La trayectoria intelectual de Marcuse está acompañada de un compromiso constante con las formas de la crítica filosófica heredadas de la tradición occidental, desde la forma en la cual aparece la negación de lo dado a través del diálogo socrático hasta la manera en que se configura la crítica del sistema capitalista en el siglo XX. Esto no quiere decir que Marcuse haya sido un erudito que absorbió y comprendió a cabalidad todos los sistemas e ideas filosóficas y que las (...) utilizó al servicio de su propia consideración crítica del mundo; más bien resalta que entre sus elaboraciones han estado presentes algunos de los contextos e ideas más potentes del pensamiento que ha entendido de manera crítica la estructura de las sociedades humanas. (shrink)

Investigating the neo-Kantian origins of structuralism and culturalism, this article analyses the development of Cassirer's thought by following his intellectual progression from knowledge to culture, and from culture to praxis. The article is in two parts. In the first part, the author presents an analysis of Cassirer's relational conception of knowledge. In the second part, the critique of knowledge is superseded by a critique of culture. The author analyses Cassirer's anthropological philosophy of symbolic forms and critically compares it to Simmel's (...) vitalist theory of culture. The article ends with a plea for a practical sociology inspired by Cassirer's return to Kant's practical philosophy. (shrink)

The words terror and terrorism are used widely today and are used to denote an illegitimate act of violence. War, on the other hand is used as a more open concept, the legitimacy of every particular act is at least placed under limited debate. The issue of how our thoughts upon the legitimacy of violence are ordered by the framing of the legal concepts of terror and war is an important contemporary question. One way into this question is by giving (...) an account of Carl Schmitt’s theory of ‘partisan war.’ Introducing Schmitt’s concept of the ‘partisan’ into Anglophone legal theory is the main aim of this paper. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for the existence of pathologies of juridicism. I attempt to show that the Western regime of right tends to colonize our intersubjective relations, resulting in the formation of affective and habitual dispositions that actually hinder participation in social life. Speaking of pathologies of juridicism is to claim that the legal form fundamentally contaminates the way in which we relate to ourselves, to others, and to the world, resulting in an ethically deformed, distorted or deficient form (...) of subjectivity. To support my thesis I consult a philosopher, whose work still provides a powerful analysis and critique of juridicism, namely, Hegel. Hegel provides an historic and a systematic theory of the pathologies of juridicism. His historical theory locates the origin of the abstract subjectivity of right in Roman antiquity. His systematic theory understands the negative effects of an absolutization of the legal domain as a persistent threat to social integration and an individual’s pursuit of the good life. I clarify these argumentative dimensions in two steps, beginning with Hegel’s historical analysis of right in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History. I then reconstruct Hegel’s critique of the subjectivity of right in the short chapter on the ‘Condition of Right’ in his Phenomenology of Spirit. In conclusion, I argue that, although Hegel’s diagnosis is correct, his prescribed therapy must fail: instead of radically altering abstract right in terms of content and form, it only recommends its complementation through other ethical spheres. (shrink)

Arendt uses the exemplary validity of Socrates to think and value the possibilities of joint philosophical and political orientations in our present juncture. In this way Arendt’s ‘Socrates’ is not a mythic, historic, or dramatic individual, but offers an example of the best of the human condition. Unfortunately, because Arendt held the social conditioning and constraining of Socrates’ possibilities at arm’s length, his status as an exemplar is problematic and he ends up referring to a historical rather than contemporary possibilities. (...) While Arendt had resources in her notion of the ‘world’ to better ground her simultaneously analytic and normative construction of ‘Socrates’, the lack of a social grounding makes ‘Socrates’ a significantly unmoored and shifting signifier. After showing the vacillations of ‘Socrates’ in Arendt, I supplement her normatively laden account with a Weberian grounding. With this firmer social grounding, ‘Socrates’ can refer to the possibilities of joint philosophical and political orientations in ancient Athens and thereby highlight how our world makes a contemporary version unlikely or impossible. Yet, this Weberian grounding comes at a cost. The normative dimension essential in Arendt’s ‘Socrates’ is lost due to Weberian value-neutrality. ‘Socrates’ can name a contemporary unlikelihood or impossibility, but if the enveloping social order does not value what it renders impossible, Weberian ideal-types on their own are incapable of offering normative resources for critique. I conclude by blending a Weberian social mooring with Arendt’s value-laden framework for social analysis and thereby recuperate the missing normative dimension. In short, by accepting the relational, necessarily plural, and dynamic root of human action we can, much like Arendt’s intended use of ‘Socrates’, value orientations that best express these norms, and criticize contemporary conditions that constrain their realization. (shrink)

