Digital communication now pervades all spheres of life, creating new possibilities for commodification: personal data and communication are the new resources of surplus value. This in turn brings about a totally new category of threats to privacy. With recourse to the culture industry critique of early critical theory, this article seeks to challenge basic theoretical assumptions held within a liberal account of privacy. It draws the attention to the entanglement of technical and socio-economic transformations and aims at elaborating an alternative (...) framing which takes into account that privacy is not in the first place a pre-political space for individual freedom but a constituted sphere in which social power relations are reproduced in a particularly deceitful way. With recourse to positions of critical theory, this article revisits the conceptual ambiguity of liberation and oppression and looks to draft prospects for a socio-theoretical justification and critique of privacy, updated for the digital age. Following the tradition of critical theory, the argument focuses on (new) forms of domination in and by privacy. It aims to prepare the ground for a critique of the social’s increasing commodification as well as an idea of privacy understood as reflexive participation in social practices. (shrink)

The idea that there is a distinctively practical use of reason, and correspondingly a distinctively practical form of knowledge, unites many otherwise diverse voices in the history of practical philosophy: from Aristotle to Kant, from Rousseau to Marx, from Hegel to G.E.M. Anscombe, and many others. This volume gathers works by scholars who take inspiration from these and many other historical figures in order to deepen our systematic understanding of questions raised by their work that still are, or ought to (...) be, at the center of contemporary philosophical debate: the form and nature of practical reasoning, agential self-consciousness or practical knowledge, how knowledge of the good relates to our motivational capacity, and the shape of philosophical thinking about sound forms of living together. Accordingly, the volume is divided into three parts: action theory, meta-ethics, and political philosophy. This fusion of perspectives delivers novel possibilities not only for answering the systematic questions outlined above, but also for understanding both what unifies and distinguishes those historical voices that have sought to articulate the concept of practical reason. “This fascinating volume brings out the richness and profundity of an oft-neglected approach to understanding human agency, one that foregrounds action as itself an exercise of reason. Essays on ethics, mind, action, and political philosophy explore the history, substance, and implications of this idea, cutting across while also revealing the unity underlying various parts of philosophy that are typically treated separately.” – Eric Marcus, Auburn University. (shrink)

In a lecture that Habermas gave on his 90th birthday he ironically, but with serious intent, called a good Kant a sufficiently Marxist educated Kant. This dialectical Kant is the only one of the many Kants who maintains the idea of an unconditioned moral autonomy but completely within evolution, history and in the middle of societal class and other struggles. The article tries to show what Kant could have learned from his later critics to enable him to become a member (...) of the Frankfurt School’s neo-Marxist theory of society. (shrink)

Hegel’s approach to ancient scepticism is often discussed only in the context of epistemological questions. But it is also of crucial importance for his practical philosophy. Hegel draws on central figures of Pyrrhonian scepticism in order to subject Kant’s antinomies – i. e., Kant’s cosmology – to a fundamental revision. He radicalises Kant’s sceptical method to “self-completing scepticism”. At the same time he gives Kant’s concept of the world a practical twist: In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, world means an inhabited (...) sphere in which powers and counter-powers are in conflict with each other. In doing so, he opens up the tradition of negativist thinking in political philosophy, which ranges from Marx and Adorno to the current theories of radical democracy. When Hegel calls Pyrrhonian skepticism a “negative dialectic”, he thereby marks what he views as a deficit: the inferiority of Pyrrhonian skepticism to speculative philosophy. However, it is precisely the practical dimension of Hegel’s dialectic that suggests that the sceptical motives of his thinking should be given great weight. This can be seen most clearly in Hegel’s concept of Bildung, which defines emancipation processes as the reactivation of open power relations in static conditions of domination. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 29, Issue 1, Page 279-282, March 2021.

Este artículo se propone indagar hasta qué punto la definición de la negatividad en términos de fuerza, que propone Christoph Menke en el marco de sus reflexiones estéticas, logra superar las coordenadas a partir de las cuales este concepto había sido pensado por la tradición. Mi hipótesis es que Menke se aleja de la inclinación metafísica a identificar la negatividad con el espíritu, pero tiende a reproducir el mismo esquema dualista por medio del cual la interpretación tradicional había establecido la (...) exterioridad de la negatividad. En tal sentido, el modo de proceder de Menke resulta paradójico, porque busca aprehender una negatividad fundamental, pero se sirve para ello de conceptos que ya son un intento de neutralizar el hiato inherente a la normatividad. (shrink)