This article provides a phenomenological analysis of the difference between self-recognition and recognition of another, while referring to some contemporary neuroscientific studies on the rubber hand illusion. It examines the difference between these two forms of recognition on the basis of Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s work. It argues that both phenomenologies, despite their different views on inter-subjectivity, allow for the specificity of recognition of another. In explaining self-recognition, however, Husserl’s account seems less convincing. Research (...) concerning the rubber hand illusion has confirmed that self-recognition involves more than an immediate experience of oneself. Merleau-Ponty’s later work, describing self-recognition as the result of assimilative identification, will be used to explain the possibility of illusion between one’s “hereness” and “thereness”. The possibility of this illusion is inherent to self-recognition, while it is lacking in recognition of another. (shrink)

From the point of the EU law, the CJEU has the exclusive competence to interpret the EU legal norms and decide upon validity of the legal acts adopted by the EU institutions because it is the most effective method to ensure the unilateral interpretation of the EU law and to prevent its fragmentation. Thus, it can be presumed that all disputes between the Member States regarding the EU law must be solved by the CJEU. The paper aims at finding the (...) answer to the question whether international courts under the international law must refuse their jurisdiction in cases where disputes of the Member States relate with the EU law. With the view of this aim, arguments arising from the international law (for instance, prohibition of intervening into affairs of another legal system, prohibition of abuse of laws), on the basis of which an international court should decline its jurisdiction, and applicability of such arguments to the situation discussed is assessed and an independent approach is formulated. (shrink)

Axel Honneth draws a distinction between three types of recognition: (1) love, (2) respect and (3) social esteem. In his The Struggle for Recognition, the recognition of cultural particularity is situated in the third sphere. It will here be argued that the logic of recognition of cultural identity also demands a non-evaluative recognition, namely a respect for difference. Difference-respect is formal because it is a recognition of the value of a particular culture not "for (...) society" or "as such", but for the social group involved. Yet, although it is formal, difference-respect cannot be reduced to respect for personal autonomy and its preconditions, as Honneth wrongly suggests in Redistribution or Recognition? It is argued here that difference-respect is oriented towards another dimension of the person, namely social attachments. This kind of respect entails a separate register of formal recognition with a corresponding concept of personal identity and a parallel category of social disrespect. What morally justifies difference-respect from a recognition-theoretic approach is the practical relation-to-self that thus becomes possible, namely self-respect as a sense of belonging. The formal conception of the good life that Honneth articulates should include the insight that this sense of belonging is as much a necessary condition for the good life as is personal autonomy. (shrink)

I argue that we get an account of social invisibility that best fits our practice of moral complaint if we reject orthodoxy and accept a quite different view of what it is to see another person as a person. On my view, seeing a person as a person is inseparable from caring about her in person-specific ways—hence from a disposition to a range of interpersonal emotional responses to her point of view. Thus, a person’s humanity is invisible to us, (...) according to this picture, when we are unreceptive to her power to influence our attitudes and will through her own attitudes and will. (shrink)

This paper looks at the place of items long associated with the bodies of South Asian women in mainstream fashion. First, there will be a profiling of some of the scenes where bindhies, mendhies and related scents and sounds are donned and adored by white bodies. By participating in conversations with South Asian women in Britain in the second part of the article, the author is able to discuss some of the stirrings raised by the recent legitimization of these items (...) by multicultural capitalism, leading towards an exploration of a different sense of aesthetics, memory and desire. The ambivalent attraction of limited recognition offered by the anthropological urge to ‘know’ the ethnic ‘other’ is noted. A consideration of the rage induced by the power of whiteness to play with ‘ethnic’ items which had not so long ago been reviled when they were worn by South Asian women points to the historical amnesia that underlies much multicultural celebration. The allure of images packaged as oriental for South Asian women themselves, although often from a different set of sensibilities and memories, stresses the importance of historical reconstruction. (shrink)

Objective: Tangent Space Mapping using the geometric structure of the covariance matrices is an effective method to recognize multiclass motor imagery. Compared with the traditional CSP method, the Riemann geometric method based on TSM takes into account the nonlinear information contained in the covariance matrix, and can extract more abundant and effective features. Moreover, the method is an unsupervised operation, which can reduce the time of feature extraction. However, EEG features induced by MI mental activities of different subjects are not (...) the same, so selection of subject-specific discriminative EEG frequency components play a vital role in the recognition of multiclass MI. In order to solve the problem, a discriminative and multi-scale filter bank tangent space mapping algorithm is proposed in this article to design the subject-specific Filter Bank so as to effectively recognize multiclass MI tasks. Methods: On the 4-class BCI competition IV-2a dataset, first, a non-parametric method of multivariate analysis of variance based on the sum of squared distances is used to select discriminative frequency bands for a subject; next, a multi-scale FB is generated according to the range of these frequency bands, and then decompose multi-channel EEG of the subject into multiple sub-bands combined with several time windows. Then TSM algorithm is used to estimate Riemannian tangent space features in each sub-band and finally a liner Support Vector Machines is used for classification. Main Results: The analysis results show that the proposed discriminative FB enhances the multi-scale TSM algorithm, improves the classification accuracy and reduces the execution time during training and testing. On the 4-class BCI competition IV-2a dataset, the average session to session classification accuracy of nine subjects reached 77.33 ± 12.3%. When the training time and the test time are similar, the average classification accuracy is 2.56% higher than the latest TSM method based on multi-scale filter bank analysis technology. When the classification accuracy is similar, the training speed is increased by more than three times, and the test speed is increased two times more. Compared with Supervised Fisher Geodesic Minimum Distance to the Mean, another new variant based on Riemann geometry classifier, the average accuracy is 3.36% higher, we also compared with the latest Deep Learning method, and the average accuracy of 10-fold cross validation improved by 2.58%. Conclusion: Research shows that the proposed DMFBTSM algorithm can improve the classification accuracy of MI tasks. Significance: Compared with the MFBTSM algorithm, the algorithm proposed in this article is expected to select frequency bands with good separability for specific subject to improve the classification accuracy of multiclass MI tasks and reduce the feature dimension to reduce training time and testing time. (shrink)

