In this volume honouring Robert Pippin, prominent philosophers such as John McDowell, Slavoj Žižek, Jonathan Lear, and Axel Honneth explore Hegel's proposals concerning the historical character of philosophy. Hegelian doctrines discussed include the purported end of art, Hegel's view of human history, including the history of philosophy as the history of freedom, and the nature of self-consciousness as realized in narrative or in action. Hegel scholars Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Sally Sedgwick, Terry Pinkard, and Paul Redding attempt to vindicate some (...) of Hegel's claims concerning historical philosophical progress, while others such as Robert Stern, Christoph Menke, and Jay Bernstein suggest that Hegel either did not conceive of philosophy as progressing unidirectionally or did not make good on his claims to progress: perhaps we should still be Aristotelians in ethics, or perhaps we are still torn between sensibility and reason, or between individuality and social norms. Perhaps capitalism has exacerbated such problems. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical LifeLiz DisleyRobert B. Pippin. Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. xi + 308. Paper, $29.99In this work, Pippin offers an interpretation of freedom, rationality, and agency in Hegel’s work and adds substantive content to the key concept of recognition. In doing so, he offers not only a compelling elucidation of a particularly (...) opaque part of Hegel’s analysis of human action and interaction, but also demonstrates the relevance of his practical philosophy to contemporary discussions about free will, intersubjectivity, autonomy, recognition, and liberalism. Pippin provides a substantial defense of Hegel’s position in the context of contemporary political philosophy, arguing against a commonly-held view that Hegelian political philosophy must be much closer to modern communitarian theories than those of classical or modern liberalism. Pippin’s work is central to the recent resurgence of interest in Hegel’s theoretical philosophy by analytical philosophers such as Robert Brandom and John McDowell, as well as the renewed study of recognition in a practical context.Controversially, Pippin claims that Hegel has only one theory of intersubjectivity and recognition from the time of the Jena writings to the Philosophy of Right. The theory develops from an initial stage, where “the desideratum of mutual recognition is posed and explored,” to a realization that ethical life as described in the Philosophy of Right provides the necessary conditions for rational, mutual recognition (184n4). Thus, he rejects the common view in recent Continental Hegel scholarship, asserted by critics including Jürgen Habermas, Michael Theunissen, and Axel Honneth, that Hegel fails to develop adequately the theory of intersubjectivity initially present in his earlier writings and subsumes intersubjectivity into a “grand metaphysical process” of the Absolute Subject’s self-manifestation (184).Pippin defends Hegel from this common charge on the basis of his “very unusual” concept of freedom (185). The key claim here is that Hegel does not set recognition or indeed other-relation as a precondition for any kind of self-relation, but rather, “A true individual [End Page 112] is a free subject and recognition relations function in a complex way as conditions for that possibility” (186). This seems like a promising method of demonstrating that Hegel’s intersubjectivity does not, after all, dissolve in the face of a monological divine conception of reality. The difficulty with the approach, as Pippin concedes, is that it involves making a series of radical, strange, and controversial claims. These claims, in general, focus on the temporal priority of freedom, recognition, and rationality: deeds can count as “mine” in Pippin’s special sense only if they are undertaken rationally, but this state of rationality depends on being in a social state of recognizing and being recognized (190). However, it is neither radical nor strange to make a clear distinction between human interdependence in terms of our particular social psychology and in terms of “an ideal of normative mutuality inherent in any attempt to act” (211).Pippin appreciates that defenders of Hegel’s concept of recognition do not want to say that I cannot be a free subject by myself, but at the same time want to leave the door open for there to be some kind of possibility of ascertaining moral harm in cases of failure to recognize. For Pippin, free actions, and actions committed out of free will, are those committed by agents in a particular social context, namely being situated within norm-governed relations of reciprocal recognition to others. Such an approach fulfills neither of these criteria, since it means I cannot be free by myself but also that, in the case of my being placed in a situation where I am not within these relations of reciprocal recognition to others, there is no obvious originator of moral harm caused by this recognition (218). Pippin accepts that there is no clear answer to this difficulty, but his account of the genesis of norms and social rationality does save Hegel’s account from the objection by Theunissen, Habermas, Honneth et al. mentioned above. Like Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Pippin sees the answer to charges of introducing a... (shrink)

