This book is a critical exposé of the ways in which mainstream political philosophy silences dissent.

The thesis is that Adorno has a normative ethics, albeit a minimal and negative ethics of resistance. However Adorno’s ethical theory faces two problems: the problem of the availability of the good and the problem of whether a normative ethics is consistent with philosophical negativism. The author argues that a correct of understanding the role of the ineffable in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics solves both problems: it provides an account of the availability of the good that is consistent with his philosophical (...) negativism. The author counters the prevalent objection that Adorno’s aporetic philosophy, like some negative theology, leads to irrationalism and mysticism. The parallel with negative theology is developed by means of a comparison with Nicholas of Cusa. Drawing on Wittgentstein’s saying/showing distinction and Adrian Moore’s work the author argues that Nicholas and Adorno can be seen to share a philosophically defensible notion of ineffable knowledge. (shrink)

This is a critical discussion of Habermas's conception of moral cognitivism. I explain how it fits in with his meta-ethical anti-realism. I place Habermas's Discourse Ethics in the broad field of analytic meta-ethics. I also look at the question of whether the Frege-Geach problem applies to Habermas's Discourse Ethics, and if so, how he should best reply.

This paper attempts to get some critical distance on the increasingly fashionable issue of realism in political theory. Realism has an ambiguous status: it is sometimes presented as a radical challenge to the _status quo_; but it also often appears as a conservative force, aimed at clipping the wings of more ‘idealistic’ political theorists. I suggest that what we might call ‘actually existing realism’ is indeed a conservative presence in political philosophy, and that its ambiguous status plays a part in (...) making it so. But I also argue that there is no necessary connection between realism and conservatism. This paper describes the three contingent and suspiciously quick steps which lead from an initial commitment to being attentive to the real world, via a particular kind of pessimism about political possibilities, to an unnecessarily conservative destination. In the process, I try to show how the ubiquitous trinity of realism, pessimism and conservatism might be pulled apart, thus removing the artificial tension between ‘being realistic’ and the demand for far-reaching social change. (shrink)

J|rgen Habermas is the most renowned living German philosopher. This book aims to give a clear and readable overview of his philosophical work. It analyzes both the theoretical underpinnings of Habermas's social theory, and its more concrete applications in the fields of ethics, politics, and law. Finally, it examines how Habermas's social and political theory informs his writing on real, current political and social problems. The author explores Habermas's influence on a wide variety of fields--including philosophy, political and social theory, (...) cultural studies, sociology, and literary studies. He uses a problem-based approach to explain how Habermas's ideas can be applied to actual social and political situations. The book also includes a glossary of technical terms to further acquaint the reader with Habermas's philosophy. Unlike other writing on Habermas, this Introduction is accessibly written and explains his intellectual framework and technical vocabulary, rather than simply adopting it. (shrink)

Alison Jaggar recommends a radical break with a dominant approach to the philosophy of immigration shared by both liberal cosmopolitans and liberal nationalists. This paper is intended as an exploration of Jaggar’s conclusions and as an attempt to carry them further. Building on her critique, I argue that the characteristic questions asked by both cosmopolitans and nationalists appear inappropriate when seen against the political reality of immigration. In the last part of the paper, I argue that liberal nationalist contributions in (...) particular have problematized immigration and immigrants in ways not fundamentally different from those seen on the racist right. (shrink)

In this book, James Gordon Finlayson examines the Habermas-Rawls debate in context and considers its wider implications. He traces their dispute from its inception in their earliest works to the 1995 exchange and its aftermath, as well as its legacy in contemporary debates. Finlayson discusses Rawls’s Political Liberalism and Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms, considering them as the essential background to the dispute and using them to lay out their different conceptions of justice, politics, democratic legitimacy, individual rights, (...) and the normative authority of law. He gives a detailed analysis and assessment of their contributions, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of their different approaches to political theory, conceptions of democracy, and accounts of religion and public reason, and he reflects on the ongoing significance of the debate. The Habermas-Rawls Debate is an authoritative account of the crucial intersection of two major political theorists and an explication of why their dispute continues to matter. (shrink)