The paper explores what it could mean to speak of love as involving a delight in ‘the simple actuality’ of another, or, as Buber does, of the ‘touchable’ human being as ‘unique and devoid of qualities’. Developing strands in Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of perception, it is argued that the relation between recognising this as a particular individual and recognising particular qualities in her may be close to the reverse of what might be supposed: a recognition of this distinctive smile (...) being dependent on a recognition of who this is. The fundamental place of particulars, as opposed to kinds, in our thought about those we know and care for is developed in part through a phenomenological treatment of our perception of faces. That treatment is set in a context of the justification of our judgements about who someone is, and is linked with a critique of treatments of proper names of individuals in the spirit of Frege. It is in our speaking to those we know that we find a relation to a particular that is direct—not mediated by a description of its properties—that Russell sought in ‘knowledge by acquaintance’. (shrink)

Long ago the Chinese people developed the habit of thinking in terms of images. They also formed the habit of writing and recognizing scriptforms in terms of images. In fact, these diverse cognitive processes - thinking, writing and decoding in terms of images - have been interacting and reinforcing one another for thousands of years, and, as a result, have played a significant role in shaping Chinese culture and the Chinese mind, and have become a part of the collective (...) unconscious of the people.Although today the Chinese characters are highly abstract and symbolic, the language still preserves its pictographic and ideographic prototypes, the parent script which evolved almost six thousand years ago. In other words, although modern Chinese characters are no longer actual drawings of objects, ideas, and images, they still have a blood relationship to these primitive forms. Their graphemes, configurations, or grapho-semantic radicals still bear direct semantic relation to their referents, so much so that it would be fair to describe the development of Chinese writing as an overlapping process as well as a gradual one. (shrink)

Abstract Nancy Fraser raises serious doubts about the critical potential of identity theories of recognition on the ground that they encourage the reduction of personal identity to cultural identity. Based on a comparative analysis of Charles Taylor's and Axel Honneth's theories of recognition, this paper argues that Fraser's critique is justified with respect to some aspects of Taylor's theory of identity, but not with respect to his conception of recognition, or to Honneth's conception of both identity and (...) recognition. Taylor's theory of identity recognition is vulnerable to Fraser's critique because under certain conditions of pathological socialization it cannot prevent the normative subordination of strong evaluation to whatever dominant goods are acquired through acculturation. Honneth's theory of identity recognition overcomes this normative weakness in three ways. First, Honneth differentiates between three types of self-relation that cannot be reduced to cultural identity. Second, he operates with a mixed, attributive?responsive model of recognition that normatively underwrites all these types of self-relation. Third, he makes the condition of reciprocity in recognition the criterion for successful self-realization that enables one to distinguish between misrecognition and non-normative experiences of human suffering. (shrink)

The paper is devoted to a certain way of thinking of the action of another. The posture of mind is characteristically expressed by a specific use of what G. E. M. Anscombe calls stopping modals. On this use, the sentence, “You can’t do that; it is mine,” registers the necessity of justice. My question is: what is the relation between the status of a person, a bearer of rights, the recognition of others as persons, and the practice of (...) addressing the demands of justice to one another? According to a certain strand in the tradition, the answer is: in the sphere of justice, a special union arises among language, mind, and world such that there is a sense in which addressing, recognizing, and being a person are one reality. The paper articulates the relevant sense of ‘one reality’ and offers an argument in support of the formula. In the course of the argument I suggest that this issue is central to understanding the philosophical significance of the second person and appreciating that it marks an irreducible and fundamental form of thought. (shrink)

There are several paradigms of 'first philosophy' (e.g. Aristotle, Descartes). A third paradigm of first philosophy is transcendental pragmatics or transcendental semiotics (exemplified by Peirce and Wittgenstein). Husserl correctly grasped that Descartes inaugurated first philosophy in the sense of a transcendental inquiry into the foundations of absolute knowledge. But Husserl's retrieval of Descartes remains within the second paradigm in that it ignores the role of language as a condition of the possibility of objectively constituted knowledge. I propose to re-examine Descartes's (...) conception of first philosophy to see if it can be read in the light of the third paradigm of transcendental philosophy, namely transcendental semiotics. I argue that Cartesian methodic doubt can be rehabilitated (against Wittgenstein's critique) as a kind of 'fallibilistic' approach to knowledge of a Peircean kind, and that the Cartesian cogito can be read (following Hintikka) as recognition of performative contradiction and of the necessity of speech acts, and hence of the transcendental communication community. (shrink)

