In his book Das Recht der Freiheit, Axel Honneth develops a theory of social justice that incorporates negative, reflexive and social forms of freedom as well as the institutional conditions necessary for their reproduction. This account enables the identification of social pathologies or systemic normative deficits that frustrate individual efforts to relate their actions reflexively to a normative order and inhibits their ability to recognize the freedom of others as a condition of their own. In this article I utilize Honneth’s (...) theory in the diagnosis of a contemporary social pathology, which impedes social recognition and thereby contributes to social injustice. I argue that this particular social pathology – associated with the Second Amendment right to bear arms – has given rise to a pernicious form of subjectivity, which I call self-defensive. I conclude with some remarks concerning what this application reveals about the strengths and weaknesses of Honneth’s account. (shrink)

In this accessible introduction for students, teachers, and activists, Chad Kautzer guides readers through the dynamic field of radical philosophy. Kautzer s innovative approach is to organize the analysis of radical philosophical projects from Marxism, feminism, and queer theory to radical environmental, race, and political theory around their defining methodological commitments and emancipatory goals. Beginning with a discussion of the historical, dialectical, and reflexive forms of critique these projects employ, Radical Philosophy reveals the internal structure and overlapping (...) similarities of particular philosophical projects discussed in subsequent chapters. The result is a coherent and systematic introduction for beginners and specialists alike. (shrink)

There has been a persistent misunderstanding of the nature of cosmopolitanism in Immanuel Kant’s 1795 essay “Perpetual Peace,” viewing it as a qualitative break from the bellicose natural law tradition preceding it. This misunderstanding is in part due to Kant’s explicitly critical comments about colonialism as well as his attempt to rhetorically distance his cosmopolitanism from traditional natural law theory. In this paper, I argue that the necessary foundation for Kant’s cosmopolitan subjectivity and right was forged in the experience of (...) European colonialism and the (pre-Kantian) theory it engendered. It is in this context that we witness the universalization of subjectivity and the subjectivization of right, emerging from the justificatory needs of extra-national jurisdiction and resource appropriation. This form of cosmopolitanism, whose emergence necessarily tracks the rise of global capitalism, continues to exert great and often uncritical influence on theories and practices of peace today. (shrink)

Pragmatism has been called "the chief glory of our country's intellectual tradition" by its supporters and "a dog's dinner" by its detractors. While acknowledging pragmatism's direct ties to American imperialism and expansionism, Chad Kautzer, Eduardo Mendieta, and the contributors to this volume consider the role pragmatism plays, for better or worse, in current discussions of nationalism, war, race, and community. What can pragmatism contribute to understandings of a diverse nation? How can we reconcile pragmatism's history with recent changes (...) in the country's racial and ethnic makeup? How does pragmatism help to explain American values and institutions and fit them into new national and multinational settings? The answers to these questions reveal pragmatism's role in helping to nourish the fundamental ideas, politics, and culture of contemporary America. (shrink)

The following interview was conducted on July 13, 2009 at the JFK Institute for Graduate Studies, Freie Universität in Berlin, shortly after a conference, entitled “Class in Crisis: Das Prekariat zwischen Krise und Bewegung,” at which Harvey delivered a keynote address. The conference, organized by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, engaged the political, socio-economic, and conceptual dimensions of the so-called precariat class. The precariat (das Prekariat or la précarité) is typically defined by short-term employment, persistent marginalization, and social insecurity—something of a (...) fragmented urban underclass whose precariousness is increasingly evident in traditionally middle-class economic life. While the concept of the precariat has yet to take root in English-language social theory, the work of Loïc Wacquant (who also delivered a keynote at the Berlin conference), for example, has been popularizing it. (shrink)

The normative politics of Rorty’s Achieving Our Country are inextricably related to the political-philosophical principles of Contingency,irony, and solidarity, yet the nature of this relation is not explicit, particularly regarding Rorty’s earlier public/private sphere distinctionand renunciation of metavocabularies. This paper argues that Rorty’s call for patriotism as a necessary condition for political practiceand a romantic historicism that replaces intersubjectively recognized history, leads to a privatized conception of the nation, betraying the most promising principles of Contingency, irony, and solidarity, and threatening (...) the necessary conditions of democratic and solidaristic practices. This critique also accounts for the theoretical lacunas in Rorty’s most recent essays attempting to elucidate American Empire. (shrink)

