Hegel's "Elements of the Philosophy of Right" offers an innovative and important account of normativity, yet the theory set forth there rests on philosophical foundations that have remained largely obscure. In "Hegel's Theory of Normativity," Kevin Thompson proposes an interpretation of the foundations that underlie Hegel's theory: its method of justification, its concept of freedom, and its account of right. Thompson shows how the systematic character of Hegel's project together with the metaphysical commitments that follow from its (...) method are essential to secure this theory against the challenges of skepticism and to understand its distinctive contribution to questions regarding normative justification, practical agency, social ontology, and the nature of critique--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

In this Introduction, we offer, in the first section, a brief sketch of events before turning to track the profound innovations in militancy and theory that Le Group d'information sur les prisons (The Prisons Information Group, the GIP) and its work represent. In the second section, we explore the GIP’s prisoner-centered and largely prisoner-led structure, predicated on the recognition that prisoners have the political knowledge and political agency most relevant to prison resistance movements. In the third section, we trace the (...) GIP’s concomitant reconceptualization of the prison and the intellectual, both of which it embeds in a shared social field of which the former is symptomatic and to which the latter is beholden. In the fourth section, we develop the GIP’s anti-carceral, even abolitionist, legacies implicit within these innovations of militancy and theory, as well as across its archive more generally. Finally, in the fifth section, we close by sketching the GIP archive’s critical reception to date and then carve out new frontiers of interpretive debate in light of contemporary incarceration practices and developments in anti-carceral theory. (shrink)

A groundbreaking collection of writings by Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group documenting their efforts to expose France’s inhumane treatment of prisoners. Founded by Michel Foucault and others in 1970–71, the Prisons Information Group (GIP) circulated information about the inhumane conditions within the French prison system. Intolerable makes available for the first time in English a fully annotated compilation of materials produced by the GIP during its brief but influential existence, including an exclusive new interview with GIP member Hélène (...) Cixous and writings by Gilles Deleuze and Jean Genet. (shrink)

AbSTRACTThis paper is concerned with Foucault's historical methodology. It argues that the coherence of his project lies in its development of a set of tools for unearthing the historical principles that govern thought and practice in the epochs that have shaped the present age. Foucault claimed that these principles are, at once, transcendental and historical. Accordingly, the philosophical soundness of Foucault's project depends on his having developed a satisfactory way of passage between the absolutist purism of the transcendental and the (...) mundane contingency of the historical. The paper shows that the key to seeing how Foucault achieved this desideratum lies in a surprising and largely unexplored methodological tradition that he himself explicitly acknowledged: Husserlian phenomenology as it was taken up, modifed, and practiced in the thought of the philosopher of logic and mathematics, Jean Cavaillès—what I call the phenomenology of the concept.The essay has four parts. The first sketches the two most prominent lines of interpretation of Foucault's methodology and argues that both are inadequate, not least because they both dismiss Foucault's phenomenological heritage. The second part lays out the rudiments of the neglected strand of the phenomenological tradition inaugurated by Cavaillès's important critique and appropriation of Husserlian method. This serves, in turn, to set the stage for the third part that examines, first, Canguilhem's and then Foucault's distinct projects for grasping the transcendental within the historical, and the historical within the transcendental—their respective continuations of Cavaillès's phenomenology of the concept. The essay concludes with a brief consideration of the pathways that this way of reading Foucault opens up for understanding the nexus of power, knowledge, and subjectivation that came to define his work. (shrink)

What philosophical motivations lay behind the emergence of the genealogical method in Foucault’s thought? Pace traditional interpretations, I argue that genealogy is best construed as a supplementary addition to the archaeological mode of investigation. It addresses an issue that arose within the problematic to which the archaeological method responds, but which that method was not designed to solve: the problem of “transcendental genesis” as this issue was defined within the unique parameters set forth by the French phenomenological tradition.