_Debates in Nineteenth-Century European Philosophy _offers an engaging and in-depth introduction to the philosophical questions raised by this rich and far reaching period in the history of philosophy. Throughout thirty chapters, the volume surveys the intellectual contributions of European philosophy in the nineteenth century, but it also engages the on-going debates about how these contributions can and should be understood. As such, the volume provides both an overview of nineteenth-century European philosophy and an introduction to contemporary scholarship in this field. (...) __KEY DEBATES IN EUROPEAN NINETEENTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY__ Kristin Gjesdal Contributors Editor's Introduction I. Kantian Presuppositions 1. The Reception of the _Critique of Pure Reason_ in German Idealism by Rolf-Peter Horstmann 2. The Reception of the _Critique of Pure Reason_ in German Idealism: A Response to Rolf-Peter Horstmann by Paul Guyer II. Fichte 3. Fichte's Original Insight by Dieter Henrich 4. Fichte's Original Insight: Dieter Henrich's Pioneering Piece Half A Century Later by Günter Zöller III. Romanticism 5. Philosophical Foundations of Early Romanticism by Manfred Frank 6. Response to Manfred Frank, "Philosophical Foundations of Early Romanticism" by Michael N. Forster IV. Hegel 7. From Desire to Recognition: Hegel's Account of Human Sociality by Axel Honneth 8. On Honneth's Interpretation of Hegel's "Phenomenology of Self-Consciousness" by Robert B. Pippin V. Schelling 9. The Nature of Subjectivity: The Critical and Systematic Function of Schelling's Philosophy of Nature by Dieter Sturma 10. Nature as Unconditioned? The Critical and Systematic Function of Schelling's Early Works by Dalia Nassar VI. Schopenhauer 11. The Real Essence of Human Beings: Schopenhauer and the Unconscious Will by Christopher Janaway 12. Emancipation from the Will by David E. Wellbery VII. Comte 13. Auguste Comte and Modern Epistemology by Johan Heilbron 14. Why Was Comte an Epistemologist? by Robert C. Scharff VIII. Mill 15. Mill: The Principle of Liberty by John Rawls 16. John Rawls on Mill's Principle of Liberty by John Skorupski IX. Darwin 17. Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection and its Moral Purpose by Robert J. Richards 18. Response to Richards by Gabriel Finkelstein X. Kierkegaard 19. Kierkegaard's _On Authority and Revelation _ by Stanley Cavell 20. A Nice Arrangement of Epigrams: Stanley Cavell on Søren Kierkegaard by Stephen Mulhall XI. Marx 21. Marx's Metacritique of Hegel: Synthesis Through Social Labor by Jürgen Habermas 22. Epistemology and Self-Reflection in the Young Marx by Espen Hammer XII. Dilthey 23. Wilhelm Dilthey after 150 Years by Hans-Georg Gadamer 24. Gadamer on Dilthey by Frederick C. Beiser XIII. Nietzsche 25. Nietzsche's Minimalist Moral Psychology by Bernard Williams 26. Naturalism, Minimalism, and the Scope of Nietzsche's Philosophical Psychology by Paul Katsafanas XIV. Freud 27. Bad Faith and Falsehood by Jean-Paul Sartre 28. Freud by Sebastian Gardner XV. Twentieth-Century Developments 29. Analytic and Conversational Philosophy by Richard Rorty 30. Not Knowing What the Right Hand is Doing: Rorty's "Ambidextrous" Analytic Redescription of Nineteenth-Century Hegelian Philosophy by Paul Redding References for Republished Texts Accompanying Original Works. (shrink)

One of the dominating themes in the first part is the negative treatment that Marx’s concept of labor has received by late critical theorists, particularly Habermas. While supportive of the rejection of Marx’s economic functionalism entailed by Habermas’s adoption of communicative action as the basic category of critical theory, Honneth worries about the indifference towards the normative potential of labor that he sees in most twentieth-century social theory. Honneth agrees with critics of reductionism that labor is neither the only form (...) of social reproduction, nor a primary source of emancipatory consciousness, as the fragmentation and depolitization of a working class that has suffered the effects of Taylorism clearly manifests. But Honneth is still convinced that the experience of recognition is to a large extent associated with work, and that Habermas tends to understand interaction in terms of instrumental action, making the concept of interaction inadequate to capture the sort of normative claims expressed by workers who do not see themselves sufficiently recognized in the labor they do. Although Honneth acknowledges that he has not settled how to navigate between these competing interests, the clarity of the call for a more complex concept of labor justifies the inclusion of these papers in the volume. (shrink)

