This article analyzes the later work of Michel Foucault on ethics, freedom, and self-governance as it applies to the ethics of consumption and to new ethical consumerist movements such as fair-trade coffee. Foucault's emphasis on practices of the self helps elucidate the virtue ethics involved in consumption choices. Ethical consumption is cast as a set of practices of self-development: through critical activity and the quest for freedom, persons seek to transform themselves to live in reciprocal relationships with other persons and (...) nature. This requires public deliberation and collective action to effect change within ourselves and our practical systems of consumption and production. (shrink)

Heidegger jamais considerou Ser e tempo como uma investigação ética nem dedicou qualquer de suas obras à discussão específica dessa questão, aspecto que vem sendo criticado como sintoma de uma insidiosa precariedade ética instalada no coração de sua reflexão ontológica. A crítica recorrente afirma que, em Ser e tempo, Heidegger teria inviabilizado a reflexão ética ao comprometer-se com o "solipsismo existencial", isto é, com o isolamento do "si-mesmo decidido" em relação aos outros, desconsiderando, ainda, a exigência de uma fundamentação última (...) da ação ética. O argumento deste texto considera que Ser e tempo não configura um tratado ético no sentido metafísico tradicional, mas traz consigo os elementos teóricos para a sua reavaliação pós-metafísica ao dar ensejo a uma ética da precariedade. Uma ética da precariedade é desprovida de fundamentos últimos ou procedimentos intersubjetivos capazes de assegurar critérios transcendentais infalíveis de validação da qualidade ética da conduta humana, pois se assenta no reconhecimento da finitude constitutiva do Dasein. A consideração do "ser-para-a-morte" como o "modo de ser mais próprio" do Dasein não implica a irresponsabilidade ética para com os outros, mas tem como seu aspecto positivo a liberação da amizade como o modo próprio da relação ética, inspirando um agir cauteloso e resistente a quaisquer sistemas teóricos que definam padrões últimos quanto à moralidade do agir.Heidegger did not dedicate his philosophical thinking to ethical questions and explicitly denied considering his major opus, Being and Time, as an ethical inquiry, a fact that has been interpreted by many critics as a symptom of a deep ethical failure at the heart of his ontological thinking. The recurrent criticism is that Heidegger's Being and Time avoids any ethical questioning by committing itself to the "existential solipsism" which isolates the authentically resolute self from the others, and by disregarding the requirement of a last foundation able to assure the ethical character of human actions in the world. This text argues that although Heidegger's Being and Time should not be viewed as an ethical treatise in the sense of metaphysics, it brings forth important ethical implications that may procure a post-metaphysical ethics, an ethics of precariousness. An ethics of precariousness does not depend on having access to first principles, foundations or inter-subjective proceedings aiming at transcendental criteria to evaluate and warrant the ethical character of one's actions in the world, since it is based on the acknowledgment of Dasein's essentially constitutive finitude. The consideration of "being-toward-death" as the most proper way of Dasein's being does not imply ethical irresponsibility toward others, but has as its positive consequence the liberation of friendship, understood as the proper mode of Dasein's ethical relation to otherness. Such a post-metaphysical ethics should inspire a cautious acting in the world as well as resistance against theoretical systems aiming at the foundation of absolute standards of morality. (shrink)

Exploring the apparent tension between Foucault’s analyses of technologies of domination – the ways in which the subject is constituted by power–knowledge relations – and of technologies of the self – the ways in which individuals constitute themselves through practices of freedom – this article endeavors to makes two points: first, the interpretive claim that Foucault’s own attempts to analyse both aspects of the politics of our selves are neither contradictory nor incoherent; and, second, the constructive claim that Foucault’s analysis (...) of the politics of our selves, though not entirely satisfactory as it stands, provides important resources for the project of critical social theory. (shrink)

This essay argues a case for viewing Derrida's work in the context of recent French epistemology and philosophy of science; more specifically, the critical‐rationalist approach exemplified by thinkers such as Bachelard and Canguilhem. I trace this line of descent principally through Derrida's essay ‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’. My conclusions are (1) that we get Derrida wrong if we read him as a fargone antirealist for whom there is nothing ‘outside the text'; (2) that he provides some (...) powerful counter‐arguments to this and other items of current postmodern wisdom; (3) that deconstruction is more aptly viewed as continuing the epistemo‐critical approach developed by thinkers like Bachelard; and (4) that it also holds important lessons for philosophy of science in the mainstream Anglo‐ American ‘analytic’ tradition. (shrink)