Gadamer and Habermas both argue that some earlier theorists of interpretation in the human sciences, despite recognizing the meaningful character of social reality, still succumb to objectivism because they fail to conceive the relation of interpreters to their subjects in terms of cross-cultural normative “dialogue.” In particular, Gadamer and Habermas claim that the most prominent nineteenth-century philosopher of the human sciences, Wilhelm Dilthey, fell prey to a misleading Cartesian outlook which sought to ground the objectivity of interpretation on complete transcendence (...) of the interpreter’s present cultural and historical situation. This article challenges Gadamer’s and Habermas’s claim by arguing that new research on nineteenth-century hermeneutic thought reveals Dilthey to be much more aware of the reflexive, present-centered nature of historical research than they maintain and further that their own “dialogical” model of interpretation suffers from notable obscurities which Dilthey’s work itself helps expose. (shrink)

This paper maintains that post Lave and Wenger VET has overlooked the relation between vocational curricula and workplace practice. The paper attributes this oversight to Kant's legacy in the ‘situated’ tradition in VET and critics of that tradition. The paper argues that when Vygotsky's concept of mediation is allied to the recent work of Robert Brandom and John McDowell, it is possible to formulate a non‐dualisitic conception of the relation between mind and world that goes beyond the Kantian separation of (...) mind and allows us to grasp the interdependency of theory and practice. The paper concludes by outlining the implications of this philosophical and theoretical claim for vocational curriculum and vocational pedagogy. (shrink)

In History and Class Consciousness’ central essay ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’, Lukács resolved the antinomies of bourgeois philosophy in the revolutionary ‘standpoint of the proletariat’. Lukács’ strategy in deriving this proletarian standpoint, however, transposed the logical necessity appropriate to philosophical determinations into possibilities for revolutionary praxis imbedded in socio-historical contexts. Further, since the standpoint is determined as the necessary solution to bourgeois antinomies, it must be conceived singularly, rather than through its manifest diversity. As the key to (...) mediating the social totality beyond antinomies, the ‘standpoint of the proletariat’ is therefore merely reflectively posited and one-sidedly determined. While many have developed logical, social-analytic, and political problems associated with determining the proletariat by way of its imputed or party-determined rather than empirical consciousness, few point to the very concept ‘standpoint of the proletariat’ as the source for these problems due to the fact that it is an abstractly derived solution to a philosophically posed problem. Socio-historical determination working with the modality of possibility can resolve Lukács’ antinomic determination of the standpoint of the proletariat. (shrink)

I reconstruct Lukács’s immanent critique of German Idealism, found within his essay ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’, in order to foreground his philosophical reflection on the concepts of mediation, logic, genesis and praxis. I situate this reflection within his philosophy of praxis as a whole before highlighting the dialectical development of these terms within it. They are posited initially as abstract, methodological demands and are subsequently concretised and enriched, via Lukács’s critical evaluation of the antinomies he discovers in (...) Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. My reconstruction is both exegetical and critical. I demonstrate that Lukács’s concept of praxis is explicitly intended to both bear the weight of Hegel’s Absolute and overcome it. On this basis, I propose a novel immanent critique of Lukács’s philosophy of praxis, suggesting that while Lukács wishes his concept of praxis to express a living, present and ontologically novel truth, his insight is won – in the fashion of Hegelian philosophy – after the historical event upon which it is built, as a philosophical reflection. Lukács’s self-contradiction is that while he regards his philosophy of praxis as having overcome speculative, Hegelian philosophy, in fact, the position he generates remains firmly but unconsciously within it. Consequently, Lukács’s philosophy of praxis possesses a theological dimension and must be regarded as an example of the kind of ‘conceptual mythology’ he sought to overcome. (shrink)

