Though the names “Judith Butler” and “Martin Heidegger” rarely come together in Butler and Heidegger scholarship, the critical encounter between these philosophers might help us conceptualize the relationship between freedom and marginalization. In this paper, I will read Butler from the perspective of the Heidegger of Being and Time and claim that what Butler's philosophy suggests is the radical dependency of one's freedom on the cultural resuscitation of socially murdered racial, sexual, ethnic, religious, and sectarian/confessional minorities. More specifically, I will (...) claim that the socially sanctioned subject's freedom is dependent on the marginalized Other's freedom, and, conversely, the marginalized Other's freedom is dependent on the socially sanctioned subject's freedom. (shrink)

David Lewis is most famous in the analytical metaphysics literature for his analysis of the truth conditions of counterfactual conditionals in terms of possible worlds, and for his analysis of causation in terms of counterfactual conditionals. He uses a notion of comparative similarity of possible worlds in his analysis of counterfactual conditionals. However, since he attributes reality to possible worlds he has attracted many criticisms. The aim of our paper is to present some counterfactuals whose account cannot be given within (...) a Lewisian framework, and to point to some devastating results for Lewis of such an inadequacy. (shrink)

Foucault's philosophy is often divided into three periods: the archeological period of the 1960's, the geneological period of the 1970's, and the ethical period of the 1980's. Considering the subjects Foucault worked on, the methods he employed, and the nature of his analyses in the 1960's, 1970's, and 1980's, it seems prima facie that there is a considerable difference between the different periods of Foucault's career. Nevertheless, Fooucault claims that he has been working on the same subject, that is, the (...) construction of subjective experience, throughout most of his career. The aim of this paper is to question, via the presentation of two sexual case studies taken from the history of psychiatry, what kind of portrait of Foucault has painted if we take him by his word. These studies will also help us ask how we can give an account of the construction of sexual experience from the perspective of Foucault the archaeologist, the genealogist, and at the same time, the ethicist. (shrink)

Özet: 20. yüzyılın son çeyreğinde, çıkış noktasını mensubu olduğu kültüre, ulusa veya devlete karşı korunması için bireysel haklarla donatılmış ve içerisinde yetiştiği kültürü rasyonel yetileri ile değerlendirip terk edebilme gücüne sahip “birey” anlayışında bulan “bireyci” liberalizmin içerisinden, bireylerin “kültürel” varlıklar olduklarını, bireysel özgürlüğün “kültürlerin korunması” olmaksızın icra edilemeyeceğini, bunun için de “kültürel azınlık hakları”nın liberalizmin olmazsa olmazı olduğunu savunan “liberal çokkültürcülük” doğmuştur. Bu yazıda, liberal çokkültürcülüğün en önemli versiyonlarından biri olan “ulusalcı liberalizm” incelenecek ve onun kadınlardan, LGBTİ bireylerinden ve dini (...) veya mezhepsel muhaliflerden oluşan “azınlık-içindeki-azınlık” gruplarının ortaya çıkardığı çoğulculuğu kapsayacak teorik araçlar geliştiremediği; bu yüzden de yeterince çoğulcu olmadığı iddia edilecektir.In the last quarter of the 20th century, liberal multiculturalism was born out of individualistic liberalism. Whereas the latter takes as its starting point the individual, who is supposed to be protected against the intrusions of his/her culture, nation, or state via individual rights, and who is capable of leaving the cultural heritage s/he was raised into; the former takes human beings as cultural entities, and defends that individual freedom cannot be performed without the protection of culture and that cultural minority rights are the sine qua non for liberalism. In this essay, I will examine one of the most important versions of liberal multiculturalism, namely national liberalism, and argue that it is not pluralistic enough due to the fact that it has not created the necessary tools to accommodate the sort of pluralism that is formed out of minorities-within-minorities. (shrink)

Ethno‐cultural minority rights have been regarded as a part of human rights since the last decade of the twentieth century. These rights are often formulated in predominantly culturalist terms. Citing the importance of culture in the lives of members, they are conceptualized as tools for protecting the distinct identity of minority cultures. This paper claims that this way of formulating minority rights is to portray minority communities as if they were not concerned with the pathologies of modern democracies, such as (...) the increasing marginalization of citizens from democratic life, far‐right populism, and the subordination of democracy into the functional requirements of economy. Accordingly, it argues for a theory of minority rights that formulates these rights as tools for protecting democracy against such pathologies. In doing so, it takes its point of departure from Jürgen Habermas’s communicative action theory and his understanding of democracy and public autonomy. (shrink)

Queering Multiculturalism argues for group-specific rights for ethno-cultural minorities, but without ignoring the possibility that such rights may lead to ethnic chauvinism, balkanization, and the cultural marginalization of minorities-within-minorities, such as ethnic LGBT people.

Martin Heidegger was not only one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century but also a supporter of and a contributor to one of the most discriminatory ideologies of the recent past. Thus, "the Heidegger's case" gives us philosophers an opportunity to work on discrimination from a philosophical perspective. My aim in this essay is to question the relationship between freedom and discrimination via Heidegger's philosophy. I will show that what bridges the gap between Heidegger's philosophy and a discriminatory (...) ideology such as the National Socialist ideology is Heidegger's conceptualization of freedom with the aid of a monolithic understanding of history--one that refuses to acknowledge the plurality and heterogeneity in the socio-historical existence of human beings. Accordingly, I will claim that the Heideggerian freedom depends on the social, if not literal, murder of the marginalized segments of a given society. However, I will refuse to conclude that Heidegger's philosophy is a Nazi philosophy and that it should never be appropriated as long as we want to purify our thoughts from discriminatory ideas. Rather, I will re-appropriate Heidegger, against Heidegger, to read and interpret Michel Foucault's and Judith Butler's philosophies. My aim here is to construct a social ontology that may justify anti-discriminatory policies. More specifically, through my Heideggerian readings of Foucault and Butler, I will argue that one's freedom is dependent on the cultural resuscitation of socially, and sometimes literally, murdered racial, sexual, ethnic, religious, and sectarian/confessional minorities. (shrink)

In his very last, now famous, interview, Michel Foucault states that his philosophical thought was shaped by his reading of Heidegger, even though he does not specify what aspects of Heidegger’s philosophy inspired him in the first place. However, his last interview is not the only place where Foucault refers to Heidegger as his intellectual guide. In his 1981/1982 lecture course, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Foucault confesses that the way Heidegger conceptualized the relationship between subject and truth was a (...) starting point for him for thinking about the relationship between truth, subject, subjective-transformation, and freedom. Accordingly, the aim of this paper is to reconstruct the Foucault-Heidegger encounter from the perspective of subject-truth relation. I will ask how Heidegger and Foucault conceptualized the relationship between truth, self-transformation, and freedom. And I will claim that for both Foucault and Heidegger, freedom lies in constantly and creatively repeating the traditional possibilities of existence in order to question the reified patterns of interpretation, and in order to reveal the anxiety–engendering–truth that what is regarded as natural and inevitable in human life is historically contingent and transformable. (shrink)