In this article, we explore the implications of a Rawlsian theory for intergenerational issues. First, we confront Rawls's way of locating his `just savings' principle in his Theory of Justice with an alternative way of doing so. We argue that both sides of his intergenerational principle, as they apply to the accumulation phase and the steady-state stage, can be dealt with on the bases, respectively, of the principle of equal liberty and of the difference principle. We then proceed by focusing (...) on the implications of applying maximin to his steady-state stage. One central claim is that, in principle, Rawlsians should consider not only generational dissavings, but also generational savings, as unfair. This principle suffers a series of exceptions on which we focus in the fourth section of the article. In some cases, growth can be maximin compatible. (shrink)

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

How does the compositional arrangement of elements in a complex image, like a diagram, a picture or a map, represent the structural features of its content? In this paper I argue that they do so iconically, through the exploitation of relations of visual similarity and dissimilarity. I develop the general claim that our interpretation of this sort of images is guided by the implicit defeasible assumption that things that are patently related represent things that are relevantly related in a similar (...) way. I also identify the usual intrinsic and extrinsic mechanisms we use to represent structural features and illustrate them with an example from real life: a recent infographic from a popular science magazine. (shrink)

Retinoids play a critical role in patterning, segmentation, and neurogenesis of the posterior hindbrain and it has been proposed that they act as a posteriorising signal during hindbrain development. Until now, direct evidence that endogenous retinoid signalling acts through a gradient to specify cell fates along the anteroposterior axis has been missing. Two recent studies tested the requirement for retinoid signalling in the developing hindbrain through systematic application of a pan-retinoic acid receptor antagonist.(1,2) They demonstrate a stage-dependent requirement for increasing (...) retinoid signalling activity along the hindbrain that proceeds from anterior to posterior. Together these findings challenge the concept of a stable gradient of retinoic acid across the hindbrain and warrant a re-interpretation of the phenotypes obtained by genetic and nutritional disruption of retinoid signalling in the amniote embryo. BioEssays 23:981–986, 2001. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Is there a notion of domain specificity which affords genuine insight in the context of the highly modular mind, i.e. a mind which has not only input modules, but also central ‘conceptual’ modules? Our answer to this question is no. The main argument is simple enough: we lay out some constraints that a theoretically useful notion of domain specificity, in the context of the highly modular mind, would need to meet. We then survey a host of accounts of what domain (...) specificity is, based on the intuitive idea that a domain specific mechanism is restricted in the kind of information that it processes, and show that each fails at least one of those constraints. (shrink)

Green's target article is an attack on most current connectionist models of cognition. Our commentary will suggest that there is an essential component missing in his discussion of modeling, namely, the idea that the appropriate level of the model needs to be specified. We will further suggest that the precise form of connectionist networks will fall out as ever more detailed constraints are placed on their function.

En este ensayo exploramos una perspectiva epistemológica en la que el elemento social y colectivo del conocimiento juega un papel fundamental en la explicación de su producción y transmisión. Primero presentamos y criticamos una posición individualista que ha sido dominante en la epistemología contemporánea y cuyas raíces pueden trazarse, al menos, hasta Descartes. Posteriormente introducimos y defendemos nuestra propia mirada, una en la que el conocimiento es un proceso constituido por un conjunto de actividades y prácticas que tiene un carácter (...) material. (shrink)

Existe evidencia de que el ajuste transcultural influye en el desempeño académico en población migrante. A partir de un análisis categorial del discurso, este trabajo evidencia experiencias de ajuste transcultural en cinco migrantes retornados de nivel de licenciatura que emigraron a EE.UU. Los resultados ofrecen guías para diseñar intervenciones psicoeducativas en inclusión social para esta población en contextos universitarios.

Machen Schlafmittel musikalisch? -- Warum macht Musik hungrig und ein voller Bauch müde? -- Musikgenealogie--was ist das eigentlich? -- Träumen Musiker anders? -- Warum haben manche Frauen und Männer Verlautungsschwierigkeiten? -- Treffen die Botschaften der Mythen und Träume, die von Musik handeln, auch wirklich zu? -- Was geschieht in Menschen, die der Musik verfallen sind?

