In his recently published posthumous works "Prefiguration" and "The Rigorism of Truth" Hans Blumenberg surprisingly steps into the area of political history that he had left widely unconsidered in "Work on Myth". While "Prefiguration" tackles the “demonic” aspects of Napoleon and Hitler that Blumenberg tries to dismantle and bring into derision, in "Rigorism of Truth" he attacks Hannah Arendt's phrase of the Banality of Evil in relation to the Jerusalem trial against Adolf Eichmann in 1961. In this latter issue Blumenberg (...) defends the demonic he sees culminated in the form of Eichmann to assert what he calls the “mythical dimension“ in the Israeli process of nation-building. To him, Eichmann represents a prototypical demon incarnate that must be slaughtered by the heroic character seen in young state Israel. This obviously turns Blumenberg's criticism of Napoleon and Hitler into an affirmation of political myths that, on the face of it, appears to be a contradiction in terms. The essay focuses on this theoretical tension and tries to point out that significance (“Bedeutsamkeit”) is not only a necessity for individual self-assertion (“Selbstbehauptung”) but also a category of communality that must be handled with care. (shrink)

Being young today is no longer a transitory stage, but rather a choice of life, well established and brutally promoted by the media system. While the classic paradigms of adulthood and maturation could interpret such infantile behavior as a symptom of deviance, such behavior has become a model to follow, an ideal of fun and being carefree, present in a wide variety of contexts of society. The contemporary adult follows a sort of thoughtful immaturity, a conscious escape from the responsibilities (...) of an anachronistic model of life. If an ideal of maturity remains, it does not find behavioral compensations in a society where childish attitudes and adolescent life models are constantly promoted by the media and tolerated by institutions. (shrink)

Since Jürgen Habermas' speech for the Peace Price of the German Book Trade in October 2001, secular reason – personified by one of its main protagonists – has been able to debate with religion anew. For the purpose of an unbiased encounter between philosophy and religion, Habermas introduced the term “postsecular” back then in order to emphasize that this dialogue was inevitably necessary, all the more in the face of religiously motivated terrorism. Nonetheless, this willingness to debate was accompanied by (...) the conviction that secular reason itself, as a matter of fact, would be “ideologically neutral”. However, taking the necessity of accomplishing the confrontation with “world” (Weltbewältigung) seriously, the reflection on world view as a whole unveils its implied tasks of granting metaphysical and existential certainty (metaphysische Sicherheit), therefore resulting in the statement that there cannot be a neutral world view at all. Only dialogue as exchange of beliefs generates the general framework within which the discursive issues of world views are separated from their existential aspects, thus enabling a reasonably conducted debate without endangering the existential certainty of its participants. As a consequence, the neutrality of world views exclusively rests in dialogue and is no unique feature of secular reason at all. Eventually, this leads to the reconsideration of the conditions that must be given for an argument to be called “rational”. The article tries to point out that an argument in political contexts, whether given by a religious or a secular person, should only be acknowledged rational if it takes at least all living people – regardless of their group affiliations – into account. (shrink)

El texto muestra la complejidad de la discusión en torno al sentido y la dirección de la historia, en especial, la dificultad mayor de una dotación de sentido en favor del desarrollo histórico en el mundo actual. El ensayo reconstruye brevemente la posición pesimista de la Escuela de Frankfurt sobre..

That something is profoundly wrong with the way in which enlightenment has unfolded has widely been taken to be the main thrust of Dialectic of Enlightenment. In this paper, I propose to defend that to understand the book and shed light on some of its most puzzling features, one should rather take Horkheimer and Adorno's critical claim at face value: through their criticism they contend to have prepared a positive concept of enlightenment. How this can be so is the question (...) I want to answer. I defend that what we need is an account that works out the conceptual grounds on which their critique can operate. The focus of my attempt will consist in understanding what they mean when they assert that rationality is intrinsically social and how they conceive of rationality as being reflective at its core. (shrink)

The aim of the present volume is to draw the balance of naturalism's success so far.