Recent political developments have made the notion of 'post-truth' ubiquitous. Along with associated terms such as 'fake news' and 'alternative facts', it appears with regularity in coverage of and commentary on Donald Trump, the Brexit vote, and the role – relative to these phenomena – of a half-despised, half-feared creature known as 'the public'. It has become commonplace to assert that we now inhabit, or are entering, a post-truth world. In this paper, I issue a sceptical challenge against the distinctiveness (...) and utility of the notion of post-truth. I argue, first, that the term fails to capture anything that is both real and novel. Moreover, post-truth discourse often has a not-fully-explicit political force and function: to ‘irrationalise’ political disaffection and to signal loyalty to a ‘pre-post-truth’ political status quo. The central insight of the speech act theory of J. L. Austin and others – that saying is always also doing – is as indispensable for understanding the significance of much of what is labelled ‘post-truth’, I’ll argue, as it is for understanding the significance of that very act of labelling. Keywords: post-truth, speech acts, Trump, brexit, Austin. (shrink)

Since its influential rendering by Rae Langton in her 1993 paper, “Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts,” the “silencing argument” against pornography has become the subject of a lively debate that continues to this day. My intention in this paper is not to join in the existing debate, but to give a critical overview of it. In its current form, I suggest, it is going nowhere . Yet the silencing argument, I believe, nevertheless contains an indispensable insight—and more radical potential than (...) is usually acknowledged either by its defenders or its opponents. I argue that in order to preserve this insight and unleash its potential, we should begin by adopting the following motto: MacKinnon, not Austin! (shrink)

The thesis is that Adorno has a normative ethics, albeit a minimal and negative ethics of resistance. However Adorno’s ethical theory faces two problems: the problem of the availability of the good and the problem of whether a normative ethics is consistent with philosophical negativism. The author argues that a correct of understanding the role of the ineffable in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics solves both problems: it provides an account of the availability of the good that is consistent with his philosophical (...) negativism. The author counters the prevalent objection that Adorno’s aporetic philosophy, like some negative theology, leads to irrationalism and mysticism. The parallel with negative theology is developed by means of a comparison with Nicholas of Cusa. Drawing on Wittgentstein’s saying/showing distinction and Adrian Moore’s work the author argues that Nicholas and Adorno can be seen to share a philosophically defensible notion of ineffable knowledge. (shrink)

Habermas and Rawls are two heavyweights of social and political philosophy, and they are undoubtedly the two most written about authors in this field. However, there has not been much informed and interesting work on the points of intersection between their projects, partly because their work comes from different traditions—roughly the European tradition of social and political theory and the Anglo-American analytic tradition of political philosophy. In this volume, contributors re-examine the Habermas-Rawls dispute with an eye toward the ways in (...) which the dispute can cast light on current controversies about political philosophy more broadly. Moreover, the volume will cover a number of other salient issues on which Habermas and Rawls have interesting and divergent views, such as the political role of religion and international justice. (shrink)

In this article I press four different objections on Forst’s theory of the ‘Right to Justification’. These are (i) that the principle of justification is not well-formulated; (ii) that ‘reasonableness and reciprocity’, as these notions are used by Rawls, are not apt to support a Kantian conception of morality; (iii) that the principle of justification, as Forst understands it, gives an inadequate account of what makes actions wrong; and (iv) that, in spite of his protestations to the contrary, Forst’s account (...) veers towards a version of moral realism that isprima facieincompatible with Kantian constructivism. I then evaluate Forst’s theory in the light of a distinction made by Sharon Street between restricted and unrestricted constructivism. I show that Forst has reason to deny that it is either the one or the other, but he is not able to show that it is both or neither. I conclude that the arguments Forst advances in support of his constructivist theory of the right to justification entail that it is a metaphysical and comprehensive conception in the relevant, Rawlsian sense. Forst’s theory of the right to justification therefore fails to fulfil one of the main stated aims. (shrink)

