What does it mean to be real? Could reality, taken in itself, have a sense? Or, can a reality different from and independent of any thinking possess sense? But if thinking were not of reality, would it still be able to be as such? Furthermore, is all genuine thinking in some sense unreal? The present essay addresses these issues. However, first of all, certain definitions are necessary, the most controversial being, undoubtedly, that of reality. Let us begin by trying to (...) establish the boundaries of the real, so as to be in a position to discover if there is some possibility of transcending them. (shrink)

Is not trying to define uniqueness somehow an aberration? Any definition implies a determination and an expression ; how is it possible to determine that which resembles no other thing and to express something that has no other expression but its own? A definition is a general form of thinking, a form that includes a generality; the larger this generality, the more valuable the definition. Thus, how could we hope it to include the unique, which is so unlike everything else (...) that it cannot be contained in any generalization, and which, coinciding with the universal, breaks the particular/general relation? Since these two terms are not able to account for the unique, this one is not to be treated as a concept, but as an idea. Further, it is not too great an effort to recognize that the idea of the unique stems from the idea of the One. But who can define the One except by a tautology? (shrink)

This book discusses the concept of immanent critique, i. e. whether there is a form of critique which neither just applies empirically accepted standards nor independently justified norms but rather reconstructs norms which are immanent to social practices. -/- It surveys both political theories of criticism (Walzer, Taylor, MacIntyre) and contemporary critical theories (Habermas, Honneth) for how they describe such forms of critique and develops a new model of immanent critique. For this purpose, it takes up both contemporary social ontology (...) theories and the discussion about rule-following. The book argues that we can speak of immanent rules as far as persons can practically recognize each other as members of rule-governed practices if they attribute each other defeasible normative authority. -/- Finally, it describes the consequences of the adoption of such a model for our description of a practice of critique and analyzes both first-order immanent critique and the second-order critique of reification. (shrink)

Suppose we are asked to draw up a list of things we take to exist. Certain items seem unproblematic choices, while others (such as God) are likely to spark controversy. The book sets the grand theological theme aside and asks a less dramatic question: should mathematical objects (numbers, sets, functions, etc.) be on this list? In philosophical jargon this is the ‘ontological’ question for mathematics; it asks whether we ought to include mathematicalia in our ontology. The goal of this work (...) is to answer this question in the affirmative, by drawing on considerations on the the applicability of mathematics to natural science. (shrink)

Traditional arguments for privacy in public suggest that intentionally public activities, such as political speech, do not deserve privacy protection. In this article, I develop a new argument for the view that surveillance of intentionally public activities should be limited to protect the specific good that this context provides, namely democratic legitimacy. Combining insights from Helen Nissenbaum’s contextualism and Jürgen Habermas’s theory of the public sphere, I argue that strategic surveillance of the public sphere can undermine the capacity of citizens (...) to freely deliberate in public and therefore conflicts with democratic self-determination. (shrink)

Recent disclosures suggest that many governments apply indiscriminate mass surveillance technologies that allow them to capture and store a massive amount of communications data belonging to citizens and non-citizens alike. This article argues that traditional liberal critiques of government surveillance that center on an individual right to privacy cannot completely capture the harm that is caused by such surveillance because they ignore its distinctive political dimension. As a complement to standard liberal approaches to privacy, the article develops a critique of (...) surveillance that focuses on the question of political power in the public sphere. (shrink)

What is it to base a belief on reasons? Existing attempts to give an account of the basing relation encounter a dilemma: either one appeals to some kind of neutral process that does not adequately reflect the way basing is a content‐sensitive first‐personal activity, or one appeals to linking or bridge principles that over‐intellectualize and threaten regress. We explain why this dilemma arises, and diagnose the commitments that are key obstacles to providing a satisfactory account. We explain why they should (...) be rejected anyway, and then offer a new, knowledge‐first virtue epistemological theory of the basing relation that shows how we can substantially theorize about mental processes without these commitments. The resulting view plausibly captures the way in which basing is an inherently mental and content‐sensitive process. (shrink)

It is sometimes argued that ideal theories in political philosophy are a form of ideology. This article examines arguments building on the work of Charles Mills and Raymond Geuss for the claim that ideal theories are cognitively distorting belief systems that have the effect of stabilizing unjust social arrangements. I argue that Mills and Geuss neither succeed in establishing that the content of ideal theories is necessarily cognitively defective in the way characteristic for ideologies, nor can they make plausible which (...) mechanisms ensure the alleged negative effects of the widespread acceptance of ideal theorizing. This does not mean that all hope is lost for the ideology objection, however. By turning to a second Marxian model of ideology, I argue that the ideological character of ideal theories is not so much a matter of their content, but rather of their form. Ideal theories falsely present the normative concepts that they use as semantically practice-independent and thereby block potential challenges from subordinate groups to dominant ideologies. It is therefore not the normative content of ideal theories which proves to be objectionable, but the particular role their concepts play in wider political discourse. (shrink)

