The aim of this article is to argue for a conception of critical social science based on the model of constitutive rules. The author argues that this model is pragmatically superior to those models that employ notions like "illusion" and " ideology," as it does not demand a specification of the "real (but hidden) interests" of social actors. Key Words: constitutive rules • critical theory • ideology • recommendations • social facts.

What is phenomenology's contribution to contemporary debates in the philosophy of mind? I am here concerned with this question, and in particular with phenomenology's contribution to what has come to be called the problem of (intentional) consciousness. The problem of consciousness has constituted the focal point of classical phenomenology as well as the main problem, and indeed perhaps the stumbling block, of the philosophy of mind in the last two decades (Fisette and Poirier 2000). Many philosophers of mind, for instance, (...) Thomas Nagel (1974), Ned Block (1995), Owen Flanagan (1977), Colin McGinn (1991) and David Chalmers (1996), have acknowledged the properly phenomenological character of this problem; Nagel is even willing to entrust the study of phenomenal consciousness to what he calls an “objective phenomenology.” Yet, the phenomenology to which these philosophers resort has little to do with the conceptual framework that was developed within the phenomenologicaltradition.They put forward an entity they term “phenomenal consciousness,” but only in the hope that it may be explained by means of the theories that currently prevail in the philosophy of mind or in cognitive sciences. (shrink)

Sports studies is currently dominated by the intellectualist approach to understanding skill and expertise, meaning that questions about the phenomenological nature of skilled performance in sport have generally been overshadowed by the emphasis on the cognitive. By contrast, this article responds to calls for a phenomenology of sporting embodiment by opening up a philosophical exploration of the nature of athletic being-in-the-world. In particular, the paper explores the conceptualisation of immanence and transcendence in relation to the embodied practice of dance, engaging (...) with Merleau-Ponty’s important insight that the body can be a source of transcendence. I also draw on data from in-depth qualitative interviews with professional contemporary dancers to explore dancers’ concepts of ‘being in your body’ and ‘being in the moment’, and to suggest that during the actual embodied practice of dance, dancers do not experience transcendence and immanence as they are conceptualised in philosophy. Rather, I argue, dancers experience a third mode of being that is somehow in-between these two binary terms. I have called this ‘inhabited transcendence’. (shrink)