Discourse ethics is originally conceived as a programme of philosophical justification of morality. This depends on the formal derivation of the moral principle (U) from non-moral principles. The moral theory is supposed to fall out of a pragmatic theory of meaning. The original programme plays a central role in Habermas's social theory: the moral theory, if true, provides good evidence for the more general theory of modernization. But neither Habermas nor his followers have succeeded in providing a formal derivation. This (...) essay shows how and why Habermas's proposed derivation is impossible. As if aware of the lacuna, Habermas has recently suggested that (U) can be derived by 'abduction' rather than deduction. The proposal draws heavily on modernization theory; hence the only justification for (U) now available to him rests on premises drawn from that theory. The original programme of the justification of morality has thus given way to the weaker programme of the philosophical elucidation of morality. Further, since Habermas's moral theory is no longer justified independently of modernization theory, but at least partly by it, the moral theory cannot without circularity provide evidence for the modernization theory. (shrink)

‘Immanent criticism' has been discussed by philosophers of quite different persuasions, working in separate areas and in different traditions of philosophy. Almost all of them agree on roughly the same story about its origins: It is that Hegel invented immanent criticism, that Marx later developed it, and that the various members of the Frankfurt School, particularly Adorno, refined it in various ways, and that they are all paradigmatic practitioners of immanent criticism. I call this the Continuity Thesis. There are four (...) different claims that interest me. Hegel is the originator of immanent criticism. Hegel's dialectical method is that of immanent criticism. Adorno practises immanent criticism and endorses the term as a description of his practice. Adorno's dialectical method is fundamentally Hegelian. In this article, I offer an account of immanent criticism, on the basis of which, I evaluate these four claims and argue that the Continuity Thesis should be rejected. (shrink)

As well as providing a clear and critical introduction to the theory, this refreshing overview focuses on the practice of feminism with coverage of actions and activism, bringing the subject to life for newcomers as well as offering fresh perspectives for advanced students. Explanations of the main strands to feminism, such as liberalism, sit alongside an exploration of a range of approaches, such as radical, anarchist and Marxist feminism, and provide much-needed context against which more familiar historical themes may be (...) understood. The author's broad and inclusive view conveys the diversity and disagreement within feminism with accessible clarity. The analysis of key terms equips readers with a critical understanding of the vocabulary of feminist debates that will be invaluable to undergraduate students. (shrink)

Fertility preservation has become more common for various populations, including oncology patients, transgender individuals, and women who are concerned about age-related infertility. Little attention has been paid to fertility preservation for patients with differences/disorders of sex development (DSD). Our goal in this article is to address specific ethical considerations that are unique to this patient population. To this end, we present a hypothetical DSD case. We then explore ethical considerations related to patient’s age, risk of cancer, concern about genetic transmission (...) of a DSD condition to children, co-occurring gender dysphoria, and access to experimental fertility preservation procedures. Given the limitations of current technologies, we recommend offering fertility preservation to individuals living with DSD using an informed decision-making approach that instills realistic expectations and minimizes the potential for false hope. Finally, we conclude with practical recommendations for this case based on the ethical considerations. (shrink)

Adorno's saying that ‘art is the promise of happiness’ radiates into every corner of his work from his aesthetic theory to his critical theory of society. However, it is much misunderstood. This can be seen from the standard answer to the question: in virtue of what formal features do art works, according to Adorno, promise happiness? The standard answer to this question suggests that the aesthetic harmony occasioned by the organic wholeness of the form realized in the artwork contrasts with (...) and throws into relief the antagonistic nature of society. The trouble is that this answer is flatly incompatible with Adorno's historicism and central components of his aesthetic modernism, including his critique of classicism, and his negativism. I propose a re-interpretation of Adorno's thesis that art is the promise of happiness that overcomes these difficulties. (shrink)

I. The Problem of Normative Foundations: Habermas's Original Criticism of Adorno and Horkheimer In The Theory of Communicative Action, Jürgen Habermas writes:From the beginning, critical theory labored over the difficulty of giving an account of its own normative foundations …1Call this Habermas's original objection to the problem of normative foundations. It has been hugely influential both in the interpretation and assessment of Frankfurt School critical theory and in the development of later variants of it. Nowadays it is a truth almost (...) universally acknowledged that any critical social theory in possession of normative…. (shrink)

