A critical interrogation of elements of Hobbes's political and natural philosophy and its capacity to enrich our understanding of the natural of democratic life.

This book critically reevaluates the political thought of Niccolò Machiavelli, demonstrating the extent to which he can be seen to formulate a unique ethical foundation for democratic practice that is grounded in the creative orientation of all individuals.

Thinking Radical Democracy is an introduction to nine key political thinkers who contributed to the emergence of radical democratic thought in post-war French political theory: Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Pierre Clastres, Claude Lefort, Cornelius Castoriadis, Guy Debord, Jacques Rancière, Étienne Balibar, and Miguel Abensour. The essays in this collection connect these writers through their shared contribution to the idea that division and difference in politics can be perceived as productive, creative, and fundamentally democratic. The questions they raise regarding equality and (...) emancipation in a democratic society will be of interest to those studying social and political thought or democratic activist movements like the Occupy movements and Idle No More. --Provided by publisher. (shrink)

This article suggests that the philosophical contributions of the French democratic theorist Miguel Abensour offer a unique model for the practice of the history of political thought. Under the influence of the first generation of Frankfurt School critical theory, Abensour can be seen as applying a method of thinking in constellations to the study of historical texts, the critical rearrangement of conceptual elements drawn from the latter generating new dialectical images that reveal something previously obscured about the object of investigation. (...) The history of political thought on this model is less about the recuperation of a definite textual intelligibility than the revelation of social and political alterity. (shrink)

Recent scholarship on the political thought of Niccolò Machiavelli has demonstrated the extent to which the latter's republicanism is of a populist type, and a potentially important resource for contemporary democratic theory. Although work has been produced on the constitutional form of the Machiavellian republic, less effort has been made to articulate the theoretical assumptions upon which the advocacy of such a republic is ethically grounded. Here, I attempt to locate the democratic ethical imperative in the affirmation of a fundamental (...) human difference. Influenced by the Epicurean tradition, Machiavelli's natural philosophy considers material entities as absolute singularities lacking internal teleological direction, their movement the productive result of contingent encounters. One cannot assume a natural or pre-social identity of desire between persons. Democracy is the ethically preferred regime because it is the one that is capable of facilitating the expression of this human uniqueness. (shrink)

This article examines the political anthropological work of Pierre Clastres in light of the emergence of the subfield of comparative political theory. In particular, it argues that Clastres’ recons...

In this essay I consider the potential of Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories to contribute to the enrichment of contemporary democratic theory. In opposition to both of the major groups of current interpreters of this text—those who see it as representative of a conservative turn in Machiavelli’s thought grounded in a newfound skepticism regarding popular political competencies, and those who see it as merely a re-presentation of the republican commitments of the Discourses on Livy—I argue that it reveals to us a unique (...) political potentiality, but one that is essential for the construction of an internally consistent Machiavellian theory of democracy. Specifically, through disclosing the historicity and contingency of the humors of the parts of the city, the Histories suggests the possibility of concretely actualizing a condition of social equality, thus overcoming the main democratic deficit of the Discourses—the perpetuation of inequality, as represented in the preservation of the existence of a class with a desire to oppress. (shrink)

Politics as Radical Creation examines the meaning of democratic practice through the critical social theory of the Frankfurt School. It provides an understanding of democratic politics as a potentially performative good-in-itself, undertaken not just to the extent that it seeks to achieve a certain extrinsic goal, but also in that it functions as a medium for the expression of creative human impulses. Christopher Holman develops this potential model through a critical examination of the political philosophies of Herbert Marcuse (...) and Hannah Arendt. (shrink)

This article suggests that the philosophical contributions of the French democratic theorist Miguel Abensour offer a unique model for the practice of the history of political thought. Under the influence of the first generation of Frankfurt School critical theory, Abensour can be seen as applying a method of thinking in constellations to the study of historical texts, the critical rearrangement of conceptual elements drawn from the latter generating new dialectical images that reveal something previously obscured about the object of investigation. (...) The history of political thought on this model is less about the recuperation of a definite textual intelligibility than the revelation of social and political alterity. (shrink)

Perhaps the most often criticized element of Hannah Arendt's political theory is her insistence on the necessity of constructing and maintaining rigid boundaries between various activities of the human condition. Less often, however, is the attempt undertaken to determine the philosophical motivation stimulating this project of distinction. This article will attempt to demonstrate the extent to which Arendt's imperative is rooted in a certain misreading of the Marxian dialectic. The first part of the article will outline the contours of Arendt's (...) erroneous interpretation of Marx's understanding of labour, demonstrating the degree to which the latter breaks down the tripartite structure of the vita activa. The second part of the article will read Arendt's affirmation of distinction as being a response to what Arendt will take to be the problems of the dialectic, specifically the dialectic's allegedly necessary positing of conceptual contingency and logical necessity. Finally, the third part of the article will demonstrate, through an examination of two key passages in the work of Marx, the extent to which Marx himself was just as concerned with overcoming the type of homogeneous and abstract universalism rejected by Arendt. The ground will thus be provided for the overcoming of the necessity of Arendtian distinction, and perhaps also for a more fruitful engagement between the Marxian and Arendtian theoretical problematics. (shrink)

