Although Amy Allen’s critique of contemporary Frankfurt School critical theory has been widely discussed, her concern for an adequate conceptualization of reason’s intertwinement with power has not received the attention it deserves. The article shows that the diagnosis of a too idealistic account of reason forms the backbone of Allen’s charges against Habermas, Honneth and Forst, before it discusses her criteria for an adequate conceptualization of the intertwinement of reason and power. It demonstrates that Allen’s attempt to formulate such a (...) conceptualization falls short of two of her own criteria, namely the basic commitments of essentially impure reason and radical self-reflexivity. Taking seriously Allen’s proposal for a radical self-reflexive genealogical critique would force her to question the very terms in which she formulates her critique of critical theory, namely the search for “normative foundations,” and the article sketches a way for doing so. (shrink)

Was bedeutet die steile Karriere von Verantwortung (nicht nur) in der Philosophie, und welchen Preis zahlen wir dafür? Dass große Teile der modernen Philosophie ihr verfallen sind, so die zentrale These, bezahlt diese mit Blindheit für die theoretischen wie praktischen Auswirkungen von Verantwortung. Um sie zu analysieren, muss Verantwortung als diskursiven Operator verstanden werden, dessen Einheit im ambivalenten Selbstverhältnis der Verantwortung Tragenden liegt. Seine praktischen Auswirkungen werden exemplarisch in den Praktiken der Arbeit und der Kriminalität studiert, in denen das verantwortliche (...) Selbstverhältnis intensiviert und zugleich von der Voraussetzung substantieller Handlungsmacht entkoppelt wird. So hilft Verantwortung, eine unternehmerische Logik in die Selbstverhältnisse zunehmend entmachteter Lohnarbeiterinnen und »Arbeitsloser« einzuschmelzen sowie die Bürgerinnen aktiv in die präventiv gewendete Kriminalpolitik einer auf öffentliche Sicherheit fixierten Gesellschaft einzubinden. Die theoretischen Auswirkungen werden anhand der Genealogie von Verantwortung innerhalb der Philosophie analysiert, in der sich Verantwortung vom Instrument in der metaphysischen Debatte um Willensfreiheit zu einem eigenständigen moralischen Problem und schließlich zur Gewissheit wandelt, mit der andere philosophische Fragen erklärt werden. Fixpunkt aller Reflexionen bleibt das ambivalente verantwortliche Selbstverhältnis als aktiver Umgang mit dem Faktum des eigenen Unterwerfens – sowohl dem Unterworfen-sein als auch dem Unterwerfen Anderer. Das zum Faktum erklärte Unterwerfen erlaubt dem Subjekt, sich unabhängig von seiner tatsächlichen Handlungsmacht als souverän zu erleben, und bildet den verborgenen Kern des verantwortlichen Selbstverhältnisses. Weil Verantwortung aber zunehmen gebraucht wird, um die Bindungskraft von Normativität als ureigenes Gebiet der Philosophie zu explizieren, verleitet ihre Attraktivität dazu, diese Selbstobjektivierung zu übersehen oder zu leugnen und den praktischen Gebrauch der philosophischen Legitimierungen von Verantwortung auszublenden. Dagegen setzt dieses Buch eine diagnostische Kritik, die den Bann der Verantwortung wenn nicht bricht, so doch entlarvt. (shrink)

Political epistemology is the name of an ambitious task. In order to aptly conceptualise the internal relationship between truth and knowledge on one side, and politics and society on the other side, political epistemology must reformulate the concepts of epistemology and social and political theory. For the concept of knowledge, this task implies to consider the truth and the force of knowledge equally. Frieder Vogelmann shows in his book the far-reaching consequences of this endeavour: for the contemporary debate about (...) untruth in politics, for the possible forms of social critique, and for the reflection upon philosophy and its history. (shrink)

Most people would agree that we should behave and act in a responsible way. Yet only 200 years ago, ‘responsibility’ was only of marginal importance in discussions of law and legal practice, and it had little ethical significance. What is the significance of the fact that ‘responsibility’ now plays such a central role in, for example, work, the welfare state, or the criminal justice system? What happens when individuals are generally expected to think of themselves as ‘responsible’ agents? And what (...) are the consequences of the fact that the philosophical analysis of ‘responsibility’ focuses almost exclusively on conditions of agency that are mostly absent from real life? -/- In this book, Frieder Vogelmann demonstrates how large parts of philosophy have fallen under responsibility’s spell, and he uses a Foucauldian approach in an attempt to break it. The three axes of power, knowledge, and self are used in a detailed analysis of the practical regimes of labour (including the welfare state), criminality (including policing, punishment practices, and criminal proceedings), and philosophy, and of the two subject positions required by ‘responsibility’ – those of the attributors and bearers of responsibility – within them. The power relations between these positions, which Vogelmann carefully excavates from the grounds of our practices, reveal that the deck is stacked unevenly from the start. (shrink)