Critical theories often express scepticism towards the idea that social critique should draw on general normative principles, seeing such principles as bound to dominant conceptual frameworks. However, even the models of immanent critique developed in the Frankfurt School tradition seem to privilege principles over particular moral experiences. Discussing the place that particular moral experience has in the models of Honneth, Ferrara and Adorno, the article argues that experience can play an important negative role even for a critical theory that is (...) committed to the necessity of conceptual mediation, as moral experiences can undermine our confidence in the appropriateness of our moral concepts. Building on McDowell’s account of moral perception and Brandom’s interpretation of Hegel’s theory of experience, one can reconstruct Adorno as providing a “radically negativist” approach to immanent critique that takes particular moral experience seriously. (shrink)

Some of the post-socialist countries of Europe experienced after the fall of communism what some called a religious revival. Anthropologists and sociologists alike were sure that they discovered serious evidence against the case of secularization theory. What unfortunately most of them failed to observe was the particular shape and form of this religious growth and the structural changes of the religious mentalities occurred in the process of transition from a closed, ideologically monopolized society, to a pluralistic one. After more than (...) half of a century of atheistic ideologization of the public sphere, Romania remains one of the most religious countries of both Eastern and Western Europe. The thesis of this article is that this fact is due to the lack of modernization of the Romanian social system both before and during the post-socialist period. (shrink)

In his Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, Wittgenstein claims, puzzlingly, that ‘the proof creates a new concept’ (RFM III-41). This paper aims to contribute to clarifying this idea, and to showing how it marks a major break with the traditional conception of proof. Moreover, since the most natural way to understand his claim is open to criticism, a secondary goal of what follows is to offer an interpretation of it that neutralizes the objection. The discussion proceeds by analysing a (...) well-known geometrical proof. (shrink)

This chapter discusses a fundamental ambivalence in Marx's use of the term "ideology". On the one hand, he employs a cognitivist critique of ideologies, condemning them in virtue of their epistemic or cognitive insufficiencies. On the other hand, what he so describes as false is a specific second-order belief: The belief that the cognitive is independent from material practice. If this belief is false, however, a merely epistemic critique of ideologies must miss its very point. -/- The chapter argues that (...) there is a way out of this dilemma if we assume, that ideologies are correct expressions of false practices. Ideological practices are practices which are constituted by norms that deny people the opportunity to legitimately question the categories which express basic distinctions established in the practices. In this case, ideological beliefs are not false, but deficient insofar they can only be expressed by employing concepts that rely on a limitation of our cognitive abilities. (shrink)

Many contemporary forms of oppression are not primarily the result of formally organized collective action nor are they an unintended outcome of a combination of individual actions. This raises the question of collective responsibility. I argue that we can only determine who is responsible for oppression if we understand oppression as a matter of social practices that create obstacles for social change. This social practice view of oppression enables two insights: First, that there is an unproblematic sense in which groups (...) can bear irreducible collective responsibility for oppression. Second, that there are derived forms of individual responsibility for members of dominant groups. (shrink)

When we criticize social institutions and practices, what kinds of reasons can we offer for such criticism? Political philosophers often assume that we must rely on universal moral principles that are not necessarily connected to the particular social practices of our communities. Traditionally,continental critical theory has rejected this claim through its endorsement of the method of immanent critique. Immanent critique is a critique of social practices that draws on norms already present within these practices to demand social change, rather than (...) merely conservatively reproducing them. This book defends the claim that such a critique is not only possible, but also has politically powerful potential. Taking up recent developments in analytic collective intentionality theory and in the philosophy of language, the book argues that all social practices rest on structures of mutual recognition between persons that allow social theorists to reconstruct hidden norms present within these practices. Starting from a comprehensive critique of contemporary critical theory, the book also spells out the consequences of this line of thought for the practice of social critique, for the social sciences and for political philosophy. (shrink)