The work of Herbert Marcuse, unlike that of certain of his colleagues at the Institut für Sozialforschung, is most often maligned as being excessively positive and identitarian. His work on Freud, for example, is criticized for being grounded in a crude biological determinism which points towards an ultimate reconciliation of both psychic and social conflict. This essay will attempt to counter such readings by critically juxtaposing Marcuse’s concept of non-repressive sublimation with Cornelius Castoriadis’s understanding of psychic socialization. It will be (...) suggested that the affinities between Marcuse and Castoriadis’s appropriations of Freudian metapsychology reveals the degree to which the former can be read as a radical democratic thinker affirming the values of autonomy and creativity. This reading demonstrates that Marcuse has much to contribute to contemporary debates on the role of the aesthetic and the sensuous in democratic theory. (shrink)

This article suggests that the philosophical contributions of the French democratic theorist Miguel Abensour offer a unique model for the practice of the history of political thought. Under the influence of the first generation of Frankfurt School critical theory, Abensour can be seen as applying a method of thinking in constellations to the study of historical texts, the critical rearrangement of conceptual elements drawn from the latter generating new dialectical images that reveal something previously obscured about the object of investigation. (...) The history of political thought on this model is less about the recuperation of a definite textual intelligibility than the revelation of social and political alterity. (shrink)

This article seeks to address a tension in contemporary scholarship regarding Machiavelli’s view of human nature. While it is common for readers to identify Machiavelli’s rejection of any foundational law that determines the structure of the world, it is just as common for them to abstract human nature from this world and thereby to posit a fixed human essence. Machiavelli is thus seen as an anti-essentialist when it comes to external nature and as an essentialist when it comes to internal (...) human nature. I will attempt to demonstrate, however, that for Machiavelli these two interpretations are integrated into an overall ontology of being that rejects all forms of essentialist thinking, including all positive models of human nature. Machiavelli’s rejection of a fixed or positive human essence will be demonstrated by analyzing his account of the openness of human being to change and alteration by socialization, and his account of the multiplicity of forms of human doing and being. I argue that Machia... (shrink)

This paper will provide an immanent critique of the political theory of Herbert Marcuse. I argue that Marcuse’s politics are often inadequate when considered from the standpoint of his theory of socialism, the latter being understood as the realization of the negative human capacity for creation in all those fields within which the human being is active. Although Marcuse’s politics often reveals itself as instrumental and managerialist in orientation, I will argue that there nevertheless remains a certain countertendency in his (...) philosophy, one which can be seen as affirming a negative and nonidentitarian politics of overcoming that looks always toward creation. (shrink)

In Minimal Rationality, Christopher Cherniak boldly challenges the myth of Man the the Rational Animal and the central role that the "perfectly rational...

The coherence objection to the doctrine of the Incarnation maintains that it is impossible for one individual to have both the attributes of God and the attributes of a human being. This article examines Thomas Aquinas’s answer to this objection. I challenge the dominant, mereological interpretation of Aquinas’s position and, in light of this challenge, develop and defend a new alternative interpretation of Aquinas’s response to this important objection to Christian doctrine.

Assertion is the central vehicle for the sharing of knowledge. Whether knowledge is shared successfully often depends on the quality of assertions: good assertions lead to successful knowledge sharing, while bad ones don't. In Sharing Knowledge, Christoph Kelp and Mona Simion investigate the relation between knowledge sharing and assertion, and develop an account of what it is to assert well. More specifically, they argue that the function of assertion is to share knowledge with others. It is this function that supports (...) a central norm of assertion according to which a good assertion is one that has the disposition to generate knowledge in others. The book uses this functionalist approach to motivate further norms of assertion on both the speaker and the hearer side and investigates ramifications of this view for other questions about assertion. (shrink)