In this article the mirror is considered as a model of the adequacy of the world and mind, which to some extent dominated the European history of ideas. This idea of relationship and mutual perception in the field of intersubjectivity is problematic enough when the concrete collision of two corporeal entities, two personalities as two bodies, is at stake. According to author, the metaphor of the mirror serves in the history of culture as an analog of the relationship of a (...) person to himself, to others, to the world, thereby placing the topic of anthropology, the human self and worldview at the center of the research. In the author's view, the mirror metaphor is not so much about how strong the mirror metaphor is in this context, but primarily about the social limit of physical perception reflexes. The other person's social reflection on us contains a personal dimension that is equivalent to matching mutual reflections, including the rejection of contact with each other. The mirror can only confirm the psychophysical side of my being, while the other person mirrors my social side behind this side, where he also has the ability through his subjectivity and spontaneity to deny me in the mirror image, i.e. to deny me any recognition. The author describes various asocial forms of view that refuse to allow symmetry between us and others with reference to the metaphorical theories of Ralf Konersmann and Hans Blumenberg. Using metaphor we can address pre-conceptual expectations, needs, and experiences that conceptual language does not have access to. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Trauma, Recognition, and the Place of LanguageJuliet Mitchell (bio)Definitions of trauma abound within the psychoanalytic discipline. My own definition is going to be simple. A trauma, whether physical or psychical, must create a breach in a protective covering of such severity that it cannot be coped with by the usual mechanisms by which we deal with pain or loss. The severity of the breach is such that even (...) if the incident is expected, the experience cannot be foretold. We cannot thus make use of anxiety as a preparatory signal. The death of a sick relative, the amputation of a diseased limb may be consciously known about in advance, but if they are to be described as traumatic then the foreknowledge was useless. In trauma we are untimely ripped.Whether it is as childhood seduction, infantile abuse, shell shock, or war violence, or as a preoccupation with the place of neoteny and the trials of human birth, trauma is continually posited as the hypothetical “origin” of psychic states. However, although “trauma” is crucial to psychoanalytic theory, trauma in itself is not really the focus of its analysis. Freud proposed a “biological bedrock” on which psychic states were formed, but this bedrock was not the object of psychoanalytic inquiry. I suggest that what emerges as a motif in the many retheorizings of psychoanalysis time and again, as another “bedrock,” is trauma. One might call it an “experiential bedrock.” As with biology, it is crucial—but as the area of another mode of inquiry. Psychoanalysis is equipped to contribute to the understanding of the reaction to trauma, not to the trauma itself.In a colloquial context we tend to look from the perspective of the observer and label a range of difficult or tragic occurrences “traumatic.” Instead, I want to define trauma from the perspective of the person who experiences it. This means both that the same event will not always be traumatic for different people, and that the experience of different events, if they are experienced as trauma, will be the same whatever the event and whoever the sufferer. It was essentially for this reason that Freud eventually disagreed with the rich findings of Otto Rank, who proposed the trauma of birth as the origin of mankind’s neurosis. Trauma is the great equalizer. What differentiates us, since we were all born? Furthermore, what appears to be the trauma from the observer’s perspective may, from the viewpoint of the psychic response of the recipient, only be the catalyst that brings to the surface an experience which, were it not for this later event, might not in itself have been traumatic (or vice versa). Even so extreme an experience as the Holocaust may not breach the defenses of a particular individual. The catalytic event in the present triggers an earlier occurrence which becomes traumatic only by virtue of its retrospectively endowed meaning.Probably all animate matter can be traumatized; it would seem likely that the response to the breach in the human defensive system takes place at a generalizable psychosocial level. Recognition and language are interactional social processes; without another person neither a psyche nor language is possible. Object relations analysts, notably D. W. Winnicott, whom Max Hernandez addresses in his paper in this issue, have devoted their work to aspects of the psyche, Lacanians to language. To me the fields are interdependent and gain from being looked at together, both in their practice and in the theories that can [End Page 121] be applied to them. When we have a physical trauma it is common for an immediate aftereffect to be some uncertainty about words; even the ability to spell correctly can temporarily disappear. There are undoubtedly physiological explanations for this. But I shall argue that there are psychological parallels. Every patient whom I would regard as having had some relevant form of trauma had a specific relationship to language, and it is this that concerns me. In addition, Max Hernandez describes the breach in the defenses caused by the anal rape of a patient when he was a young boy. But neither the patient’s symptom nor his complaint on coming to a therapist for treatment pertains to... (shrink)

Theories of recognition have largely neglected the question of whether “struggles for recognition” might permissibly use violent means. In this article I explore the question of whether and how it is possible to show proper respect for the victim of one’s violence. Focusing on self-defense as the paradigmatic case of justified violence, two questions arise: (1) What renders an agent liable to violent action? (2) If she is liable, what is the appropriate, i.e., proportionate, degree of defensive violence (...) that still expresses respect for her? I claim that – in order to answer these questions – three dimensions of what is defended must be distinguished: goods, rights and one’s moral status. Clarifying their relationship allows me to argue that persons become liable to defensive violence if they directly pose (or intentionally and significantly contribute to) an unjustified threat to important goods protected by the rights of another person, even if they, as “attackers “or “threats “are innocent, i.e., do not display disrespect. I argue that those accounts which claim a moral symmetry between innocent attackers or threats on the one hand and innocent bystanders on the other hand, misunderstand the role of (dis) respect in a theory of justified violence. Moreover, when it comes to considerations of proportionality the dimension of (dis) respect has to be taken much more seriously than is usually the case. Here, instead of focusing mainly on the importance of goods we should pay more attention to (especially political) relationships of intersubjective (dis) respect. (shrink)

"The Nordic welfare states have arguably been successful in terms of social solidarity – although the heavily institutional and state-driven solutions as opposed to community- or family-based ones in various issues from child to elderly care may have made it seem as mere ‘quasi-solidarity’ in comparison to more communitarian ideals. This essay approaches such social solidarity in terms of Axel Honneth’s recognition-theoretical framework – arguing that there’s much more potential in Honnethian ideas of recognition and esteem than in (...) Honneth’s official view in Struggle for Recognition linking social solidarity only to social esteem based on contributions to the shared good. The first section briefly introduces Honneth’s three forms of recognition and also distinguishes social solidarity from other relevant notions of solidarity. It points out that there is far from perfect overlap between the ideas of social solidarity and social esteem. Of the three main forms of Honnethian recognition, one can link the notion of social solidarity to respect and care as well, and not primarily to esteem. In the final section these forms of mutual recognition will be discussed in the context of justifying basic income which arguably institutionalises high solidarity, yet is prima facie more straightforward to justify in terms of respect or care than in terms of esteem. The reason is that esteem is supposed to be conditional on differential merits, capacities, contributions or achievements whereas basic income is supposed to be unconditional. Furthermore, section two points out that there may be varieties of esteem and some of such varieties of “politics of esteem” may not that centrally be related to social solidarity. It distinguishes between three contexts of social esteem. One is related to the minimum standing as free from discrimination in terms of disesteem, another is related to one’s being a contributor to the shared social ends in some publicly defined role, and the third is related to excellence in one’s personal projects of self-realisation. The third section articulates some challenges to any kind of ‘politics of esteem’: how to decide whether something is or is not esteem? How would a good society respond to these kinds of cases – especially ones compatible with the modern universalistic ethos? What to think of the positive duties and permissions to engage in the “esteem services” of actually forming opinions and giving recognition? And finally, how to see the relation between social esteem and social solidarity? The sections four to six then go through the three kinds of cases (non-discrimination, contributions, self-realisation), answering the four questions: is this really a kind of esteem? Is it compatible with the ethos of universalism? How to distribute the related duties and permissions? How is it related to social solidarity? These sections map the ethical and political consequences of the claim that full human agency is dependent on positive relations to self, including self-esteem, and that these relations are deeply dependent on the recognition from other individuals and institutions such as the state. The basic Honnethian idea is that a good society is sensitive to the dynamics of self-relations and recognition. For example, the invisible housework by women should get due recognition, and welfare services should not be delivered in a stigmatising or demeaning fashion as stigmatising practices may lead to an internalised sense of inferiority and low self-esteem. Section seven finally takes up the question of basic income in light of the various forms of recognition and esteem, to be followed by a brief conclusion. ". (shrink)