Chomskyian claims of a genetically hard-wired and cognitively autonomous “universal grammar” are being promoted by generative linguistics as facts about language to the present day. The related doctrine of an evolutionary discontinuity in language emergence, however, is based on misconceptions about the notions of homology and preadaptation. The obvious lack of equivalence between symbolic communicative capacities in existing nonhuman primates and human language does not preclude common roots. Normal and disordered language development is strongly influenced by the genome, but there (...) is no evidence for the existence of specific genes underlying “universal grammar.” In the mature brain, stages of language processing can be distinguished and “first-pass” syntactic analyses appear to precede semantic decoding. However, this partial seriality – as well as behavioral and clinical dissociations between lexical and functional categories – can be best described, not in terms of serially activated and discrete modules, but in terms of classes of cell assemblies that differ in their distributional properties. Whereas cell assemblies involved in semantic interpretation (“content word” assemblies) are widely distributed and are generally less vulnerable to focal lesion, those involved in structural decoding (functor assemblies) are primarily distributed within the left perisylvian cortices and are selectively vulnerable to left perisylvian lesion. These distributional differences are explained in terms of the perceptuomotor components involved in the acquisition of relevant representations. The emerging “motivated” or “toposemantic” brain regional specificity can only be accommodated with “soft” and maturational versions of modularity. The failure to reproduce double dissociations in current connectionist models is due to overly simple neuroscientific assumptions, notably that of overall equipotentiality. Linguistic models should not be expected to be “implemented” in the brain, but need to be constrained by neuroscientific evidence on how biological brains function. (shrink)

The papers collected in this volume, although dealing with several different themes, congeal around a debate about the ways and extent of the dominance of linear time and progressive history and the concomitant delineation of the nation in Chinese and Japanese historiography.

This commentary on Marilyn Strathern's article, “Binary License,” discusses certain implications of her assertion that intertribal relationships among urban migrants in Papua New Guinea are not “ethnic.” For if such social encounters do not involve a conventional politics of identity, what then might its politics be? By comparing Strathern's Melanesian case with ethnographic examples in Corsica and Mongolia, a novel relational modality of “intensive ethnicity” may be identified, one that differs qualitatively from the “extensive ethnicity” with which anthropologists have usually (...) been concerned. The two forms of ethnicity are equally relative, in that a given group's self-understanding and self-designation are in both cases the result of its relations with other groups. However, ethnically extensive relations of the standard anthropological variety involve symbolic processes of boundary making and boundary maintenance whereby contrasting cultural traits or contents are arbitrarily assigned to and distributed among preexisting social forms and social scales (whether individuals, communities, or nations). Conversely, the more intensive intertribal engagements described by Strathern and certain other anthropologists are relational all the way down, given that everything about the terms of these relations (including their form, scale, and dimensioning) is defined by the particular quality in question. Thus a contrast may be established between the politics of identity and what might be called non-identity politics. If the former amounts to an ethnic economy in which subjectivities are exchanged in a commodity-like, alienable way, then, in the latter, stereotypical naming and other seeming “ethnic” practices amount to gift-like, non-alienable insertions of selves into others. (shrink)

Originally created in 1892, Hugo Rheinhold’s sculpture “Monkey contemplating a human skull“ continues to attract a global audience. It is particularly appreciated by science ethicists, physical anthropologists and evolutionary biologists.This article explores the iconography of the sculpture, analyzes its iconology and discusses its message: an appeal to scientists – rendered through a witty, multilayered symbolism – to consider the ethical implications of their research. Biographical background information on the life of the German-Jewish artist and philosopher sheds further light on the (...) ethical and pacifist dimensions of his work. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

In this pathbreaking study, Axel Honneth argues that "the struggle for recognition" is, and should be, at the center of social conflicts.

The theory of justice is one of the most intensely debated areas of contemporary philosophy. Most theories of justice, however, have only attained their high level of justification at great cost. By focusing on purely normative, abstract principles, they become detached from the sphere that constitutes their “field of application” - namely, social reality. Axel Honneth proposes a different approach. He seeks to derive the currently definitive criteria of social justice directly from the normative claims that have developed within (...) Western liberal democratic societies. These criteria and these claims together make up what he terms “democratic ethical life”: a system of morally legitimate norms that are not only legally anchored, but also institutionally established. Honneth justifies this far-reaching endeavour by demonstrating that all essential spheres of action in Western societies share a single feature, as they all claim to realize a specific aspect of individual freedom. In the spirit of Hegel’s _Philosophy of Right_ and guided by the theory of recognition, Honneth shows how principles of individual freedom are generated which constitute the standard of justice in various concrete social spheres: personal relationships, economic activity in the market, and the political public sphere. Honneth seeks thereby to realize a very ambitious aim: to renew the theory of justice as an analysis of society. (shrink)

In this pathbreaking study, Axel Honneth argues that "the struggle for recognition" is, and should be, at the center of social conflicts. Moving smoothly between moral philosophy and social theory, Honneth offers insights into such issues as the social forms of recognition and nonrecognition, the moral basis of interaction in human conflicts, the relation between the recognition model and conceptions of modernity, the normative basis of social theory, and the possibility of mediating between Hegel and Kant.