Although the various interpretations of Foucault’s model of critique often seem to differ only in minor details, they seriously diverge by situating critique on different levels of abstraction in Foucault’s work. Mapping interpretations of Foucault’s critique according to this criterion shows that none of them pays full attention to all three of Foucault’s methodological imperatives which he calls nihilism, nominalism and historicism. The article offers such a reading of Foucault’s critique, interpreting it as a diagnostic practice of prefigurative emancipation. The (...) task of diagnosing the present explains how Foucault’s critique functions as a philosophical practice, and by making explicit in which ways it emancipates us, it gives us reasons why we might be interested in doing critique like that. (shrink)

Although seldom examined and not explained by Robert Brandom himself, the concept of responsibility is as important as the concept of inference for Brandom’s account of discursivity. Whereas ‘inference’ makes explicit the propositional content of concepts as the inferentially structured totality of their relations of material incompatibility, ‘responsibility’ makes explicit the normative force of these relations. ‘Responsibility’ thus becomes the paradigm of understanding normativity’s binding force – and my critical reading demonstrates that it fosters a moralizing, juridifying and economizing understanding (...) of normativity’s binding force. Furthermore, a diagnostic interpretation of Nietzsche’s genealogy of ‘responsibility’ reveals that Brandom’s concept of ‘responsibility’ is not an exception but exemplary for how ‘responsibility’ is used in philosophy. (shrink)

All theories of critique rely on a – often implicit – description of the activity that doing critique is supposed to consist in. These “pictures of critique” frame all further distinctions and justifications in the debate about critique and critique’s normativity. After distinguishing three pictures of critique – measuring, disrupting and emancipating critique – I ask whether the theoretical reflection in which a certain conception of critique is elaborated is itself accurately captured by the picture of critique it employs. In (...) other words: Is the theoretical reflection of critique a critical activity according to its own picture of critique? I propose to call only those theories of critique critical theories the theoretical activity of which is a critical activity on their own picture of critique - which are surprisingly few. Most critical theories are thereby revealed to be rather traditional when it comes their own theorizing of critique. (shrink)

In this article, three theses are proposed. The first is that ›force‹ and ›normativity‹ are not just two fundamental concepts in philosophy today but two paradigms: Each claims to structure how we view the world, to name what is specifically human and to determine the task of philosophy. Their confrontation repeats, according to the second thesis, the dispute between neo-Kantian normativism and life-philosophy in the 19th century, best captured by the concepts of ›life‹ and ›validity.‹ Third, the differences within this (...) repetition concern the position, status and nature of subjectivity: Whereas theories of validity in the 19th century are at least partially anti-subjectivist, and thus accused of being abstract, scholastic and hostile to ›life‹ by life-philosophy, today it is the paradigm of ›force‹ which regards the subject as a contingent result of forces. In contrast, contemporary normativism argues for the autonomy of a sovereign subject whose activity is the source of non-indifference in his or her world. (shrink)

Currently, the rise of science denialism is met by a new positivism that is equally detrimental for the natural and social sciences and humanities. Both paint an unrealistic picture of science in the singular, based on an idealist epistemology. In stark opposition, the article argues for a materialist epistemology that can support a realistic understanding of scientific practices by taking seriously their plurality, historicity and contextuality.

‘Post-truth’ is a failed concept, both epistemically and politically because its simplification of the relationship between truth and politics cripples our understanding and encourages authoritarianism. This makes the diagnosis of our ‘post-truth era’ as dangerous to democratic politics as relativism with its premature disregard for truth. In order to take the step beyond relativism and ‘post-truth’, we must conceptualise the relationship between truth and politics differently by starting from a ‘non-sovereign’ understanding of truth.