Starting from the sensuous perception of what is seen, an attempt is made at re-casting a Husserlian theory of constitution of the object of intuition, as one leaves the natural attitude through a transcendental method, by positing several theses so as to avoid the aporias of philosophical binary oppositions such as rationalism and empiri-cism, realism and idealism, logicism and psychologism, subjectivism and objectivism, transcendentalism and ontologism, metaphysics and positivism. Throughout fifty-five theses on constitution, the Husserlian proposal of continuously reforming philosophizing (...) by transcendental reduction is revisited, leaving the latter incomplete as new conversions are required by noetic-noematic correlations between world and consciousness. (shrink)

Este libro promete ser una contribución para el estudio de la teoría crítica en general y para el análisis de la historia de la Escuela de Frankfurt en particular. Todos los trabajos que están contenidos en este volumen hacen parte del amplio marco teórico de la teoría crítica de la sociedad. Muchos siguen las huellas de los fundadores de esta tendencia, mientras que otros se presentan como críticos de la misma y unos cuantos más tratan de vincular problemas y contextos (...) de relevancia a los conceptos más destacados que se empezaron a construir hace cien años en Frankfurt. Encontramos como buena excusa para su publicación precisamente el año centenario del Instituto de Investigación Social. Además, hemos creído conveniente organizar los materiales en secciones que van desde la historia de la Escuela de Frankfurt hasta la consideración de algunos interrogantes de actualidad motivados por el desarrollo de la teoría crítica. No obstante, con esto no pretendemos establecer límites absolutos de clasificación. Confesamos que nuestra forma de organizar los ensayos responde simplemente a criterios editoriales más que a cuestiones teóricas y conceptuales. Claramente las intersecciones entre los estudios aquí presentados son amplias y hacen que cada una de las propuestas pueda dialogar con las otras en función de sus evidentes parecidos de familia. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 10, Page 1480-1493, December 2022. By applying the concept of democracy and the state proposed by Richard Rorty, the article aims to make a theoretical contribution to understanding frames of political mobilization and solidarity. While Rorty’s conceptual instruments stem from the field of epistemology and moral philosophy and have, so far, not been widely applied to theorizing statehood in general and labour market policy in particular, his ideas can help to understand leftist politics (...) between inter- and re-nationalization. By drawing on empirical findings on debates and negotiations between European trade union organizations, the text proposes an idea on how to overcome a dualistic framework beyond a footloose cosmopolitanism and national protectionism. (shrink)

Pelkey’s anchoring of the semiotic square in embodiment is excellent news for cognitive literary theory, a dynamic field still in search of itself. However, his validation of the square, though theoretically unexceptionable, suffers in the execution, for his interpretation of the country song “Follow your Arrow” is less successful. The present article benefits from Pelkey’s validation as it organizes a tool of cultural-semantic analysis (CS-tool) as a ‘deviant’ semiotic square. The article then shows how this particular semiotic square allows us (...) to analyze the song in terms which build on Pelkey’s analysis, but also arrive at more satisfying results. Where Pelkey sees liberation in the song and the square, the tool uncovers manipulation in the former and closure in the latter. The article then assesses the complementarity of and differences between the two squares: Pelkey works on a local sentence-level through direct implicature, thus following the narrative/authorial voice of the poem. The CS-tool starts from a position of higher abstraction requiring a less defined, but still sufficient and more wide-ranging, three-step implicature. This allows the tool to step back from the song’s authorial voice and uncover its manipulations. The article closes by discussing the deviant features of the present square. (shrink)