The British social philosopher Gillian Rose (1947–1995) developed, in Dialectic of Nihilism, a way of posing the problem of ideology by showing the dependence of philosophical and social thought on historical legal concepts. She termed it ‘jurisprudential wisdom’ and through it aimed to expose unexamined presuppositions within philosophical consciousness and thereby to perform ideology critique on such consciousness. This article examines Rose’s version of ideology critique, first by setting out its context within post-Kantian thought and Rose’s own intellectual project. It (...) then tackles in detail Rose’s view that Roman law significantly shapes Kant’s form of rationality as a whole. It concludes that her argument is suggestive and highlights important features of Kant’s thought, but that it ultimately fails as an ideology critique. It does not follow that Rose’s form of ideology critique via jurisprudence fails as a whole; on the contrary, it retains plausibility. Rose’s misfire against Kant is a salutary lesson in the dangers of ideology critique and Kant’s survival of Rose’s attack is important for the assessment of his philosophy. (shrink)

I suggest that we can read Marx in the light of recent analytic, neo-Hegelian thought. I summarize the Pittsburgh School philosophers’ claims about the myth of the given, the claim that human experience is conceptual all the way out, and that we live in a space of reasons. I show how Hegel has been read in those terms, and then apply that reading of Hegel to Marx’s argument that capital is akin to what Hegel called Geist, or spirit. We can (...) understand capitalism as a space of reasons that is contradictory: while the space of reasons is supposed to make human freedom possible, our space of reasons makes freedom impossible. Reading Marx in this way is helpful, because it avoids the flaws of analytical Marxism, existentialism and structuralism. However, it raises a large problem of its own: Can the theory of the space of reasons be applied to a society that is not free of alienation? I argue that it can, but only in ways that would not satisfy the analytic neo-Hegelians themselves. (shrink)

This thesis offers a systematic analysis of the ideological structure in the Islamic Republic of Iran through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalytic critique of ideology. The Lacanian emphasis on the libidinal constitution of ideology changes the object of analysis from social reality in its empirical aspects to the unconscious or disavowed conditions sustaining social reality in the Islamic Republic. The overall analysis of this thesis is divided into three interrelated research domains: the first domain of political subjectivity examines how subjectivity (...) in Iran is embedded in the ideological order, as well as how that order was constructed through the 1979 Islamic revolution by tapping into the unconscious agency of political subjectivity; the second theologico-political domain inquires into the form of ideology materialised in the socio-political framework of the Islamic Republic and analyses its libidinal sustainability; the third domain explores the political economy in Iran by conflating its historical and ontological inquiry. The analysis of the three domains helps me to discern the inherent contradictions of the ideological structure in contemporary Iran and the peculiar way these contradictions are mediated. Their mediation conversely ensures the reproduction of ideology on an unconscious level. This thesis therefore explores how ideology in the Islamic Republic of Iran enables a consistent experience of social reality and how subjectivity sustains the ideological order through libidinal investments. (shrink)

The article considers the theme of Bildung and the educational process in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, with reference to the philosophical tradition in which his ideas stand. This tradition is traced through the work of Hegel, von Humboldt and the Marburg neo-Kantian Paul Natorp. It is shown that Bakhtin’s central essays on the novel are permeated with ideas about education, and that the strengths and weakness of the ideas can be understood only with reference to their philosophical sources. What (...) becomes apparent is the need to root Bakhtin’s illuminating reflections on the relationship between language, world view and the educative role played by the novel in an account of the institutional structure of the society in which they are embedded. (shrink)

