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It is common today to find in philosophical and scientific works the idea of agent causation dismissed as unintelligible. This article is meant to challenge that view. It argues that the conception of agent causation that Paul Ricoeur has defended is by no means unintelligible. Indeed there are compelling, even if not definitive, reasons for acknowledging the existence of such causation. The point of departure for this argument is Ricoeur’s reflection on the discursive character of human existence. To make my case, I focus on the discursive practice of offering and receiving recommendations. This sort of practice is integral to important areas of human activity, including scientific activity. Though it is often overlooked, agent causation is a necessary precondition for the intelligibility of this practice. I acknowledge that just how agent causation comes to be in the course of the biological evolution of human beings is ontologically enigmatic. Nonetheless, the evidence in its favor is not only intelligible but is too robust to be dismissed merely on the grounds that it is ontologically ‘inconvenient’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pippin, Pinkard and Brandom are rightly seen as representatives of a distinct approach in contemporary Hegel scholarship. Still, their interpretations diverge due to different definitions and uses of conceptions of discursive practice. We focus on three ways in which such definitions and uses bear on their interpretations. First, while Lumsden has recently criticized Pinkard and Brandom for ‘discursive bias’ in their accounts of the contestation and upheaval of normative authority in Hegel’s Phenomenology, we note that Pinkard distinguishes between various modes of reason-giving, and we argue that a further qualification of interdependencies between these modes may support his interpretation against such criticism. Second, Pinkard and Pippin have recently criticized Brandom’s conception of discursive score-keeping practice, and Pippin in particular has argued that the latter rests on an individualistic reductionism about content foreign to Hegel. However, we find that the real issue is that the modes of methodological abstraction and idealization assumed for Brandom’s conception of discursive practice leave out of account the historical alteration as well as the institutional embodiment of normative authority as emphasized by Pippin and Pinkard. Third, while Pippin and Pinkard both make Hegel’s notion of modern ethical life bear on a conception of practical rationality, their uses of a conception of discursive practice in such an undertaking betray divergent conceptions of the sociality of rational agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]