Religion was always perceived as the threshold between two worlds. It is a space where individuals are supposed to be connected to a different reality through the mediating power of a particlular ritual, at a specific time and in a certain space. A new space of appearance is the expected outcome along with this relocation from profane to sacred. Religious broadcasting could be conceptualized as a visual and acoustic “altar”. The ritual, space and time are the pillars of this audio-visual (...) “cathedral” the very space that could build the bridge between sacred and profane, and the means for this mediated, symbolic transfer. This paper tries to outline the power of media representation in the context of religious broadcasting that uses ritual and imagination to maintain and negotiate the distinction between sacred and profane and to generate alternative narratives. In this regard, the religious broadcasting, presuming the sacerdotal role to represent, mediate and interpret the relationship between sacred and profane is being conditioned by a ritualized medium. As a result, the religious messages could end up as a ritualized mystification that would jeopardize the production of meaning. (shrink)

Rahel Jaeggi argues that forms of life ought to be the main reference point for a critical theory of society because the internal normative structure of life forms allows for immanent critique. In this article, I extend her model by systematically considering the possibility of oppressive forms of life. Oppressive forms of life are clusters of practices in which subordinated groups are systematically excluded or disabled from participating in the social processes of interpretation through which the values and purposes of (...) those very practices are determined. The possibility of oppressive forms of life poses a challenge to the method of immanent critique because it seems that any such critique must rely on immanent norms that are at least partly constituted by interpretations and that can therefore be distorted by oppression. I argue that Jaeggi’s model of immanent critique can be extended to respond to that challenge, either by recovering a constitutive form of freedom within all forms of life or by consciously adopting a partisan stance in favour of oppressed and marginalised self-understandings. (shrink)

This working paper examines the notion of "immanent critique", a central methodological commitment of critical theories of society. In the first part, I distinguish immanent critique - a critique which reconstructs norms immanent in a social practice which point beyond the normative self-understanding of its members - from both external and internal critique and examine three questions that a theory of immanent critique has to answer (a social ontological, an epistemological and a justificatory question). After surveying some of the classic (...) accounts of immanent critique in part two, I then distinguish two varieties of immanent critique, a hermeneutic and a practice-theoretic approach. Drawing on theories in recent analytic philosophy, I finally argue for a practice-theoretic approach to immanent critique that locates the relevant norms in a practice constituted by mutual recognition. (shrink)

The work of the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács is a constant source of controversy in the history of the Frankfurt School. All leading thinkers of that theoretical tradition have struggled with Lukács’s theory. On the one hand, it was an inspiration for their attempts to come to terms with the oppressive features of capitalist modernity. On the other hand, both its political conclusions and Lukács’s actual philosophical submission to Soviet orthodoxy seemed to show that his theoretical framework was deeply flawed (...) in one aspect or another. (shrink)

According to Jürgen Habermas, his Theory of Communicative Action offers a new account of the normative foundations of critical theory. Habermas’ motivating insight is that neither a transcendental nor a metaphysical solution to the problem of normativity, nor a merely hermeneutic reconstruction of historically given norms, is sufficient to clarify the normative foundations of critical theory. In response to this insight, Habermas develops a novel account of normativity, which locates the normative demands of critical theory within the socially instituted practice (...) of communicative understanding. Although Habermas has claimed otherwise, this new foundation for critical theory constitutes a novel and innovative form of “immanent critique.” To argue for and to clarify this claim, I offer, in section 1, a formal account of immanent critique and distinguish between two different ways of carrying out such a critique. (shrink)

Over the last decade, AI models of language and word meaning have been dominated by what we might call a statistics-of-occurrence, strategy: these models are deep neural net structures that have been trained on a large amount of unlabeled text with the aim of producing a model that exploits statistical information about word and phrase co-occurrence in order to generate behavior that is similar to what a human might produce, or representations that can be probed to exhibit behavior similar to (...) what a human might produce (meaningsemblant behavior). Examples of what we can call Statistics-of-Occurrence Models (SOMs) include: Word2Vec (CBOW and Skip-Gram), BERT, GPT-3, and, most recently, ChatGPT. Increasingly, there have been suggestions that such systems have semantic understanding, or at least a proto-version of it. This paper argues against such claims. I argue that a necessary condition for a system to possess semantic understanding is that it function in ways that are causally explainable by appeal to its semantic properties. I then argue that SOMs do not plausibly satisfy this Functioning Criterion. Rather, the best explanation of their meaning-semblant behavior is what I call the Statistical Hypothesis: SOMs do not themselves function to represent or produce meaningful text; they just reflect the semantic information that exists in the aggregate given strong correlations between word placement and meaningful use. I consider and rebut three main responses to the claim that SOMs fail to meet the Functioning Criterion. The result, I hope, is increased clarity about why and how one should make claims about AI systems having semantic understanding. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant's work continues to be a main focus of attention in almost all areas of philosophy. The significance of Kant's work for the so-called continental philosophy cannot be exaggerated, although work in this area is relatively scant. The book includes eight chapters, a substantial introduction and a postscript, all newly written by an international cast of well-known authors. Each chapter focuses on particular aspects of a fundamental problem in Kant's and post-Kantian philosophy, the problem of the relation between the (...) world and transcendence. Chapters fall thematically into three parts: sensibility, nature and religion. Each part starts with a more interpretative chapter focusing on Kant's relevant work, and continues with comparative chapters which stage dialogues between Kant and post-Kantian philosophers, including Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Jean-François Lyotard, Luce Irigaray and Jacques Derrida. A special feature of this volume is the engagement of each chapter with the work of the late British philosopher Gary Banham. The Postscript offers a subtle and erudite analysis of his intellectual trajectory, philosophy and mode of working. The volume is dedicated to his memory. (shrink)

