Fellow in the Context of the Juniorforums I

October 2011 – September 2012

Well-founded reason. The Theoratisation of Practice, Pragmatism and the Problem of Criticism
(Situierte Vernunft. Praxistheorie, Pragmatismus und das Problem der Kritik)

Jörg Volbers studied and gained his PhD from Freie Universität. He was formerly a research associate at Freie Universität’s Sonderforschungsbereich 447 "Kulturen des Performativen" (Performative Cultures), where he worked on the relevance of creativity in Wittgenstein. In his project, Dr. Volbers analyzes a systematic problem in contemporary theory. The term 'practice' is an indispensable tool for description and analysis in today’s humanities disciplines. From a methodological perspective, the term is particularly appealing since it allows to view sense and meaning as the results of publicly accessible acts, which can be described and analysed from a scientific perspective. But this perspective is confronted with a problem: How can one concieve phenomena such as creativity, a rational change of semantic normativity, or criticism in a methodological framework based on the notion of 'practice'? Dr. Volbers wishes to explore this problem by re-reading the classics of American pragmatism.