Mein Beitrag versucht, die für die Anthropologie grundlegende Frage nach der Tier/ Mensch-Unterscheidung anders zu wenden. Zu oft wurde der Begriff des Tieres fraglos vorausgesetzt, um das Rätsel des Menschseins im Abgleich dazu zu diskutieren. Was aber macht das Tiersein aus, wenn auch der Mensch zu den Tieren zählt? Wir verstehen, das ist meine These, die Tiere, ja die Natur besser, wenn wir uns selbst als Tiere, als Natur, begreifen und von dem, was uns aus Sicht der historischen Anthropologie auszeichnet, (...) auch auf die Tierwelt blicken. Das, was wir über die menschliche Lebensform wissen bzw. in Erfahrung bringen können, gilt es, nicht als Ausnahme, sondern als integrative Möglichkeit des Tierischen, des Natürlichen, des Biologischen zu denken. (shrink)

To think about the metaphysics of our digital era – who are we? where do we come from? but, first of all, where are we going? – we have to notice that the majority of people, instead of interacting with the boring surroundings, is deeply focused on a neverending and nervous human-machine interaction, which has become a universal human trait. Unluckily, the discussion here will be about an anthropology of the homo digitalis, that is, about the possibilities/dangers of the undefined (...) boundaries between the online and the offline life that unavoidably changes the same vision of the world, which finds in Descartes (ratio), and not in Bacon (experientia), its predecessor. (shrink)

The most fundamental challenge facing humans today is the imminent destruction of the life-generating and life-sustaining ecosystems that constitute the planet Earth. There is considerable evidence...

Social ontology is the study of the nature and properties of the social world. It is concerned with analyzing the various entities in the world that arise from social interaction. -/- A prominent topic in social ontology is the analysis of social groups. Do social groups exist at all? If so, what sorts of entities are they, and how are they created? Is a social group distinct from the collection of people who are its members, and if so, how is (...) it different? What sorts of properties do social groups have? Can they have beliefs or intentions? Can they perform actions? And if so, what does it take for a group to believe, intend, or act? -/- Other entities investigated in social ontology include money, corporations, institutions, property, social classes, races, genders, artifacts, artworks, language, and law. It is difficult to delineate a precise scope for the field (see section 2.1). In general, though, the entities explored in social ontology largely overlap with those that social scientists work on. A good deal of the work in social ontology takes place within the social sciences (see sections 5.1–5.8). -/- Social ontology also addresses more basic questions about the nature of the social world. One set of questions pertains to the constituents, or building blocks, of social things in general. For instance, some theories argue that social entities are built out of the psychological states of individual people, while others argue that they are built out of actions, and yet others that they are built out of practices. Still other theories deny that a distinction can even be made between the social and the non-social. -/- A different set of questions pertains to how social categories are constructed or set up. Are social categories and kinds produced by our attitudes? By our language? Are they produced by causal patterns? And is there just one way social categories are set up, or are there many varieties of social construction? -/- The term ‘social ontology’ has only come into wide currency in recent years, but the nature of the social has been a topic of inquiry since ancient Greece. As a whole, the field can be understood as a branch of metaphysics, the general inquiry into the nature of entities. (shrink)

En este trabajo el autor se propone dos objetivos complementarios. En primer lugar, demostrar la actualidad de la Edad Media y, en segundo lugar, la falsa novedad de los Tiempos Modernos. Se trata de mostrar el horizonte medieval de la modernidad y por lo tanto, la falsa disyunción que esta establece entre su propio origen, como ruptura, frente al oscurantismo medieval. El autor analiza varios momentos considerados como indicadores de esta ruptura y varios temas considerados tradicionalmente como modernos para mostrar (...) su filiación medieval. Sin embargo, el autor no pretende defender la continuidad histórica dentro de la lógica de la modernidad, sino la posibilidad de una genealogía de los “olvidos” que caracterizan nuestra época, para defender y reconsiderar lo inactual dentro de una nueva definición de lo contemporáneo; y el estudio de la filosofía medieval por ella misma, más allá de su pre-modernidad, en un orden ya postmoderno. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Jahrgang: 109 Heft: 1 Seiten: 147-169.

