With his insightful and wide-ranging theory of recognition, Axel Honneth has decisively reshaped the Frankfurt School tradition of critical social theory. Combining insights from philosophy, sociology, psychology, history, political economy, and cultural critique, Honneth’s work proposes nothing less than an account of the moral infrastructure of human sociality and its relation to the perils and promise of contemporary social life. This book provides an accessible overview of Honneth’s main contributions across a variety of fields, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of (...) his thought. Christopher Zurn clearly explains Honneth’s multi-faceted theory of recognition and its relation to diverse topics: individual identity, morality, activist movements, progress, social pathologies, capitalism, justice, freedom, and critique. In so doing, he places Honneth’s theory in a broad intellectual context, encompassing classic social theorists such as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, Dewey, Adorno and Habermas, as well as contemporary trends in social theory and political philosophy. Treating the full range of Honneth’s corpus, including his major new work on social freedom and democratic ethical life, this book is the most up-to-date guide available. _Axel Honneth_ will be invaluable to students and scholars working across the humanities and social sciences, as well as anyone seeking a clear guide to the work of one of the most influential theorists writing today. (shrink)

Theorists of public reason such as John Rawls often idealize constitutional courts as exemplars of public reason. This paper raises questions about the seduction and limits of analogies between theorists’ account of public reason and actual constitutional jurisprudence. Examining the work product of the United States Supreme Court, the paper argues that while it does engage in reason-giving to support its decisions—as the public reason strategy suggests— those reasons are (largely) legalistic and specifically juristic reasons—not the theorists’ idealized moral-political reasons (...) on matters of fundamental principle. But if constitutional courts do not engage on matters of fundamental principle, then a public reason strategy for assuaging democratic worries about judicial review would no longer be open: prominent liberal and deliberative democratic theorists could no longer point to the alleged superiority of constitutional courts to speak in the name of, and for, the people’s shared political principles. The paper extends beyond the U.S. case study by pointing to three institutional factors explaining the disanalogy between what some constitutional courts do and what public reason theories require them to do. It concludes with considerations about whether the public reason strategy might be more successfully applied to international courts. (shrink)

In this book, Christopher F. Zurn shows why a normative theory of deliberative democratic constitutionalism yields the best understanding of the legitimacy of constitutional review. He further argues that this function should be institutionalized in a complex, multi-location structure including not only independent constitutional courts but also legislative and executive self-review that would enable interbranch constitutional dialogue and constitutional amendment through deliberative civic constitutional forums. Drawing on sustained critical analyses of diverse pluralist and deliberative democratic arguments concerning the (...) legitimacy of judicial review, Zurn concludes that constitutional review is necessary to ensure the procedural requirements for legitimate democratic self-rule through deliberative cooperation. Claiming that pure normative theory is not sufficient to settle issues of institutional design, Zurn draws on empirical and comparative research to propose reformed institutions of constitutional review that encourage the development of fundamental law as an ongoing project of democratic deliberation and decision. (shrink)

What does social justice require in contemporary societies? What are the requirements of social democracy? Who and where are the individuals and groups that can carry forward agendas for progressive social transformation? What are we to make of the so-called new social movements of the last thirty years? Is identity politics compatible with egalitarianism? Can cultural misrecognition and economic maldistribution be fought simultaneously? What of the heritage of Western Marxism is alive and dead? And how is current critical social theory (...) to approach these and other questions? Much of the most productive work done in recent social theory has revolved around such issues, in particular, around those concerning the relationship between the politics of recognition and the politics of distribution. After the intense theoretical focus over the last fifteen years or so on the issues of recognition politics—multiculturalism, multi-nationalism, identity politics, group-differentiated rights, the accommodation of difference, and so on—some social theorists have worried that attention has been diverted from important issues of distributive equality—systematic impoverishment, increasing material inequality, ‘structural’ unemployment, the growth of oligarchic power, global economic segmentation, and so on. While some critics seem to have adopted a blunt ‘it’s the economy, stupid’ line of criticism,1 others have attempted to develop an overarching, integrative theoretical framework adequate to the diverse issues concerning both economic and cultural justice. For example, Axel Honneth proposes that a suitably developed and normatively robust theory of intersubjective recognition can adequately integrate an analysis of apparently diverse contemporary struggles: those for a just division of labor and hence, a fair distribution of resources and opportunities, as well as those for a culture free of identity-deforming disrespect and denigration. (shrink)

