Radical democratic thinking is becoming intrigued by the material situatedness of its political agents and by the role of nonhuman participants in political interaction. At stake here is the displacement of narrow anthropocentrism that currently guides democratic theory and practice, and its repositioning into what we call ‘the nonhuman condition’. This Critical Exchange explores the nonhuman condition. It asks: What are the implications of decentering the human subject via a new materialist reading of radical democracy? Does this reading dilute political (...) agency? Or should this be seen, on the contrary, as an invitation for new voices and demands to enter into democratic assemblages? How might engagement with the more-than-human disrupt or extend theories of radical democracy? Hans Asenbaum and Amanda Machin discuss the human democratic subject both through radical democratic and new materialist lenses. They suggest that a new materialist decentred subject does not lose agency but further gains political responsibility in radical democracy. Jean-Paul Gagnon highlights the possibility of becoming through loss. In losing our anthropocentric arrogance—our understanding of being other and better than animal—we become more connected and discover our place in human-nonhuman assemblages. Melissa Orlie agrees that something can be gained through renouncing dominant human fantasies and presents a ‘radical democratic naturalism’. By renouncing land violence and acknowledging nature’s subjectivity, we can further nonexploitative radical democratic politics. This is where the notion of ‘tidalectic’ processes introduced by James L. Smith is helpful. Focusing on water and the Indigenous knowledges around rivers, he considers how democracy and community can be reimagined as plural, cyclical and attentive to the nonhuman with which the human is inevitably entangled. Diana Leong offers a different approach. Considering the nonhuman from the perspective of Black Studies demands an awareness to how blackness has long been constituted as non- or partially human. (shrink)

Hans Joas is one of the foremost social theorists in Germany today. Based on Joas’s celebrated study of George Herbert Mead, this work reevaluates the contribution of American pragmatism and European philosophical anthropology to theories of action in the social sciences. Joas also establishes direct ties between Mead’s work and approaches drawn from German traditions of philosophical anthropology. Joas argues for adding a third model of action to the two predominant models of rational and normative action—one that emphasizes the creative (...) character of human action. This model encompasses the other two, allowing for a more comprehensive theory of action. Joas elaborates some implications of his model for theories of social movements and social change and for the status of action theory in sociology in the face of competition from theories advanced by Luhmann and Habermas. The problem of action is of crucial importance in both sociology and philosophy, and this book—already widely debated in Germany—will add fresh impetus to the lively discussions current in the English-speaking world. (shrink)

More and more, we present ourselves and encounter others through profiles. A profile shows us not as we are seen directly but how we are perceived by a broader public. As we observe how others observe us, we calibrate our self-presentation accordingly. Profile-based identity is evident everywhere from pop culture to politics, marketing to morality. But all too often critics simply denounce this alleged superficiality in defense of some supposedly pure ideal of authentic or sincere expression. This book argues that (...) the profile marks an epochal shift in our concept of identity and demonstrates why that matters. You and Your Profile blends social theory, philosophy, and cultural critique to unfold an exploration of the way we have come to experience the world. Instead of polemicizing against the profile, Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul J. D’Ambrosio outline how it works, how we readily apply it in our daily lives, and how it shapes our values—personally, economically, and ethically. They develop a practical vocabulary of life in the digital age. Informed by the Daoist tradition, they suggest strategies for handling the pressure of social media by distancing oneself from one’s public face. A deft and wide-ranging consideration of our era’s identity crisis, this book provides vital clues on how to stay sane in a time of proliferating profiles. (shrink)

We publish here the letters between Gadamer and Ricoeur, as they are found in the Archives of the two philosophers (Gadamer-Archiv in Marbach and Fonds Ricoeur in Paris). Starting from February 1964 and ending on October 2000, the thirty-five letters reproduced here cannot give a complete picture of their much richer correspondence and relations, because it seems that neither Ricoeur, nor Gadamer kept all the letters they received from one another. But altogether, they document their common concerns, their mutual respect, (...) even their intellectual solidarity and finally the particular context that brought them to write to one another, i.e. Ricoeur’s intention to publish a translation of Gadamer’s book, Truth and Method, in a new series he edited for the Seuil Publisher. This publishing and translation project will mark their entire correspondence. (shrink)

This book shows that classic Chinese philosophy is as rational as Western approaches dealing with the problems of logic, epistemology, language analysis, and linguistic topics from a philosophical point of view. It presents detailed analyses of rational and methodological features in Confucianism, Taoist philosophy, and the School of Names as well as Mohist approaches in classical Chinese philosophy, especially in regard to ideas of valid knowledge. The authors also provide new arguments against cultural relativism and antirational movements like religious fundamentalism (...) that do not pay due attention to what all human beings have in common-- to cultural universals. (shrink)

