Normative Species

This book is about rules, especially about human capability to create, maintain and follow rules, as a root of what makes humans different from other animals. Scrutinizing this capability tells us who we humans are and what kinds of lives we live. The book builds on Sellars' and Brandom's inferentialism in a novel naturalistic way.

Jaroslav Peregrin is a professor at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Hradec Králové, Czechia, and the research professor at the Department of Logic of the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences. He is the author of Doing Worlds with Words (1995), Meaning and Structure (2001), Inferentialism (2014), Reflective Equilibrium and the Principles of Logical Analysis (together with V. Svoboda, 2017) and Philosophy of Logical Systems (2020). His current research focuses on logical and philosophical aspects of inferentialism and on more general questions of normativity.

Introduction 1. Now I can go on! 2. Creature of rules 3. Preliminaries I: Rules and other human gear 4. Preliminaries II: Rules as part of nature 5. Preliminaries III: Kinds of rules 6. Normative attitudes 7. Rules in the natural world 8. The natural history of correctness 9. Systems of rules and institutions 10. Behavioral patterns 11. Practices 12. The space of meaningfulness 13. Logic 14. Cooperation and morals 15. Freedom 16. The world 17. Conclusion: We have become a normative species