We reply to the objections raised in Polis 40 (2023) by Ryan Balot and Manuel Knoll to our original paper ‘Recognition and Redistribution in Aristotle’s Account of Stasis’, published in Polis 39 (2022). We argue that Knoll is correct in arguing that Aristotle distinguishes between democratic views of distributive justice and his own, but wrong to argue that this wholly resolves a tension in Aristotle’s exposition between views of democratic justice as, in one sense, based on equality ‘according to (...) worth’ and in another based on arithmetic equality. Balot, we contend, misconstrues our original argument when he represents us as claiming that, according to Aristotle, the injustice which leads agents to engage in stasis exists entirely in their own minds. We did not and do not hold that view and therefore (pace Balot) are in no way committed to any of its alleged implications. Balot’s misunderstanding on that point entails a wholesale misrepresentation of our original argument. (shrink)

ABSTRACTEmpathy represents a fundamental ability that allows for the creation and cultivation of social bonds. As part of the empathic process, individuals use their own emotional state to interpret the content and intensity of other people’s emotions. Therefore, the current study was designed to test two hypotheses: empathy for the pain of another will result in biased emotional intensity judgment; and changing one’s emotion via emotion regulation will modulate these biased judgments. To test these hypotheses, in experiment one we (...) used a modified version of a well-known task that triggers an empathic reaction We found that empathy resulted in biased emotional intensity judgment. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of a bias in the recognition of emotional facial expressions as a function of empathy for pain. In experiment two, we replicated these findings in an independent sample, and further found that this biased emotional intensity judgment can be moderated via reappr... (shrink)

In Hegel's Practical Philosophy (2008), Robert Pippin argues that Hegel's mature concept of recognition is properly understood as an ontological category referring exclusively to what it means to be a free, rational individual, or agent. 1 I agree with Pippin that recognition for Hegel functions in this capacity. However, I shall argue that conceiving it this way also requires that we conceive it as a political category. Furthermore, while Hegel insists that recognition must be concrete?mediated by actors (...) who hold one another accountable according to institutional norms implicit in their actual social roles? I argue, appealing to Hegel himself, that social crisis impels actors to transcend their roles and adopt abstract points of view more in keeping with philosophical forms of reflection. Such alienation?so ardently embraced by postmodernists?need not undermine the possibility of recognition as an ontological category, as Pippin fears, but rather comports with the expressivist theory of action he imputes to Hegel, which describes the socially recognized intentions, rationales, and identities?not to mention, freedom?of actors as unfolding in interminable dialogue. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Another Look at Silence and Knowledge of God in Ignatius's Letter to the EphesiansRyan Patrick Budd"The man whose delight is in the Lord's teaching knows the art of sitting still in the right place."—Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical PoetryIn this essay, I attempt to supplement the better analyses of St. Ignatius of Antioch's Epistle to the Ephesians (Ign. Eph.) 14.1 through 15.3 with structural insights. The main (...) fruit of the analysis will be to affirm the "mystical" meaning of Ignatius's concept of "hearing Christ's silence": the mature believer, who truly understands Christ's word, will be able to hear the silence of Christ—meaning, to understand Christ's hidden and mysterious Godhead—because Christ dwells within the believer as in a temple. The essay will proceed in three sections: First, a review of the more substantive commentaries on "silence" in Ign. Eph. 14–15; second, a presentation of a potential structure of the passage and a commentary on what that structure, if correct, would yield; and third, a very brief confirmation of the findings by reference to themes in St. Paul's own Epistle to the Ephesians.Scholarly Commentary on Ignatius and "Silence"In discussing Ign. Eph. 14–15, scholars have come to a wide variety of views, for almost as many reasons, as to what Ignatius means when he says the following: [End Page 451]It is better to be silent and to be, than to speak and not be. Teaching is good, if the one speaking should do. There is, then, one Teacher, who "spoke and it came to be," and even the things he has done silently are worthy of the Father. The one truly hearing the word of Jesus can also hear his [Jesus's] silence, that he might be fully made, that he might act through what he says and be understood through his (the believer's) silence.(15.1–2)1There are, however, two predominant camps into which one could group the different scholarly opinions: the first camp holds that Ignatius merely is speaking about integrity, the correspondence between words and deeds;2 the second camp holds that he is enunciating a kind of Christian mysticism.3 Two prominent members of the second camp, Virginia Corwin and Gregory Vall, though quite distinct in their views of the bishop of Antioch, provide reasoning that I find decisive in favor of recognizing that Ignatius—while certainly emphasizing a true correspondence between words and deeds—carries the point further than simple moralizing.Virginia Corwin's "Reserve of Deity" and the Believer's Knowledge of ChristCorwin, in her analysis of the passage, points toward a "reserve" existing "behind" the visible works of Christ, which is to be identified with his invisible, and thus "silent," Godhead, which one who truly hears his word can also "hear." She acknowledges, however, that Ignatius first recognizes Christ as an example of a truly effective teacher due to the absolute [End Page 452] correspondence between his words and his acts. She writes, "Christ... is a teacher unlike most, since there is no contrast at all between his profession and his actions.... He has an absolute clarity and a complete lack of any hypocrisy."4 The result of this recognition is not to stress ethical integrity, however important: it is to argue that, because of the correspondence between Christ's words and his silent acts and his even more silent person, the one who knows his words can come to a deep, profound, and infallible knowledge of who he is, himself.Corwin argues that there is something more about this Teacher than the mere—though impressive—integrity of his message:But it is not only the integrity of the teacher that distinguishes him, but his unique power: "He spoke and it came to pass"; at these words to the minds of both the writer and the hearers of the letter must have occurred the image of the mighty acts of creation.... It is precisely because the words of Jesus are in a sense mighty acts that they must be seen in the larger perspective.5Which "larger perspective" she means... (shrink)