Many have claimed that legitimate constitutional democracy is either conceptually or practically impossible, given infinite regress paradoxes deriving from the requirement of simultaneously democratic and constitutional origins for legitimate government. This paper first critically investigates prominent conceptual and practical bootstrapping objections advanced by Barnett and Michelman. It then argues that the real conceptual root of such bootstrapping objections is not any specific substantive account of legitimacy makers, such as consent or democratic endorsement, but a particular conception of the logic of (...) normative standards—the determinate threshold conception—that the critic attributes to the putatively undermined account of legitimacy. The paper further claims that when we abandon threshold conceptions of the logic of legitimacy in favor of regulative-ideal conceptions, then the objections, from bootstrapping paradoxes to the very idea of constitutional democracy, disappear. It concludes with considerations in favor of adopting a more demanding conception of the regulative ideal of constitutional democracy, advanced by Habermas, focusing on potentials for developmental learning. (shrink)

Are we witnessing progress or regress in the recent increasing popularity and electoral success of populist politicians and parties in consolidated democratic nations? ... Is the innovative use of popular referendum in Great Britain to settle fundamental constitutional questions a progressive or regressive innovation? ... Similarly, is the increasing use of constituent assemblies to change constitutions across the world evidence of progress in democratic constitutionalism, or, a worryingly regressive change back toward unmediated popular majoritarianism? ... This paper reflects on some (...) of the perils and promise of framing such questions with the conceptual couplet of progress and regress. It considers four compelling critiques of the use of ‘progress’ and its cognates in sociopolitical theory, as well as arguing that such concepts are nevertheless ineliminable for our normative theories. The paper concludes by suggesting that we can avoid the most serious problems by employing only conceptions of political progress and regress that are piecemeal, pragmatic, and processual. (shrink)

Christopher F. Zurn - Perspectives on Habermas - Journal of the History of Philosophy 40:2 Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.2 274-275 Book Review Perspectives on Habermas Lewis Edwin Hahn, editor. Perspectives on Habermas. New York: Open Court, 2000. Pp. xiv + 586. Paper, $29.95. This collection of essays on the wide-ranging body of thought produced by Jürgen Habermas over the course of close to fifty years represents a significant lost opportunity. Although originally planned as a volume (...) in the Library of Living Philosophers series, in 1999 Habermas pulled out of the project because, as Hahn tells us, "of other events in his life" . Volumes in this series have typically provided unique and valuable resources: not only quality secondary essays by leading contemporary philosophers, but essay-by-essay responses by the featured philosopher, as well.. (shrink)

Contemporary recognition theory has developed powerful tools for understanding a variety of social problems through the lens of misrecognition. It has, however, paid somewhat less attention to how to conceive of appropriate responses to misrecognition, usually making the tacit assumption that the proper societal response is adequate or proper affirmative recognition. In this paper I argue that, although affirmative recognition is one potential response to misrecognition, it is not the only such response. In particular, I would like to make the (...) case for derecognition in some cases: derecognition, in particular, through the systematic deinstitutionalization or uncoupling of various reinforcing components of social institutions, components whose tight combination in one social institution has led to the misrecognition in the first place. I make the case through the example of recent United States debates over marriage, especially but not only with respect to gay marriage. I argue that the proper response to the misrecognition of sexual minorities embodied in exclusively heterosexual marriage codes is not affirmative recognition of lesbian and gay marriages, but rather the systematic derecognition of legal marriage as currently understood. I also argue that the systematic misrecognition of women that occurs under the contemporary institution of marriage would likewise best be addressed through legal uncoupling of heterogeneous social components embodied in the contemporary social institution of marriage. (shrink)

