The prior issue of Krisis (42:1) published Critical Naturalism: A Manifesto, with the aim to instigate a debate of the issues raised in this manifesto – the necessary re-thinking of the role (and the concept) of nature in critical theory in relation to questions of ecology, health, and inequality. Since Krisis considers itself a place for philosophical debates that take contemporary struggles as starting point, it issued an open call and solicited responses to the manifesto. This is one of the (...) sixteen selected responses, which augment, specify, or question the assumptions and arguments of the manifesto. (shrink)

T. W. Adorno's and Max Horkheimer'sDialectic of Enlightenmentis fifty years old. Its disconcerting darkness now seems so bound to the time of its writing, one may well wonder if we have anything to learn from it. Are its main lines of argument relevant to our social and philosophical world? Are the losses it records losses we can still recognise as our own?

Moral modernity, including political modernity, is founded on the series of acts whereby, throughout Europe, torture was banned. Torture became the paradigm of moral injury, of what must never be done to an individual because it is intrinsically degrading and devaluing. The body of the torture victim is the meeting place of state and citizen: either the rule of law recognizes bodily autonomy as its own moral basis - broken laws standing for broken bodies - or the law becomes a (...) vehicle of sovereign authority that knows no limit. Thus, it is the morally charged conception of the rule of law that holds together the ban on torture with the recognition of human dignity: remove the prohibition on torture and neither the liberal state nor modern moral life is intelligible. The connections between the abolition of torture, the rule of law, and the institution of human dignity was forged in the once enormously influential and now virtually unknown On Crimes and Punishments by Beccaria. (shrink)

This set of six volumes provide a full picture of the School by examining the important developments that have occured since the deaths of the original core of Frankfurt scholars. In particular the work of Jurgen Habermas is fully assessed.

In the "Introduction" to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel provides a method of investigation wherein our comprehension of the nature of knowledge is to emerge through a process in which various forms or shapes of consciousness test their own conception of knowledge. For Hegel, this method is legitimated by the thought that each way or manner of cognizing what is must presuppose an idea of what is to count as a successful cognition; hence, each form of consciousness involves both a (...) conception of what knowing is, what cognitive experience is like, and what is presumed to be revealed in experience so understood. For example, if one believes that we learn about the world through perception, as Locke construes it, then one will equally presuppose that, in perceptual experience, we gain knowledge of particulars through the diversity of sensory properties each exhibits. Phenomenological testing involves seeing whether consciousness can deliver the knowledge promised; in the case of perception, the question will be whether direct perceiving can account for the unity of an object whose specificity depends on it exemplifying an array of universal properties. Perceptual consciousness learns it cannot account for the object in this way because its passivity debars it from adequately locating the source or character of a thing's unity; it is thus forced to reconceptualize both itself and its concept of an object. Hegel calls the process in which a new self-understanding and a new concept of an object emerge from the failure of correspondence in the previous form "experience". (shrink)