Forms of Normativity - Transitions and Intersections

Normativity is the feature of whatever should or ought to be. In a vide variety of forms, normativity permeates human life: from natural functions, instrumental requirements and rules of skill, laws of predicative logic and inference to social conventions, institutions, moral norms to the standards of international law. Understanding normativity both in its distinctive forms and in its overarching features is recognized as an important task of philosophical research; it matters not only to a great variety of philosophical problems, but also to neighboring academic disciplines, as well as to the understanding of human social life. Recent philosophical research has advanced in two directions: specialized research has deepened our understanding of each form of normativity, and a number of more or less abstract general accounts have been developed to account the overarching structures. The DocFunds project Forms of Normativity Transitions and Intersection (FoNTI) aims at filling the lacuna between these established research perspectives. FoNTI introduces a new research perspective by coordinating specialized research in such a way as to investigate into the transitions and interconnections between the forms of normativity and thus to develop a bottom up view of the landscape of normative phenomena. FoNTI gathers a faculty of excellent researchers in the various domains of normativity who will work closely together in the coordination and supervision of the planned doctoral research. FoNTI aims at building a network of leading experts and a curriculum of research seminars, doctoral colloquia, and workshops that will ensure the best impact and dissemination of the expected research. FoNTI will thus offer its participating doctoral students a sound platform for their future careers.

Normativity is a rather recent label for the distinctive feature of whatever should or ought to be the case. Normativity comes in a wide variety of forms that stretches across a broad range of apparently very different phenomena: ranging from natural functions (e.g., the heart should pump blood), instrumental requirements and rules of skill (e.g., coffee should be prepared with clean water), the laws of predicative logic and inference (e.g., whoever knows that the train leaves at 2.10, and knows that it is 2 now, should conclude that the train leaves in 10 minutes), to social conventions (e.g., people should address each other in a way that facilitates communication), social institutions and moral norms (e.g., promises should be kept), and the standards of international law (e.g., states should not interfere with people's freedom of speech). These phenomena differ in the nature of the norm in question as well as in the nature of the entity that is held to this standard. It is not clear that all of them can be covered by a single unified account of normativity. Since each of these phenomena is the topic of intense current philosophical research, the question arises what these research fields can learn from each other, methodologically as well as content-wise. Within the Doc.Funds-Project "Forms of Normativity - Transitions and Intersections", doctoral researchers pursued this question together with their supervising faculty and a rapidly increasing network of international experts from a plurality of perspectives. Intense and specialized research was carried out within a setting that facilitated cooperation and cross-fertilization between different but suitably related research fields and that included joint workshops and seminars, as well as an exchange program. FoNTI resulted in contributions to research fields as the philosophy of technology, climate ethics, social philosophy, and the philosophy of mathematics.