This paper argues that political civility is actually an illusionistic ideal and that, as such, realism counsels that we acknowledge both its promise and peril. Political civility is, I will argue, a tension-filled ideal. We have good normative reasons to strive for and encourage more civil political interactions, as they model our acknowledgement of others as equal citizens and facilitate high-quality democratic problem-solving. But we must simultaneously be attuned to civility’s limitations, its possible pernicious side-effects, and its potential for strategic (...) manipulation and oppressive abuse, particularly in contemporary, pluralistic and heterogeneous societies. (shrink)

Theorien der "Anerkennung" zeichnen sich durch eine außergewöhnliche Leistungsstärke aus. In den letzten Jahren haben sie die Forschung auf den Gebieten der Moralphilosophie, der Politischen Philosophie und der Sozialphilosophie, aber auch auf denen der Psychologie und der Sozialwissenschaften sowohl thematisch als auch methodisch sehr stark bereichert. Viele dieser Theorien versuchen zudem, Überlegungen, die von klassischen Autoren wie Fichte oder Hegel entwickelt wurden, für die aktuelle Diskussion systematisch fruchtbar zu machen. Dieser Konstellation trägt der vorliegende Band Rechnung. Durch eine Verzahnung von (...) systematischen und philosophiegeschichtlichen Überlegungen leistet er einen wesentlichen Beitrag zur Lösung und Weiterentwicklung aktueller anerkennungstheoretischer Probleme und Fragestellungen sowie zu einer Neuinterpretation klassischer philosophischer Texte. Aufgrund seines thematischen Zuschnitts ist das Buch nicht nur für Philosophen, sondern auch für Sozialwissenschaftler von großem Interesse. Mit Beiträgen von: J. Bernstein, D. Brudney, J.-Ph. Déranty, N. Fraser, A. Honneth, H. Ikäheimo, A. Laitinen, F. Neuhouser, T. Pinkard, M. Quante, E. Renault, H.-C. Schmidt am Busch, L. Siep, A. Wildt und Ch. F. Zurn. (shrink)