The normative politics of Rorty’s Achieving Our Country are inextricably related to the political-philosophical principles of Contingency,irony, and solidarity, yet the nature of this relation is not explicit, particularly regarding Rorty’s earlier public/private sphere distinctionand renunciation of metavocabularies. This paper argues that Rorty’s call for patriotism as a necessary condition for political practiceand a romantic historicism that replaces intersubjectively recognized history, leads to a privatized conception of the nation, betraying the most promising principles of Contingency, irony, and solidarity, and threatening (...) the necessary conditions of democratic and solidaristic practices. This critique also accounts for the theoretical lacunas in Rorty’s most recent essays attempting to elucidate American Empire. (shrink)

Our symposium on Naomi Zack's newest book, The Ethics and Mores of Race: Equality after the History of Philosophy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), had its origin in an Author Meets Critics panel of the Radical Philosophy Association at the American Philosophical Association Pacific Division conference in 2012, organized by José Jorge Mendoza. The respondents--Kristie Dotson, Lewis Gordon, José Jorge Mendoza, and Lucius T. Outlaw Jr.--have revised and expanded their original papers and Naomi Zack has in turn provided a detailed response (...) to their contributions. The result is an insightful, critical, and multiperspectival engagement with Zack's work. Throughout the respondents' papers you will find references to the twelve requirements that Zack argues are necessary for an ethics of race. These can be found in an appendix to Naomi Zack's response. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for the existence of pathologies of juridicism. I attempt to show that the Western regime of right tends to colonize our intersubjective relations, resulting in the formation of affective and habitual dispositions that actually hinder participation in social life. Speaking of pathologies of juridicism is to claim that the legal form fundamentally contaminates the way in which we relate to ourselves, to others, and to the world, resulting in an ethically deformed, distorted or deficient form (...) of subjectivity. To support my thesis I consult a philosopher, whose work still provides a powerful analysis and critique of juridicism, namely, Hegel. Hegel provides an historic and a systematic theory of the pathologies of juridicism. His historical theory locates the origin of the abstract subjectivity of right in Roman antiquity. His systematic theory understands the negative effects of an absolutization of the legal domain as a persistent threat to social integration and an individual’s pursuit of the good life. I clarify these argumentative dimensions in two steps, beginning with Hegel’s historical analysis of right in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History. I then reconstruct Hegel’s critique of the subjectivity of right in the short chapter on the ‘Condition of Right’ in his Phenomenology of Spirit. In conclusion, I argue that, although Hegel’s diagnosis is correct, his prescribed therapy must fail: instead of radically altering abstract right in terms of content and form, it only recommends its complementation through other ethical spheres. (shrink)

In this essay I explore competing senses and tensions of the relation between the etymology of ta pragmata and praxis, with specific attention paid to Heidegger’s theorization of modernity. In so doing I question the relation between rights and persons, and whether there might not be a new way of thinking about rights that does not presuppose or privilege the agency of personhood. Pragmatic rights would not assume the liberal values of self-determination that underpin personhood, and would enable a notion (...) of rights beyond liberal humanism more appropriate for twenty-first century political concerns and problems. (shrink)

The great work of the psychotic judge Daniel Paul Schreber, namely Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, has received predictable and rather unimaginative interpretations as the discourse of a lunatic. The work has not been studied as a theory of law. Schreber, it is argued here, was an extreme lawyer, a radical melancholegalist, a black letter theorist, a critic avant la lettre, and a radical theorist of an impure jurisprudence.

Beliefs once limited to the extremes of the North American gun culture have become mainstream, while the US Supreme Court’s ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller and a spate of right-to-carry laws have contributed to the proliferation of guns in public life. These changes in political discourses, legislative agendas, and social practices are indicative of an emergent and pernicious form of subjectivity, which is here defined as self-defensive. Such subjectivity is characterized by a pathological identification with the right of (...) self-defense, which undermines the social conditions of individual freedom and renders subjects unable to comprehend the function of abstract rights within an informal normative order. Practically speaking, this raced and gendered subjectivity relies on extra-legal relations of domination for its reproduction. The rapid expansion of gun rights and the recent loosening of restrictions on self-defensive violence are argued to be responses to a perceived threat to these identity-constituting relations, rather than to the threat of violent crime, which has long been on the decline. (shrink)

In this chapter, I make the case for platonic realism, the thesis that there are properties that lack spatial locations. After criticizing the one-over-many argument for realism and Lewis's argument for realism, I endorse a modal argument that derives the existence of platonic properties from considerations involving necessary truth. I then defend this argument from various objections. Finally, I argue that epistemic considerations and considerations of parsimony favor a weak form of platonic realism on which there are platonic properties, but (...) each property could have had an instance, and would have been located in its instances if it had any. (shrink)

