ABSTRACT The media's attentive vigil over America's most militant and outrageous activists in the abortion wars has obscured a massive but quiet effort on the part of evangelicals to engage their opponents in exemplary deliberative discussions about bioethics. For a variety of reasons, activists in the pro‐life movement are more committed to carving out civic spaces for such dialogue than are their pro‐choice counterparts. This discrepancy invites investigation into the forces that promote and constrain political movements' interest in deliberation, as (...) well as highlighting the undeniable limits to deliberative ideals. (shrink)

Freud (and later commentators) have failed to explain how the origins of psychoanalytical theory began with a positivist investment without recognizing a dual epistemological commitment: simply, Freud engaged positivism because he believed it generally equated with empiricism, which he valued, and he rejected ‘philosophy’, and, more specifically, Kantianism, because of the associated transcendental qualities of its epistemology. But this simple dismissal belies a deep investment in Kant’s formulation of human reason, in which rationality escapes natural cause and thereby bestows humans (...) with cognitive and moral autonomy. Freud also segregated human rationality: he divided the mind between (1) an unconscious grounded in the biological and thus subject to its own laws, and (2) a faculty of autonomous reason, lodged in consciousness and free of natural forces to become the repository of interpretation and free will. Psychoanalysis thus rests upon a basic Kantian construction, whereby reason, through the aid of analytic techniques, provides a detached scrutiny of the natural world, i.e. the unconscious mental domain. Further, sovereign reason becomes the instrument of self-knowing in the pursuit of human perfection. Herein lies the philosophical foundation of psychoanalytic theory, a beguiling paradox in which natural cause and autonomous reason — determinism and freedom — are conjoined despite their apparent logical exclusion. (shrink)

In this essay, I critically examine Habermas’ approach to fundamentalism, a question that explicitly and implicitly alike bears influence on the formation of his postsecular thesis. The overview of his theory is followed by a combined analysis, depending on Torkel Brekke’s sociological study on fundamentalism, on the one hand, and a joint study by Adam Seligman and others in the field of anthropology and social theory. In this regard, questions of sincerity and authenticity are in the focus of my examination, (...) underlying that philosophical relevance of the question. On the basis of this combined analysis I argue that fundamentalism can be best analysed as an essential though specific element of modernity. I state that despite its critical attitude towards many developments of modernity, fundamentalism is not only reactively but, in its attitudinal core, a proactively modern phenomenon, and needs be interpreted accordingly as part of the evolving postsecular scenario. (shrink)

Can sociology comprehend evil? The contemporary relevance of Kurt H. Wolff’s sociology is his lucid, critical vision of modernity which does not shy away from understanding what evil is. This is accompanied not by pessimism, but by trust in human beings and their positive ability to appeal to the moral conscience. Read today, Wolff’s pages must be placed in the category of a new understanding of the human subject and the diagnosis of our time, the request for which threads in (...) and out of contemporary social theory. Awareness of history, rejection of sociological nominalism, emphasis upon the role of the human subject in an unprecedented situation: in Wolff, these themes converge and invite us to open ourselves to the re-enchantment of the world. After describing with some detail the main concepts of Wolff’s sociological theory and phenomenological approach, the paper suggests a reading of the re-enchantment of the world in terms of a sociological confrontation with evil, which has all too often been bypassed by sociology. We cannot grasp the evildoer's motivations from the perspective of an autonomous, rationally disengaged and masterful subject which tends to eclipse emotive and embodied senses of selfhood. By suspending the taken-for-granted definitions which exist in mainstream literature, by making an excruciating effort in looking at or reading detailed descriptions of evildoing, by assuming the victim’s suffering as part of our sociological explanation, we can start understanding what evil is today and in what way it is connected to modernity. (shrink)

The emergence of processes of globalization has gone hand in hand with a theoretical ?crisis? in sociology. According to an increasing number of scholars, ?global society? has transformed the ?social? to such an extent that classical sociological theory and that of the nineteenth century no longer seem adequate for conceptualizing not only the ?new society,? but (human) society as such. The very distinction between human and non-human society has gone lost. In this context, is it still possible to formulate a (...) ?theory of society? and what form should such a theory take? (shrink)