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Fall 2006
Volume 06, Number 1

Newsletter on Hispanic/Latino Issues in Philosophy

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Eduardo Rabossi: Professor and Researcher

Alicia E. Gianella*
Universidad Nacional de La Plata

Eduardo Rabossi had multiple philosophical interests, as well as great analytic and critical acumen. Such skills enabled him to carry out valuable individual work and were also instrumental in leading those around him, disciples and colleagues alike, to philosophical reflection. Through long years of participation in Argentine and Iberoamerican philosophy institutions, until his passing, his natural ability for dialogue, respectful listening, and communication skills made the task look easy.

He was in charge of administrative and directorial roles for many years in several institutions, most notably the presidency of the Sociedad Argentina de Análisis Filosófico (SADAF), an institution that Rabossi founded together with a small group of philosophers. With the return of democracy to Argentina in 1983, he was made chair of the philosophy department at the Universidad de Buenos Aires’s Facultad de Filosofía y Letras. Rabossi was also dissertation advisor of numerous Ph.D. candidates and directed research projects in a variety of institutions. I had the luck and the privilege of being part of some of those projects, and I can attest to his great skill for the leading and promotion of philosophical activity.

He participated in the founding and development of the Asociación Filosófica Argentina (AFRA) and was also its president during the initial stages. He also presided at one time over the Interamerican Society of Philosophy and was a member of its Executive Committee. In addition to his constant effort for the local development of philosophy, Rabossi cultivated relationships with renowned philosophers from all over the world. Many of them, for example, A. Bilgrami, F. Broncano, N. Block, A. Coffa, D. Davidson, M. Fridman, J. Kim, M. Platt, J. Searle, E. Sosa, and J. Toribio, among others, came to Buenos Aires at Rabossi’s invitation, or because of his work. He also participated in and organized numerous philosophy meetings, both in Argentina and abroad. He was an important Argentine and Latinoamerican referent for the international philosophical community, and he kept close ties with the Sociedad Española de Filosofía (SEFA). Rabossi also held visiting scholar positions in England, Italy, Australia, the United States, Germany, and Mexico.

His Contribution to Philosophy of Mind and Philosophy of Language

I will first review Rabossi’s contribution to philosophy of mind, one of his main teaching and research interests. He focused on this subject during the last twenty years of his life, and he often integrated it with philosophy of psychology.

Like many other philosophers, he arrived at these topics through philosophy of language, another key philosophical issue he investigated that I will dwell upon later. Rabossi was also interested in ethics and human rights, as well as in metaphilosophical problems concerning the place of philosophy and its relationship to science, philosophy’s historical development as a discipline and its professional and academic institutionalization, and teaching philosophy.
He taught numerous undergraduate and graduate seminars on philosophy of mind at the University of Buenos Aires and at many other national universities. He coordinated seminars on the subject at SADAF—most notably what was known as the "Tuesday Group," which went on for more than ten years and until his passing. He mentored an outstanding group of young researchers, currently working at various local and international academic institutions. He was also the advisor for several of his students’ doctorate theses on the topic.

In his long and fruitful philosophy career, these are the main themes in philosophy of mind that Rabossi worked on:

I) He discussed virtually all of the issues revolving around the mind-body problem in numerous projects sponsored by the University of Buenos Aires, the Agencia Nacional de Investigaciones, as well as in his seminars, book chapters, and articles. He analyzed the different versions of dualism, the theory of psycho-physic identity in "La tesis de la identidad mente-cuerpo" (1995.b), and functionalism. He considered the problems of reductionism in general, and particularly on the topic mind-body and mind-brain in its different variations: ontological, conceptual, theoretical, and explicative. Even if he rejected dualism and was in favor of monism, he did not fail to recognize the shortcomings of both positions. As the good philosopher he was, Rabossi focused his interest in the proposed justifications.

He analyzed various theories on the nature of the mental, covering such different positions as those of Ryle—he translated the important and influential volume The Concept of Mind—Quine, Wittgenstein, Fodor, and Kim, as well as the more recent takes on the subject by Dennett and Clark. Davidson’s anomalous monism also became the object of Rabossi’s critical study.

Rabossi questioned the legitimacy of what is known as "the problem of consciousness" and the so-called "problem of the qualia." He considered those "problems" to be the fruit of conceptual confusion and of an aprioristic methodology.

In his articles and seminars, Rabossi considered topics such as mental causation, physicalism, supervenience, and multiple realizability. He was particularly interested in the arguments in favor of this last thesis. Rabossi’s interest in Wittgenstein’s thought led him to conduct excellent seminars on the topic, analyzing its various periods, the affinities and differences between those periods, and Wittgenstein’s peculiar conception of mind and of language.

In his seminars, he also analyzed Brentano’s intentionality and its legacy for contemporary philosophy, and the various positions of psychologism in philosophy, criticizing some and agreeing with those akin to naturalism.