Drawing on research from digital media studies, political theory and rhetoric, this article explores online radical conservative and reactionary ‘ideological entrepreneurs’. It argues that online media are uniting an ‘ideological family’ around concepts of natural inequality and hostility to those who deny them. Placing this phenomenon in context, the article shows how online culture reinvigorates well-established discourses of opposition to bureaucrats, intellectuals and experts of all kinds, rejecting one version of the neoliberal state and of its personnel, a ‘new class’ (...) understood to dominate through discursive, cultural power and imagined through the figures of the ‘Social Justice Warrior’ and the ‘Cultural Marxist’. In competing for a share of the marketplace of ideas, these ideological entrepreneurs promise insights – the revelations of the ‘red pill’ – critiquing ‘actually-existing’ neoliberalism yet insisting on the ‘rationality’ of governance through markets and promising adherents techniques for achieving success as liberated entrepreneurial selves. (shrink)

In the past few years, the situation and experiences of women in academic philosophy—and in academia more broadly—have received unprecedented attention. For feminist philosophers, a growing awareness of the problems facing women in the discipline is something to be welcomed. Nevertheless, this article raises some serious concerns about the framework within which these problems are often analyzed and addressed. I argue that the currently prevalent approach overemphasizes issues of representation and, additionally, risks becoming preoccupied with experimental psychology at the expense (...) of political and social criticism. (shrink)

Many commentators have failed to identify the important issues at the heart of the debate between Habermas and Rawls. This is partly because they give undue attention to differences between Rawls’s original position and Habermas’s principle, neither of which is germane to the actual dispute. The dispute is at bottom about how best to conceive of democratic legitimacy. Rawls indicates where the dividing issues lie when he objects that Habermas’s account of democratic legitimacy is comprehensive and his is confined to (...) the political. But his argument is vitiated by a threefold ambiguity in what he means by ‘comprehensive doctrine’. Tidying up this ambiguity helps reveal that the dispute turns on the way in which morality relates to political legitimacy. Although Habermas calls his conception of legitimate law ‘morally freestanding’, and as such distinguishes it from Kantian and natural law accounts of legitimacy, it is not as freestanding from morality as he likes to present it. Habermas’s mature theory contains conflicting claims about the relation between morality and democratic legitimacy. So there is at least one important sense in which Rawls’s charge of comprehensiveness is made to stick against Habermas’s conception of democratic legitimacy, and remains unanswered. View HTML Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.Where the Right Gets in: On Rawls’s Criticism of Habermas’s Conception of LegitimacyVolume 21, Issue 2James Gordon Finlayson DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1369415416000017Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. Where the Right Gets in: On Rawls’s Criticism of Habermas’s Conception of LegitimacyVolume 21, Issue 2James Gordon Finlayson DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1369415416000017Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. Where the Right Gets in: On Rawls’s Criticism of Habermas’s Conception of LegitimacyVolume 21, Issue 2James Gordon Finlayson DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1369415416000017Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation. (shrink)

In the past few years, the situation and experiences of women in academic philosophy—and in academia more broadly—have received unprecedented attention. For feminist philosophers, a growing awareness of the problems facing women in the discipline is something to be welcomed. Nevertheless, this article raises some serious concerns about the framework within which these problems are often analyzed and addressed. I argue that the currently prevalent approach overemphasizes issues of representation and, additionally, risks becoming preoccupied with experimental psychology at the expense (...) of political and social criticism. (shrink)

In this essay I reconstruct what I take to be Adorno's metaphysics of moral solidarity in the moment of its fall. At its heart lies a materialist idea of humanism, and a moral notion of human solidarity. I put this reconstruction to work, answering Michael Theunissen's challenge, namely that Adorno must, but cannot, justify the positive premise of his negativism of what ought not to be, and that he must, but cannot justify his minimal deontological morality. In my view, properly (...) interpreted, Adorno once equipped with this moral notion of human solidarity, can answer Theunissen's challenge, in a way that makes best sense of his (Adorno's) epistemological and metaphysical negativism, and in a way that is consistent with his critique of Kantian morality. (shrink)