This book investigates context-sensitivity in natural language by examining the meaning and use of a target class of theoretically recalcitrant expressions. These expressions-including epistemic vocabulary, normative and evaluative vocabulary, and vague language -exhibit systematic differences from paradigm context-sensitive expressions in their discourse dynamics and embedding properties. Many researchers have responded by rethinking the nature of linguistic meaning and communication. Drawing on general insights about the role of context in interpretation and collaborative action, Silk develops an improved contextualist theory of CR-expressions (...) within the classical truth-conditional paradigm: Discourse Contextualism. The aim of Discourse Contextualism is to derive the distinctive linguistic behavior of a CR-expression from a particular contextualist interpretation of an independently motivated formal semantics, along with general principles of interpretation and conversation. It is shown how in using CR-expressions, speakers can exploit their mutual grammatical and world knowledge, and general pragmatic reasoning skills, to coordinate their attitudes and negotiate about how the context should evolve. The book focuses primarily on developing a Discourse Contextualist semantics and pragmatics for epistemic modals. The Discourse Contextualist framework is also applied to other categories of epistemic vocabulary, normative and evaluative vocabulary, and vague adjectives. The similarities/differences among these expressions, and among context-sensitive expressions more generally, have been underexplored. The development of Discourse Contextualism in this book sheds light on general features of meaning and communication, and the variety of ways in which context affects and is affected by uses of language. Discourse Contextualism provides a fruitful framework for theorizing about various broader issues in philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive science. (shrink)

Expressivism promises an illuminating account of the nature of normative judgment. But worries about the details of expressivist semantics have led many to doubt whether expressivism's putative advantages can be secured. Drawing on insights from linguistic semantics and decision theory, I develop a novel framework for implementing an expressivist semantics that I call ordering expressivism. I argue that by systematically interpreting the orderings that figure in analyses of normative terms in terms of the basic practical attitude of conditional weak preference, (...) the expressivist can explain the semantic properties of normative sentences in terms of the logical properties of that attitude. Expressivism's problems with capturing the logical relations among normative sentences can be reduced to the familiar, more tractable problem of explaining certain coherence constraints on preferences. Particular attention is given to the interpretation of wide-scope negation. The proposed solution is also extended to other types of embedded contexts—most notably, disjunctions. (shrink)

"Foucault lesen" [Reading Foucault] proposes a systematic and philosophical readig of Foucaut’s work: Systematically, I emphasize Foucault’s methodological perspective as a nihilistic, nominalistic and historicistic analysis of practices and the realities produced by them. This analysis proceeds along the three axes of knowledge, power and self-relations. I explore the consequences of this interpretation regarding the debates about Foucault’s concept of critique, his attack on the science humaines and his stance vis-à-vis neoliberalism. My interpretation amounts to a philosophical reading because it (...) demonstrates that the ‘history of truth’ is at the core of Foucault’s philosophy. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Moral Naturalism is the view that moral judgments aim at describing moral facts and that these are ordinary garden-variety natural facts. Moral Naturalism has trouble accounting for the intuition that we cannot outsource moral judgments, i.e., we cannot ground a moral conviction that p on the fact that a reliable moral adviser holds that p. There have been, however, several attempts to explain this intuition away or to discredit the intuition pumps that bring it forward. I argue that moral (...) naturalists are not in a position to deny this intuition. Moral Naturalism embodies a conception of the minimal conditions for someone to qualify as capable of making moral judgments; among these conditions is the acknowledgment of the supervenience of the moral on the non-moral; given the naturalist's conception of what it takes for someone to be capable of moral judgment, if we allow agents to outsource their moral judgments we come to situations in which the convictions of moral agents do not comply with the acknowledgment of moral supervenience. The naturalist must, therefore, deny the possibility of moral outsourcing. Moral Naturalism, then, faces the problem of making sense of the ban on moral outsourcing. (shrink)

Paragraphs §§ 108-133 of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations seems to contain reminders about what we should and should not do when we do philosophy: we should neither present theories (§109) nor interfere with the actual use of language (§124); we should, on the other hand, bring the words back from their metaphysical use to their everyday use (§116) and simply present things, without explaining them (§126). But if the correct way of doing philosophy is just to describe what lies open to (...) view, what justifies those normative considerations? If everything he has to offer are descriptions, how can he make considerations about philosophy to which the philosophical tradition apparently does not comply? We will argue that these passages do contain methodological recommendations. Those, however, are not the immediate result of the application of the method, i.e., they are not something we discover about philosophy by employing the method itself. The methodological considerations are justified because they are the result of a reliable process of deliberation. What makes the deliberative process reliable is the fact that the application of the method provides us with an accurate description of the goal that the philosophical practice traditionally has in view, thus enabling us to deliberate correctly. (shrink)

