la raison pratique kantienne
Georg W. Bertram (Hildesheim): Normativität und Kreativität

Richard Eldridge (Swarthmore): What's Left of Epistemology?

Zwischendiskussion


Mercredi, 20 juillet 2005

Normativität der Kritik - Kritik der Normativität
Arnaud Pelletier (Paris/Hannover): Michel Foucault et les normes de la pensée
Katrin Meyer (St. Gallen): Normierung und Normalisierung bei Michel Foucault
Patricia Purtschert (Basel): Normierung und Regulierung bei Judith Butler

Après-midi libre


Jeudi, 21 juillet 2005

Normativität, Politik, Recht und Ethik
Tanja Pritzlaff (Bremen): Sprachliche und gesellschaftliche Normen: Politische Theorie in brandomscher Per-spektive
James Ingram (New York): Norms, Conflict, Progress
Christophe Laudou (Madrid): Le discours de la victime - une parole qui transcende les normes

Sarah Clarke Miller (Memphis): How to Construct the Scope of Moral Status
Christine Clavien (Neuchâtel): Thinking Morality and Normativity from an Evolutionary Perspective: an Analy-sis Illustrated with Gibbard's Moral Theory


Vendredi, 22 juillet 2005

Normativität, Zeitlichkeit und Geschichtlichkeit
Roberto Farneti (Bologna/Los Angeles): Thucydides's Error. The Case for a Natural History of Humans
Tim Henning (Münster/Princeton): Die narrative Biographie als normative Grundlage der Kritik
Mohammadreza Javaheri (Paris/Heidelberg): Le rapport entre la normativité et l'historicité - une nouvelle approche Hégélienne

Markus Wolf (Bremen/Leipzig): Zeitlichkeit und Philosophie des Normativen im Denken von Jacques Derrida

Abschlussdiskussion