It is widely held that for a life to be conferred meaning it requires the appropriate type of agency. Call this the agency requirement. The agency requirement is primarily motivated in the philosophical literature by the assumption that there is a widespread pre-theoretical intuition that humans have the capacity for meaning whereas animals do not; and that difference must come down to their agency or lack thereof. This paper aims to undercut the motivation for the agency requirement by arguing our (...) pre-theoretical intuitions actually run opposite; that animals, and even objects, can have meaningful lives/existences. The argument is twofold. First, I extend an existing argument for animals as having a capacity for meaning to objects. Second, I argue maintaining that only humans have the capacity for meaning results in the more counterintuitive upshot that all animals and objects have, by definition, meaningless existences. Since we pre-theoretically believe that anything can be meaningful—even things which by definition lack agency—then we have strong reason for being sceptical about an agency requirement for meaning in life. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop a theory on which each of a thing’s abundant properties is immanent in that thing. On the version of the theory I will propose, universals are abundant, each instantiated universal is immanent, and each uninstantiated universal is such that it could have been instantiated, in which case it would have been immanent. After setting out the theory, I will defend it from David Lewis’s argument that such a combination of immanence and abundance is absurd. I (...) will then advocate the theory on the grounds that it accomplishes all of Lewis’s “new work” while providing a gain in parsimony and a new account of fine-grained content. I will close with a discussion of how the theory also affords a new reply to two objections to uninstantiated universals: Armstrong’s charge that they are inconsistent with naturalism, and a Benacerraf-Field-style objection about epistemic access. (shrink)

For centuries, theologians and philosophers, among others, have examined the nature of religious experience. Students and scholars unfamiliar with the vast literature face a daunting task in grasping the main issues surrounding the topic of religious experience. The Cambridge Companion to Religious Experience offers an original introduction to its topic. Going beyond an introduction, it is a state-of-the-art overview of the topic, with critical analyses of and creative insights into its subject. Religious experience is discussed from various interdisciplinary perspectives, from (...) religious perspectives inside and outside traditional monotheistic religions, and from various topical perspectives. Written by leading scholars in clear and accessible prose, this book is an ideal resource for undergraduate and graduate students, teachers, and scholars across many disciplines. (shrink)

Positively re-assesses the relationship between body and soul in Plato's later dialogues, focusing on the harmony between them.

For many centuries philosophers have been discussing the problem of evil - one of the greatest problems of intellectual history. There are many facets to the problem, and for students and scholars unfamiliar with the vast literature on the subject, grasping the main issues can be a daunting task. This Companion provides a stimulating introduction to the problem of evil. More than an introduction to the subject, it is a state-of-the-art contribution to the field which provides critical analyses of and (...) creative insights on this longstanding problem. Fresh themes in the book include evil and the meaning of life, beauty and evil, evil and cosmic evolution, and anti-theodicy. Evil is discussed from the perspectives of the major monotheistic religions, agnosticism, and atheism. Written by leading scholars in clear and accessible prose, this book is an ideal companion for undergraduate and graduate students, teachers, and scholars across the disciplines. (shrink)

Relative to an ordinary context, an utterance of the sentence ‘Everything is in the car’ communicates a proposition about a restricted domain. But how does this work? One possibility is that quantifier expressions like 'everything' are context sensitive and range over different domains in different contexts. Another possibility is that quantifier expressions are not context sensitive, but have a fixed, absolutely general meaning, and ordinary utterances communicate a restricted content via Gricean mechanisms. I argue that, contrary to received opinion, the (...) latter view has both a number of methodological and also intuitive advantages over the former. I then reply to three objections to the latter view: the binding argument (due to Stanley and Szabo), the availability-based attack (due to Recanati), and an argument based on Recanati’s scope principle. (shrink)

While Nozick and his sympathizers assume there is a widespread anti-hedonist intuition to prefer reality to an experience machine, hedonists have marshalled empirical evidence that shows such an assumption to be unfounded. Results of several experience machine variants indicate there is no widespread anti-hedonist intuition. From these findings, hedonists claim Nozick's argument fails as an objection to hedonism. This article suggests the argument surrounding experience machines has been misconceived. Rather than eliciting intuitions about what is prudentially valuable, these intuitive judgements (...) are instead calculations about prudential pay-offs and trade-offs. This position can help explain the divergence of intuitions people have about experience machines. (shrink)