Being open to persuasion can help show respect for an interlocutor. At the same time, open-mindedness about morally objectionable claims can carry moral as well as epistemic risks. Our aim in this paper is to specify when there might be duty to be open to persuasion. We distinguish two possible interpretations of openness. First, openness might refer to a kind of mental state, wherein one is willing to revise or abandon present beliefs. Second, it might refer to a deliberative practice, (...) according to which one is willing to engage with opposing reasons. We suggest these two interpretations are conceptually and empirically distinct. Once disambiguated, we suggest that different contexts may make different forms of openness appropriate as expressions of respect. (shrink)

Political philosophers tend to notice their differences more than their similarities. I suggest that contemporary analytic political philosophy in fact exhibits a 'dominant paradigm', the main features of which are a commitment to liberal capitalism and a preference for the designing of 'just institutions.' To subscribe to this paradigm involves making a decision about how to manage the philosophical 'agenda.' In order to focus on certain issues within this paradigm, alternatives, most notably socialism, have to be excluded from prolonged consideration. (...) A popular way of supporting this policy is by reference to the perceived failure of 'real existing socialism.' Taking the late political philosopher Brian Barry, among others, as an example, I argue that this argumentative strategy is unconvincing, and furthermore that its deployment tells a worrying story about the practice of political philosophy. (shrink)

Many of Habermas's critical commentators agree that Discourse Ethics fails as a theory of the validity of moral norms and only succeeds as a theory of the democratic legitimacy of socio-political norms. The reason they give is that the moral principle is too restrictive to count as a necessary condition of the validity of norms. Other commentators more sympathetic to his project want to abandon principle and remodel Discourse Ethics without it. Still others want to downplay the role of universalizing (...) moral discourse and to make more of Habermas's less demanding, though still somewhat vague, conception of ethical discourse. Against this chorus of critical voices Habermas maintains that his conception of moral discourse and the moral principle are central to Discourse Ethics in general, and to the normative heart of his political theory in particular. The conflict may have arisen in part because the concept of a ‘universalizable interest’ which is central to Habermas's understanding of moral discourse and of the moral principle remains opaque even after nearly two decades of critical debate. Actually Habermas's concept of interest is pretty obscure too. But the obscurity surrounding the concept of interest is not the source of the confusion. For our present purposes we can simply stipulate that an interest is a reason to want. The notion of reason rests loosely on the notion of a need, and the concepts of need and desire are take left deliberately vague. The source of the current confusion lies in the notion of universalizability that is in play. Once we pay due attention to the conditions of the universalizability of interests contained in Habermas's formulation of the moral principle, we can distinguish between a weaker and a stronger version of the principle. I argue that only the weaker version is defensible. But I also want to show that Habermas is tempted into defending the stronger version, and to explain why he does so. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Conflict and Reconciliation in Hegel’s Theory of the TragicJ. G. FinlaysonἊϱης Ἂϱει ξυμβαλεῖ, Δίϰᾳ Διϰα. (Κοεφοϱοι 461)this article has two related aims: to expound and defend Hegel’s theory of the tragic; and to clarify Hegel’s concept of reconciliation. These two aims are related in that a widespread, but misleading, conception of the tragic and a common, but mistaken, understanding of Hegel’s concept of reconciliation can seem to offer mutual (...) support. According to the misleading conception, the tragic consists in the defeat of human lives and projects that arises from irresolvable conflict. Goethe is the most notable exponent of this view. In 1824 Goethe writes that “everything tragic rests on irresolvable opposition. As soon as resolution enters or becomes possible the tragic vanishes.”1 The mistaken understanding of Hegel’s concept of reconciliation is that it consists in a triumphal and wholly affirmative resolution of contradiction through the attainment of harmony. It is easy to see how the two views support one another. For Hegel presents the tragic as a dialectic of conflict and reconciliation in human action, a dialectic in which the moment of reconciliation is ineliminable. So, if one conceives reconciliation as an harmonious resolution of conflict and one also subscribes to Goethe’s view that the tragic rests on irreconcilable opposition, one is not likely to take Hegel’s theory of the tragic very seriously. If, however, we keep in mind what Hegel means by ‘reconciliation, ’ then we can begin both to understand and to defend his theory of the tragic. [End Page 493]1. TRAGEDY AND THE TRAGICLet us begin with a preliminary delineation and defense of the concept of the tragic. Hegel does not have a theory of tragedy, he has a theory of the tragic. A theory of tragedy would be genre-specific, a theory about tragedies, the works of theater and not the pitiable and terrifying events they represent.2 Aristotle’s Poetics is a theory of tragedy. It is a theory about the composition of tragic poems, about their parts and their function. One can call a theory of tragedy loosely an ‘aesthetic’ theory, to the extent that it is a theory of the experience of a work of tragedy, indeed for the ancient Greeks, an experience not just of beholding but of participating in the performance of a tragedy. By contrast, a theory of the tragic is not a theory about tragedies. It is not genre specific, for not only tragedies are tragic. And neither is it an ‘aesthetic’ theory about the experience of a work of tragedy. Rather, it is a theory about what makes a work of theater into a tragedy, about what it is to be a tragedy. True, the essence of tragedy has to do with experience, but it has to do primarily with the experience of the tragic hero, not the experience of the actor or the spectator.Furthermore, whereas a theory of tragedy tells us something about tragedies, a theory of the tragic tells us something about human experience, human actions and the ethical-life of a community in which the actions are played out.3 The tragic arises from the way in which institutions, customs, and practices within which we become what we are, shape our actions on the one hand, and take shape through our actions on the other. Hence the question of the tragic enjoys a certain priority over the question of tragedy. The works of theater we call tragedies exist because of the tragic, not vice versa.There is another reason why we should grant that the question of the tragic as such is interesting and relevant. Tragedy is not a vague term; historically at least the matter of classification has been settled. It is not as if, in significant instances, it is impossible to decide whether a work of ancient drama is or is not a tragedy. Lebeck may argue, rather unconvincingly that the trial scene in the Eumenides is a parody of Athenian litigation; but she does not dispute that it is a tragedy.4 Steiner may claim that “tragedies end badly,” in flagrant disregard of the evidence, (the Eumenides of Aeschylus, and Sophocles’ Philoctetes and Oedipus at... (shrink)