The ethics of autonomous cars and automated driving have been a subject of discussion in research for a number of years :28–58, 2016). As levels of automation progress, with partially automated driving already becoming standard in new cars from a number of manufacturers, the question of ethical and legal standards becomes virulent. For exam-ple, while automated and autonomous cars, being equipped with appropriate detection sensors, processors, and intelligent mapping material, have a chance of being much safer than human-driven cars in (...) many regards, situations will arise in which accidents cannot be completely avoided. Such situations will have to be dealt with when programming the software of these vehicles. In several instances, internationally, regulations have been passed, based on legal considerations of road safety, mostly. However, to date, there have been few, if any, cases of a broader ethics code for autonomous or automated driving preceding actual regulation and being based on a broadly composed ethics committee of independent experts. In July 2016, the German Federal Minister of Transport and Digital Infrastructure, Alexander Dobrindt, appointed a national ethics committee for automated and connected driving, which began its work in September 2016. In June 2017, this committee presented a code of ethics which was published in German and in English. It consists of 20 ethical guidelines. Having been a member of this committee, I will present the main ethical topics of these guidelines and the discussions that lay behind them. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that a proper understanding of the historicity of love requires an appreciation of the irreplaceability of the beloved. I do this through a consideration of ideas that were first put forward by Robert Kraut in “Love De Re” (1986). I also evaluate Amelie Rorty's criticisms of Kraut's thesis in “The Historicity of Psychological Attitudes: Love is Not Love Which Alters Not When It Alteration Finds” (1986). I argue that Rorty fundamentally misunderstands Kraut's Kripkean analogy, and (...) I go on to criticize her claim that concern over the proper object of love should be best understood as a concern over constancy. This leads me to an elaboration of the distinct senses in which love can be seen as historical. I end with a further defense of the irreplaceability of the beloved and a discussion of the relevance of recent debates over the importance of personal identity for an adequate account of the historical dimension of love. (shrink)

This handbook article gives a critical overview of recent discussions of epistemic authority. It favors an account that brings into balance the dictates of rational deference with the ideals of intellectual self-governance. A plausible starting point is the conjecture that neither should rational deference to authorities collapse into total epistemic submission, nor the ideal of mature intellectual self-governance be conflated with (illusions of) epistemic autarky.

There is now a general consensus amongst philosophers in the values in science literature that values necessarily play a role in core areas of scientific inquiry. We argue that attention should now be turned from debating the value-free ideal to delineating legitimate from illegitimate influences of values in science, a project we dub “The New Demarcation Problem.” First, we review past attempts to demarcate the uses of values and propose a categorization of the strategies by where they seek to draw (...) legitimacy from. Next, we propose a set of desiderata for what we take to be a satisfactory solution and present a case study where conflicting sets of values clearly impinge on science, but where the legitimacy of their influence is ambiguous. We use these desiderata and the case study to illustrate what we take to be the strengths and weaknesses of current strategies. To be clear, our goal is not to answer the question we pose, but to articulate a framework within which a solution can be judged. (shrink)

This paper is built around a single, simple idea. It is widely agreed that there is a distinctive kind of awareness each of us has of his own bodily actions. This action-awareness is different from any perceptual awareness a subject may have of his own actions; it can exist in the absence of such perceptual awareness. The single, simple idea around which this paper is built is that the distinctive awareness that subjects have of their own mental actions is a (...) form of action-awareness. Subjects’ awareness of their own mental actions is a species of the same genus that also includes the distinctive awareness of bodily actions. More specifically, I claim. (shrink)

Christopher Hookway presents a series of essays on the work of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1913), the 'founder of pragmatism' and one of the most important and original American philosophers.

How does good combine with bad? Most creatures are neither so blessed as to only enjoy good nor so cursed as to only suffer bad. Rather, the good and bad they receive throughout their lives combine to produce their overall quality of life. But it’s not just whole lives that have combined good and bad. Many stretches within contain both positive and negative occurrences whose value is joined to form the overall quality of that span of time. In a single (...) morning someone might wake up, brush their teeth, stub their toe groggily lumbering down the stairs, and have a sip of coffee that’s tasty but so hot they burn their tongue. These events are good and bad for them to various degrees, and their value comes together to form an overall value for them of that morning. A single moment, even, can have combined value from distinct pockets of good and bad that occur simultaneously. The tastiness of the coffee is good, but the pain of the heat is bad. They combine to form an overall value of the sipping moment – negative if the pain outweighed the flavor. Thus, wellbeing and illbeing combine. But how? How can someone rightly chastise themselves for sipping the overly hot coffee when it was, in fact, good because it was tasty? To pose the question starkly, a life can be bad, even so bad to not be worth living, and yet it can have many instances of good, where these goods are, in themselves, pure of any negativity. But how can good make something bad? (shrink)

A number of cases involving self-locating beliefs have been discussed in the Bayesian literature. I suggest that many of these cases, such as the sleeping beauty case, are entangled with issues that are independent of self-locating beliefs per se. In light of this, I propose a division of labor: we should address each of these issues separately before we try to provide a comprehensive account of belief updating. By way of example, I sketch some ways of extending Bayesianism in order (...) to accommodate these issues. Then, putting these other issues aside, I sketch some ways of extending Bayesianism in order to accommodate self-locating beliefs. Finally, I propose a constraint on updating rules, the "Learning Principle", which rules out certain kinds of troubling belief changes, and I use this principle to assess some of the available options. (shrink)