Three experiments investigated reasoners' beliefs about causal powers; that is, their beliefs about the capacity of a putative cause to produce a given effect. Covariation-based theories (e.g., Cheng, 1997; Kelley, 1973; Novick & Cheng, 2004) posit that beliefs in causal power are represented in terms of the degree of covariation between the cause and its effect; covariation is defined in terms of the degree to which the effect occurs in the presence of the cause, and fails tooccur in the absence (...) of the cause. To test the degree to which beliefs incausal power are reflected in beliefs about covariation information, participants in three experiments rated their beliefs that putative causes have the capacity to produce a given effect (i.e., possess the causal power to produce an effect) as well as their beliefs regarding the degree to which the putative cause and effectcovary. A strong positive correlation was discovered between participants' beliefs in causal power and their beliefs that the effect occurs in the presence of the cause. However, no direct relationship was found between participants' beliefs in causal power and their belief that the effect will fail tooccur in the absence of the cause. These findings were replicated using bothwithin- (Experiments 1 and 3) and between-subject designs (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, we extended these analyses to measures of familiarity, imageability, and detailedness of the representation. We found that participants' beliefs in causal power were strongly associated with familiarity, and imageability, but not the perceived detailedness of the cause and effect relationship. These data provide support for a multidimensional account of causal knowledge whereby people's representations of causation include, but are not limited to, the covariation, familiarity, and imageability of cause and effect relationships. (shrink)

AbSTRACTThis paper is concerned with Foucault's historical methodology. It argues that the coherence of his project lies in its development of a set of tools for unearthing the historical principles that govern thought and practice in the epochs that have shaped the present age. Foucault claimed that these principles are, at once, transcendental and historical. Accordingly, the philosophical soundness of Foucault's project depends on his having developed a satisfactory way of passage between the absolutist purism of the transcendental and the (...) mundane contingency of the historical. The paper shows that the key to seeing how Foucault achieved this desideratum lies in a surprising and largely unexplored methodological tradition that he himself explicitly acknowledged: Husserlian phenomenology as it was taken up, modifed, and practiced in the thought of the philosopher of logic and mathematics, Jean Cavaillès—what I call the phenomenology of the concept.The essay has four parts. The first sketches the two most prominent lines of interpretation of Foucault's methodology and argues that both are inadequate, not least because they both dismiss Foucault's phenomenological heritage. The second part lays out the rudiments of the neglected strand of the phenomenological tradition inaugurated by Cavaillès's important critique and appropriation of Husserlian method. This serves, in turn, to set the stage for the third part that examines, first, Canguilhem's and then Foucault's distinct projects for grasping the transcendental within the historical, and the historical within the transcendental—their respective continuations of Cavaillès's phenomenology of the concept. The essay concludes with a brief consideration of the pathways that this way of reading Foucault opens up for understanding the nexus of power, knowledge, and subjectivation that came to define his work. (shrink)

The concept of political authority is the guiding problematic of Kant's mature political philosophy. The proper foundation of state authority lies, according to him, in the idea of an “original contract” and it is only in terms of this regulative principle that the sovereign nature of the state can even be conceived. By placing this doctrine at the core of his political thought Kant appears to affirm the fundamental tenet of the contractarian tradition: legitimate political authority arises only from the (...) consent of those under such authority. (shrink)

This volume is a collection of phenomenological investigations of the political domain. The essays analyze basic concepts such as action, community, and the relation of the political to the ethical, investigate fundamental issues such as the nation-state, leadership, sovereignty, and responsibility, and they examine the convergence of these matters as exemplified in racial discrimination. The volume also includes discussions of the often-neglected work of such important contributors to this field as Alfred Schutz and Paul Ricoeur.

Hegel's system is not teleological. For a philosophy to be teleological, as I shall use the term, means that it takes the basic nature of the world itself or any foundational account of that world to be defined ultimately by final causality. Such a view has, of course, long stood as the dominant model for interpreting Hegel's system. This essay argues, to the contrary, that the accounts of Teleology and Life in the Science of Logic, and more precisely their analyses (...) of what Hegel calls there subjective purpose and objective purpose, actually demonstrate this conception of teleology to be profoundly mistaken.The conventional reading of these sections is that they argue for two related claims: (1) that the means-ends relationship of extrinsic purposiveness—subjective purpose—is made possible by the intrinsic self-organizing process of intrinsic purposiveness; and (2) that intrinsic purposiveness—objective purpose—takes the basic structure of an organism, a natural purpose (Naturzweck), as its model, a model defined by final causality. I show this to be a deeply flawed interpretation. Hegel certainly shows that extrinsic purposiveness entails intrinsic purposiveness, but he does not conceive of intrinsic purposiveness, objective purpose, in terms of the final causality inherent in the model of a natural purpose. Rather, the systematic account of logical life argues that the activity of life must be understood as genus and this as a process of self-differentiation where the immanent and necessary unfolding of determinate negation itself, and itself alone, engenders the development without possessing or relating itself to any antecedent content. Hence, this austere thesis, rather than any form of final causality, is, as Hegel puts it, the truth of teleology, the nature of the absolute idea, and, as a result, Hegel's system is shown, at its very core, not to be teleological. (shrink)