From the perspective of gender theory, the intersections among gender, class, and race make it difficult, if not impossible, to assign political issues and identities to just one social movement. Instead, the negotiation of movement ownership of issues and identities occurs through interaction among social movements, including interactions that create denial and distance. This article takes the interaction of labor organizing and feminism as the lens for studying movement interaction at three levels: opportunity structure, organizing practices, and framing ideas. Using (...) a case study of a strike of day care workers in West Berlin in the winter of 1989-90, it contrasts inclusive and exclusive forms of solidarity and their consequences for organizational practices. This particular strike received little support from either feminists or the labor movement and eventually failed, an outcome that can be seen as reflecting the weakness of structural and organizational supports for frames favoring inclusive solidarity. (shrink)

Contemporary concerns about the increase in untruths in politics have renewed interest in the relationship between truth and politics. Is democracy losing its foundations in a ‘post-truth era’ because it is becoming disconnected from reality? Or are facts, to which a technocratic mindset cannot tolerate alternatives, threatening to suppress political debate? In twelve contributions, political theorists investigate the relationship between truth and politics against the background of the current discussion. With contributions by Floris Biskamp, Oliver Flügel-Martinsen, Eva Marlene Hausteiner, Oliver (...) Hidalgo, Anna Hollendung, Dominik Klein, Gundula Ludwig, Franziska Martinsen, Johannes Marx, Martin Nonhoff, Frank Nullmeier, Samuel Salzborn, Hagen Schölzel, Frieder Vogelmann and Lucas von Ramin. (shrink)

This book combines insights from philosophy and linguistics to develop a novel framework for theorizing about linguistic meaning and the role of context in interpretation. A key innovation is to introduce explicit representations of context — assignment variables — in the syntax and semantics of natural language. The proposed theory systematizes a spectrum of “shifting” phenomena in which the context relevant for interpreting certain expressions depends on features of the linguistic environment. Central applications include local and nonlocal contextual dependencies with (...) quantifiers, attitude ascriptions, conditionals, questions, and relativization. The result is an innovative, philosophically informed compositional semantics compatible with the truth-conditional paradigm. (shrink)

Die Debatte um die Differenz von „Verantwortung“ und „Pflicht“ ist kein bloßer Streit um Wörter, geht es doch um Begriffe, für die der Anspruch erhoben wird, sie seien konstitutiv für moralische Normativität oder gar für Normativität per se. Doch welchen Unterschied macht es, die besondere Bindungskraft von Normativität über Verantwortung oder über Pflicht zu explizieren? Die Genealogie der philosophischen Reflexionen auf Verantwortung lokalisiert die Differenz zwischen Pflicht und Verantwortung in den jeweiligen Selbstverhältnissen, die mit diesen Begriffen verbunden werden. Die Analyse (...) der Struktur dieser Selbstverhältnisse erklärt sowohl, warum Verantwortung häufig als moderner Ersatzbegriff für Pflicht gedacht wird, als auch, welchen Unterschied die Explikation der Bindungskraft von Normativität über Verantwortung oder Pflicht macht: Je nachdem, mit welchem Begriff normative Kraft erläutert wird, wandert das entsprechende Selbstverhältnis in die Verfasstheit von Normativität ein. (shrink)

Business ethics and firm economic performance have traditionally often been regarded as mutually exclusive ends. We challenge this “either-or” belief and analyze when and how ethical firm leadership and firm performance may harmonize well. In extension of earlier research on ethical leadership and performance at the individual and team level, we study the context–dependency of the organization level relationship between CEO ethical leadership and firm performance. We propose a moderated mediation model of the link between CEO ethical leadership and firm (...) performance, identifying mediating and moderating variables unique to the organization-level of analysis. CEO ethical leadership is argued to work through organizational ethical culture which promotes firm performance under the condition that there is a strong corporate ethics program in place. Results from a multisource cross-sectional study, in which we surveyed 145 participants from 32 organizations and validated organizational performance ratings by objective performance data, showed support for our conceptual model. (shrink)

n diesem Beitrag zum Scherpunkt "Politische Theorie in der Krise" untersuche ich das von liberalen Theorien produzierte Wissen. Der Beitrag folgt dazu drei Selbstbeschreibungen des politischen Liberalismus, der sich erstens selbst als dominierendes Zentrum der gegenwärtigen Politischen Theorie sieht, der zweitens Anspruch darauf erhebt, mit seinem Wissen die politischen Selbstverständnisse von Bürger_innen anleiten und verändern zu können, und der schließlich drittens seine eigene Wirksamkeit in der Wirklichkeit im Rahmen der Diskussion um ideale und nicht-ideale Theorie verhandelt. Im affirmativen Nachvollzug dieser (...) drei Selbstbeschreibungen zeigt der Artikel, wie das Wissen des politischen Liberalismus eine von politischen Konflikten befreite Wirklichkeit erzeugt und zugleich die politischen Selbstverständnisse der Bürger_innen mithilfe dieser Wirklichkeitskonstruktion lenkt. Damit zielt das Wissen des politischen Liberalismus darauf ab, eine Subjektivität zu formen, die sich zugunsten einer rechtsförmigen Verwaltung von Politik verabschiedet. (shrink)