II) One of Rabossi’s constant interests was folk psychology. He examined the topic in several articles such as "Por qué el sentido común importa a la filosofía" (1979) and "La filosofía de sentido común y la teoría de la teoría. Algunas reflexiones críticas" (2000). Rabossi discussed the controversies on the explanations given by the Theory of Theory (TT) and Theory of Simulation (TS). He supported the existence of a nucleus of irremovable basic convictions, against the revisable and disposable character that would follow from the thesis that folk psychology is a theory. He also stressed the role of certain practices over the role played by (or attributed to) theory.

Rabossi examined the heterogeneous composition of the mental components of folk psychology, as well as the advantages and problems introduced by the Theory of Simulation. Finally, in a naturalized frame, he reflected on the contribution of developmental psychology and evolutionism to the discussion. Rabossi supported the thesis of incorporating relative consideration to the various folk areas, such as folk physics and folk biology.

III) Another of Rabossi’s interests was the birth and development of cognitive science, and the role of philosophy in a complex system of contributions featuring disciplines such as psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience. He teamed up with cognitive psychologists and interacted with neuroscientists, discussing issues such as the role of language in thought and the role of concepts. He considered the debate on the role of representation and metarepresentation.

Rabossi also analyzed the Artificial Intelligence (AI) hard program and the explicative advantages of connectionism. He also stressed the importance of taking emotions and the role of the body into consideration. This is something that the Cognitive Sciences were initially reluctant to do.

IV) Throughout his career, Rabossi showed an interest in the notion of rationality and the debate around its various forms and modes, as well as in irrationality and the problem posed by the explanation of phenomena such as wishful thinking, self-deception, and akrasia, for instance in his 1984 article "Video magliora proboque: pero...Notas sobre el problema de la incontinencia." Besides being about phenomena that are interesting, per se, these topics are also interesting because they put general theories on mind structure to the test.

Rabossi supported a naturalized position for philosophy, which he conceived as a field of common work, a science-philosophy continuity, the compatibility between philosophy and science, and the existence of interfaces between both domains.

In "Filosofía de la Mente y Filosofía de la Psicología. La agenda, la práctica, el dominio," from 2002, he favors a metaphilosophical naturalism, opposed to a canonical conception—in philosophy in general, and philosophy of mind in particular—that is characteristically aprioristic and based on conceptual elucidation. Against this traditional aproach to philosophy of mind, Rabossi preferred to align himself with the "second" Wittgenstein, and with Dennett’s naturalism.

His metaphilosophical naturalism led him to interact with scientists of the mind: psychologists, neurologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and linguists. He was invited to attend numerous meetings with professionals and scholars from these disciplines. This interaction eventually led to some of his published work, such as "La mente, el cuerpo y la concepción freudiana de lo psíquico" in 1982 and "Psicólogos, filósofos e interfaces" in 2003.

As mentioned before, Eduardo Rabossi developed an interest in philosophy of mind and psychology from issues pertaining to philosophy of language, a discipline that he enthusiastically taught and researched for many years. We will now briefly summarize his contribution to this field. Rabossi was a full-time professor of philosophy of language in the philosophy department of the Universidad de Buenos Aires. He led an important group of disciples in the discipline, and for many years he conducted a seminar on Philosophy of Language at the Sociedad Argentina de Análisis Filosófico. He also taught courses on the discipline in other Argentine and Latinoamerican universities. He was mainly interested in the pragmatic line; speech acts doctrine was one of his preferred topics. Together with Genaro Carrió, he translated into Spanish and wrote a preface for J. L. Austin’s How to do Things with Words, one of the most influential works in this line of thought. In 1972 Rabossi published in Crítica an article on "Locuciones e ilocuciones: Searle y Austin," in 1979 published Teoría del significado y actos lingüísticos for the University of Carabobo (Venezuela), and in a 1988 an article for Manuscrito "¿Verdad y significado o significado y verdad?" discussed the controversy surrounding Strawson’s theoretical model of language, and that of Davidson. Rabossi not only studied speech acts theory, as well as F. De Saussure’s and N. Chomsky’s theories of language, but Sapir-Worf’s linguistic relativism was also part of his seminars and courses. His translation into Spanish of Ian Hacking’s book Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy? highlights Rabossi’s interest in diverse views on language. He also analyzed the classical texts, but always from a contemporary perspective. In "Lenguaje, pensamiento y realidad," Revista Latinoamericana de Filosofia, JL 82, he considered from a modern point of view the Aristotelian model of Peri Hermeneías. He also wrote an article on Hobbes’s philosophy of language (Manuscrito IV, 1980). In "Ideas abstractas y términos generales" Rabossi presented and discussed the famous dispute between Locke, Berkely, and Hume on abstract ideas in Ensayos actuales sobre (Adam Smith y David Hume, Ed., Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, septiembre 1978, Buenos Aires).