This essay attempts to provide a preliminary outline of a theory of identity. The first section addresses what the sociologist Niklas Luhmann has called ‘the problem of identity’, or, in other words, the mind–society (rather than the mind–body) problem: In how far can the internal (psychological) self and the external (social) persona be integrated into a unit? The second section of the essay briefly defines a basic vocabulary of a theory of identity. ‘Identity’ is understood as the existentially necessary formation (...) of a coherence between the ‘self’ (the ‘I’ as it is experienced in thoughts and feelings), its body and its social ‘persona’ (the individual person with its social attributes). Three different major paradigms of identity formation are distinguished from one another: a sincere identity is constructed through a firm commitment of the self to its social roles; an authentic identity is constructed through the creation of a social persona on the basis of one’s unique and original self; a ‘profilic’ identity, as we call it, is shaped by successfully presenting a personal profile under conditions of second-order observation as they prevail, for instance, in the social media, but also in other contemporary social systems. In the third section of the essay, we present a sketch of the historical sequence of these three paradigms of identity. Although these paradigms are not mutually exclusive and can coexist, it seems that sincerity flourished in pre-modern society, while authenticity came to prominence along with the functional differentiation of modern society and is now, along with the increased significance of second-order observation, gradually overshadowed by the influence of profilicity. (shrink)

This experiment compared the effects of exposure to masked phobic stimuli at a very brief stimulus-onset asynchrony on spider-phobic and non-phobic individuals. Participants were identified through a widely used questionnaire and a Behavioral Avoidance Test with a live, caged tarantula to establish baseline levels of avoidance. One week later, they were individually administered one of two continuous series of masked images: spiders or flowers. Preliminary masking experiments showed that independent samples of participants from the same populations failed to recognize these (...) stimuli. Participants in the main experiment reported ratings of subjective distress immediately before and after the exposure manipulation. Then they engaged in the BAT once again. Very brief exposure to images of spiders reduced phobic participants’ avoidance of the tarantula. No effects were evidenced on subjective distress, or on non-phobic participants. Theoretical implications for the non-conscious basis of fear are discussed. (shrink)

The contributions to this volume are from participants of the international conference "Kreisel's Interests - On the Foundations of Logic and Mathematics", which took place from 13 to 14 2018 at the University of Salzburg in Salzburg, Austria. The contributions have been revised and partially extended. Among the contributors are Akihiro Kanamori, Göran Sundholm, Ulrich Kohlenbach, Charles Parsons, Daniel Isaacson, and Kenneth Derus. The contributions cover the discussions between Kreisel and Wittgenstein on philosophy of mathematics, Kreisel's Dictum, proof theory, the (...) discussions between Kreisel and Gödel on philosophy of mathematics, some bibliographical facts, and a collection of extracts from Kreisel's letters. (shrink)

Lawyers pretend as if the process of application of laws, as well as its outcome, could be an analytic-deductive derivation; especially law students learn that legal decision-making is primarily a logic process. But we know that application of laws depends on analytic-logical as well as on voluntaristic (wilful) elements. Exact relations between these components are unknown and will be unknown. At most German law schools students as the most important imperative tool learn the so called “Auslegung” through the use of (...) theoretical instruments, which do not reflect the interpretation of law practice. These mentioned causes result in irrationality of legal decision-making. In order to achieve more rationality in the process and result of legal decision-making, the contribution makes four suggestions regarding legal methodology and legal education. These proposals consist of few long-term pragmatic approaches to more rationality of legal decision-making. (shrink)

We note an increasing consciousness of weakness of legal methodology taught to law students today: The students get neither real idea nor feeling of legal decision-making as mixture of legal matters, issue of facts, personal inputs, diverging interests, and the interplay with other actors. For minimize these defects it is necessary that law students learn in legal studies the following points: (1) Legal decision-making is a special kind of decision-making and is embedded in all problems of this process. (2) Jurisprudence (...) is a hybrid science: It deals with facts of issue as well with legal matter. (3) Jurisprudence will be understood as transnational science and requires greater cooperation between law schools all over the world. (4) Legal education should focus on general principles and legal tools rather than on detailed rules. (5) Legal theory should demonstrate students our lack of understanding legal decision-making. (6) A realistic legal methodology has to take into account the impossibility of absolute certainty of the correctness of legal decision. (7) It is important to point out that analysis of facts of the case as crucial part of legal methodology requires teaching systems to introduce students in the respective techniques in practice like case studies, projects as well as legal clinics or SASLA-system. (shrink)