This paper develops an interpretation of Nietzsche’s ethics and metaethics that reconciles his apparent antirealism with his engagement in normative discourse. Interpreting Nietzsche as a metaethical constructivist—as holding, to a first approximation, that evaluative facts are grounded purely in facts about the evaluative attitudes of the creatures to whom they apply—reconciles his vehement declarations that nothing is valuable in itself with his passionate expressions of a particular evaluative perspective and injunctions for the free spirits to create new values. Drawing on (...) Nietzsche’s broader epistemological and psychological views, I develop a distinctive, and genuinely Nietzschean, version of constructivism. On this account, evaluative properties are grounded in affective valuations of the new philosophers. The proposed interpretation synthesizes a variety of disparate features of Nietzsche’s writings and improves on existing interpretations in the literature. The resulting version of constr.. (shrink)

Neste artigo considero e rejeito uma leitura não-cognitivista do sentimentalismo moral de Hume (segundo a qual ele identifica convicções morais com impressões de um tipo particular) bem como uma leitura disposicionalista (segundo a qual Hume concebe convicções morais como crenças causais a respeito do poder de traços de caráter de produzir certos sentimentos em espectadores apropriados). Sustento que as falhas dessas leituras mostram que Hume é mais bem compreendido como um teórico do erro, de acordo com quem embora convicções morais (...) sejam crenças elas jamais são verdadeiras. Em contraste com teorias do erro contemporâneas, contudo, a tese de Hume não se baseia em uma alegação metafísica para efeito de que não há propriedades morais. Antes, ele sustenta que ideias morais não são ideias de qualidades que possam ser corretamente predicadas de ações ou traços de caráter, mas ideias de sentimentos e que, portanto, crenças morais incorporam sistematicamente um erro categorial. AbstractIn this paper I consider and reject a noncognitivist reading of Hume’ s moral sentimentalism (according to which he identifies moral convictions with impressions of particular kind) as well as a dispositional reading (according to which Hume takes moral convictions to be causal beliefs about the power of character traits to produce certain feelings in suitable spectators). I argue that the shortcomings of these views show that Hume is best understood as an error theorist, according to whom although moral convictions are beliefs they are never true. In contrast with contemporary error theories, however, Hume’s view is not grounded on a metaphysical claim to the effect that there are no moral properties. He holds instead that moral ideas are not at all ideas of qualities that could be truthfully predicated of actions or character traits but rather ideas of feelings and, therefore, that moral beliefs systematically incorporate a category error. (shrink)

How is philosophical knowledge related to the world in which it is produced – and how should it be related? In the article, “world” refers to the whole of historically established, politically contested and materially constituted practices. Three ideal-type relationships are distinguished: affirmatively in the world, negatively against the world, and with the world. The article argues for the latter because it combines the two decisive insights of the first two relationships: the insight into philosophy’s facticity, i. e., it being (...) bound to the world, and the insight into philosophy’s freedom, i. e., that it can, nevertheless, turn against that world. Political epistemology is needed to explicate any philosophy with the world because it holds together, in a productive tension, minimal materialism as the core of the insight into philosophy’s facticity and the irreducibility of thought as the core of the insight into philosophy’s freedom. (shrink)

Foucault’s concept of ‘biopolitics’ has sparked a lively debate within critical theory, although Foucault himself rarely used it after The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. In this chapter I argue that the reasons both for the way ‘biopolitics’ stirred Foucault’s readers and for his subsequent abandonment are to be found in the relation between Foucault’s model of critique and the role ‘biopolitics’ plays in it: it names the counter-truths derived from Foucault’s critical diagnosis of the dispositif of sexuality. Since ‘biopolitics’ (...) was introduced as a notion with a specific critical function closely tied to Foucault’s model of critique, I first explicate this model of critique as a diagnostic practice of prefigurative emancipation before re-reading Le Volonté de Savoir from this methodological perspective. After Le Volonté Savoir, Foucault tried turning ‘biopolitics’ into a descriptive term, no longer naming the critical diagnosis but the object to be criticised. Yet within Foucault’s model of critique, this required him to produce a new critical diagnosis which he never did. The implication for contemporary usages of ‘biopolitics’ in critical theory is that it either needs to develop its own counter-truths from a critical analysis of biopolitics or use a different model of critique. (shrink)