Recent work in democratic theory has seriously questioned the dominant pluralist model of self-government and recommended the adoption of a ‘deliberative’ conception of constitutional democracy. With this shift in basic political theory, the objection to judicial review, often voiced in jurisprudential theory, as an anti-democratic instance of paternalism merits another look. This paper argues that the significant differences between four recent theories of constitutional review—put forward by Ely, Perry, Dworkin, and Habermas—are best understood as arising from different positions taken on (...) two cross-cutting distinctions that have been inherited from Locke and Rousseau: democratic processes as aggregative versus deliberative, and democratic legitimacy as substantive versus procedural. A reconstruction and critical evaluation of the four theories of judicial review, with special emphasis on their underlying theories of constitutional democracy, yields a set of criteria for adequate accounts of democratic processes, democratic legitimacy, and their relation to judicial review. I argue that the best understanding of constitutional review is yielded by Habermas’s theory because it combines a conception of popular sovereignty in terms of the collective process of citizens’ deliberative attempt to institutionalize the general will through law, with a resolutely proceduralist conception of democratic legitimacy. However, I also argue that some of the specific proposals Habermas makes concerning the institutionalization of constitutional review in an independent, non-accountable judiciary and the scope of duties for such a body need to be modified in the light of his overriding commitments to participatory deliberative processes and procedural legitimacy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.2 (2002) 274-275 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Perspectives on Habermas Lewis Edwin Hahn, editor. Perspectives on Habermas. New York: Open Court, 2000. Pp. xiv + 586. Paper, $29.95. This collection of essays on the wide-ranging body of thought produced by Jürgen Habermas over the course of close to fifty years represents a significant lost opportunity. Although originally planned as a volume (...) in the Library of Living Philosophers series, in 1999 Habermas pulled out of the project because, as Hahn tells us, "of other events in his life" (ix). Volumes in this series have typically provided unique and valuable resources: not only quality secondary essays by leading contemporary philosophers, but essay-by-essay responses by the featured philosopher, as well as an intellectual autobiography, and a useful bibliography. Unfortunately, the present volume not only lacks Habermas's responses to the contributors, an intellectual autobiography, and a bibliography of his works, but is also comprised of essays whose collective quality can only be considered notably erose, containing essays of both significant and questionable value.First the bad news. Of the twenty-nine essays just over half are not worth reading for those either new to, or long familiar with, Habermas. The great majority of these present significantly distorted or confused accounts of different aspects of his work, often apparently based on little or no familiarity with the primary source material, and close to none with the significant body of secondary literature. Some authors seem not to have read anything published in English translation by Habermas past 1973 or so, even though his two most significant works--The Theory of Communicative Action (1984 and 1987) and Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (1996)--appeared later. Ignorance of the second of these is especially pronounced throughout and regrettable since many patently false claims about Habermas's positions on issues in political philosophy, legal theory, and social theory could have been avoided by consulting Between Facts and Norms, rather than deriving "Habermas's position" aprioristically from what one thinks he might say. Other essays present particularly nasty and personalized invective in the place of argument: one author for example, calls Habermas's political opinions "pathological," "inhumane," "exhibiting a seriously flawed sensitivity," and so "beastly" as to raise "profound questions about the writer's claims to superior rationality."The good news is that close to half of the volume contains important and stimulating work. Some of the best of this performs the crucial tasks of sensitively explicating Habermas's ideas, carefully critiquing them where needed, and finally extending the reformed ideas to new domains, new problems, and new issues. Exemplary in this way is James Bohman's [End Page 274] piece on reviving the project of ideology critique by using Robert Brandom's pragmatic inferentialism to cash out Habermas's notion of systematically distorted communication. Other useful articles on broadly epistemic themes include those by David Detmer, Richard Palmer, Carlos Pereda, and Beth Singer.Two essays--by Enrique Dussel and James Marsh--represent broad and incisive, yet sympathetic, critiques of Habermas for not sufficiently carrying through on the emancipatory promise of critical theory. Both point to a certain preoccupation in Habermas's work in moral and political theory with issues of rationality, proceduralism, and ideal justification that seems to have crowded out a practical focus on issues of poverty, inequality, and exploitation, especially as these are articulated through the emerging structures of global capitalism and along the fault lines separating West and East, North and South. Concurring in political upshot, but drawing on Habermas's new form of social contractarian argument, David Ingram argues provocatively that Habermas's ideals of social equality require much more radical forms of "market socialism" and direct democratic self-organization than Habermas himself is willing to endorse. Douglas Kellner's outstanding article gives a clear overview of Habermas's changing conception of the public sphere and its role in democracy, presents various criticisms of that, and argues for an account conceptually and evaluatively adequate to the emergence... (shrink)

In Between Facts and Norms (1992) Habermas set out a theory of law and politics that is linked both to our high normative expectations and to the realities consequent upon the practices and institutions meant to put them into effect. The article discusses Hugh Baxter’s Habermas: The Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy and the drawbacks he finds in Habermas’ theory. It focuses on raising questions about and objections to some of the author’s leading claims.

This volume collects original, cutting-edge essays on the philosophy of recognition by international scholars eminent in the field. By considering the topic of recognition as addressed by both classical and contemporary authors, the volume explores the connections between historical and contemporary recognition research and makes substantive contributions to the further development of contemporary theories of recognition.

The phenomenal overflow debate is a debate about the richness of phenomenal consciousness. There are two candidate views: the rich view and the sparse view. The rich view says phenomenal consciousness outstrips access consciousness and the contents of working memory. The sparse view denies this. Moreover, according to some conceptions of the sparse view, the subjective impression of richness depends on scene statistics and the refrigerator-light illusion. The purpose of this paper is to show there are additional resources available to (...) the sparse view in accommodating intuitions of richness that have yet to be fully appreciated by participants in the debate. To this end, research pertaining to feature binding and activity-silent working memory will be discussed. (shrink)

