“Dismantling the master's house”: Freedom as ethical practice in Brandom and Foucault

Journal of Religious Ethics 37 (3):419-448 (2009)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

This article makes a case for the capacity of "social practice" accounts of agency and freedom to criticize, resist, and transform systemic forms of power and domination from within the context of religious and political practices and institutions. I first examine criticisms that Michel Foucault's analysis of systemic power results in normative aimlessness, and then I contrast that account with the description of agency and innovative practice that pragmatist philosopher Robert Brandom identifies as "expressive freedom." I argue that Brandom can provide a normative trajectory for Foucault's diagnoses of power and domination, helping to resolve its apparent lack of ethical direction. I demonstrate that Foucault, in turn, presents Brandom with insights that might overcome the charges of abstraction and conservatism that his pragmatic inferentialism frequently encounters. The result is a vindication of social practice as an analytical lens for social criticism that is at once both immanent and radical

Other Versions

No versions found

Similar books and articles

Power, Resistance, and Freedom.Jon Simons - 2013 - In Christopher Falzon, Timothy O'Leary & Jana Sawicki (eds.), A Companion to Foucault. Malden Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 299–319.
Discursive control, non-domination and Hegelian recognition theory.Fabian Schuppert - 2013 - Philosophy and Social Criticism 39 (9):893-905.
Freedom as Critique. Foucault Beyond Anarchism.Karsten Schubert - 2020 - Philosophy and Social Criticism 46.
Recognizing freedom.Katharine M. McIntyre - 2018 - Philosophy and Social Criticism 45 (8):885-906.
Reconstructing republican freedom.Michael J. Thompson - 2013 - Philosophy and Social Criticism 39 (3):277-298.
Freedom as critique: Foucault beyond anarchism.Karsten Schubert - 2021 - Philosophy and Social Criticism 47 (5):634-660.

Analytics

Added to PP
2009-08-18

Downloads
3,850 (#1,980)

6 months
347 (#5,005)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Jason Springs
University of Notre Dame

References found in this work

Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.Noam Chomsky - 1965 - Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press.
Political Liberalism.J. Rawls - 1995 - Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 57 (3):596-598.
The souls of Black folk.W. E. B. Du Bois - 1987 - Oxford University Press.

View all 35 references / Add more references