The Southern Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

ABSTRACT It is commonly held that the goals at which an action aims are specified by the pro-attitude/belief pairs in light of which the action seems appealing to the agent. I argue that the existence of multiple-incentives cases shows this thesis to be false. In order to account for such cases we have to ascribe to agents the capacity to actively determine the goals at which their actions aim. I refer to this capacity as the agent’s “will”. Agents endowed with (...) a will are capable not only of determining their own behavior but also their motives. I conclude that the existence of multiple-incentives cases shows that agents have this capacity. RESUMO É comumente sustentado que os fins visados por uma ação são especificados pelos pares atitude/crença à luz dos quais a ação parece atrativa para o agente. Eu argumento que a existência de casos de múltiplos incentivos mostra que essa tese é falsa. De maneira a dar conta desses casos devemos atribuir a agentes a capacidade de determinar ativamente os fins visados por suas ações. Refiro-me a essa capacidade como a “vontade” do agente. Agentes dotados de vontade são capazes não apenas de determinar seu próprio comportamento mas também seus motivos. Concluo que a existência de casos de incentivos múltiplos mostra que agentes têm essa capacidade. (shrink)

This paper develops an account of the meaning of `ought', and the distinction between weak necessity modals (`ought', `should') and strong necessity modals (`must', `have to'). I argue that there is nothing specially ``strong'' about strong necessity modals per se: uses of `Must p' predicate the (deontic/epistemic/etc.) necessity of the prejacent p of the actual world (evaluation world). The apparent ``weakness'' of weak necessity modals derives from their bracketing whether the necessity of the prejacent is verified in the actual world. (...) `Ought p' can be accepted without needing to settle that the relevant considerations (norms, expectations, etc.) that actually apply verify the necessity of p. I call the basic account a modal-past approach to the weak/strong necessity modal distinction (for reasons that become evident). Several ways of implementing the approach in the formal semantics/pragmatics are critically examined. The account systematizes a wide range of linguistic phenomena: it generalizes across flavors of modality; it elucidates a special role that weak necessity modals play in discourse and planning; it captures contrasting logical, expressive, and illocutionary properties of weak and strong necessity modals; and it sheds light on how a notion of `ought' is often expressed in other languages. These phenomena have resisted systematic explanation. In closing I briefly consider how linguistic inquiry into differences among necessity modals may improve theorizing on broader philosophical issues. (shrink)

Begriffe herrschen, so können wir im Anschluss an Wittgenstein und Nietzsche sagen, wenn sie unsere Denk-, Handlungs-, und Seinsweisen bestimmen und uns zugleich vergessen machen, dass sie Ergebnisse einer langen Geschichte von Konflikten um jene sozialen Praktiken sind, in denen sie gebraucht werden. Denn ihre heutige Bedeutung ergibt sich aus dem Sieg eines bestimmten Gebrauchs – mit jeder unreflektierten Verwendung bekräftigen wir daher unhinterfragt die Sieger der Begriffsgeschichte. Die Responsibilisierung unseres Denkens ist die in diesem Sinne verstandene Herrschaft eines bestimmten (...) Gebrauchs von „Verantwortung“. Die heute selbstverständliche Verwendung von „Verantwortung“ resultiert aus der Entwicklung des Begriffs in Recht, Politik und Philosophie, in der „Verantwortung“ an ein spezifisches Selbstverständnis des verantwortlichen Subjekts gebunden wird. Darin verbirgt sich eine Objektivierung von Machtbeziehungen im Inneren des Subjekts, damit dieses sich allen Einschränkungen zum Trotz souverän fühlen kann. Insofern haben wir gute Gründe, die Responsibilisierung des Denkens zu kritisieren. (shrink)

This chapter develops an account of the meaning and use of various types of legal claims, and uses this account to inform debates about the nature and normativity of law. The account draws on a general framework for implementing a contextualist theory, called 'Discourse Contextualism' (Silk 2016). The aim of Discourse Contextualism is to derive the apparent normativity of claims of law from a particular contextualist interpretation of a standard semantics for modals, along with general principles of interpretation and conversation. (...) Though the semantics is descriptivist, it avoids Dworkin’s influential criticism of so-called “semantic theories of law,” and elucidates the nature of “theoretical disagreements” about the criteria of legal validity. The account sheds light on the social, interpersonal function of normative uses of language in legal discourse. It also gives precise expression to Hart’s and Raz’s intuitive distinctions among types of legal claims (internal/external, committed/detached), while giving them a uniform type of analysis. The proposed semantics and pragmatics of legal claims provides a fruitful framework for further theorizing about the nature and metaphysics of law, the relation between law and morality, and the apparent practical character of legal language and judgment. Discourse Contextualism provides a solid linguistic basis for a broader account of legal discourse and practice. (shrink)

