This book offers a critical assessment of Axel Honneth’s complex and growing opus in social and political philosophy. It examines this in the context of the history and future of the Frankfurt School and in its relation to contemporary analytic approaches to social and political philosophy as well as postmodernist critics.

Until recently, sex determination in mammals has often been described as a male determination process, with male differentiation being the active and dominant pathway, and only in its absence is the passive female pathway followed. This picture has been challenged recently with the discovery that the gene encoding R-spondin1 is mutated in human patients with female-to-male sex reversal.((1)) These findings might place R-spondin1 in the exceptional position of being the female-determining gene in mammals. In this review, possible roles of R-spondin1 (...) during sex determination as well as questions arising from this study will be discussed. (shrink)