A cryptonormative judgment, roughly speaking, is a judgment that is presented by the agent who makes it as non-normative, but that is in fact normative. The idea of cryptonormativity is familiar from debates in social theory, social psychology, and continental political philosophy, but has to my knowledge never been treated in analytic metaethics, moral psychology or epistemology except in passing. In this paper, I argue, first, that cryptonormative judgments are pervasive: familiar cases from everyday life are most naturally diagnosed as (...) cryptonormative judgments. Secondly, they reveal that normative judgment is a state that can be quite deeply non-transparent to its bearer, in a way that is not, for example, assimilable to the phenomenon of self-deception. Thirdly, they shed light on debates over amoralism and lend some support to a picture of normative psychology that links normative judgment constitutively to motivation. In the conclusion, I make some remarks about the social and political insidiousness of cryptonormativity, looking forward to future work. (shrink)

Transformations and disasters in our global environment are indivisible from the consequences of modern civilization. This essay argues that future development on our planet demands not new theories but, rather, a rethinking of modernity. The purpose of this study is to regain and recover the path of thinking that enables us to preserve, conserve, and sustain our global environment. This essay is an attempt to explore the foundation of environmental ethics based on ecological and social responsibility.

Whilst presenting a number of features that have been put forward to characterize modernity as a way of life and a social system, this entry suggests a dissident genealogy that reveals a hidden history of continuities and alternatives. It thereby problematizes the norms about periodization and the assumptions about the elaboration of a logos that underlie the concept of the modern. This approach to modernity as a complex of processes, institutions, subjectivities, and technologies challenges the more familiar history of linear (...) temporalities and progressive transformations. The fruitfulness of seeing modernity, as much as other historical periods, as hybrid assemblages in a state of flux is that it draws attention to the heterogeneity and processual nature of cultures and feeds into the possibility of the critique of the present. (shrink)

Niklas Luhmann and Jacques Derrida start with a common assumption in their analyses of the law and the economy - the foundational paradox of social institutions. But then autopoiesis and deconstruction move into opposite directions. Luhmann pursues the question of how de-paradoxification constructs the immanence of social institutions and builds a world of autopoietic social systems. By contrast, Derrida's thought aims at the transcendence of social institutions through their re-paradoxification. However, there is a hidden supplementarity of autopoiesis and deconstruction which (...) makes it worthwhile to relate the theories to each other. Derrida's distinction of writing/speech is necessarily blind toward Luhmann's distinction of consciousness/communication, but is, at the same time, continuously provoked by it. On another level, the opposite happens. Luhmann's autopoiesis is permanently irritated by Derrida's différance but is at the same time unable to conceptualize it. This complementary blindness of their distinctions directrices is a permanent source of mutual irritation which requires a reformulation of the social and of the possibility of justice. (shrink)

Acknowledging the power of the id-drives, Freud held on to the authority of reason as the ego’s best tool to control instinctual desire. He thereby placed analytic reason at the foundation of his own ambivalent social theory, which, on the one hand, held utopian promise based upon psychoanalytic insight, and, on the other hand, despaired of reason’s capacity to control the self-destructive elements of the psyche. Moving beyond the recourse of sublimation, post-Freudians attacked reason’s hegemony in quelling disruptive psycho-dynamics and, (...) focusing upon the social domain, they sought strategies to counter the oppressive (repressive) social restrictions and conformist impositions impeding individual freedom that result from thwarted desire. Postmodern celebration of desire at the expense of reason and sublimation leaves the Enlightenment prospects altogether and moves psychoanalysis into a new terrain, where the very notion of rationality and an autonomous ego upon which much of Freudianism rests has been deconstructed. Thus the debate that begins with Freud’s social theories reflects the deeper divisions, which arose with postmodern ethics and discarded Cartesian–Kantian notions of personal identity. Here we consider the moral framework in which Freudian social theory sits and a contrasting understanding of agency that confronts his modernist conception. In that debate, we discern the larger humanist confrontation with postmodernity. Yet, all who engaged Freud shared some version of his utopian ethos, albeit radically restructuring the theory upon which social reform might occur. (shrink)