In Oneself as Another, Paul Ricoeur proposes a new ethical theory that integrates Aristotle’s eudaemonist virtue ethical outlook with Immanuel Kant’s deontological ethics. The goal is ambitious, and recent discussions in anglophone philosophy have made its undertaking look to be founded on a confusion. The new argument goes that the ethical justification at work in the Aristotelian and Kantian traditions is of opposed kinds. Attempts to integrate them, as a result, are either incoherent, or, in the best case, simply (...) minor variations on one or another predominant ethical outlook. The essay grants the opposed kinds thesis and argues that despite its apparent impossibility, Ricoeur nevertheless does succeed in integrating two ethical approaches, including their different sources of justification, to produce a novel and thus ethically interesting theory. The essay closes, finally, with a reflection on how this method might be developed one step further to include an insight by Emmanuel Levinas on the look of the Other, and so make for an ethics of recognition. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss the idea of democratic love from the perspective of gender equality. More precisely, I argue that a particular form of gender inequality, namely a gender-specific division of care labour, jeopardizes democratic love. In the first two sections of the article, I introduce Anthony Giddens’ original idea of a ‘democratization of the personal’ and show how Axel Honneth has developed it by relying on the Hegelian notion of social freedom. In the third section, I discuss how (...) the problem of care work affects democratic love relationships and depict the solution to this problem advocated by recognition theory, namely economic recognition. After having reconstructed some possible affinities between socialist-feminist arguments and Honneth’s suggestions, as well as criticisms against them, I outline another recognition-theoretic strategy for recognizing care work. I argue that the recognition paradigm conveys a view of the love relationship as inherently implying a caring recognition of human beings’ dependencies and vulnerabilities. I conclude by hinting at the idea that caring recognition may be extended beyond the social sphere of love, as constituent of social relations in general. (shrink)

It is a personal matter, a point of autobiography, but it illustrates something that beats in the heart of Cillian McBride’s compact and quietly ambitious book, that I cannot myself choose to value, that I cannot myself choose to esteem, racial or homophobic bigotry. Hence bigots cannot justifiably demand that I recognize the alleged value of their bigotry; nor can they demand such recognition from society more generally, esteem being tied in this way to sincere evaluation. Although a failure (...) to obtain social recognition might result in a loss of self-esteem for some bigots, and although this would in a way be bad, this negative result would be, in another way, simply too bad for bigotry. (shrink)

The author states that the very idea of human dignity lies in human relationships in the form of mutual recognition of one another. She emphasizes the ‘daily’ commitment to dignity as an essential feature of intersubjectivity and insists on the bodily dimension as the fundamental mode of relationships to the other. Thus human dignity is first of all the dignity of the body.

There can be no doubt that we do know one another. We know that others exist and we know a good deal about others. The question is how we know others. To say that others do not exist would be to assert a solipsism—a theory which no serious philosopher has ever maintained. Solipsism is absurd. Not because it is self-contradictory, for there is nothing self-contradictory in the notion that I alone exist having the experiences and thoughts which I do (...) have and that apart from me nothing and no one else exists. It is absurd simply because others do exist and I know this; because, that is to say, it contradicts the known evidence. This is the sole—but the adequate—ground for concluding solipsism to be absurd. Any discussion of this present problem, therefore, must begin with, the recognition of the fact that knowledge of others occurs. (shrink)

This study compares Philip Pettit’s account of freedom to Hegelian accounts. Both share the key insight that characterizes the tradition of republicanism from the Ancients to Rousseau: to be subordinated to the will of particular others is to be unfree. They both also hold that relations to others, relations of recognition, are in various ways directly constitutive of freedom, and in different ways enabling conditions of freedom. The republican ideal of non-domination can thus be fruitfully understood in light of (...) the Hegelian structure of ‘being at one with oneself (Beisichsein) in another’. However, while the Hegelian view converges with Pettit on non-domination and recognition, their comprehensive theories of freedom are based on radically different metaphysics. One key difference concerns the relationship between freedom and nature, and there is a further difference between Pettit’s (ahistorical) idea of the concept dependence of freedom, and the Hegelian (historical) idea of the conception dependence of freedom. -/- Keywords: Pettit; Hegel; freedom; non-domination; mutual recognition; republicanism; ‘being at one with oneself’; social freedom. (shrink)

Of all the memorable, and influential, passages of the Phänomenologie des Geistes none are more famous or enjoyed greater attention than those sections devoted to the master-slave dialectic. It would seem almost inconceivable then that anything would be left to say concerning Hegel's martial struggle, the sheer number of illustrious scholars who have commented on this text bearing ample testimony to the probable redundancy of further comment. However, in actual fact, this is not the case. Indeed, it is probable that (...) Hegel is addressing and utilising not a theory of recognition but rather two quite distinct concepts of recognition. The appropriate passages are of course the master-slave section itself and the rather oblique references to the »confession« of one consciousness to another at the end of chapter six. Commentators have generally been in agreement that the master-slave section marks the beginning of Hegel's theory of recognition; that is, that the continuation of the treatment of recognition in chapter six marks a further development of the concept formulated in chapter four - a further development seemingly promised by Hegel himself - »With this, we already have before us the notion of spirit. What still lies ahead for consciousness is the experience of what spirit is«. However the preceding is interpreted, the reader is surely right to recognize that something has been »won«, the triumphalist language being repeated in the following »[it is] in the Notion of Spirit, that consciousness first finds its turning-point, where it leaves behind the colourful show of the sensuous here-and-now and the nightlike void of the supersensible beyond, and steps out into the spiritual daylight of the present«. However, this triumph may have been misunderstood. The theory of recognition referred to in the master-slave dialectic may have been a »turning-point«, a new beginning, but it was a new beginning that was soon realised to be a dead-end. The following will attempt to demonstrate that there is a quite radical discontinuity at the heart of the concept of recognition itself, a discontinuity that can be traced to its origins in the Fichtean system itself. For the master-slave dialectic is »Fichte's wake« - it is at once a celebration and a mourning for the first concept of recognition, the unworkability of which heralded a truly new beginning. That is, the concept of recognition outlined in the Einige Vorlesungen uber die Bestimmung des Gelehrten. The second concept of recognition, that of the Grundlage des Naturrechts cannot be reckoned a further development or emendation of the first concept, its quite peculiar status, and philosophical importance as a »spiritual concept«, precluding any such treatment. The latter concept may mark the birth of Hegelian or speculative idealism itself. It is the contention of the following that understanding this quite radical discontinuity will fashion a better understanding of the connection between transcendental and speculative philosophy, the point of transition or sublation. (shrink)

