Ramberg’s Naturalized Rationalism

The chapter investigates how Ramberg can hold an ideal account of rationality and naturalism in one vision. I underline and elaborate on three main threads in Ramberg’s piece "Naturalizing Idealizations: Pragmatism and the Interpretivist Strategy": the consequences of Ramberg’s view for ontology (1), his distinctive conception of rationality (2), and how these first two points account for his definition of philosophy as practice that seeks to investigate not merely the meaning of words, but the meaning of life (3). All three aspects, I argue, hang together and can be entered via Ramberg’s distinctive appropriation and elaboration of Davidson’s anomalous monism and Rorty’s eliminative materialism. As Ramberg shows, both anomalous monism and eliminative materialism appear contentious when viewed through the traditional lens of a dualism between language and world, yet become coherent once Rorty’s “vocabulary–vocabulary” is fully embraced. Once this move has been taken, ontology dissolves into Davidson’s “bland monism” and rationality is fully at the service of our creature-needs, where ‘our’ refers to concrete, finite creatures in concrete and determined environments, who come with this anomaly to be able to hold an infinity of potential projects and to change habits.