Two principles in epistemology are apparent examples of the close connection between rationality and truth. First, adding a disjunct to what it is rational to believe yields a proposition that’s also rational to believe. Second, what’s likely if believed is rational to believe. While these principles are accepted by many, it turns out that they clash. In light of this clash, we must relinquish the second principle. Reflecting on its rationale, though, reveals that there are two distinct ways to understand (...) the connection between rationality and truth. Rationality is fundamentally a guide to the belief-independent truth, rather than a guide to acquiring true beliefs. And this in turn has important implications for current discussions of permissivism, epistemic reasons, and epistemic consequentialism. (shrink)

You can stand strong in the midst of shaking. Does it feel like all hell is breaking loose in the church right now? This time of shaking is actually an act of God -- a refiner's fire through which He will bring radical, glorious reformation to the church through exposure, confrontation, and cleansing. Through this upheaval, God is seeking to mold and mature His people into the supernatural community that were destined to be! In a dramatic encounter with the fear (...) of the Lord, author and pastor, Chad Norris received an assignment from God to bring fatherly training, correction, and rebuke to the Church, shaping fellow believers into powerful Kingdom representatives. In God is Shaking His Temple, Chad offers a prophetic invitation to partner with this move of God to manifest His Kingdom on earth. In this book, you will discover... Ancient truths that come with promises of blessing Discernment to distinguish between God's work and the devil's Strength to stand firm in the midst of crisis and chaos Wisdom to walk as a mature child of God, fit to move in signs, wonders and miracles Freedom from religious bondage and false views of God This season of upheaval is an invitation from the Father to incline your ear, hear the Lord's voice, and join His Kingdom army that will bring Heaven's light to this dark world. (shrink)

We present the findings of a worldwide survey that was administered to business ethic scholars to better understand journal quality within the business ethics academic community. Based upon the data from the survey, we provide a ranking of the top 10 business ethics journals. We then provide a comparison of business ethics journals to other mainstream management journals in terms of journal quality. The results of the study suggest that, within the business ethics academic community, many scholars prefer to publish (...) in the top business ethics academic journals over other mainstream management journals. Furthermore, the results of the study suggest that within the business ethics academic field there are two dominant academic communities: one in Europe and one in North America. Each of these academic communities has its own preferred publication outlets, suggesting a potentially problematic bifurcation of business ethics scholarship. (shrink)

_Plato's 'Timaeus'_ brings together a number of studies from both leading Plato specialists and up-and-coming researchers from across Europe, opening new perspectives on familiar problems, while shedding light on less well-known passages.

For many centuries philosophers have been discussing the problem of evil - one of the greatest problems of intellectual history. There are many facets to the problem, and for students and scholars unfamiliar with the vast literature on the subject, grasping the main issues can be a daunting task. This Companion provides a stimulating introduction to the problem of evil. More than an introduction to the subject, it is a state-of-the-art contribution to the field which provides critical analyses of and (...) creative insights on this longstanding problem. Fresh themes in the book include evil and the meaning of life, beauty and evil, evil and cosmic evolution, and anti-theodicy. Evil is discussed from the perspectives of the major monotheistic religions, agnosticism, and atheism. Written by leading scholars in clear and accessible prose, this book is an ideal companion for undergraduate and graduate students, teachers, and scholars across the disciplines. (shrink)

Volume I. The history of evil in antiquity : 2000 BCD-450 CE -- volume II. The history of evil in the medieval age : 450-1450 -- volume III. The history of evil in the early modern age : 1450-1700 -- volume IV. The history of evil in the 18th and 19th centuries : 1700-1900 -- volume V. The history of evil in the early twentieth century : 1900-1950 -- volume VI. The history of evil from the mid-twentieth century to today (...) : 1950-2018. (shrink)

To successfully transform Ender Wiggin from a bright six‐year‐old child into the most effective military strategist and space commander the world had ever known, teachers at the Battle School needed to teach him to discipline himself to think and behave like a soldier. In Ender's Game the International Fleet's Battle School subjected children to a rigorous and grueling educational program. This put the Battle School's administrators and teachers in an incredibly powerful position: they had the unilateral power to determine what (...) knowledge and skills were necessary to be a successful soldier. The work of French philosopher Michel Foucault is invaluable in showing how power and knowledge are interdependent in governing the I.F.'s soldiers and in teaching them to be self‐governing at the I.F.'s Battle School, which mirrors the Panopticon. (shrink)

In this paper, we investigate a large-scale financial statement fraud to better understand the process by which individuals are recruited to participate in financial statement fraud schemes. The case reveals that perpetrators often use power to recruit others to participate in fraudulent acts. To illustrate how power is used, we propose a model, based upon the classical French and Raven taxonomy of power, that explains how one individual influences another individual to participate in financial statement fraud. We also provide propositions (...) for future research. (shrink)