Since the emergence of neo-evolutionism in the 1960s, various critiques of the theory of social or socio-cultural evolution have been forwarded, including notably those of Immanuel Wallerstein, Alain Touraine and Anthony Giddens who decisively reject the idea of evolution. Within this context, Jürgen Habermas's theory of socio-cultural evolution has also become a specific object of critique, the best known in the English-speaking world being, perhaps, Michael Schmid's critique. While the latter is ultimately based on neo-Darwinistic assumptions which allow a non-Marxist (...) alternative to be pitted against Habermas's position, a significant immanent critique has been taking shape during the late 1970s and 1980s the contours of which are at present starting to become visible, despite the fact that as yet it is nowhere developed and presented in a systematic manner. I have in mind here the work of younger authors belonging to the circle around Habermas, such as Johann Arnason, Axel Honneth, Hans Joas, Günter Frankenberg, Ulrich Rödel, and Klaus Eder, who have not only developed a critique of Habermas but are also engaged in developing an alternative to him within the framework of critical theory. (shrink)

This article offers a political reading of Franz Kafka's posthumous work The Trial. In this novel, the main protagonist (Joseph K.) is subject to an arrest and trial conducted by the ambiguous authority of a shadowy court and its officials. This article explores Joseph K.'s experience of being subject to the Law, and relates this to our own understanding and experience of political subjectivity in modern times. K.'s doomed search for order through a ‘permanent resolution’ of his case is related (...) to the modern desire for order: Specifically, the desire for both philosophical and political frameworks that provide narratives or certainty. Here modernity is understood to be characterized by an anxiety brought about by a crisis in authorship and authority. The article then considers K.'s desire for justice and the Law, and his entanglement with the power of the court, as analogous to the modern experience of the triad of justice–law–power, which is subsumed under the banner of ‘sovereignty’. In particular, the article explores K.'s inability to locate, read, or fix the Law; a problem that is also reflected in the aporia of sovereignty as justice–law–power. K.'s experience alerts us to the contradictions in the triad justice–law–power; contradictions that occur as although each member of the triad is dependent upon the other two, each member of the triad also seeks to exclude or deny this dependency. Thus, read politically, K.'s struggle in The Trial can be seen as a reflection of the modern struggle with sovereignty as the triad justice–law–power, and the impasse that K. reaches is also the impasse that modernity has reached. (shrink)

This article positions ‘safety’ and ‘risk’ as key public health problems in mental health. I demonstrate that discourse about safety occurs extensively in relation to mental health, but it does not occur in a way where the mental health system gets any safer for the key actors involved. Ongoing unproductive discourse occurs because the different actors involved are speaking at cross purposes and about different things against the background of a ‘public’ discourse focused on safety crises. I map the general (...) interests of the main set of actors to demonstrate the conflicted and complex nature of discourse around mental health safety. In response I outline a dialogical approach to safety and risk based on the work of Habermas and values of recovery. This is presented as a framework from which to assess whether discourse is occurring effectively to develop shared meanings. Shared understandings of safety will mean that the safety needs of relevant actors can be understood and negotiated rather than giving way to an actuarial process which does not take into consideration the context of a person’s life. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophy, to be useful to Orthodox Christian theology, must capture the “essence” of the divine and human activity in the world in the scientific sense of Edmund Husserl. Scholastic philosophy is no longer an academically privileged supporter of theology in the interpretation of the universe. In its place, this paper suggests that phenomenological philosophy becomes the unique and transcendent partner, as it were, in the interpretive dialogue. The methodological thinking of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger offers a way of (...) philosophical understanding that is more satisfactory than the traditional scholastic metaphysics in giving meaning to contemporary human experience. A phenomenological eco-theological approach captures the essences of a subject’s immediate and holistic perception of the environment. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , September 2008, Volume 8, Edition 2. (shrink)