Since the Enlightenment, critique has played an overarching role in how Western society understands itself and its basic institutions. However, opinions differ widely concerning the understanding and evaluation of critique. To understand such differences and clarify a viable understanding of critique, the article turns to Kant’s critical philosophy, inaugurating the “age of criticism”. While generalizing and making critique unavoidable, Kant coins an unambiguously positive understanding of critique as an affirmative, immanent activity. Not only does this positive conception prevail in the (...) critique of pure and practical reason and the critique of judgment; these modalities of critique set the agenda for three major strands of critique in contemporary thought, culminating in among others Husserl, Popper, Habermas, Honneth, and Foucault. Critique affirms and challenges cognition and its rationality, formulates ethical ideals that regulate social interaction, and further articulates normative guidelines underway in the ongoing experimentations of a post-natural history of human nature. In contradistinction to esoteric Platonic theory, philosophy at the threshold of modernity becomes closely linked to an outward-looking critique that examines and pictures what human forms of life are in the process of making of themselves and challenges them, by reflecting upon what they can and what they should make of themselves. As a very widely diffused practice, however, critique may also become a self-affirming overarching end in itself. (shrink)

The ArgumentQuantification is not merely a strategy for describing the social and natural worlds, but a means of reconfiguring them. It entails the imposition of new meanings and the disappearance of old ones. Often it is allied to systems of experimental or administrative control, and in fact considerable feats of human organization are generally required even to create stable, reasonably standardized measures. This essay urges that the uses of quantification in science, social science, and bureaucratic social and economic policy are (...) analogous in important ways to accountancy. (shrink)

After integrating the main lines of argumentation developed in the special issue, this paper makes a balance of the question on the public role of the university. Furthermore, the paper focuses on the discussion underlying the articles collected in the issue. A distinction is made between “comprehending” the past and present of the university on the one hand and “justifying” the university and its public role on the other hand. In view of this distinction, it is argued that the question (...) concerning the value of a idea of the university and its public role is related to the question of democracy. The question is, however, not only whether we live in a democracy, but whether we may still speak of a “commitment to democracy”. An inquiry into the meaningfulness of a “idea” of the university arises directly from this question. At this point, the viewpoint of Derrida is introduced to discuss the question of the democracy and university of the future. (shrink)

Critique is a concept that is constantly used as an instrument for agreement or disagreement, for reflection and discussion. There is a difference, however, between critique as a historically grounded phenomenon and critique as a utopian conception not situated in any particular socio-historical context. Educational theory resists reduction to empirical science partly because of its utopian character. Thus tensions that arise within it concerning its individual, social and emancipatory aims mean that it always has a double aspect of being both (...) utopian and socially grounded at the same time. In general there is a tension within the practice of education between upbringing, on the one hand, and self-emancipation on the other, which is reflected at the level of educational theory in the distinction between normative-utopian and dogmatic-empirical elements. Even a utopian critique, however, must make use of the social and historical materials available in order to function, and thus it becomes itself historically situated. This unavoidable situation is one that must be embraced by a self-consciously utopian form of theorising. Just like other theories of society, the theory of education has two possibilities for self-definition. It can be conceived of either as a utopian or as a factual theory. In the latter case, it follows social contingency passively, giving itself over to the ‘destiny of Being’ in order to await the ‘result’. But it can also be interested and take part in social processes, and thus contribute to the opening out of thought and culture to utopian considerations. Educational critique, even in the utopian sense, however, has to recognise its own dogmatic elements in order to function as critique. It is thus self-evident that critique without dogmatism is not only impossible but also senseless. Similarly, educational dogmatism, although it apparently excludes critique by definition, must contain within itself the possibility of new forms of critique based on its own assumptions. Its very reliance on empirical methods to address the solution of unquestioned problems can itself subvert the dogmatic normative assumptions on which that empirical enquiry is based. (shrink)