European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 3, Page 943-960, September 2022.

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

This paper presents a corpus-based, interdisciplinary, empirical study in social philosophy of the possibilities of remaking the concept and practice of class consciousness in metamodernism based on four sources: the works of prominent Western philosophers from 1900-2023 (5064 English-language books and articles), the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (43 volumes), the writings of Ukrainian sociologist Olena Symonchuk, and the Facebook posts in the group of the Ukrainian medical women’s movement #BudyakNina (#Be like Nina). The first two sources allowed (...) us to understand the primary logic of this concept, but also its philosophical rationale and contradictions in the context of the twentieth-century historical experience, including the transformations in Western society and proletarian revolutions. It was found that reason, homogeneity, and purposefulness, which were expected in theory from the practice of the workers’ revolutionary movement, were manifested instead by the ruling class, who integrated the working class in the West. In the East, instead of genuinely proletarian revolutions, there was a resurgence of tyranny over and alienation from the broad popular masses by professional revolutionaries, and later by state-party bureaucracy. However, the concept of class consciousness can only be partially considered obsolete since it implies stages of class consciousness development. The last two sources in our study demonstrated that in contemporary Ukrainian conditions, it is possible to speak of the formation of two stages of class consciousness development: understanding one’s own interests and inequality. This creates opportunities to assert that the metamodernist revival of history has also implications for the concept and practice of class consciousness among contemporary workers. This offers hope for a more successful remake of the emancipatory potential of Marxist ideas to address the modern crisis of capitalist humanity in the 21st century. It should be emphasized that this research was conducted using corpus linguistics, allowing for the analysis of large volumes of texts by both philosophers and participants in the #BudyakNina (#Be like Nina) movement. This approach enabled us to identify the main contexts and conceptual focus of their texts, providing a strong empirical foundation for the entire study. (shrink)

Hyppolite stresses his proximity to Merleau-Ponty, but the received interpretation of his “anti-humanist” reading of Hegel suggests a greater distance between their projects. This paper focuses on an under-explored dimension of their philosophical relationship. I argue that Merleau-Ponty and Hyppolite are both committed to formulating a mode of philosophical expression that can avoid the pitfalls of purely formal or literal and purely aesthetic or creative modes of expression. Merleau-Ponty’s attempt to navigate this dichotomy, I suggest, closely resembles Hyppolite’s interpretation of (...) Hegel’s “speculative” mode of expression. In particular, his emphasis on the “mediating” character of philosophical language, which moves between descriptive and creative expression, suggests a debt to Hyppolite. This reading provides more evidence to think that Hyppolite cannot be straightforwardly understood as an anti-humanist or post-phenomenological thinker, and paves the way for a _rapprochement_ between his work and the broader phenomenological tradition. (shrink)

This book provides the first detailed account of Gramsci's work in the context of current critical and socio-cultural debates. Renate Holub argues that Gramsci was ahead of his time in offering a theory of art, politics and cultural production. Gramsci's achievement is discussed particularly in relation to the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin, Bloch, Habermas), to Brecht's theoretical writings and to thinkers in the phenomenological tradition especially Merleau-Ponty. She argues for Gramsci's continuing relevance at a time of retreat from Marxist (...) positions on the postmodern left. Antonio Gramsci is distinguished by its range of philosophical grasp, its depth of specialized historical scholarship, and its keen sense of Gramsci's position as a crucial figure in the politics of contemporary cultural theory. (shrink)

The aim of the work is to examine the relationship between the concepts of “immanence” and “politics” in the works of Hegel and Deleuze. Both Hegel and Deleuze are thinkers of immanence and they explicitly think this concept in relation to the problem of political practice. As I show, they attempt to “ground” politics in immanence. The purpose of this work is to prove that there exists an inherent paradox in the undertaking to “ground” politics in immanence. Both philosophers are (...) confronted with a paradox that emerges from this “grounding”. The paradox appears in the form of natural violence. Both authors fail to contain this violence through arguments. In order to show this, I examine the relationship between two further concepts: history and the state. I compare Hegel’s and Deleuze’s formulations of world-history and universal history, tracing the analogies and differences in how they think the relationship of the state to history. Based on the conclusions I then focus on the relationship of politics to immanence. The paradox of natural violence, I show, emerges from the relationship of the state at the “end of history”. (shrink)

The main purpose of the following inquiry is to emphasise the importance of a phenomenon long neglected by the majority of the human sciences, the artefact; each one of us, no matter what age, sex or culture, is in contact with artefacts every moment of our lives yet despite this they have received scant attention. The study begins by outlining a definition of the artefact, highlighting those characteristics which, in combination, ensure its centrality to social life before, through a discussion (...) of Popper's ideas, proceeding to see how material culture can be conceptualised as meaningful. In order to understand how meaning becomes attached to the artefact the notion of objectification will be analysed and, consequently, so shall the importance of both the type of activity and the physical nature of the materials involved in the artefact's production. Picking up on the theme of materiality this aspect of material culture will be shown to pose major problems to any interpretation of the artefact along semiological lines; language and material culture are evinced to possess fundamentally distinct characteristics which make comparisons between them far from straightforward. These differences will be analysed further, concentrating specifically on the role of context in the establishment of meaning. This leads on to the proposal that our understanding of artefacts can occur on three levels; three forms of knowledge are thus described of which a linguistically formulated type constitutes just one kind. The penultimate chapter tackles the ways in which artefacts affect us, how they are active elements in our relationships with them; therefore, a dialectical position is postulated in which both artefacts and agents take part. Finally, the study concludes by stressing some of its wider implications and suggests a few of the practical situations to which it can be applied. (shrink)