A discussion of the Hegel and the Frankfurt School, with a focus on Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse. It discusses in detail the different ways in which each of these major figures interprets Hegel, and it discusses the influence that Hegel had on on their respective theories.

This chapter argues that studies of political ideology should be combined with research into political rhetoric. An ideology is not only a particular way of organizing values, concepts, and signifiers; it is also a way of formulating and selecting arguments for these, of devising and deploying strategies and styles of persuasion. These are not secondary to the core propositions of an ideology but part of what that ideology is. The chapter begins by making the case for adding the study of (...) arguments to research into concepts and signifiers. It then reviews ways in which rhetoric has recently become important for historians of political thought, political scientists, and theorists of deliberation. Outlining ways in which we might best research rhetoric and ideologies, the chapter argues that it is especially important to examine the different ways in which ideologies appeal to authority, emotion, and reason. (shrink)

What can examining the introductions to books in philosophy tell us about those books, and about that discipline? This article begins by differentiating ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ perspectives on the discipline of philosophy, questioning the most likely understanding of this division as one between professional and ‘layman’, and emphasizing instead a basic distinction between ‘affirmative’ and ‘non-affirmative’. The introduction, I suggest, is productively symptomatic of the character of contemporary philosophy. Like an owl pellet, it can tell us a lot about the (...) kind of creature that philosophy is and the environment it inhabits.Export citation. (shrink)

