| In this dissertation I explore the intersection of two distant philosophical traditions, Sellars's strand of neopragmatism and philosophical hermeneutics. The aim is to offer a stereoscopic account of the role of concepts in experience, incorporating insights from both traditions and countering contemporary approaches that, for all their professed novelty, remain trapped in a rather antiquated paradigm of the discursive. The picture of the conceptual I am opposing in my dissertation is one that finds its roots in Kant and is characterized by its formalism and its reliance on the paradigm of explicit judgment. One of the limitations of such a view is revealed in its incapacity to harmonize the pragmatic and the conceptual, our embodied-embedded dealings and rule-governed behavior, as has been recently exposed by the McDowell/Dreyfus debate. Both sides of the divide, I argue, share the same flawed premise, a rationalistic view of concepts that easily falls prey to accusations of intellectualism and detachment. The remedy, I claim, comes in the shape of an enlarged understanding of concepts that draws its inspiration primarily from philosophical hermeneutics and, not without an air of irony, incorporates valuable pragmatic insights from Sellars's reflections on normativity and his discussion of pattern-governed behavior. The resulting account locates language and concepts squarely within the realm of our embodied skillful coping---concepts incarnated in praxis. |
