Keep Score and Punish.

Lecture by Frieder Vogelmann (Bremen), organized by the Department of Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy

Although seldom examined and not explained by Robert Brandom himself, the concept of responsibility has the same fundamental status as the concept of inference in Brandom’s account of discursivity. Whereas “inference” makes explicit the propositional content of concepts as the inferentially structured totality of their relations of material incompatibility, “responsibility” makes explicit the normative force of these relations.

"Responsibility" thus becomes the paradigm of understanding normativity’s binding force – and frames normativity in a peculiar and problematic way which shows especially in the subjectivity Brandom’s concept of responsibility constitutes. "Responsibility" leads, I argue, to a moralizing, juridifying and economizing understanding of normativity’s binding force. Moreover, a closer look at the history of “responsibility” within the philosophical reflections that rely on and engage with it will reveal that Brandom’s concept of “responsibility” is not an exception but exemplary for what the concept of responsibility does in philosophy.

When & where?

Wednesday, 25 January 2017, 3.15 - 5 pm
Faculty of Philosophy, room Omega