Michael Schmitz

He works mainly in the philosophy of mind, language, and society. His doctoral thesis was on the mind–body problem. He has published articles on consciousness, perception and action, practical knowledge, intentions and their limits, collective intentionality, joint attention, propositions and the force–content distinction, questions, and group speech acts. Recently, he has written on legal phenomena from a perspective that brings together the theory of collective intentionality with traditional questions in the philosophy of law.

Many of his interests revolve around the notion of force/mode, both in the sense of what distinguishes assertions and directions, beliefs and intentions, and of modes such as we-mode and role-mode, in which people think, feel, perceive, and act through identification with groups and with the roles they may have in these groups. He also works on a layered view of mind and language, where different layers can be distinguished in terms of the formats of the representations involved.

In his FWF project “What is in a Question?”, which he is conducting at CEU, he develops a new account of questions and the meaning of force indicators that overcomes the traditional force–content dichotomy. He argues that force indicators present the theoretical or practical positions subjects take up toward the world, and that questions, as well as logical and fictional acts, are higher-level acts. Through a question, a subject presents an assertion or a direction and presents himself as wondering whether to accept or reject that assertion or direction (yes–no questions), or how to complete it (constituent questions). Two of his main goals are to integrate force indicators into the theory of meaning and to develop a framework that treats the theoretical domain of assertion and theoretical knowledge and the practical domain of direction and practical knowledge as mutually irreducible, yet structurally parallel.

Before coming to CEU, he was a member of the interdisciplinary research group “Limits of Intentionality” at the University of Konstanz and an Assistant Professor at the University of Vienna, where he is still a Privatdozent and a member of the supervisory faculty of the Vienna Doctoral School of Philosophy. He has also been a Jacobsen Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, University College London, a Visiting Lecturer at UC Berkeley, and a frequent visitor to the Berkeley Social Ontology Group.