In this paper I will argue that critical theory needs to make its socio-ontological commitments explicit, whilst on the other hand I will posit that contemporary social ontology needs to amend its formalistic approach by embodying a critical theory perspective. In the first part of my paper I will discuss how the question was posed in Horkheimer’s essays of the 1930s, which leave open two options: (1) a constructive inclusion of social ontology within social philosophy, or else (2) a program (...) of social philosophy that excludes social ontology. Option (2) corresponds to Adorno’s position, which I argue is forced to recur to a hidden social ontology. Following option (1), I first develop a metacritical analysis of Searle, arguing that his social ontology presupposes a notion of 'recognition' which it cannot account for. Furthermore, by means of a critical reading of Honneth, I argue that critical theory could incorporate a socioontological approach, giving value to the constitutive socio-ontological role of recognition and to the socio-ontological role of objectification. I will finish with a proposal for a socio-ontological characterization of reification which involves that the basic occurrence of recognition is to be grasped at the level of background practices. (shrink)

Feminist philosophers and philosophers drawing on the German tradition of social philosophy have recently converged in stressing the importance of the concept of reification?first explicitly discussed by György Lukács?for the diagnosis of contemporary social and ethical problems. However, importing a theoretical framework alien to Lukács? original discussion has often led to the conflation of reification with other social and ethical problems. Here it is argued that a coherent conception of reification, free of implausible Marxist and idealist trappings, can be recovered (...) from Lukács? original discussion of it: the socially induced distortion of experience such that what is in fact human action appears as mere natural happening. This phenomenon is to be distinguished from, firstly, instrumentalising objectification of persons and, secondly, person-identification failure, with which Martha Nussbaum and Axel Honneth respectively have equated reification in recent work. Reification, on the understanding of it recovered here, is problematic not just because it is an illusion, but also because it can render moral reasons for action or omission, and grounds of ethical evaluation, invisible to agents, and, moreover, because it can lead people to tolerate as inevitable undesirable situations which could in fact be changed. It can thus ground social criticism. (shrink)

Reification is a concept of critical theory that denotes certain problematic, habitualised forms of objectification. In this article, I examine whether the concept can be applied in environmental philosophy and what value it has for environmental critical theory. I begin by introducing the concept and the two senses in which reification of the non-human world has been discussed in the literature: first, denoting the misrecognition of others’ attitudes towards the natural world; and second, denoting a misconceived relationship between humans and (...) their environment. After this, I introduce two potentially new subjects of reification: non-human animals and non-human nature. I also discuss two phenomena that could count as reification: industrial meat production and the commodification of ecological systems. (shrink)