Both in this field and in philosophy of mind, Eduardo Rabossi displayed a brilliant analytical intelligence paired with a remarkable expository ability, which became evident in his teaching, his participation in countless conferences and other academic events, and in his writing.

His trademark approach to each one of these issues could be described as follows: first, he would begin with a careful analysis of the state of the question, which he introduced with the utmost clarity and precision. Then, he would present all of the objections raised, listing all of the possible solutions, and, finally, he would identify the assumptions involved and their implications. He has left us with fond memories, but also with the challenge to continue his work with the same level of quality and exigency that he set for himself and his disciples.

Works by Eduardo Rabossi on Philosophy of Mind and Philosophy of Language:

1972- "Locuciones e ilocuciones: Searle y Austin," Crítica. S 72; 6: 3-41.
1975.a.- "El Tractatus y la Filosofía Crítica," Revista Latinoamericana de Filosofía, vol. I, N 2.
1975.b.- "Austin y la falacia descriptiva," Revista Latinoamericana de Filosofia, 1: 50-56.
1977- "Meaning, Force and Explicit Performatives," in Philosophica-Belgium. 1977; 19: 89-109.
1978- "Ideas abstractas y términos generales," in Ensayos actuales sobre Adam Smith y David Hume, Ed. Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, September 1978, Buenos Aires.
1979.a.- "Por qué el sentido común importa a la filosofía," Manuscrito, Vol. III, N 1.
1979.b.- Teoría del significado y actos lingüísticos. Publicación de la Universidad de Carabobo, Venezuela.
1980.a.- "Ideas abstractas y términos generales," in Manuscrito IV.
1980.b.- "Hobbes y la Filosofía del Lenguaje," Brasil, vol 4, n 1.
1982.a.- "La mente, el cuerpo y la concepción freudiana de lo psíquico," in Acta Psiquiátrica y Psicología de América Latina.
1982.b.- "Lenguaje pensamiento y realidad," in Revista Latinoamericana de Filosofia.
1983.-"¿Verdad y Significado o Significado y Verdad? Manuscrito, VII, (2).
1984.a.- "Video magliora proboque: pero... Notas sobre el problema de la incontinencia," in Análisis Filosófico, Vol. IV, N 1.
1984.b.- "Meaning, Force and Explicit Performatives," in Philosophical Analysis in Latin America, edited by Jorge Gracia et al. Reidel, Boston, 141-64.
1990- "Wittgenstein: Representaciones y pensamientos," in Cuadernos de Filosofia. 9-19.
1993- "Esquemas Conceptuales: Relativismo y Ontologia," in Temas Actuales de Filosofia, edited by Maria Julia Palacios, Publicación de la Univ. Nacional de Salta: Buenos Aires.
1995.a.- "Cómo explicar lo mental: cuestiones filosóficas y marcos científicos" in Filosofía de la Mente y Ciencia Cognitiva, edited by Eduardo Rabossi. Barcelona: Paidos.
1995.b.- "La tesis de la identidad mente-cuerpo," in La mente humana, edited by Fernando Broncano, Enciclopedia Iberoamericana. Editorial Trotta S.A.
1995.c.- "Nota sobre el reduccionismo y la realizabilidad variable," Análisis Filosófico. 15 (1-2): 167-80.
1996- "Racionalidad dialógica. Falacias y retórica filosófica. El caso de la llamada ‘falacia naturalista’," in La Racionalidad: su poder y sus límites, comp. O. Nudler, Buenos Aires- Barcelona: Paidos.
2000.- "La psicología de sentido común y la teoría de la teoría. Algunas reflexiones críticas," in Eudoxa Serie Filosófica 12, 643-55.
2002.a.- "Las falacias filosóficas y el estigma del naturalismo," in Los caminos del naturalismo. Mente conocimiento y moral, edited by Diana Pérez, Buenos Aires: Eudeba.
2002.b.- "Filosofía de la Mente y Filosofía de la Psicología. La agenda, la práctica, el dominio," Azafea. Universidad de Salamanca. Vol. 4, 21-43.
2002.c.- "Mental Causation: Anatomy of a Problem," Manuscrito, 285-304.
2003- "Psicólogos, filósofos e interfaces," in Psicología Cognitiva y Filosofía de la Mente, edited by A. Duarte and E. Rabossi, Buenos Aires-Madrid: Alianza Editora.
2004- "La Psicología del Sentido Común y los Modelos de Atribución Mental," in La Mente y sus Problemas, edited by E. Rabossi, Buenos Aires: Catálogos.

*Professor Nora Stigol collaborated in the writing of this review, particularly on Rabossi’s involvement with philosophy of language.

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