Stephen Morse has long proclaimed there to be a “fundamental psycho-legal error” that is regularly made by legal and social/psychological/medical science academics alike. This is the error of thinking that causation of human choice by factors themselves outside the chooser’s control excuses that chooser from moral responsibility. In this paper, I examine Morse’s self-labelled “internalist” defense of his thesis that this is indeed an error, and finds such internalist defense incomplete; needed is the kind of externalist defense of Morse’s thesis (...) that can only be provided by a worked-out compatibilist moral philosophy. The body of the paper outlines the kinds of compatibilisms that are plausible, contrasting them with two less plausible attempts to salvage responsibility in the face of an advancing neuroscientific determinism. These two less plausible rescue attempts, libertarianism and fictionalism, each seek to salvage responsibility even while not disavowing the FPLE. (shrink)

It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that the notion of ecological and social embeddedness is one of the most exploited philosophical ideas these days, both in the academia and beyond. The most troublesome about the overall trend is that many proponents of the idea of social embeddedness simplistically consider selfhood as a form of aberration which merely provides vindication for inequality and violence. In this paper, instead of attacking the problem of the individual versus the collective (...) head-on, I approach it by way of a critique of Stephen Turner’s repudiation of transcendental collectivism. According to Turner, transcendental entities, such as tacit knowledge, presuppositions, or traditions, should be altogether removed from explanatory schemata in the social sciences. I believe that Turner’s razor cuts too deep and the rejection of implicit framing is at best premature. Against the background of the identified shortcomings of Turner’s model of interactive learning, I track the interrelations between social development and the development of the self with an eye to showing that the relationship between individual selves and social reality is an extremely complex and multifactorial matter which we cannot hope to navigate without a proper transcendental frame. The frame is what mediates the relationship between the individual and the collective. (shrink)

The heritage of transcendental philosophy, and more specifically its viability when it comes to the problematic of the philosophy of social sciences, has been a key point of dissensus between Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel. Whereas Apel has explicitly aimed at a transcendental-pragmatic transformation of philosophy, Habermas has consequently insisted that his formal pragmatics, and the theory of communicative action which is erected upon it, radically de-transcendentalizes the subject. In a word, the disagreement concerns whether transcendental entities have any substantial (...) role to play in philosophical discourse and social-scientific explanations. My aim is to reconstruct how Apel establishes a connection between transcendentals, qua the ideal communicative community and the possibility of non-objectifying self-reflection. As I shall demonstrate, the principles that transcendental pragmatics sees as underlying social actions are not to be understood in a strictly judicial way, as “supernorms.” Rather, they should be conceptualized and used as a means for action regulation and mutual action coordination. Against this backdrop, I show that the concept of the ideal community provides the necessary underpinnings for Habermas’ schema of validity claims and the project of reconstructive sciences. (shrink)