I examine Beauvoir's moral assessment of Romantic Love in The Second Sex. I first set out Beauvoir's central philosophical assumptions concerning the nature and situations of women, setting the framework for her analysis of the intersubjective dynamic which constitutes the phenomenology of romantic loving. In this process four double-bind paradoxes are generated which can lead, ultimately, to servility in the woman who loves. In a separate analysis, I ask whether it is wrong for a woman to aspire to and/or choose (...) this form of servitude. I distinguish two kinds of considerations: (1) those having to do with the intrinsic moral nature of the commitment or decision, and (2) those based on considerations of harm: first, to the woman who loves; second, to the loved Other; third to the nature of the relationship; and fourth, to society in general. (shrink)

Marx developed a sophisticated theory of labour under capitalism’s expanding reproduction but wrote little specifically on immaterial labour. This paper reflects on how to build from Marx’s writings a more comprehensive theory of immaterial labour. Integral to this theorisation is bringing in young Marx’s writings on alienation and human nature, and praxis read as the ‘point of knowledge is to change the world’. Integrating the young and mature work into a single perspective that highlights the actively causal dimension of human (...) creativity and knowledge for the making of history critically adds to and thereby transforms the naturalism and structural determinism of orthodox readings of Marx’s Marxism. We relate this theorisation specifically to the project of liberating academic labour from the shackles of its neoliberal containment by making ‘knowledge socialism’. (shrink)

Post–dualist philosophies of nursing acknowledge embodiment as a condition of human existence. Philosophical writing, however, remains abstract and disembodied. A philosophical framework that embraces embodiment needs to recover the materiality of language; its text needs to include language that is not only rational and clear but sensuous and ambiguous. I describe three cultural narratives of women's embodiment and compare them with an imaginative narrative, a nurse's poem about women in labour. I propose, not that philosophers become poets, but that they (...) abandon a dualist position in which language is either literal or metaphorical, adopting instead the poet's approach in which any word or object has unlimited meanings. I argue that, without fixed reference points, language embodies rather than escapes contingency. Finally, I discuss two forms of philosophical writing – irony and motet – that savour contingency, illustrating philosophy as endless redescription, aiming not for finality but for the grace of a dancer's deliberate fall. (shrink)

Volume 52, Issue 5, May 2020, Page 475-484.

_Traces the history of mind-body dualism._.

Larry Laudan has recently advanced a philosophy of science that appears to answer both Kuhnian critics of the rationality of science, on the one hand, and interpretive and critical theorists' objections to a naturalistic social science, on the other. Like Lakatos before him, Laudan argues that scientific progress is indeed a rational affair. But Laudan goes one step further, arguing that his analysis yields a set of rational criteria for theory choice. In addition, Laudan explicitly claims that the standard he (...) proposes can be applied in any realm of empirical inquiry. Employing a case study of the development of strategic doctrine during the Cold War period, I show this latter claim to be false. Because Laudan's standard for theory choice depends on an exclusively cognitive calculus, it cannot account for, much less help us weigh, the practical implications of theory choice. I conclude that such an accounting procedure may be appropriate for the natural sciences but can hardly be adequate in the realm of thermonuclear politics, where theory choice carries with it potentially catastrophic practical consequences. More generally, choosing from among competing political theories must make explicit room for discursive argument. (shrink)

In recent years, the West has increasingly experienced a sense that the political aspects of its social life have undergone a profound alteration. There is a sense of blockage, of non-responsiveness, a feeling that the political class no longer represents the interests of the broader society. Underlying all of this is a loss of legitimacy. What exactly is legitimacy? How does it function? How is it lost? These are the questions that I address in this article. While I refer to (...) Max Weber’s remarks on legitimacy, my thesis is my own. My claim is that legitimacy involves temporal identity. It depends upon the ability of both individuals and peoples to identify themselves as the same over time. Legitimacy’s breakdown is the breakdown of this identity. (shrink)

This paper situates Bogdanov in the context of social theory generally and socialist theory in particular. It outlines briefly the principal characteristics of his mature system, and assesses the strengths and weaknesses of his approach to the fundamental problems of social thought. The paper devotes particular attention to the problem of just how systems develop from less complex to more complex forms of organization, and evaluates Bogdanov's solution to this problem against the background of populist, social democratic, and Leninist alternatives.