Theories of recognition often acknowledge that some forms of recognition can be ideological. Only recently have authors also begun to ask whether all ideological phenomena involve a more basic form of misrecognition of epistemic agents. I argue that an expressivist reconstruction of the Marxian theory of ideology can help us to understand what forms of misrecognition are involved in ideology. According to this understanding, ideological discourses reflect the rules of hierarchical social practices and impose limits on the capacity of subjects (...) to challenge dominant conceptual distinctions. While rational epistemic subjects will tend to experience such limits as misrecognition, this does not require any negative interpersonal attitudes on the part of others. Therefore, at least some forms of ideology involve primarily structural, rather than interpersonal, misrecognition. I argue that ideologies that persist without involving widespread false beliefs can best be understood in this way and that neoliberalism is a paradigmatic example of such an ideology. (shrink)

Lukács is widely recognized as being the first critical theorist to have explicitly developed the idea of a “standpoint theory”. According to such a theory, members of oppressed groups enjoy an epistemic privilege regarding the nature of their oppression. However, there is no agreement regarding what precise argument Lukács offers for his claims regarding the alleged epistemic privilege of the working class. Additionally, it remains unclear whether later feminist standpoint theories share any continuity with Lukács’s argument. In this analysis, I (...) identify four arguments for the epistemic privilege of oppressed groups that could be attributed to Lukács. I argue that, although Lukács does not consistently endorse any specific argument, the most promising interpretation suggests that epistemic privilege arises from a contradiction between the norms that guide the self-understanding of such groups and the effects of the social practices they are socially obligated to engage in. (shrink)

The paper argues that scientific progress is best characterized as an increase in scientists' understanding of the world. It also connects this idea with the claim that scientific understanding and explanation are captured in terms of unification.

This attempt to reveal several aspects of language power begins with the integralism promoted by Eugen Coseriu, who presents in his work the creative force of language. The author constructs a parallel between the structure of the communist society and the parithetic order of language. Thus, the force of an idiom is going to be exposed, and the preferred example is going to be the recent and painful history of the political life of Southeastern Europe, especially that of the former (...) Yugoslav republic. The author intends to demonstrate that linguistic idioms may eventually become extremely powerful, especially in certain historical circumstances. This conclusion in itself is judged to be interesting enough to move readers to be more attentive toward the power of language, from the perspective of finding the particular tradition that claims the existence, at the beginning of human language, of one unique (original) language. (shrink)

Frege writes in Numbers and Arithmetic about kindergarten-numbers and “an a priori mode of cognition” that they may have “a geometrical source.” This resembles recent findings on arithmetical cognition. In my paper, I explore this resemblance between Gottlob Frege’s later position concerning the geometrical source of arithmetical knowledge, and some current positions in the literature dedicated to arithmetical cognition, especially that of Stanislas Dehaene. In my analysis, I shall try to mainly see to what extent (Frege’s) logicism is compatible with (...) (Dehaene’s) intuitionism. (shrink)

A critical approach on tolerance can be done as an endeavor to asset its rational arguments brought in its support or/and as a justification of its moral value within the process of human being completion. The commitment to such critical task is more necessary as it is unyieldingness summon in contemporary debates in political religious and, especially moral contexts, it has been equally valorized and contested. The most remarkable analyses of this rather summary rubric for many and often contradictory connotations, (...) then concept, underline the idea that a limit-matter is at stake: can be tolerated the intolerable? Because these boundaries are hard to be distinguished the critical position intellectually reasonable seems to be that of examining if is not more socially profitable and morally justifiable to be tolerant rather than intolerant.Developing possible arguments for and against the universal value of tolerance, critical discourse imposes a very meaningful statement: to uphold our humanity, even the demand for our right to intolerance must be done within the framework and with the means of tolerance. (shrink)