Several years ago Jürgen Habermas wrote a short answer to the question: “Does Hegel's Critique of Kant apply to Discourse Ethics?” The gist of his short answer is, “no”. Insofar as Hegel's criticisms of the formalism and abstract universalism of the moral law never even applied to Kant's moral theory in the first place, they also fail to apply to discourse ethics. Insofar as Hegel's criticisms of the rigorism of the moral law and of Kant's conception of autonomy do hit (...) the mark, discourse ethics successfully draws their sting by reconceiving Kant's moral standpoint along the following lines. 1. Kant wrongly undertakes to establish the moral law as a “fact of reason”: discourse ethics derives the moral standpoint from two premises — one formal, a rationally reconstructed logic of argumentation, and one material, namely our intuitions about how to justify utterances. 2. Kant wrongly contends that we must be able to think of ourselves as both intelligible characters, inhabiting a noumenal world, and as empirical characters inhabiting the world of appearances: discourse ethics allows that in everyday contexts of action and in the context of moral discourse we have one character that has real needs and interests. 3. Kant is also mistaken in arguing that moral autonomy requires human beings to abstract away from their needs and interests and to will universalizable maxims for the sake of their universal form: discourse ethics understands moral autonomy to consist in the free adoption of a standpoint from which conflicts of interest can be impartially regulated, by giving special weight to the satisfaction of universalizable interests. 4. Kant misconceives the categorical imperative as an objective test of universalizability that is applied by individual wills in isolation: discourse ethics reconceives the moral universalism as an ideal of intersubjective agreement of participants in discourse. On the differences between the principles of discourse ethics and Kant's categorical imperative Habermas is wont to cite McCarthy's summary of his — Habermas' — position: “Rather than ascribing as valid to all others any maxim that I can will to be a universal law, I must submit my maxim to all others for the purposes of discursively testing its claim to universality. The emphasis shifts from what each can will without contradiction to be a general law, to what all can will in agreement to be a universal norm”. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that a common view of Habermas’s theory of public reason, which takes it to be similar to Rawls’s ‘proviso’, is mistaken. I explain why that mistake arises, and show that t...

This article re-examines the Habermas–Rawls debate. It contends that what is at issue in this dispute has largely been missed. The standard view that principle and the original position form a useful point of comparison between their respective theories and that the dispute between them can be fruitfully understood on this basis is rejected. I show how this view has arisen and why it is wrong. The real issue between them lies in their respective accounts of the justification of political (...) norms,and in their competing conceptions of legitimacy. I show how these two concepts connect. I distinguish between methodological disputes arising from the differences in approach that each takes to the questions of political legitimacy and political justification, and substantive issues about whether, and if so how moral reasons are germane to the justification of political norms. (shrink)

This article re-examines the Habermas–Rawls debate. It contends that what is at issue in this dispute has largely been missed. The standard view that principle and the original position form a useful point of comparison between their respective theories and that the dispute between them can be fruitfully understood on this basis is rejected. I show how this view has arisen and why it is wrong. The real issue between them lies in their respective accounts of the justification of political (...) norms,and in their competing conceptions of legitimacy. I show how these two concepts connect. I distinguish between methodological disputes arising from the differences in approach that each takes to the questions of political legitimacy and political justification, and substantive issues about whether, and if so how moral reasons are germane to the justification of political norms. (shrink)

Many commentators have failed to identify the important issues at the heart of the debate between Habermas and Rawls. This is partly because they give undue attention to differences between their respective devices of representation, the original position and principle, neither of which are germane to the actual dispute. The dispute is at bottom about how best to conceive of democratic legitimacy. Rawls indicates where the dividing issues lie when he objects that Habermas’s account of democratic legitimacy is comprehensive and (...) his is confined to the political. But his argument is vitiated by a threefold ambiguity in what he means by “comprehensive doctrine.” Tidying up this ambiguity helps reveal that the dispute turns on the way in which morality relates to political legitimacy. Although Habermas calls his conception of legitimate law “morally freestanding”, and as such distinguishes it from Kantian and Natural Law accounts of legitimacy, it is not as freestanding from morality as he likes to present it. Habermas’s mature theory contains conflicting claims about relation between morality and democratic legitimacy. So there is at least one important sense in which Rawls's charge of comprehensiveness is made to stick againstHabermas’s conception of democratic legitimacy, and remains unanswered. (shrink)

What is a thing? It is an apparently simple question to which few philosophers or social scientists have devoted any serious attention. This chapter attempts to explain this neglect, and then to develop a way of thinking about the question by distinguishing things, and the concept ‘thing’, from objects and entities with which they are often conflated. This more refined and adequate conception of the thing is then deployed in order to help answer two related questions: ‘Why do things matter? (...) What are the grounds of our attachment to them, and of our obligations towards them?’ It is argued that an endemic failure within philosophy and social science to reflect on what constitutes the thinghood of things makes it harder than it need be to answer questions concerning their value and why they matter to us. (shrink)