Of all the memorable, and influential, passages of the Phänomenologie des Geistes none are more famous or enjoyed greater attention than those sections devoted to the master-slave dialectic. It would seem almost inconceivable then that anything would be left to say concerning Hegel's martial struggle, the sheer number of illustrious scholars who have commented on this text bearing ample testimony to the probable redundancy of further comment. However, in actual fact, this is not the case. Indeed, it is probable that (...) Hegel is addressing and utilising not a theory of recognition but rather two quite distinct concepts of recognition. The appropriate passages are of course the master-slave section itself and the rather oblique references to the »confession« of one consciousness to another at the end of chapter six. Commentators have generally been in agreement that the master-slave section marks the beginning of Hegel's theory of recognition; that is, that the continuation of the treatment of recognition in chapter six marks a further development of the concept formulated in chapter four - a further development seemingly promised by Hegel himself - »With this, we already have before us the notion of spirit. What still lies ahead for consciousness is the experience of what spirit is«. However the preceding is interpreted, the reader is surely right to recognize that something has been »won«, the triumphalist language being repeated in the following »[it is] in the Notion of Spirit, that consciousness first finds its turning-point, where it leaves behind the colourful show of the sensuous here-and-now and the nightlike void of the supersensible beyond, and steps out into the spiritual daylight of the present«. However, this triumph may have been misunderstood. The theory of recognition referred to in the master-slave dialectic may have been a »turning-point«, a new beginning, but it was a new beginning that was soon realised to be a dead-end. The following will attempt to demonstrate that there is a quite radical discontinuity at the heart of the concept of recognition itself, a discontinuity that can be traced to its origins in the Fichtean system itself. For the master-slave dialectic is »Fichte's wake« - it is at once a celebration and a mourning for the first concept of recognition, the unworkability of which heralded a truly new beginning. That is, the concept of recognition outlined in the Einige Vorlesungen uber die Bestimmung des Gelehrten. The second concept of recognition, that of the Grundlage des Naturrechts cannot be reckoned a further development or emendation of the first concept, its quite peculiar status, and philosophical importance as a »spiritual concept«, precluding any such treatment. The latter concept may mark the birth of Hegelian or speculative idealism itself. It is the contention of the following that understanding this quite radical discontinuity will fashion a better understanding of the connection between transcendental and speculative philosophy, the point of transition or sublation. (shrink)

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been playing a significant role in acoustic modeling. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are the advanced version of DNNs that achieve 4–12% relative gain in the word error rate (WER) over DNNs. Existence of spectral variations and local correlations in speech signal makes CNNs more capable of speech recognition. Recently, it has been demonstrated that bidirectional long short-term memory (BLSTM) produces higher recognition rate in acoustic modeling because they are adequate to reinforce higher-level representations (...) of acoustic data. Spatial and temporal properties of the speech signal are essential for high recognition rate, so the concept of combining two different networks came into mind. In this paper, a hybrid architecture of CNN-BLSTM is proposed to appropriately use these properties and to improve the continuous speech recognition task. Further, we explore different methods like weight sharing, the appropriate number of hidden units, and ideal pooling strategy for CNN to achieve a high recognition rate. Specifically, the focus is also on how many BLSTM layers are effective. This paper also attempts to overcome another shortcoming of CNN, i.e. speaker-adapted features, which are not possible to be directly modeled in CNN. Next, various non-linearities with or without dropout are analyzed for speech tasks. Experiments indicate that proposed hybrid architecture with speaker-adapted features and maxout non-linearity with dropout idea shows 5.8% and 10% relative decrease in WER over the CNN and DNN systems, respectively. (shrink)

This paper is divided into two parts. Part I focuses on the manner in which the components of the face recognition system work together so that a perceiver, within several hundred milliseconds after seeing a familiar face, is able to both identify the face of the perceived and recall elements of the history of past encounters with the perceived. Face recognition plays a crucial role in enabling both human and nonhuman primates to interact in collaborative social groups. This (...) critical function is accomplished through the unidirectional coded transfer of informational elements from one component to another. Although these informational elements themselves are not meaningful to the perceiving agent, they do nevertheless contain essential bits of information that are necessary for the final formation of the meaningful message. The structural components of the system are identified and the manner in which informational elements are coded and transferred sequentially from component to component in the brain of the perceiver is described. The independent, physically separated components in the face recognition system are bridged by an additional component, an “adaptor”, that mediates the transfer of informational elements from one component to another. The nature of the independent systems, and the manner by which the bridging or adaptor apparatus enables coded information transfer from one system to another is discussed. Part II focuses on the analysis of recognition in human-designed sign systems such as Braille and Morse code. Recognition in human-designed sign systems is notable for the stability of the link between sign and meaning. Face recognition is characterized as being subjective, indicating that the meaning of a sign to a perceiver is variable and dependent on context, whereas human-devised sign recognition is characterized as being objective, indicating that the meaning of a sign is context independent and invariant. Human-designed sign systems require the presence in brain of a referent world. An example of a referent world is the set of letters of the alphabet. Representations of this set are installed in the brain through social mediated learning. Human-designed sets of signs are created to correspond, via a code enabling adaptor structure, to referent worlds in the brain. Human-designed sign systems are the foundations for literacy, a capability only found in humans. (shrink)

For Hegel, the ideal relation that two self-conscious beings might have to each other is one of reciprocal mutual recognition. According to Hegel, “a self-consciousness exists for [another] consciousness.” That is, self-consciousness is defined by its being recognized as self-conscious by another self-consciousness. In one formulation, Robert Pippin says that this means that “being a free agent consists in being recognized as one.” However, at the same time, Hegel values self-determination, which suggests a fundamental independence from others. (...) The formative activity of Bildung, writes Frederick Neuhouser, “is not simply formative experience of any type, but formative experience that has a specific end, namely, self-determination.” The fully educated Hegelian moral subject is self-determining, and is capable of making and pursuing its own ends. In this paper, after diagnosing some misreadings of Hegel’s concept of mutual recognition, I will show that the very possibility of self-determination is undermined by the doctrine of mutual recognition, not by consciousness becoming subject to the recognition bestowed by others, but rather because of the very nature of its own act of recognition itself. (shrink)

