PARA UMA LEITURA PRAGMATISTA DE ORGANISMOS EM GERAL

Abstract

I argue that the Hegelian model of agency is constitutively embodied. To this end, I challenge justificationist and intentionalist interpretations, such as those found in Brandom, Pinkard and Pippin, according to which free actions are defined exclusively by the capacity to offer reasons for acting in a certain way. Such interpretations are based on a normative exceptionality of the spirit as opposed to nature. Unlike these authors, I propose that Hegel thinks of the way we act freely in continuity with the way non-human animals act in their environments. To do this, I recover his theory of organisms, as formulated in the Philosophy of Nature. I suggest that Hegel writes about animal organisms in general, human and non-human, as normatively constituted. A way of writing that, inspired by the pragmatist turn in Hegelian studies, promoted above all by those commentators, I will call pragmatist. As I will defend it, this normativity is actualized in the embodied way in which animal organisms in general are teleologically oriented. Rather than a normative exceptionality, I propose that human organisms are better specified, in Hegel, by the singular way in which they act out universal norms