Han Feizi’s criticisms of Confucian and Mohist political recommendations are often thought to involve materialist or historicist arguments, independently of their epistemological features. Drawing largely on Amia Srinivasan’s recent taxonomy of genealogical arguments, this paper proposes a genealogical reading of passages in “The Five Vermin [五蠹 wudu]” and “Eminence in Learning [顯學 xianxue].” This reveals Han Feizi’s arguments to be more comprehensively appreciated as problematizing Confucian and Mohist political judgments as arising from undermining contingencies, rendering them irrelevant, if not detrimental, (...) to any lasting excellence of a state. In doing this, it is also suggested that there is a ‘master argument’ underlying Han Feizi’s criticisms, according to which the epistemology of the Confucians and Mohists are fundamentally unreliable. (shrink)

Political liberalism’s central commitments to recognizing reasonable pluralism and institutionalizing a substantive conception of justice are inconsistent. If reasonable pluralism applies to conceptions of justice as it applies to conceptions of the good, then some reasonable people will reject even many liberal conceptions of justice as unreasonable. If so, then imposing these conceptions of justice on citizens violates the liberal principle of legitimacy and related public justification requirements. This problem of justice pluralism requires that political liberals abandon their commitment to (...) institutionalizing a substantive conception of justice. Instead, political justification should be limited to the public justification of a modest scheme of rights and a set of constitutional rules. Justice pluralism chastens the ambitions of political liberalism while pushing the political liberal research program in new and promising directions. (shrink)

The normative and metanormative pluralism that figures among core self-descriptions of democratic theory, which seems incompatible with democratic theorists’ practical ambitions, may stem from the internal logic of research traditions in the social sciences and humanities and in the conceptual structure of political theory itself. One way to deal productively with intradisciplinary diversity is to appeal to the idea of a meta-consensus; another is to appeal to the argument from cognitive diversity that fuels recent debates on epistemic democracy. For different (...) reasons, both strategies fail, such that a metatheoretical step aside may be desirable, one that entails modeling democratic theory after the public justification approach. (shrink)

ABSTRACTJack Knight and James Johnson argue in The Priority of Democracy that democracy should be theorized and justified pragmatically: Democratic deliberations should be given a central coordinating role in society not because they realize any particular abstract ideal, but because they would elicit the information needed to solve real-world problems. However, Knight and Johnson rely on a naïve economic understanding of knowledge that assumes implausibly that individuals know what they need to know and need only aggregate thier separate beliefs. It (...) is precisely because we may not know what we need to know that we need to continually test our ideas. Contra Knight and Johnson, moreover, we ought to accept that our ability to interpret social experiments properly is questionable. A pragmatic approach to social inquiry, therefore, ought to investigate what beliefs political actors actually bring to collective decisions rather than how theoretically perfect beliefs ought to be elicited and aggregated. (shrink)

This paper takes a social epistemology perspective on markets in general and trade deals in particular. Normatively, it is based on considerations of democratic accountability and contestation. Empirically, it is based on the assumption that all markets are embedded in institutional frameworks. Knowledge plays an important role in the institutional framework of markets: it matters both at the level of content – which knowledge has to be processed in what way, according to the market rules? – and at the level (...) of process – whose knowledge counts in setting the rules? While these considerations apply to both domestic and international markets, there are good reasons to allocate certain epistemic tasks to the frameworks of international markets, for example trade deals. While the TTIP and CETA negotiations fell short of democratic standards about transparency, the debate about them indicates growing public awareness of the importance of the institutional frameworks for international trade. (shrink)

This contribution aims to unpack the ontological nexus of cyborg identity and culture. It highlights a set of core assumptions driving its operations that merit critical attention as cyborgic and A...

Political epistemology has become a popular field of research in recent years. It sets itself the ambitious task to intertwine epistemology with social and political theory in order to do justice to the relationships between truth and politics, or reason and power. Yet many contributions either expand arguments and concepts from traditional epistemology to political phenomena or use existing theories and frameworks from social and political theory to address the politics of epistemological questions. The former approach (prominent, e.g., in the (...) epistemic injustice debate) leads to an epistemisation of political phenomena and concepts coupled with their de-politicization, the latter approach (prominent, e.g., in Frankfurt School critical theory) leads to a politicization of epistemic phenomena and concepts coupled with their de-epistemisation. Instead, it is argued that political epistemology requires reworking even basic concepts, due to its three foundational commitments: It is committed to the claim that socio-material conditions of existence matter epistemically (minimal materialism), to the self-reflection of the socio-material conditions of political epistemology's own arguments and theories (radical self-reflexivity), and to a specific form of epistemic humility (epistemic non-sovereignty). Using the notion of normativity as an exemplary problem, the article closes by highlighting the difficulty of maintaining these three commitments. (shrink)