Should we embrace nihilism, as Nolen Gertz suggests, or try to overcome it? For Nietzsche, nihilism must be overcome – if we're strong enough. The key, argues Alex Silk, is to see how nihilistic beliefs – that, say, nothing matters – derive from nihilistic feelings and bodily states. Understanding the basic features of human nature and experience at the root of nihilism paves the way toward a healthier, affirming perspective on ourselves and human life. Nietzsche’s rhetorical style helps us incorporate (...) such a perspective by engaging our feelings as well as our rational faculties. (shrink)

Most conceptual analyses of responsibility fail to sufficiently account for the historicity of the concept – both within philosophical reflections and within non-philosophical practices. Three frequently encountered problems are: First, “responsibility” is often read retrospectively in texts where the concept is not present; second, the necessary and sufficient conditions that account for responsibility’s meaning are often derived from contemporary usage alone; and third, the non-philosophical usage of “responsibility” is often dismissed as “defective” too quickly. To avoid all three problems, I (...) argue for a Foucauldian analysis of practices in which “responsibility” is used. (shrink)

Klaus Günther’s discourse theory of law links the concept of criminal responsibility with the legitimacy of democratic law. Because attributions of criminal responsibility are always aimed at a person, they contain an implicit conception of the person. In a democracy under the rule of law, Günther argues, this conception of a person must be understood, as a “deliberative person”, a free and autonomous person capable of being both the addressee and the author of legal norms. The “deliberative person” is the (...) conceptual core of criminal responsibility, yet Günther develops it using a concept of “communicative accountability” modeled on the concept of criminal responsibility that it is designed to explicate. My aim is to bring this circular grounding of criminal responsibility into view and argue that Günther’s discourse theory of law is based on a legalized picture of discourse. (shrink)

Within the context of applied bioethical reasoning, various conceptions of the human body are focused upon by the author in relation to normative notions of autonomy.

This paper demarcates a theoretically interesting class of "evaluational adjectives." This class includes predicates expressing various kinds of normative and epistemic evaluation, such as predicates of personal taste, aesthetic adjectives, moral adjectives, and epistemic adjectives, among others. Evaluational adjectives are distinguished, empirically, in exhibiting phenomena such as discourse-oriented use, felicitous embedding under the attitude verb `find', and sorites-susceptibility in the comparative form. A unified degree-based semantics is developed: What distinguishes evaluational adjectives, semantically, is that they denote context-dependent measure functions ("evaluational (...) perspectives")—context-dependent mappings to degrees of taste, beauty, probability, etc., depending on the adjective. This perspective-sensitivity characterizing the class of evaluational adjectives cannot be assimilated to vagueness, sensitivity to an experiencer argument, or multidimensionality; and it cannot be demarcated in terms of pretheoretic notions of subjectivity, common in the literature. I propose that certain diagnostics for "subjective" expressions be analyzed instead in terms of a precisely specified kind of discourse-oriented use of context-sensitive language. I close by applying the account to `find x PRED' ascriptions. (shrink)

Starting with the observation that transparency has become a concept so familiar that one hardly ever stops to consider the presuppositions and consequences of its usage, the chapter analyses transparency demands as a specific way of exercising power. By doing so, the author shows that the intrinsic logic of transparency leads to paradoxical effects. Any attempts to realize complete transparency undermine its own preconditions. As Vogelmann argues, instead of providing more visibility and clarity, transparency makes its objects “invisible” and (...) the intensification of transparency demands produces self-censorship. The chapter concludes that transparency claims undermine the distinction between the private and the public and threaten the individual autonomy. (shrink)

Current literature on ethical leadership and unethical leadership reflects a Western-based private sector perspective, pointing toward a compliance-oriented understanding of ethical and unethical leadership. As today’s executives increasingly have to ethically lead across different cultures and sectors, it becomes vitally important to develop a more holistic picture how ethical and unethical leadership is perceived in the Western and Eastern cultural cluster and the private and the public/social sector. Addressing this issue, the present study aims to identify cross-cultural and cross-sectoral commonalities (...) and differences in international executives’ perceptions of ethical and unethical leadership. Findings from in-depth interviews (N = 36) with executives from Western and Eastern cultures working in the private or the public/social sector reveal collectively held perceptions of ethical leadership (including leader honesty, integrity, concern for responsibility/sustainability, and people orientation) and of unethical leadership (referring to leader dishonesty, corruption, egocentrism, and manipulation). Results indicate limited support for a compliance-oriented perspective on ethical and unethical leadership but yield a much greater trend toward a value-oriented perspective. Concrete practice examples illustrate these different perspectives. Cultural and sectoral particularities of executive perceptions of ethical and unethical leadership are discussed. (shrink)