According to Heidegger's Being and Time, social relations are constitutive of the core features of human agency. On this view, which I call a ‘strong conception’ of sociality, the core features of human agency cannot obtain in an individual subject independently of social relations to others. I explain the strong conception of sociality captured by Heidegger's underdeveloped notion of ‘being-with’ by reconstructing Heidegger's critique of the ‘weak conception’ of sociality characteristic of Kant's theory of agency. According to a weak conception, (...) sociality is a mere aggregation of individual subjects and the core features of human agency are built into each individual mind. The weak conception of sociality remains today widely taken for granted. I show that Christine Korsgaard, one of the most creative contemporary appropriators of Kant, operates with a weak conception of sociality and that this produces a problematic explanatory deficiency in her view: she is unable to explain the peculiar motivational efficacy of shared social norms. Heidegger's view is tailor made to explain this phenomenon. I end by sketching how Heidegger provides a social explanation of a major systematic concern animating Korsgaard, the concern with the importance of individual autonomy and answerability in human life. (shrink)

The paper starts by identifying dynamic stabilization as a defining feature of modern societies. This term refers to the fact that such a society requires growth, augmentation and high rates of innovation in order to reproduce its structure and to preserve the socioeconomic and political status quo. The subsequent sections explore the mechanisms and consequences of this mode of social reproduction, proceeding in three steps. First, three key aspects or ‘motors’ of dynamization are identified, namely the mechanisms of appropriation, acceleration (...) and activation. In the second step, we argue that this ‘Triple-A-Mode’ of dynamic stabilization necessarily entails a logic of incessant escalation which eventually threatens to undermine itself, leading to a multifaceted process of destabilization. Unmistakable signs of this can be seen in the current financial, democratic, ecological and psychosocial crises. The third and last part briefly and very preliminarily sketches out the possible contours of a ‘post-growth’ society which could move beyond the current mode of dynamic stabilization. (shrink)

A comparison of the analyses of West German society in the 1960s in Dahrendorf's Society and Democracy in Germany and in the 1980s in Beck's Risk Society provides the historical frame for a reconsideration of the student movement of the late 1960s in terms not of its own self-understanding but of its place and role in the larger processes of social and cultural change in the Federal Republic. The idea of cultural revolution - one of the central, defining themes of (...) the student movement - and its outcome are examined with reference to Schulze's cultural sociology of postwar German society. (shrink)

This paper offers an alternative perspective to the traditional interpretation of Hegel's philosophical reflection on history, departing from a reinterpretation of Hegel's reading of the tragic action of Antigone in Chapter VI of the Phenomenology of Spirit. The customary interpretation of this text affirms that Hegel shows how the conflict of tragic action finds its truth and its end in the identity of spirit. Tragic conflict is left behind to the same extent that spirit sublates the Greek ethical substance. This (...) way, spirit can guarantee that our historical time is released from the past of the substance, or the spiritual movement of mediation from the immediacy of an ‘in-itself’. My reading, by contrast, finds under the tragic conflict of this text of Hegel's nothing but the ‘no’ of death that negates itself, or a principle that has the form of an original and irreducible conflict. Under this interpretation of Hegelian spirit, it becomes clear that it can neither fail to posit some form of ‘in-itself’ nor sublate its own tragic nature. This way it is shown that Hegel's reflection on the past does not reassure the superiority of the identity of the present, but rather illuminates its ‘broken’ nature. I thus offer an alternative view on Hegel's comprehension of the relation between present and past and between philosophy and time. (shrink)

David Roberts's The Total Work of Art in European Modernism extends and deepens the analysis of the counter-paradigm of redemptively inspired art to modernism's own pre-occupation with secularization. It addresses the imbalance in social and critical theory whereby progressive secular rationalization has been elevated to the sole logic of modernity, and the romantic redemptive tradition has been reduced to a marginal counter-enlightenment. The total work of art paradigm allows Roberts to demonstrate how the programme of modernity has been constituted by (...) internal tensions and antinomies from the very beginning. (shrink)