This is a study about the meaning of happiness (εὐδαιμονία) in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (EN). It is argued that εὐδαιμονία in EN means actuality, and it has to be interpreted through the lenses of two metaphors used by Aristotle in EN 1.7 1098a21 and 10.6 1176a30: the “perimeter of good” and the “imprint of happiness.” To explain the meaning of happiness Aristotle first has to delineate the “perimeter of good” of human beings, and he does that with the help of (...) two criteria: the final end [τέλος] and the function of humanity [ἔργον ἀνθρώπου]. These two criteria are metaphysical concepts which describe the “good” as the final metaphysical aim of every person, and the best every person can be. This metaphysical teleological aim is the “actuality of the soul” according with excellence. This is the “perimeter” within which Aristotle enquires about εὐδαιμονία—the good of humans. (shrink)

In this volume, Sorin Sabou explores the dependency of happiness on external goods in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Sabou defends the following thesis: the dependency of happiness on external goods, in EN, is interpreted in the light of its political self-sufficiency, and in the light of our political humanity; this dependency is of three kinds: (1) enhancing-instrumental, (2) constitutive, and (3) subsistent.

Used by more than one million students around the world since its original publication, this introductory philosophy text makes accessible a wide range of philosophical issues closely related to everyday life. Emphasizing personal and immediate questions, the authors approach introductory philosophy through basic human questions rather than focusing on methodology or the history of thought. The text presents vital questions of contemporary interest in an overall framework of enduring concepts, interweaving coverage of various topics in art, history, and education. It (...) covers a variety of types of philosophy in depth, and both western and eastern perspectives are represented. Ideal for students who have no background in philosophy, Living Issues in Philosophy, 9/e simplifies technical language wherever possible; unfamiliar terms are clearly defined upon first appearance and in the end-of-chapter glossaries. Additional pedagogical features include exercises, chapter summaries, and annotated bibliographies at the end of every chapter. The text also features photo biographies of major philosophers and short excerpts from philosophical classics. (shrink)

Durante décadas, los teóricos interesados en la discusión de Kant sobre el bienestar han estudiado la postura de Kant sobre la cuestión de la redistribución de bienes en la sociedad. Lo han hecho tanto para aclarar su postura como para una fuente de inspiración para problemas conceptuales actuales, frente a filósofos políticos contemporáneos que intentan reconciliar el ideal de la libertad igualitaria con la necesaria interferencia asimétrica para la redistribución y la provisión social. En este artículo, comienzo por la breve (...) discusión kantiana sobre el estado del bienestar en la Doctrina del derecho e identifico cuatro premisas que Kant afirmó con claridad como características de su postura. Posteriormente, propongo las cinco vías interpretativas principales en la interpretación de la obra de Kant, las evalúo y las ordeno. La interpretación más acertada de la justificación kantiana del bienestar, que llamo la postura “genuinamente kantiana” no llega a explicar, sin embargo, la naturaleza del deber del bienestar que propone. Propongo una solución, retrotrayéndome en los textos kantianos, que unida a otras consideraciones y cuestiones, se puede entender como el punto de partida de una nueva vía de interpretar este tema. (shrink)

This text is a translation of Lucretius’ poem which adheres faithfully to the text, yet with poetic force, accuracy, and humanitas and includes introduction, notes, and a glossary of philosophical terms cross-referenced to use throughout the poem.

“Ideal theorists” in contemporary liberal political theory argue that we can only arrive at a conception of what our most important political values require by reference to an imagined ideal state of affairs and that we must therefore, to some extent, engage in utopian thinking. Critical theorists, from Marx and the Frankfurt School, have traditionally been highly skeptical towards using idealizations in this way. This skepticism is mirrored by contemporary authors, such as Charles Mills. I argue that most of their (...) critical arguments make a principled case only against ahistorical, decontextualized projects of utopian idealization, but not against ideal theorizing as such. Critical theories do not need to reject ideal theorizing. On the contrary: The method of immanent critique that is specific to critical theory allows for a conception of an ideal state of affairs that emerges from its diagnosis of social contradictions. I conclude that critical theories can (and should) incorporate some aspects of ideal theorizing and its utopian reference to a better society. (shrink)