Self–other discrimination was investigated with point-light displays in which actions were presented with or without additional auditory information. Participants first executed different actions in time with music. In two subsequent experiments, they watched point-light displays of their own or another participant’s recorded actions, and were asked to identify the agent . Manipulations were applied to the visual information and to the auditory information . Results indicate that self-recognition was better than chance in all conditions and was highest when (...) observing relatively unconstrained patterns of movement. Auditory information did not increase accuracy even with the most ambiguous visual displays, suggesting that judgments of agent identity depend much more on motor cues than on auditory or audiovisual information. (shrink)

In considering what makes epistemic injustice and epistemologies of ignorance wrongful, Matthew Congdon has recently argued that they involve forms of epistemic misrecognition in involving epistemic disrespect, disesteem, and neglect. Following Congdon’s remarks that both epistemic injustice and epistemologies of ignorance involve such misrecognition, this chapter considers whether and how ignorance may not involve the same types of misrecognition as epistemic injustice. In fact, there may be, as of yet, unexplored and surprising ways in which ignorance and recognition work (...) in concert. In this chapter, I contend that some cases of genuine ignorance do not involve misrecognition, but a kind of recognition: sometimes ignorance is not about being insufficiently responsive to some normatively relevant features in another, but being too responsive to them. I then argue that we can see this sort of ‘paradox of ignorance’ in Charles Mills’s discussion of white ignorance and ideal theory. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 28, Issue 1, pp 3 - 17 Hobbes and Hegel are standardly taken to be contrasting political theorists, who maintain contrasting views on philosophy, individualism, and society. However, Oakeshott’s reading of Hobbes is a reminder that Hobbes can be read in ways that reduce antagonisms between Hobbes and Hegel. Hobbes’s state of nature is an artificial device that is internally related to the significance of political artifice in rendering the social world a reasonable context for interaction just (...) as the struggle for recognition in Hegel shows the need for a political context in which individuals can interact with one another in ways that are productive and equilibrated. Both Hobbes and Hegel invoke notions of mortality, conflict and sociality in their imaginative depictions of life and death struggles. They also share a notion of the sovereignty of nation-states and were doubtful over the viability of international treaties and organisations. (shrink)

This paper builds on prior critical scholarship on Agriculture 4.0—an umbrella term to reference the utilization of robotics and automation, AI, remote sensing, big data, and the like in agriculture—especially the literature focusing on issues relating to equity and social sustainability. Critical agrifood scholarship has spent considerable energy interrogating who gets what, how decisions get made, and who counts as a “stakeholder” in the context of decision making, questions relating to distributive justice, procedural justice, and representative justice, respectively. Less attention, (...) however, has been paid in this literature to the subject of recognition justice. Recognition justice asks the question, “Who are subjects of justice?” That query, however, is easily to oversimplify. As subjectivity is neither monolithic nor fixed, implied in these discussions are deeper questions having to do with the characteristics of one’s subjectivity that deserve moral recognition. This act of translation, from justice-in-theory to justice-in-practice, also complicates the evaluation of whether Agriculture 4.0 platforms are just, or not. These recognition justice tensions are explored by leveraging qualitative data collected through forty-two face-to-face interviews with individuals on farms located in the US states of Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming who utilize these platforms. The study design intentionally oversampled for persons with disabilities, which highlights another distinguishing characteristic of the paper relative to critical Agriculture 4.0 scholarship. In addition to exposing certain ableist assumptions in these discussions, the sampling technique proved invaluable for interrogating how we think about labor, work, and leisure in agriculture. The paper specifically discusses how Agriculture 4.0, for example, shapes conceptions of what it means to be “able to work,” “willing to work,” “hard working,” etc. (shrink)

This essay takes a close look at a species of care that is particularly needed by people with progressive dementias but that has not been much discussed in the bioethics literature: the activity of holding the person in her or his identity. It presses the claim that close family members have a special responsibility to hold on to the demented person's identity for her or him, and offers some criteria for doing this morally well or badly. Finally, it considers how (...) even those with dementia can hold others in their identities, and suggests that this kind of holding too can have great moral worth. (shrink)

Interhuman relations sometimes suffer from a lack of adequate recognition. Here I ask whether this can be caused by the “third” of representations of a superhuman ultimate object or source of recognition, that is, a personal God. In arguing for a positive answer, I articulate a notion of mediational recognition, and present a systematic analysis of a trilateral form of recognition in which one party claims to mediate normative judgements of another party to a third (...) one. The analysis then focuses on the structure of metaphysical power that can be generated by religious groups and institutions. (shrink)

This article revisits Miranda Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice through one specific aspect of Axel Honneth’s recognition theory. Taking a first cue from Honneth’s critique of the limitations of the “language-theoretic framework” in Habermas’ discourse ethics, it floats the idea that the two categories of Fricker’s groundbreaking analysis—testimonial and hermeneutical injustice—likewise lean towards a speech-based metric. If we accept, however, that there are also implicit, preverbal, affective, and embodied ways of knowing and channels of knowledge transmission, this warrants an expansion of (...) Fricker’s original concept. By drawing on Honneth’s recognition theory, I argue it is possible to extend the account of epistemic injustice beyond Fricker’s two central categories, to glimpse yet another register of serious “wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower.” I define this harm as prediscursive epistemic injury and offer two central cases to illustrate this additional form of epistemic injustice. (shrink)

Empathy means understanding another person’s emotional or intentional state by vicariously sharing this state. As opposed to emotional contagion, empathy is characterized by the self–other distinction of subjective experience. Empathy develops in the second year, as soon as symbolic representation and mental imagery set in that enable children to represent the self, to recognize their mirror image, and to identify with another person. In experiments with 126 children, mirror recognition and readiness to empathize with a distressed playmate (...) were investigated. Almost all recognizers showed compassion and tried to help, whereas nonrecognizers were perplexed or remained indifferent. Several motivational consequences of empathy are discussed and its special quality is outlined in comparison with theory of mind and perspective taking. (shrink)

Empathy means understanding another person’s emotional or intentional state by vicariously sharing this state. As opposed to emotional contagion, empathy is characterized by the self–other distinction of subjective experience. Empathy develops in the second year, as soon as symbolic representation and mental imagery set in that enable children to represent the self, to recognize their mirror image, and to identify with another person. In experiments with 126 children, mirror recognition and readiness to empathize with a distressed playmate (...) were investigated. Almost all recognizers showed compassion and tried to help, whereas nonrecognizers were perplexed or remained indifferent. Several motivational consequences of empathy are discussed and its special quality is outlined in comparison with theory of mind and perspective taking. (shrink)