In past work, Habermas has claimed that justice and solidarity stand in a complementary relationship—that ‘ethical’ relations of solidarity are the ‘reverse side’ of justice. Yet in a recent address to the World Congress of Philosophy, he rejects this idea. This paper argues against this rejection. After explaining the idea, arguing for its centrality to Habermas' thought, and evaluating Habermas' scant reflections on this major transformation, I argue that his rejection of the idea is a result of a newfound skepticism (...) about the power of secular reason, and should thus be understood in terms of his corresponding turn to religious traditions as alternative sources of solidarity. I argue against this ‘religious turn’ by developing an alternative advocated by Habermas himself in earlier reflections—attention to real sociopolitical movements. In particular, I analyze feminist and black liberation movements to demonstrate that Habermas' pessimism about secular sources of justice-producing solidarity is unwarranted, and that, while ‘postsecular’ sources may provide one avenue for actionable solidarity, they are not the only one. I conclude by identifying a conceptual commonality in these two alternatives: an inclusive conception of what it means to be human. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Education is in itself a project of Enlightenment. The critical theory of the Frankfurt School, whose origin and development bear the imprint of self-destructive social-cultural processes of modernity and of the Holocaust, can count as an attempt to continue the process of Enlightenment through radical self-criticism. The paper presents the approach of the first generation of critical theory and then Jurgen Habermas' critique of this approach and his reconstruction of critical theory in his theory of communicative action. Special emphasis (...) is laid on the discussion of the ethical implications of human communication. From this background the paper enquires what significance these reflections could have for a revised concept of education. (shrink)

The author revisits H. L. A. Hart's theory of positive law and argues for a major qualification to the thesis of the separation of law and morality based on a concept of systemic legitimacy derived from the social theory of Jurgen Habermas. He argues that standards for assessing the degree of systemic legitimacy in modern legal systems can develop through reflective exercise of “critical legality,” a concept coined to parallel Hart's “critical morality,” and an expanded understanding of the “external” and (...) “internal” perspectives on legal systems. Following Habermas, he argues that modern positive law must retain systemic legitimacy. After suggesting criteria for measuring systemic legitimacy, the author concludes that the concept provides a useful approach to contemporary problems of “lawless” regimes and “law's imperialism.”. (shrink)

While post-modernist assaults on modernity correctly expose the pretensions of modernity – including its constructs of meaning in history, its abnegation of mystery, and its lapses into scientism, historicism, and relativism – the philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan discerned progress as well as decline in recent intellectual history. In part this is because under contemporary conditions we can avoid the pretensions of modernity, since – in the wake of modern science and modern historical scholarship – we witness the differentiation of (...) interiority, which, properly understood as the discovery of the self, may be seen as leading to a new integration of the spiritual, the intellectual, the moral, and the historical. (shrink)

The search for the best strategy in literacy education is a lingering phenomenon. From time to time one strategy is claimed to work best, only to be critically challenged and replaced by another. There is always debate about what the best strategy is. The belief that there is supposed to be only one best strategy is not consistent with the fact that there are diverse views on what it should be. This paper argues that the search for the best strategy (...) is not looking for the best among various practices. Instead, it calls for a critical examination of our underlying philosophical beliefs about it. Hence, the discussion of the best strategy is divided into three philosophical phases: objectivist, deconstructivist, and praxis. The search is argued to be taking a journey of philosophical investigations rather than finding a certain practice superior to all others. (shrink)

This article argues against the doxa that Foucault's analysis of education inevitably undermines self-originating ethical intention on the part of teachers or students. By attending to Foucault's lesser known, later work—in particular, the notion of ‘biopower’ and the deepened level of materiality it entails—the article shows how the earlier Foucauldian conception of power is intensified to such an extent that it overflows its original domain, and comes to ‘infuse’ the subject that might previously have been taken as a mere effect. (...) What emerges, accordingly, is a subject divested of ‘traditional’, substantial, formation, located wholly on an immanent plane, and yet centrally concerned with the practice of freedom and ethical resistance. In turn, what seemed to have no place at all in the earlier Foucault becomes central: in general, active subjectivization (subjectivation) as a counter to passive subjection (assujetissement); more particularly, subjects' ongoing production and creation (via strategic decisions and localized opposition) of a new ethos, new ‘practices of self’, and new kinds of relations. With this alternative Foucauldian position outlined, the article then focuses more particularly on the practices of education: it concludes that, instead of being rendered merely the factories of obedient behaviour, schools or colleges can be the locus for a critically-informed, oppositional micro-politics. In other words: the power-relations that (quite literally) constitute education can now be regarded, on Foucault's own terms, as being creative, ‘enabling’ and positive. (shrink)