I seek to interpret the work of Walter Benjamin in light of the "system programme" of German Idealism, in order to confront an antinomy of contemporary radical thought. Benjamin has been regarded as an anti-Hegelian thinker of the exception. Reading him against the grain, I draw out a concept of counter-tradition that eschews the opposition of intra-historical progress and extra-historical exception. The philological inspiration is a book by Franz Joseph Molitor, student of Schelling and "teacher" of Benjamin: The Philosophy of (...) History, or, On Tradition. (shrink)

This paper explores the ways in which a fuller attention to suffering in the tradition of the early Frankfurt School might valuably inform international political thought. Recent poststructural writing argues that trauma is silenced to prevent it disrupting narratives of order and progress and instead advocates a continual ‘encircling’ of trauma that refuses incorporation into a broader historical narrative. This paper welcomes this challenge to mainstream international ethics: attention to particular suffering provides an important challenge to the abstraction, instrumentalism and (...) universalism of modernity. However, if we simply mark trauma and refuse to incorporate it into any kind of narrative, we cannot profit from the ways in which suffering can illuminate the structures and ways of thinking that create it. Drawing on Adorno's negative dialectics, the paper argues that a dialectical understanding of the relationship between universalising order and disrupting particularity can lead from individual suffering towards a political re-engagement with the universal. (shrink)

Focusing on Walter Benjamin's earliest pieces dedicated to school reform and the student movement, this article traces the basic critical approaches informing his mature thought back to his struggle to critically implement and transform the theory of concept formation and value presentation developed by his Freiburg teacher, Heinrich Rickert. It begins with an account of Rickert's work, specifically of the concept of Darstellung (presentation) and its central role in Rickert's postmetaphysical theory of historical research (which he characterizes as exclusively concerned (...) with the Kantian quid juris). It shows that Rickert develops a speculative but practical theory of value recognition, which nevertheless leaves the status of value itself undetermined. Contra Rickert, Benjamin returns to the ignored quid facti, or origin of value, and shows that a metacritical, postmetaphysical approach such as Rickert's ultimately limits possible experience rather than grounding it. This basic insight, it is argued, is the cornerstone of Benjamin's concept of critique. (shrink)

Commentators on Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism have tended to view that work within the context of world-historical social processes and change. Recently, more literary forms of analyses have come to the fore emphasizing Weber’s indebtedness to the philosophical/literary efforts of Nietzsche and Goethe, among others. The following offers the preliminary observation that the concept of ‘drive’ understood as a mode of psychological operation and process considerably complicates any possible interpretation of the essay itself. Weber’s refusal (...) to specify the exact nature and extent of the psychological Antriebe underlying his rational actor may make a decisive interpretation of the text impossible. Nevertheless, there may be good reason for supposing that Weber’s usage of the terms ‘drive’ and ‘maxim’ is indicative of a Fichtean synthesis of anthropological impulses and the operations of the rational intellect via his reading of Hugo Münsterberg. (shrink)

Sketching the current division within receptions of Hegel, this article argues for Hegel as a philosophical theologian in a way that is not covered by the recent investigations into Hegel's theological project. Examining in particular the early work on Jesus Christ, the article analyses the changes in this work and how these changes in his understanding of Christology enabled Hegel to appreciate the logic of the Logos. This logic of the Logos is the basis for all his subsequent philosophy. It (...) is a logic that is made possible in his philosophical theology of mediation, incarnation, and reconciliation. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between Marx’s Capital, Georg Lukács and Critical Theory through the prism of value-form theory. Marx’s theorisation of value understands commodities as expressions of the historical form of social relations defined by capital. Products of human labour become values in capitalist production, defined by the abstract quality of undifferentiated quantities of labour-power, exchangeable through the universal character of the market. The social form of this process, Marx identifies as processing a fetish quality, where humans take on (...) the thing-like character of commodities. The impact of this theorisation on Critical Theory has been considerable, beginning with Lukács’ concept of reification. In Part I, I examine the challenge to Lukács’ interpretation of Marx’s Capital made by Gillian Rose. She draws attention to a misidentification of reification in Marx, suggesting a strong conceptual distinction between commodity-fetishism and reification. In their conceptual flattening, Rose contends that Lukács and Critical Theory generalised Marx’s value-form theory, losing its speculative character. I argue that despite Rose’s suggestion remaining unfulfilled, she helps illuminate important tensions between Marx’s value theory and Critical Theory. This comparison allows in Part II for the beginning level of a speculative approach to Marx’s Capital to be advanced. (shrink)