This essay offers a review of the basic argument and a critique of some of the central claims of Johanna Oksala’s Foucault, Politics, and Violence.

According to Hegel, the determinations of the absolute are conceptual properties that identify what the absolute is, and are related through logical entailments. The shapes of the absolute are historical configurations that religion takes as it appears in the domain of contingent existence. This essay claims that Stewart’s interpretation does not observe this distinction, and as a result transforms the determinations of the absolute into projections of a people’s self-understanding. I argue that Hegel himself takes a history of religions to (...) be a logically necessary sequence in which the determinations of the absolute are articulated and proved, rather than a history of the cultural forms that the divine happens to have taken in the movement of human history. I examine as a test case the proper place of Islam in Hegel’s schema of determinate religions in order to show how Stewart’s conflation of determinations and shapes affects the possibility of determinate world-religions arising after what Hegel takes to be the consummate religion, Christianity. (shrink)

To address the question of the nature and function of conventions, this essay explores a possible systematic link between Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology and Foucault’s historical ontology. It argues that these analyses establish, contra to the cognitivist interpretation, dominant then and now, that conventions are properly understood not as “common knowledge” nor even as “jointly accepted beliefs” —that they are not, at least at their most fundamental layer, cognitive states at all—but are instead bodily dispositions that are forged by historically shifting (...) entwinements of practices of power and forms of knowledge. (shrink)

This paper seeks to further Foucault’s work by coming to understand the specific set of conditions that govern contemporary thought and action, the “historical a priori” of our age, and from this it seeks to assess the prospects for projects of collective self-formation. It focuses on two recent innovations in molecular science: genetic counseling and performance enhancement therapies. The paper argues, on the one hand, that these sorts of practices are indicative of a fundamentally new mode of governance, neoliberalism,and, on (...) the other, that these same techniques can be means for engendering alliances of self-formation that can resist the intolerable elements of contemporary biopolitics. The key to seeing this is shown to be understanding these new technologies as ascetic exercises (“spiritual disciplines”) and thus as falling under the rubric of spiritual development that has historically defined these arts. (shrink)

This paper argues that two distinct models of resistance are to be found in Foucault's work. The first, tactical reversal, is predicated on the idea that conflict is inherent to power relations, the strategical model of power, and thus that a specific configuration of power and knowledge can be thwarted by reversing the mechanisms whereby this relation is sustained. The second, the aesthetics of existence, is based in the governmental model of power and holds that it is possible to forge (...) autonomous forms of life in and through such techniques of governance. I argue that Foucault came to favor the latter of these two alternatives because the model of power underlying resistance as tactical reversal proved insufficient both historically and conceptually. It was thus on this basis that he was able to work out the governmental conception of power relations and thereby accord a fundamental role to the concept of resistance as autonomy or self-formation. The key to understanding how this project is not only practical, but is also our obligation lies in the genealogy of the critical attitude that Foucault was developing in his final years. (shrink)

We provide a retrospective of 25 years of the International Conference on AI and Law, which was first held in 1987. Fifty papers have been selected from the thirteen conferences and each of them is described in a short subsection individually written by one of the 24 authors. These subsections attempt to place the paper discussed in the context of the development of AI and Law, while often offering some personal reactions and reflections. As a whole, the subsections build into (...) a history of the last quarter century of the field, and provide some insights into where it has come from, where it is now, and where it might go. (shrink)

The thought of G. W. F. Hegel has had a deep and lasting influence on a wide range of philosophical, political, religious, aesthetic, cultural and scientific movements. But, despite the far-reaching importance of Hegel's thought, there is often a great deal of confusion about what he actually said or believed. This is an invaluable introduction for philosophical beginners and a useful reference source for more advanced scholars and researchers.