This paper offers a critical response to Fredrik Svenaeus’ use of the Heideggerian uncanny to analyse the experience of illness. It is argued that the uncanny is part of a culture of concepts through which the condition of modernity has been analysed by philosophers, social theorists, writers and artists. All centre upon the idea of alienation, and thus not being at home in the society that should be one’s home. This association will be exploited to offer a reinterpretation of Svenaeus’ (...) thesis as a sociological and political, rather than an ontological, one. By reviewing the work of Hegelian philosophers, Georg Simmel, and novelists, represented by Mann, Camus and McCullers, it will be argued that illness is bound up with social alienation, both as something that is caused by conditions of alienation and as an interpretative response to alienation. Seeing illness as a metaphor of the human condition in modernity allows the medical humanities to inform therapy, that would allow the patient to understand their illness, not as the ontological condition of Dasein, but rather as something mediated by modern social, economic and political conditions. (shrink)

(1998). T.H. Green as a phenomenologist: linking British idealism and continental phenomenology. Angelaki: Vol. 3, Impurity, authenticity and humanity, pp. 77-88.

Abstracts of each chapter may be found by typing in your browser search bar, "Jeremy Horne, Managing Complexity Through Social Intelligence: Foundations of the Modern Organic Corporatist State", going to the Springer Publishing website and reading the abstracts for each chapter.

The article aims to show that there are everyday analogues to husserl's 'transcendental' subjectivity, And that this 'transcendence' can be understood as a limit of these varieties of detachment. Evidence is cited that his 'transcendental ego' is the body itself, In its capacity to transcend its conditions. Within this 'naturalized' interpretation of transcendental subjectivity we can see its practical and philosophical importance to our objectivity. His notion of a 'life-World' is a prophylactic against the monomaniac holding of physicalistic or other (...) theories, And his emphasis on and evocation of subjectivity is a reminder of the distinctness of other subjectivities. (shrink)

Social scientific development has been greatly influenced by Galilean-Newtonian thought which emphasized formulation of abstract hypotheses valid throughout all time and space and independent of human characteristics. This influence has resulted in an artificial hiatus between social science and social problem-solving. Dissolution of certain Galilean-Newtonian assumptions has opened the way for integrating aspects of another stream of thought, the Hegelian-Marxian one, into the social scientific endeavor. Hegelian-Marxian thought emphasizes the individual becoming self-conscious of, and involved in, the social-historical process. The (...) uniting of certain aspects of Galilean-Newtonian and Hegelian-Marxian thought provides a genuinely experimental social science in which abstract hypothesis-testing is united with social action that is based on persons' awareness of relevant hypotheses viewed in historical perspective. (shrink)

“And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep” Genesis This article examines the problem of belief as it relates to radical negativity and as such engages with two positions in regard to the Real of the void. The first, drawing from speculative realism seeks to conceptualise this void in positive terms, as something that can be reached and in a sense overcome. The second, Hegelian account, by contrast, situates the void as (...) something inherent to the very coordinates of reality and being itself. As such the following discussion specifically examines the status of objective reality within the continental philosophical paradigm. (shrink)

Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex identifies the philosophical vantage point from which she will survey the situation of women as existentialist. The ways in which she must later compromise that committment to theory in order to remain true to her feminist insights foreshadow recent developments in feminist ethics and epistemology.

En este artículo nos proponemos indagar acerca del lugar y significado que asume la categoría de autonomía estética en lo que Hegel denomina “consideración liberal de lo bello”. A tales fines, analizamos los aspectos de su teoría de la religión del arte, cuyo modelo puede encontrarse en la organización ético-política de la polis griega, así como también los presupuestos filosóficos de su célebre teorema acerca del carácter pasado del arte “en su determinación suprema”. La hipótesis que nos guía en esta (...) lectura sostiene que la estética hegeliana se encuentra tensionada por un movimiento doble que impide ubicar al arte en un lugar fijo: al mismo tiempo en que sostiene la necesidad de una categoría de libertad para la determinación conceptual de lo bello, ella es motivo de una constante complejización por una perspectiva que la excede. Esa perspectiva filosófico-histórica se fundamenta en una categoría del sujeto moral que justifica la interpretación del arte como medio de tránsito hacia figuras más avanzadas del espíritu. (shrink)