This article examines different intellectual-historical approaches to the work of Georg Lukács, arguing that a methodology similar to that of the Cambridge School is, curiously, that most in line with Lukács’s own approach. I begin with some general methodological comments on intellectual history, before showing that a proper appreciation of the discourses within which Lukács was situated is essential to understanding both the specifics and the overall project of History and Class Consciousness. Finally, I argue that situating thinkers like Lukács (...) properly within their time does not reduce them to museum pieces; rather, by seeking to capture the alterity of the past without reducing it to familiarity, we may de-reify our own world-views. (shrink)

This article explores the implications of Gillian Rose's social and political theory of modernity. For Rose, modernity not only construes `the autonomous moral subject as free within the order of representations and unfree within its preconditions and outcomes' (1996: 57), it is also `the working out of that combination' (ibid.). The implications of this view are explored below, concentrating in particular on the way Rose tackled the aporias and contradictions of modern sociology and social theory. Its conclusion is twofold. First, (...) that Rose retrieves the absolute as fundamental to the meaning of social and political critique, and second that, in the face of demands for radical political action, not least in Marx's 11th thesis on Feuerbach, it is the religious dimension of our political experience that has been consistently overlooked. It is my argument that, in her concept of `the broken middle', Rose does not overcome the gap between theory and practice, but she does comprehend it as a way of life, one characterized by human struggling and failing. This way of life calls us to `mind the gap'. (shrink)

This thesis develops an Hegelian philosophy of education by presenting the concept as the comprehension of the dialectic of enlightenment. It begins by examining recent critical theory of education which has employed Habermas's idea of communicative action in order to reassess the relationship between education and political critique. It goes on to expose the flaws in this approach by uncovering its uncritical use of critique as the method of enlightenment. Enlightenment as overcoming presupposes enlightenment as absolute education. The philosophical issues (...) raised here are then substantially examined by returning to Habermas in order to trace the presupposition of critique as method in his theorizing. It is argued that Habermas also presupposes critique as absolute enlightenment, or overcoming, in both the emancipatory knowledge-constitutive interest and in The Theory of Communicative Action, and further, that it is this presupposition which returns as the contradiction of the dialectic of enlightenment in his work. Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment is then itself examined along with Adorno's Negative Dialectics. Here it is argued that although this work marks an educational and philosophical development over Habermas, nevertheless its authors also presuppose the identity of enlightenment, this time in the claim that the dialectic of enlightenment, and negative dialectics, are not a determinate negation. The thesis shows how Habermas and Adorno, in their respective views of the dialectic of enlightenment, repeat but do not comprehend the selfdetermination which is the actual in Hegelian philosophy. The final chapter of the thesis employs Hegelian philosophy to re-examine the aporia of education as method. It argues that the dialectic of enlightenment is actual when it is recognized as the self-education of philosophical consciousness, and is the identity and non-identity which is the concept. The implications of Hegelian philosophy of education as the recognition of misrecognition are then explored, first with regard to rethinking the identity of the teacher in civil society and developing the concept as ethical pedagogy; and then to recognizing critique as comprehensive education with regard to the state in civil society. (shrink)

In this article I consider the normative and axiological dimension of Simmel’s thought. Building on previous interpretations, I argue that although Simmel cannot be interpreted as a systematic normative theorist, the issue of values and the normative standpoint can nevertheless be traced in various aspects of his multifarious work. This interpretive turn attempts to link Simmel’s obscure theory of value with his epistemological relationism. Relationism may offer a counterweight to Simmel’s value-pluralism, since it points to normative elements (e.g. internal teleology, (...) justice) that can contribute to the reconciliation between incommensurablity of forms and totality. Axiological and normative concerns (of a Hegelian source) survive also in his metaphysics of life, pointing beyond a merely Bergsonian and conservative Lebensphilosophie. I conclude with some thoughts on how this normative rethinking of Simmel’s thought can contribute towards more adequate appreciations of Simmel’s overall theory. (shrink)