William E. Connolly’s political theory forms a distinct and influential contribution to contemporary debates about the nature and prospects of democratic life in the twenty-first century. His original conceptualisations of pluralism, naturalism, the politics of the body, religion, secularism and his daring incorporation of contemporary neurobiology into political theory and analysis, have opened new paths for intellectual enquiry. Connolly has brought an American tradition of pragmatist political thinking into fruitful conversation with the best of contemporary continental European philosophy and given (...) to both a new energy and focus. In this edited collection, a distinguished panel of political theorists from both Europe and the US provide a critical and nuanced assessment of his contribution to the discipline, especially in the field of democratic theory. They identify the sources of Connolly’s work, its connections to other ways of thinking about the political and they evaluate his continuing contribution to our understanding of the problems and promises of the present and to our appreciation of what it might mean to fulfil the promise of the democratic way of life. The final chapter provides space for Connolly himself to reflect on his interlocutors and further develop his conception of a ‘world of becoming’ considering the links between political theory and the science of complexity while focusing on the immediate challenges facing both American and world politics. _Democracy and Pluralism_ provides a critical introduction to the work of William E. Connolly and to contemporary debates in political theory encompassing topics such as radical democracy, the body, religion, time and contingency. (shrink)

William E. Connolly’s political theory forms a distinct and influential contribution to contemporary debates about the nature and prospects of democratic life in the twenty-first century. His original conceptualisations of pluralism, naturalism, the politics of the body, religion, secularism and his daring incorporation of contemporary neurobiology into political theory and analysis, have opened new paths for intellectual enquiry. Connolly has brought an American tradition of pragmatist political thinking into fruitful conversation with the best of contemporary continental European philosophy and given (...) to both a new energy and focus. In this edited collection, a distinguished panel of political theorists from both Europe and the US provide a critical and nuanced assessment of his contribution to the discipline, especially in the field of democratic theory. They identify the sources of Connolly’s work, its connections to other ways of thinking about the political and they evaluate his continuing contribution to our understanding of the problems and promises of the present and to our appreciation of what it might mean to fulfil the promise of the democratic way of life. The final chapter provides space for Connolly himself to reflect on his interlocutors and further develop his conception of a ‘world of becoming’ considering the links between political theory and the science of complexity while focusing on the immediate challenges facing both American and world politics. _Democracy and Pluralism_ provides a critical introduction to the work of William E. Connolly and to contemporary debates in political theory encompassing topics such as radical democracy, the body, religion, time and contingency. (shrink)

This paper examines Honig’s use of Rancière in her book ‘Democracy and the Foreigner’. In seeking to clarify the benefits of ‘foreignness’ for democratic politics it raises the concern that Honig does not acknowledge the ways in which her own democratic cosmopolitanism may be more akin to Rancière’s police than politics. By challenging Honig’s assertion that democracy is usually read as a romance with the suggestion that it is more commonly read as a horror, I unpick the interstices of Honig’s (...) and Rancière’s work to separate foreignness from democratic cosmopolitanism. Instead, although I posit democratic cosmopolitanism’s potential as a police more conducive to politics I also suggest that the particular salience of Honig’s ‘foreigner’ figure is that it supplements Rancièrian politics, demonstrating a praxis of ‘looking anew’ at our ordinary social practices. By making these seem strange to us, we can discover a new critical perspective from which to question and subvert, thereby furthering the potential of Rancièrian democratic politics. (shrink)

In this article I lay out Kenneth Baynes's interpretation of Habermas's social and political philosophy, and develop three lines of criticism. The first concerns the question of whether, and if so in what respect, Habermas's political theory counts as a critical social theory. I argue that it is not clear in what sense Habermas's political theory is a ‘critical’ social theory, and that Baynes's interpretation throws little light on this issue. The second related issue is to what extent it can (...) be fairly claimed that on Habermas's account of democracy, political legitimacy rests on a “core morality”. While there is a possible reconstruction of Habermas along these lines, I argue that it conflicts with the central tenets of Habemras's political theory. Finally, I question whether Baynes is right to align Habermas's ideal of public reason so closely with Rawls's. (shrink)