ABSTRACT

Adolf Reinach approaches the notion of a social act primarily by means of investigating the act of promising. This chapter concentrates on those properties that promises share with other social acts and that are most relevant for the comparison with Dietrich von Hildebrand. It tackles Hildebrand's theory of social stances and its relevance for social ontology. It discusses a challenge for Hildebrand's position. This challenge concerns the kind of "communication" that has to presupposed in order for the addressee to empathically apprehend the social emotion or stance that is addressed to him or her. The chapter concludes, two possible strategies to solve this problem, the first maintains that the body of such social stances is linguistic in nature. The second denies that take the first option to be viable, but restricted to a limited number of cases. The chapter assumes, tracks a more fundamental phenomenon, but is not uncontroversial.