Democratic deliberation places the burden of self‐governance on its citizens to provide mutual justifying reasons (Gutmann & Thompson, 1996). This article concerns the limiting effect that group identity has on the efficacy of democratic deliberation for equality in education. Under conditions of a powerful majority, deliberation can be repressive and discriminatory. Issues of white flight and race‐based admissions serve to illustrate the bias of which deliberation is capable when it fails to substantively take group identity into account. As forms (...) of Gilbert's (1994) plural subjects, identity group members holding the group identity can experience agency as the freedom to believe together with members of their group. I argue that attending to how group members acquire group beliefs through trust is a reasonable accommodation of group identity in deliberation. (shrink)

In her book, Oksala shows that the arguments for the ineliminability of violence from the political are often based on excessively broad, ontological conceptions of violence distinct from its concrete and physical meaning and, on the other hand, on a restrictively narrow and empirical understanding of politics as the realm of conventional political institutions.

Part I: The representation of life -- Can life be given a real definition? -- The representation of the living individual -- The representation of the life-form itself -- Part II: Naive action theory -- Types of practical explanation -- Naive explanation of action -- Action and time -- Part III: Practical generality -- Two tendencies in practical philosophy -- Practices and dispositions as sources of the goodness of individual actions -- Practice and disposition as sources of individual action.

In this new work, political theorist Michael J. Thompson argues that modern societies are witnessing a decline in one of the core building blocks of modernity: the autonomous self. Far from being an illusion of the Enlightenment, Thompson contends that the individual is a defining feature of the project to build a modern democratic culture and polity. One of the central reasons for its demise in recent decades has been the emergence of what he calls the cybernetic society, (...) a cohesive totalization of the social logics of the institutional spheres of economy, culture and polity. These logics have been progressively defined by the imperatives of economic growth and technical-administrative management of labor and consumption, routinizing patterns of life, practices, and consciousness throughout the culture. Evolving out of the neoliberal transformation of economy and society since the 1980s, the cybernetic society has transformed how that the individual is articulated in contemporary society. Thompson examines the various pathologies of the self and consciousness that result from this form of socialization--such as hyper-reification, alienated moral cognition, false consciousness, and the withered ego--in new ways to demonstrate the extent of deformation of modern selfhood. Only with a more robust, more socially embedded concept of autonomy as critical agency can we begin to reconstruct the principles of democratic individuality and community. (shrink)

Accession Number: ATLA0001712130; Hosting Book Page Citation: p 226-235.; Language(s): English; General Note: Bibliography: p 234-235.; Issued by ATLA: 20130825; Publication Type: Essay.

The article presents critical examination of theories about collective responsibility attempting to cover responsibility for historic injustices. The author will also try to establish the possibility of collective responsibility for the present members of the group to make recompense for the injustices committed by their ancestors depending on two factors expounded in the article.

Although several important methodologies implicitly assume the truth of epistemic conservatism, the view that holding a belief confers some measure of justification on the belief, recent criticisms have led some to conclude that epistemic conservatism is an implausible view. That conclusion is mistaken. In this article, I propose a new formulation of epistemic conservatism that is not susceptible to the criticisms leveled at earlier formulations of epistemic conservatism. In addition to withstanding these criticisms, this formulation of epistemic conservatism has several (...) benefits. First, this formulation has the benefits of earlier formulations of epistemic conservatism, that is to say it makes sense of our intuitions about justification in regard to both memory beliefs and beliefs for which we have forgotten our evidence. Second, it provides a good way of responding to the skeptic’s challenge concerning the possibility of possessing knowledge of the external world posed by the Alternative Hypotheses argument. Third, it provides responses to both forms of a new skeptical problem plaguing basic knowledge structure theories, the Problem of Easy Knowledge formulated by Stewart Cohen. I argue that given the many benefits of this formulation of epistemic conservatism and the fact that it is not vulnerable to the criticisms that undermine earlier formulations of epistemic conservatism, this formulation of epistemic conservatism is a plausible view to maintain. (shrink)