There are many accounts of representation in the philosophical literature. However, regarding olfaction, Burge’s (2010) account is widely endorsed. According to his account, perceptual representation is always of an objective reality, that is, perception represents objects as such. Many authors presuppose this account of representation and attempt to show that the olfactory system itself issues in representations of that sort. The present paper argues that this myopia is a mistake and, moreover, that the various arguments in favor of olfactory objects (...) fail. Yet, by taking seriously a minimal notion of representation, adopted from Shea (2018), we can see that the olfactory system is representational after all even if it doesn’t represent objects as such. That is, olfaction issues in minimal representations. Crucially, however, this paper will conclude with an argument to the effect that olfactory object files (objectual representations of olfactory objectual properties) are constructed by interactions between various mental systems. The claim to be defended is that objectual representations of olfactory objects are constructed when minimal olfactory content is embedded in object-files that contain other non-olfactory properties that meet Burge’s criteria for representation. Some extant work on feature-binding, attention, and object-files will be introduced to support the suggestion. (shrink)

How can the power of wholes be resisted without essentializing their parts? Drawing on different archives and methodologies, including aesthetics, history, biology, affect, race, and queer, the interventions in this volume explore different ways of troubling the consistency and stability of wholes, breaking up their closure and making them more dynamic. Doing so without necessarily presupposing or producing parts, an outside, or a teleological development, they indicate the critical potential of partiality without parts.

A new approach examined two aspects of chess skill, long a popular topic in cognitive science. A powerful computer‐chess program calculated the number and magnitude of blunders made by the same 23 grandmasters in hundreds of serious games of slow (“classical”) chess, regular “rapid” chess, and rapid “blindfold” chess, in which opponents transmit moves without ever seeing the actual position. Rapid chess led to substantially more and larger blunders than classical chess. Perhaps more surprisingly, the frequency and magnitude of blunders (...) did not differ in rapid versus blindfold play, despite the additional memory and visualization load imposed by the latter. We discuss the involvement of various cognitive processes in human problem‐solving and expertise, especially with respect to chess. Prior opposing views about the basis of general chess skill have emphasized the dominance of either (a) swift pattern recognition or (b) analyzing ahead, but both seem important and the controversy appears currently unresolvable and perhaps fruitless. (shrink)

The party registration of tenure‐track faculty at 11 California universities, ranging from small, private, religiously affiliated institutions to large, public, elite schools, shows that the “one‐party campus” conjecture does not extend to all institutions or all departments. At one end of the scale, U.C. Berkeley has an adjusted Democrat:Republican ratio of almost 9:1, while Pepperdine University has a ratio of nearly 1:1. Academic field also makes a tremendous difference, with the humanities averaging a 10:1 D:R ratio and business schools averaging (...) 1.3:1, and with departments ranging from sociology (44:1) to management (1.5:1). Across all departments and institutions, the D:R ratio is 5:1, while in the “soft” liberal‐arts fields, the ratio is higher than 8:1. These findings are generally in line with comparable previous studies. (shrink)

Miles Little is an Australian surgeon, poet, and philosopher whose published work spans diverse topics in surgery, medicine, philosophy, and bioethics. In 1974 he co-authored a survey that included an analysis of interviews conducted with amputees. This was his first foray into qualitative research. Twenty years later he established a research centre at the University of Sydney that initiated a programme of qualitative research in cancer medicine. For twenty years after that, the centre acted as a hub for research that (...) applied qualitative methods from the social sciences to study the experiences of people who endure illness and onerous treatments and to reveal their evaluations of what medicine does to and for them. This essay explains why Little turned to qualitative research instead of pursuing two other research paradigms that were better established in the 1990s, namely, evidence-based medicine and quality-of-life research. It also notes a development in qualitative research methods that Little’s legacy helps to explain, one which can augment the symbolic power of socially marginalized individuals and groups. With reference to a current controversy in surgery, I argue that Little’s survey of amputees models a laudable response to criticism, and in this respect, it is still relevant today. (shrink)