In this paper, I shall investigate whether Hegel can be considered as a sort of ancestor of McDowell’s disjunctivism. If this hypothesis turns out to be plausible, then the paper offers two gains. On the one hand, it offers an innovative interpretation of the way in which Hegel conceives of our sensible epistemic access to the world. On the other hand, McDowell's own claim that his own theoretical proposal has a Hegelian sound is supported by a previously unexplored argument. I (...) organize my analysis into three parts: I sketch McDowell’s version of disjunctivism (Section 2); I analyze some passages from Hegel that I believe are important for showing some similarities between his and McDowell’s argumentative strategy (Section 3); in the conclusion (Section 4), I highlight a number of core features that Hegel seems to share with McDowell’s disjunctivism and I submit that they are sufficient to label Hegel the “grandfather” of McDowell's disjunctivism. (shrink)

This thesis develops a hermeneutic philosophy of science to provide insights into physics education. -/- Modernity cloaks the authentic character of modern physics whenever discoveries entertain us or we judge theory by its use. Those who justify physics education through an appeal to its utility, or who reject truth as an aspect of physics, relativists and constructivists, misunderstand the nature of physics. Demonstrations, not experiments, reveal the essence of physics as two characteristic engagements with truth. First, truth in its guise (...) as correspondence enables a human being to prepare for the distinctive event of physics. -/- Second, the event of physics occurs in human perception when someone forces a hidden reality to disclose an aspect of itself. Thus, the ground of physics is our human involvement with reality achieved by way of truth. -/- To support this account of physics, the thesis reports phenomenological investigations into Isaac Newton’s involvement with optics and a secondary school physics laboratory. These involve interpretations of Heidegger’s theory of beings, schema and signification. The project draws upon, and contributes to, the hermeneutic phenomenology of modern physics, a tradition in continental philosophy that begins with Immanuel Kant, and advances particularly from Martin Heidegger to Patrick Heelan. -/- The thesis advocates an ontological pedagogy for modern physics which has as its purpose each individual student’s engagement with reality and truth. Students may achieve this through demonstrations of phenomena that will enable them to dwell with physics, an experience that contrasts with their embroilment in modernity, and which perpetuates nature’s own science. (shrink)

Hegel's influence on post-Hegelian philosophy is as profound as it is ambiguous. Modern philosophy is philosophy after Hegel. Taking leave of Hegel's system appears to be a common feature of modern and post-modern thought. One could even argue that giving up Hegel's claim of totality defines philosophy after Hegel. Modern and post-modern philosophies are philosophies of finitude: Hegel's philosophy cannot be repeated. However, its status as a negative backdrop for modern and post-modern thought already shows its pervasive influence. Precisely in (...) its criticism of Hegel, modern thought is bound up with his thinking. (shrink)

Nowadays political correctness (PC) is blamed by its opponents because of a failed model of multiculturalism, an influx of migrants and the threat of terrorist acts. Obviously, a definition of tolerance given by UNESCO in 1995 has lost its meaning. In order to argue a possibility of a global ethos based on new understandings of PC, the authors refer to contemporary achievements of semiotics, hermeneutics and philosophical anthropology. We use a critical method developed in the hermeneutical tradition of P. Ricoeur, (...) J. Kristeva, Tz. Todorov and others. Criticism is directed at (1) paradoxes of postmodern philosophical attempts for justification the idea of political correctness; (2) the way of introducing new terminology, as on a language level it leads, not to inclusion, but to exclusion, of disadvantaged people because as E. Benveniste states, the third person is rather the non-person. The conclusion is that politically correct speech should be grounded on a basis which takes into account the three persons of verb conjugation. Similar philosophical and ethical ideas can be found in works of J. Kristeva, Tz. Todorov, P. Ricoeur. An example is given for how these ideas can be implemented in the fields of film and art. This is one of the possible ways of overcoming the exclusion of disadvantaged people who are only named in politically correct terms, and not as participants, in social and political dialogue. (shrink)