This article explores the relevance of death to the value of life. After a preliminary discussion of the human experience of mortality, I consider Heidegger’s argument that death is a condition of authenticity, Sartre’s claim that death is an externality that is irrelevant because it cannot be lived and Simmel’s theory that death is a boundary that is transcended by life. While all theories have their merits, I suggest that Simmel’s approach, which articulates well with Levinas’s ethical critique of Heidegger, (...) offers important insight into our responsibility for other people and for the survival of other forms of life. (shrink)

In revisiting Durkheim’s humanism in recent years, attention has been drawn to his theory of moral individualism and the usefulness of his argument that a reformed democratic capitalism can reconcile individual freedom with collective constraint. This article investigates Durkheim’s understanding of the relationship between the individual and society in greater detail, showing in the process that his thinking was ambiguous and inconsistent. Although he flirted with the notion that capitalist modernity might actively foster and legitimize destructive forms of individualism, his (...) default position was to attribute anti-social drives to a human nature set loose by weak or inadequate social norms, and then to idealize liberal humanism as the ethical remedy for this normative deficiency. The article argues that the inconsistencies in his thinking are significant, however, because they testify to the underlying contradiction between the logic of capitalism and the ideals of moral individualism, and to the difficulty of locating the moral individual in a morally irrational world. (shrink)

Jürgen Habermas has been credited with rescuing Critical Theory from the brink of nihilism. Although he has adopted Max Weber's interest in rationalization, as is well known, he questions Weber's pessimistic view that modernization will inexorably lead to the imprisonment of individuals in meaningless systems of instrumental rationality. Habermas' optimism, however, is not the result of a belief in the irreducible nature of human freedom. Rather, it derives from the more ambitious claim that the linguistic structures of the lifeworld harbor (...) the emancipatory goal of mutual understanding. This linguistic revision of Critical Theory has met considerable criticism. Habermas' optimistic interest in communication rather than praxis, democratic interaction rather than self-determining labor, has often been dismissed as a self-serving attempt to legitimate the de-radicalization of the intellectual Left and conceal its integration into the academic establishment. (shrink)

A comprehensive and scholarly exploration of the personal and philosophical origins of André Gorz's work, this book includes a unique analysis of his early untranslated texts, as well as critical discussions of his relationship to the work of Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Marx, and Habermas. Reassessing pivotal notions such as the "lifeworld" and the "subject," it argues that Gorz has pioneered a person-centred social theory in which the motive and the meaning of social critique is firmly rooted in people's lived experience.

Surveys the leading debates over Arendt's work, including totalitarianism, the public sphere and the nature of political responsibility"--Cover p. [4].