One way of explaining Rudolf Carnap’s mature philosophical view is by drawing an analogy between his technical projects—like his work on inductive logic—with a certain kind of conceptual engineering. After all, there are many mathematical similarities between Carnap’s work in inductive logic and a number of results from contemporary confirmation theory, statistics and mathematical probability theory. However, in stressing these similarities, the conceptual dependence of Carnap’s inductive logic on his work on semantics is downplayed. Yet it is precisely the conceptual (...) resources made available to Carnap from his work on semantics which allows him to understand his work on inductive logic as a kind of conceptual engineering project. The aim of this paper is to elucidate this engineering analogy in light of Carnap’s mature views through the lens of both inductive logic and semantics. (shrink)

Aristotle is often named as the first zoologist or biologist because of his writings on animals. Although Aristotle’s major intention in these books was to illustrate his ideas of how knowledge and understanding might advance, at least one modern biologist (C. Darwin) has recognized Aristotle's depth and breadth as being of surviving merit. Of greater surprise is the ongoing attention that his works continue to receive, including publications in contemporary scientific journals. This review identifies 38 peer-reviewed papers on various topics (...) from Aristotle’s biological writings that have been published during the last 50 years. These papers are described according to content (genetics, population biology, anatomy, brain, movement), specific creatures (fish, scorpions, elephants, insects, birds), publication outlet, distribution over the fifty year period surveyed, and visible trends in the topics studied. It is concluded that, in the highly-competitive field of peer-reviewed scientific publication and citation, Aristotle's biology continues to excite the interest of scientists and remains salient to modern science itself. (shrink)

Games are more varied and occupy more of daily life than ever before. At the same time, the tools available to study game play and players are more powerful than ever, especially massive data sets from online platforms and computational engines that can accurately evaluate human decisions. This essay offers six suggestions for future cognitive science research on games: Don't forget about chess, Look beyond action games and chess, Use -optimal play to understand human play and players, Investigate social phenomena, (...) Raise the standards for studies of games as treatments, Talk to real experts. (shrink)

This thesis addresses the problem of the analysis of knowledge. The persistent failure of analyses of knowledge in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions is used to motivate exploring alternative approaches to the analytical problem. In parallel to a similar development in the theory of truth, in which the persistent failure to provide a satisfactory answer to the question as to what the nature of truth is has led to the exploration of deflationary and minimalist approaches to the theory of (...) truth, the prospects for deflationary and minimalist approaches to the theory of knowledge are investigated. While it is argued that deflationary approaches are ultimately unsatisfactory, a minimalist approach to epistemology, which characterises the concept of knowledge by a set of platitudes about knowledge, is defended. The first version of a minimalist framework for the theory of knowledge is developed. Two more substantive developments of the minimalist framework are discussed. In the first development a safety condition on knowledge is derived from the minimalist framework. Problems for this development are discussed and solved. In the second development, an ability condition is derived from the minimalist framework. Reason is provided to believe that, arguably, the ability condition can avoid the problems that beset traditional analyses of knowledge. It is also shown that even if this argument fails, minimalist approaches to epistemology may serve to provide a functional definition of knowledge. Reason is thus provided to believe that minimalist approaches to epistemology can make progress towards addressing the problem of the analysis of knowledge. (shrink)

My dissertation explores the ways in which Rudolf Carnap sought to make philosophy scientific by further developing recent interpretive efforts to explain Carnap’s mature philosophical work as a form of engineering. It does this by looking in detail at his philosophical practice in his most sustained mature project, his work on pure and applied inductive logic. I, first, specify the sort of engineering Carnap is engaged in as involving an engineering design problem and then draw out the complications of design (...) problems from current work in history of engineering and technology studies. I then model Carnap’s practice based on those lessons and uncover ways in which Carnap’s technical work in inductive logic takes some of these lessons on board. This shows ways in which Carnap’s philosophical project subtly changes right through his late work on induction, providing an important corrective to interpretations that ignore the work on inductive logic. Specifically, I show that paying attention to the historical details of Carnap’s attempt to apply his work in inductive logic to decision theory and theoretical statistics in the 1950s and 1960s helps us understand how Carnap develops and rearticulates the philosophical point of the practical/theoretical distinction in his late work, offering thus a new interpretation of Carnap’s technical work within the broader context of philosophy of science and analytical philosophy in general. (shrink)