In “Violence and Metaphysics” Jacques Derrida suggests that “the only effective position to take in order not to be enveloped by Hegel would seem to be…to consider false-infinity…irreducible.” Inversely, refuting the charge of logocentrism associated with Hegelian true infinity ( wahrhafte Unendlichkeit ) would involve showing that Hegel’s speculative logic does not establish the infinity of being exempt from the negativity of the finite. This paper takes up Derrida’s challenge, and argues that true infinity is crucial to Hegel’s understanding of (...) ideality as a question of normative authority, which does not fall prey to logocentrism. Through an exposition of the dialectic of the finite and the infinite in Hegel’s Science of Logic , I argue that true infinity is not an ontological category that eliminates division, but rather refers to the metalogical standpoint involved in a philosophical account of determinacy. Although fully achieved at the end of the Logic , the metalogical standpoint that Hegel elaborates in the Seinslogik under the banner of the true infinite already clarifies that determinacy is a product of normative authority that is itself precarious. (shrink)

This article argues that church colleges of higher education, in their desire to be distinctive, can benefit from rethinking the relationship between the philosophical and the religious in order to retrieve a view of higher education as ‘upbuilding’. This will be achieved by illustrating how the central idea of speculative philosophy—that our learning about truth occurs in and through the phenomenology of aporetic experiences of the conditions of possibility—can contribute to the debate within church colleges regarding what is different about (...) their higher education. In short I will argue that Hegel and Kierkegaard (amongst others) find the aporetic experience of contingency to be of absolute significance. In what follows I will show how the religious and the philosophical are both constitutive of that absolute significance and how, when allowed to re-form each other, then together (and apart) they commend the kind of ‘upbuilding’ higher education that church colleges espouse. (shrink)

This article examines four related aspects of Hegel's approach to the teaching of philosophy and to the philosophy of the teacher. Specifically, it highlights some of the views Hegel expressed on education in general whilst Rector of the Nuremberg gymnasium; describes his opinions on the place of philosophy within the school curriculum and the structure of the philosophy course which he designed for his pupils; examines the pedagogy which he employed in teaching his system of philosophy; and offers preliminary comments (...) on his insights into the contradictions which resist the abstract identity of the teacher. (shrink)

I present Hegel’s position that beauty and moral agency cannot be paired in any productive way, demonstrating this as a culminating claim of the sixth chapter of The Phenomenology of Spirit. In this, we learn that for Hegel, beauty claims an ambiguous position, always eviscerated yet never fully put to rest. This dialectical tension requires that we attend to the place of beauty as it appears in Hegel’s thoughts on morality and marks a departure from a long-standing tradition – exemplified (...) in the work of such thinkers as Plato, Immanuel Kant, the ‘Beautiful Souls’ of 18th-century German Romanticism and Elaine Scary – that matches moral goodness with beauty. (shrink)

The project behind this and the following1 special issue of Angelaki first assumed concrete form in the shape of a three-day international conference, “Continental Philosophy and the Sciences,” hel...

There has been a resurgence of interest in the work of Raya Dunayevskaya and Herbert Marcuse, particularly regarding their shared concern with humanism and dialectics. Recent edited collections on Dunayevskaya’s correspondence have, however, drawn a sharp contrast between the conceptions of the dialectical method: Dunayesvkaya, who emphasized the need for ‘philosophic new beginnings’ to offer a new relationship between theory and practice, and Herbert Marcuse who, despite his piercing identification of the one-dimensionality of late capitalism, continued with a problematic basis (...) in (orthodox) Marxist categories. In this review essay, we outline the latest of these two volumes and its distinct contributions before engaging in a critique of Marcuse’s restrictions on humanism and dialectics, via a comparison with Dunayevskaya’s dialectical approach that was premised on questioning ‘the problems of the age’ and emphasized the open and negative polarity of dialectical possibilities. (shrink)