Gründe als Rechtfertigungen – verkörpert, eingebettet und freistehend

Abstract

Modern democratic societies exhibit a characteristic tension between pluralistic tolerance and the demand for public justification, for giving reasons. The paper explores how reason-giving is to be conceived if cognition is – as appropriate – taken to be an essentially embodied and embedded activity. Against the backdrop of John Dewey’s account of embodied thinking, three different types of public justification are distinguished, their mutual relationships and motivational forces assessed: freestanding, embedded and embodied reasoning, with special attention to the latter. The last section of the paper turns to a concrete example – the idea of a covenant between God and a people as articulated in the Hebrew Bible – and explores the multiple entanglements between all three types of reasoning pertinent there.