This article discusses the tension between social relationality and self-relationality central to Heidegger’s ontology of Dasein and the possible ways of reconciling this tension. Arguing that this is a tension between communicability and existential commitments, the article poses the question: How are existential commitments responsive to communication? After problematizing the quasi-Kantian and communitarian ways of settling the tension, the article uses Heidegger’s early reading of Aristotle to develop a third hermeneutic model of ethical relationality according to which existential commitments are (...) shareable in communication, since ethos – the existential posture towards the good – arises out of pathos that exposes Dasein to coexistence. The account of ethical relationality found in Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle thus takes the world to be a shared and dynamic ontological condition and emphasize that the world constitutes selfhood in a way that is constantly at stake in ethical communication. (shrink)

Although Jürgen Habermas and Richard Rorty both reject the traditional picture of cultural change in which intellectuals are supposed to have the ‘last word’ on cultural issues and envisage cultural changes as the result of ‘dialogue’ or ‘conversation’ between them and the lay public, they nevertheless end up espousing different pictures of cultural change because of their totally different conception of the role and function of language, truth and rationality in such dialogue. In the first two sections of this article, (...) I will recount Habermas’s critique of Rorty’s neo-pragmatism and the latter’s responses to it so that they can reveal the core issues of the debate. In the third section, I will argue that, as a ‘sociologized version’ of Rorty’s philosophy, Jeffrey Alexander’s theory of social performance provides us with a sociological framework that makes possible a wide range of empirical studies of cultural change. (shrink)

Jürgen Habermas’ characterization of Adorno’s project as an aestheticization of philosophy continues to influence our reading of his work. In contradiction to Lambert Zuidervaart, who suggests that in order to be understood as politically relevant, Adorno’s philosophy must be supplemented with empirical research, I argue in this article that Adorno’s work contains many of the resources we would need to theorize an ethical politics. First, it both identifies the moral debt carried by the subject and addresses the need for social (...) transformation in order to change this situation. Second, it proposes an ethical comportment of self-relinquishment as a first step towards this reorganization of the social. The self-relinquishment of philosophy to its object is modeled upon aesthetic experience, which, according to Adorno, we must regard as a remorseful atonement for the subject’s domination of the object in its attempt to ‘wrest itself free’ ( Aesthetic Theory, 1997c: 112) of undifferentiated being. By incorporating into philosophical thought the mimetic bodily impulses tamed by aesthetic form, we may engender within ourselves a solidarity with objectivity. Rather than the self-possessing and conservative subject that constitutes its world mentally, Adorno theorizes a subject for whom thinking is a temporalization or a becoming. Thinking produces otherness within the subject itself. In this thinking-as-becoming, we see the beginnings of a highly individuated political subjectivity capable of acting in solidarity with the other. This brings us to the third element within Adorno’s philosophy that can serve us in formulating an ethical politics: the non-violent organizational principle of the modern work of art. In mobilizing the logic of the modern work of art, the autonomous individual is empowered to forge a politics that preserves contradiction in the facilitation of a non-violent relation with others. (shrink)

Current philosophical and legal bioethical reflection on reprogenetics provides little more than a rationalization of the interests of science. There are two reasons for this. First, bioethicists attempt to address ethical issues in a “language of precision” that characterizes science, and this works against analogical and narratological modes of discourse that have traditionally provided guidance for understanding human nature and purpose. Second, the current ethical and legal debate is framed by a public/private distinction that banishes robust norms to the private (...) realm, and leaves a minimalist public discourse of harm avoidance that is insufficient for regulating the science. In this essay, I argue that Mark Hanson's account of anxiety provides a valuable starting point for addressing deficiencies in the current philosophical and legal debate, and it highlights the need for a theological discourse on genetic enhancements. Through an assessment of Joel Shumann's criticism of the public/private distinction, I show how the needed theological discourse should be situated in the context of robust communities, and how such a communitarian inter-ethic is compatible with a variant of liberalism. Finally, I critically assess James Keenan's account of virtue and perfection, in order to outline what a sufficient discourse on reproductive and genetic enhancements requires. (shrink)