This paper develops an update semantics for weak necessity modals like ‘ought’ and ‘should’. I start with the basic approach to the weak/strong necessity modal distinction developed in Silk 2018: Strong necessity modals are given their familiar semantics of necessity, predicating the necessity of the prejacent of the actual world (evaluation world). The apparent “weakness” of weak necessity modals derives from their bracketing the assumption that the relevant worlds in which the prejacent is necessary (deontically, epistemically, etc.) need be candidates (...) for actuality. ‘Should φ’ can be accepted without needing to settle that the relevant considerations (norms, preferences, expectations, etc.) that actually apply, given the facts, verify the necessity of φ. I formalize these ideas within an Update with Centering framework. The meaning of ‘Should φ’ is explained, fundamentally, in terms of how its use updates attention toward possibilities in which φ is necessary. The semantics is also extended to deontic conditionals. The proposed analyses capture various contrasting logical properties and discourse properties of ‘should’ and ‘must’ — e.g., in sensitivities to standing contextual assumptions, entailingness, and force — and provide an improved treatment of largely neglected data concerning information-sensitivity. (shrink)

Does truth have a history? Whereas Bernard William denies it and only allows a history of truthfulness, I defend the possibility of a critical history or genealogy of truth. Because a trifling relativistic historicization of truth leads to a paradoxically a-historic and pacifistic conception of truth, one must first establish the methodological concepts with which a genealogy of truth can avoid both problems. Three first steps towards such concepts can be found in some of Michel Foucault’s lectures, which lead the (...) genealogy of truth to focus on the origins of truth’s force. (shrink)

Non-naturalists about the normative face the problem of providing a metaphysical explanation for the supervenience of the normative on the natural. Recently, Gideon Rosen has argued that non-naturalists can side-step this problem by rejecting strong supervenience and the view that normative truths are metaphysically necessary. Rosen proposes to take normative truths to be normatively necessary, where normative necessity is different from and irreducible to metaphysical necessity. I argue that if Rosen is right, that creates a deeper problem for robust ethical (...) realism (the view that there are mind-independent, non-natural moral facts). According to robust ethical realism, it is a normative fact that persons are an especially valuable kind of being. But if Rosen is right, that is a metaphysically contingent fact. The existence of persons is also contingent. According to robust ethical realism, then, there is a striking match between what the normative facts happen to be and the kinds of beings that happen to exist. Persons could have failed to exist and they could have failed to be valuable, but it just so happens to be a fact about the natural world that they exist and a normative fact that they have value. Given that this match is accidental, it amounts to a miraculous coincidence. To the extent that commitment to unexplained coincidences counts against a view, robust ethical realism faces a problem. (shrink)

Die Behauptung, dass Verantwortung eine Subjektform sowie die Technik zu ihrer Herstellung bezeichnet, wird kaum Erstaunen auslösen. Wozu wären all die auf Verantwortung sich stützenden ethisch-moralischen Normen auch gut, wenn sie nicht unsere Subjektivität formen könnten? Dieses Selbstverständnis als verantwortliche Subjekte ist Nietzsches zentralen Angriffspunkt in der zweiten Abhandlung von "Zur Genealogie der Moral". Doch sein Verständnis von Verantwortung als Subjektivierungstechnik und Subjektform war im Kontext des philosophischen Diskurses, in dem er sich selbst verortet, alles andere als eine Selbstverständlichkeit. Der (...) junge Begriff »Verantwortung« war noch zu eng am Recht orientiert, um ein Selbstverhältnis zu besitzen, und wurde von der Philosophie nur in der metaphysischen Schlacht um die Willensfreiheit gebraucht. (shrink)

In seinen letzten beiden Vorlesungen untersucht Foucault anhand der historischen Praxis des freimütigen Sprechens auch seine eigenen methodologischen Begriffe. An den aus den antiken Quellen herausgearbeiteten Formen der parrhesia – als demokratische Politik, als philosophische Subjektivierungstechnik und als kynische Kritik – prüft Foucault so zugleich sein eigenes Vorgehen, Philosophie als Politik der Wahrheit zu betreiben.