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Concept
Michel Seymour
Summary
Michel Seymour (born 1954) is a Canadian philosopher from Quebec and a professor at the Université de Montréal, where he has been teaching analytical philosophy (philosophy of language and philosophy of mind) since 1990.
After having obtained a Ph.D. in philosophy from the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières in 1986, he continued to study in the same field for several years at the Oxford University under the direction of John McDowell and at the University of California, Los Angeles under the direction of Tyler Burge. He was president of the Société de philosophie du Québec from 1994 to 1996.
He published in various English language philosophy journals including the Journal of Philosophy and Philosophical Studies as well as many more in French. He is also the author of several books and director of collective works.
In the domain of philosophy of language, Michel Seymour holds an institutional and communitarian conception of language inspired in part from the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein which he opposes to the idealism of Gottlob Frege, to the inneism of Noam Chomsky and to the psychologism of John Searle. According to Seymour, speaking a language is a rule-governed activity, where the rules express the social conditions of expression-use. The rules are specified by social conventions. The meaning of expressions is indeterminate, because the rules cannot anticipate all cases. Accordingly, Seymour endorses a semantics based on assertability conditions inspired from Saul Kripke which ties the meaning of expressions to their conventional usage.
In the domain of political philosophy, Seymour starts from John Rawls's Political Liberalism to defend a conception of collective rights equal in validity and importance to individual rights, a position which notably runs counter to that of Will Kymlicka on the subject. According to Seymour, liberalism cannot rest content with an attitude of toleration based on mere respect, but must rather foster an attitude of recognition based on mutual appreciation.
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