Self practices – mental and bodily activities through which individuals try to give a shape to their existence – have been a topic of interest in the social science literature for over a century now. These studies bring into focus that such activities play important roles in our relationship to our social environment. But beyond this general insight we still do not have a framework for elucidating what kind of roles/uses have been attributed to self practices by social theorists historically. (...) Through an analysis of the works of 5 major contributors to the literature (Durkheim, Mauss, Simmel, Giddens and Foucault), the article highlights three distinct conceptualizations, which draw attention to the adaptive, defensive and transformative uses of self practices. Adaptive uses allow individuals to adjust their conduct to collective norms; defensive uses serve the maintenance and protection of self-identity despite de-individualizing pressures; and transformative self practices target the development of alternative ways of living. It is further suggested that the framework developed in the article can provide important clues about the different ‘practical’ solutions offered by social theorists to the problems that modern individuals face in constituting themselves as autonomous subjects. (shrink)

The systematic philosophical foundation for Jean-François Lyotard's postmodern and post-Marxist politics is described. The central principle of the right to create different "phrases" is uncovered and examined. The political consequences of this philosophical system are explored, leading to the conclusion that Lyotard's commitment to difference leads to political indifference. The philosophical roots of this indifference are detailed in Lyotard's Cartesian starting point and his analysis of Holocaust revisionism. This analysis reveals an idealist basis to Lyotard's philosophy of difference. Lyotard's concept (...) of difference is compared to that of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. (shrink)

A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought, the practices that we accept rest.... Criticism is a matter of flushing out that thought and trying to change it: to show that things are not as self-evident as one believed, to see that what is accepted as self-evident will no longer be accepted (...) as such. Practicing criticism is a matter of making facile gestures difficult. Michel Foucault (1988b, 154). (shrink)

The origins of philosophy of education as a discipline are relatively late, and can be traced in the Anglo-American academic world from the 1960s and a specific emphasis on conceptual problems deriving from the analytical tradition of philosophy. In more recent years, however, there has been a notable ‘Continentalist’ turn in the discipline, leading to a re-evaluation of key texts and philosophers from the French and German traditions and their relation to the discourse of education. One paradigmatic example here is (...) the work of the French postmodernist thinker Jean-Francois Lyotard. In this essay, I explore how Lyotard’s powerful critique of education in his early work, especially with regard to his influence on the May ‘68 events at Nanterre University, can be seen as crucially important, now again, to a current crisis in educational philosophy in the Western world. Moreover, Lyotard’s post-’68 work, with his paradigmatic The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge as especially important, can be seen as providing a very challenging riposte to both ‘managerialist’ and instrumentalist philosophies on the one side but also to overly simplistic ‘liberatory’ educational critiques on the other side. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between `mass media' representations of love and a model of love which we commonly view as more `realistic', that is more compatible with sharing everyday life with another. The article offers three arguments: (1) the postmodern claim that everyday life in general and romantic love in particular have been colonized by the empty `simulacrum' of mass media resonates with a long-standing Western discussion of the problematic relation between fiction and reality; (2) the relation between mass (...) media representations of love and realistic models of love is reconceptualized as deriving from two conflicting bodily experiences of love; (3) postmodern love is defined as being characterized by a particular crisis of representation in which signifiers and signifieds of love do not match. (shrink)

Dialectical critical realism makes it possible for us to better understand the irrationalities and potentialities of modernity. This is illustrated by showing the difference that concepts drawn from Bhaskar’s Dialectic make to our understanding of a particular, but central, modern irrationality: eurocentrism. Contrary to the critical discourse on eurocentrism, established accounts of modernity and modernism are vital for understanding eurocentrism. Running through the modern tradition are opposing tendencies of irrealism and realism, the main forms of which are eurocentrism and anti-eurocentrism. (...) Anti-eurocentrism is particularly strong within the Marxian tradition. This only becomes clear, however, when interpreted through the perspective afforded by Dialectic ; and when located in the context of the ‘europic problematic’, the theory of which Dialectic makes possible. Content Type Journal Article Category Article Pages 45-71 Authors Nick Hostettler, Queen Mary University of London Journal Journal of Critical Realism Online ISSN 1572-5138 Print ISSN 1476-7430 Journal Volume Volume 12 Journal Issue Volume 12, Number 1 / 2013. (shrink)