At the heart of the drama of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is the realization of the concept of self-consciousness. The self-conscious agent strives to know herself through being known by another, and after repeated failures comes eventually to learn what is required for one to know and to be known. Hegel’s famous account of a life and death struggle for recognition between two self-conscious agents marks the beginning of a long development toward the realization of the multifaceted conditions (...) for the possibility of genuine intersubjective recognition and therewith for truly responsible agency. This development is concomitantly the actualization of the concept of spirit, for true agency requires the appearance of absolute spirit in a community of self-conscious individuals. This paper explores why forgiveness is so central to this process. According to Hegel’s argument, we only fully realize our nature as self-conscious beings when we acknowledge our need for forgiveness. (shrink)

Heyes argues that nonhuman primates are unable to imitate, recognize themselves in mirrors, and take another's perspective, and that none of these capabilities are evidence for theory of mind. First, her evaluation of the evidence, especially for imitation and mirror self-recognition, is inaccurate. Second, she neglects to address the important developmental evidence that these capabilities are necessary precursors in the development of theory of mind.

In the course of the last 30 years, feminist theories of gender have shifted from quasi-Marxist, labor-centered conceptions to putatively ‘post-Marxist’ culture-and identity-based conceptions. Reflecting a broader political move from redistribution to recognition, this shift has been double edged. On the one hand, it has broadened feminist politics to encompass legitimate issues of representation, identity and difference. Yet, in the context of an ascendant neoliberalism, feminist struggles for recognition may be serving less to enrich struggles for redistribution than (...) to displace the latter. Thus, instead of arriving at a broader, richer paradigm that could encompass both redistribution and recognition, feminists appear to have traded one truncated paradigm for another – a truncated economism for a truncated culturalism. This article aims to resist that trend. I propose an anaysis of gender that is broad enough to house the full range of feminist concerns, those central to the old socialist-feminism as well as those rooted in the cultural turn. I also propose a correspondingly broad conception of justice, capable of encompassing both distribution and recognition, and a non-identitarian account of recognition, capable of synergizing with redistribution. I conclude by examining some practical problems that arise when we try to envision institutional reforms that could redress gender maldistribution and gender misrecognition simultaneously. (shrink)

How could one person justifiably create reasons for another? This article reissues this familiar ‘standing’ objection to authority, to demonstrate the structural contribution of recognition to both the idea of authority and its justification. Drawing upon theories of recognition of reasons and persons, it argues that authority must be robustly recognised, not merely identified, by both its subjects and its claimants. Such recognition operates in either roles or relations of authority to make a subject’s relevant reasons (...) for action an authority’s business. By transmitting reasons between persons on both sides of roles or relations, recognition does the connective work that is necessary to distinguish the idea of authority from other concepts of control, while structuring its justification to require both standing between persons and standards in accordance with reasons. Without the connection between persons and transmission of reasons that comes through robust recognition, one’s power over another is both claimed and received not as authority, but as coercion or persuasion; the claim itself entails meddling with (rather than serving) subjects. (shrink)

This paper argues that relations of mutual recognition (love, respect, esteem, trust) contribute directly and non-reductively to our flourishing as relational selves. -/- Love is important for the quality of human life. Not only do everyday experiences and analyses of pop culture and world literature attest to this; scientific research does as well. How exactly does love contribute to well-being? This chapter discusses the suggestion that it not only matters for the experiential quality of life, or for successful agency, (...) but that it actualizes our nature as “relational selves” (Chen, Boucher & Kraus 2011). I defend a hybrid or pluralist theory, which sees humans not only as subjects of experiences, or agents, or valuers, but also as relational selves. Expanding from love to other interpersonal relations, thriving relations of mutual recognition (love, respect, esteem, trust), contribute directly and non-reductively to our flourishing as relational selves. The paper will start by putting forward the proposal (Section 2), and then discussing it in relation to important alternatives. The focus is on alternatives which hold that love, and other forms of mutual recognition, are important for well-being, but only indirectly. One kind of challenge against the constitutive role of relations to others for well-being comes from the traditional theories that accommodate relations in some indirect ways (Section 3). A second kind of challenge admits that perhaps love is central to well-being in a direct way, but do we have reason to believe that other forms of mutual recognition are as well? (Section 4) Yet another kind of challenge is that love matters for the quality of lives in some other way than contributing to its prudential value: love is good, but is it good for us? (Section 5) A fourth kind of challenge concerns what we are, and the nature of “essentialism” involved in the approach stressing relational selfhood: cannot, say, motherhood contribute to one’s good life even if motherhood is contingent and not essential? (Section 6). In debates on recognition the idea that mutual recognition is also relevant for well-being has been put forward, for example in Axel Honneth’s (1992, ch.9 ) ”formal” theory of good life. Whatever else constitutes good life, relations of recognition form its backbone (cf. Ikäheimo 2014). Surprisingly little however is written about mutual recognition and well-being in detail, or recognition in comparison to traditional theories of well-being. This chapter aims to fill some of that void, and at the same time defend the view that well-being is one of the normative notions with which mutual recognition has a constitutive relationship. (shrink)

Each is for the other the middle term, through which each mediates itself with itself and unites with itself; and each is for itself, and for the other, an immediate being on its own account, which at the same time is such only through this mediation. They recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another. Scholars seeking an account of recognition will be familiar with the seminal section on lordship and bondage in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. In these passages (...) we learn that the dialectic of mutual recognition is the key to actualized self-consciousness, that moment in which the “I” transcends its immanence in the life process to become a self-reflective subject, actively superseding the.. (shrink)

Such love, though it expends itself in generosity and thoughtfulness, though it give birth to visions and to great poetry, remains among the sharpest expressions of self-interest. Not until it has passed through a long servitude, through its own self-hatred, through mockery, through great doubts, can it take its place among the loyalties.most readers will be at least generally familiar with the details of Hegel’s so-called struggle for recognition, his account of the emergence of communal life in chapter 4 (...) of the Phenomenology of Spirit. “Consciousness,” the argument’s protagonist, at a certain stage interprets its desire for wisdom as a desire for the regard of another; it first tries to secure it by forcing the.. (shrink)