In his _Duino Elegies,_ Rainer Maria Rilke suggests that animals enjoy direct access to a realm of being—the open—concealed from humans by the workings of consciousness and self-consciousness. In his own reading of Rilke, Martin Heidegger reclaims the open as the proper domain of human existence but suggests that human life remains haunted by vestiges of an animal-like relation to its surroundings. Walter Benjamin, in turn, was to show that such vestiges—what Eric Santner calls the _creaturely_—have a biopolitical aspect: they (...) are linked to the processes that inscribe life in the realm of power and authority. Santner traces this theme of creaturely life from its poetic and philosophical beginnings in the first half of the twentieth century to the writings of the enigmatic German novelist W. G. Sebald. Sebald’s entire oeuvre, Santner argues, can be seen as an archive of creaturely life. For Sebald, the work on such an archive was inseparable from his understanding of what it means to engage ethically with another person’s history and pain, an engagement that transforms us from indifferent individuals into neighbors. An indispensable book for students of Sebald, _On Creaturely Life_ is also a significant contribution to critical theory. (shrink)

Since it appeared in 1971, John Rawls's A Theory of Justice has become a classic. The author has now revised the original edition to clear up a number of difficulties he and others have found in the original book. Rawls aims to express an essential part of the common core of the democratic tradition--justice as fairness--and to provide an alternative to utilitarianism, which had dominated the Anglo-Saxon tradition of political thought since the nineteenth century. Rawls substitutes the ideal of the (...) social contract as a more satisfactory account of the basic rights and liberties of citizens as free and equal persons. "Each person," writes Rawls, "possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override." Advancing the ideas of Rousseau, Kant, Emerson, and Lincoln, Rawls's theory is as powerful today as it was when first published. (shrink)

Foundational attitudes towards quantum theory have recently thrown off much of the old philosophical baggage largely associated with Niels Bohr to which Einstein famously objected, including the central ‘collapse of the wavefunction’ concept. A ‘neo-Copenhagen’ interpretation, it is suggested, has arisen. This development is placed in its historical context and contrasted to philosophical allegations of anti-realism. The neo-Copenhagen interpretation remains wedded to Heisenberg's uncertainty and observer-dependent values of particles. However a discussion of Nick Herbert's ‘rainbow analogy’ suggests that subatomic particles (...) are emergent from a ‘nonlocal’ level of reality outside the domain of space and time. Critical realism recognizes that emergent systems have an irreducibly ontologically character, and in its combination of epistemological relativism and ontological realism, provides a basis for the proposition that realists who support Einstein's objections must now recognize that their realism must be redefined. (shrink)

Fields, Chris_The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, by Ruth Kastner.

In a Different Voice is the little book that started a revolution, making women's voices heard, in their own right and with their own integrity, for virtually the first time in social scientific theorizing about women. Its impact was immediate and continues to this day, in the academic world and beyond.

There is a growing realization of the need to promote a constructive dialogue between science and religion both in the scientific and the religious community. Accommodationism based on the concept of nonoverlapping magisteria is arguably the dominant trend in the effort to achieve this goal. Yet despite the fact that accommodationism has many supporters, it has so far failed to promote a productive engagement between science and religion. The article argues that such engagement requires a critical re-examination of the principal (...) tenets, self-evident truths, and intuitions by both the scientific and the religious community. It further argues that despite isolated efforts seeking to promote such re-examination in both domains, neither the scientific nor the religious establishment shows much willingness to pursue this course. Rather they prefer to follow a conservative agenda and impose limits on reason that are designed to protect the status quo. (shrink)

This essay calls attention to robust synergies between Roy Bhaskar’s philosophy of dialectical critical realism and Terrence W. Deacon’s recent investigation of the geo-historical emergence of ententional or teleological phenomena, as well as important differences. Deacon has independently arrived at an understanding of absence as causally efficacious in the emergence of life and consciousness, and deploys a range of other concepts that resonate with DCR. He develops a critique both of eliminativist and monovalent approaches to ententionality, on the one hand, (...) and their panpsychist foil, on the other, and elaborates a polyvalent scientific alternative – the theory of emergent dynamics. Though this theory is not without problems, as its immanent critique reveals – and indeed in part because of these – it opens up the prospect of a mutually illuminating dialogue between DCR and metaRealism, on the one hand, and the life sciences, on the other, in which DCR/mr underlabours for these sciences, which in turn feed back into DCR/mr philosophy and social theory, thereby helping to actualize the possibility of non-positivist naturalism. (shrink)

Uniquely among contemporary philosophies, Roy Bhaskar’s system of critical realism attempts to sublate (draw out the real strengths of and surpass) the philosophical discourse of modernity considered as a dialectically developing totality. This paper systematically expounds and comments on Bhaskar’s metacritique of that discourse and situates it briefly in relation to Jürgen Habermas’s earlier critique.

It has long been taboo for feminist theorists to draw on notions of nature in their conceptualizations of gender relations. Objecting to this nature-phobia, I argue that we need to anchor our social theories in explicit notions of the natural necessities on which any social structure draws and must ultimately accommodate. Such a reference to a ‘natural ontological order’ is needed not only for explaining how power structures can get a hold over people, but also for specifying the ways in (...) which the natural necessities impose absolute constraints on the forms that oppressive structures can take, ultimately creating a conatus to getting rid of the oppressive structure. In the human-social realm a crucial aspect of nature is those basic human needs that any society must meet in order to reproduce itself. One such human need that has been theoretically overlooked, although often implicitly assumed, is the need for love. Drawing on Anna G. Jónasdóttir's theory of ‘love power’, I elaborate on the contradictions inherent in the power that men acquire by exploiting women's love, arguing that these contradictions can be understood only with reference to natural necessities. (shrink)

This chapter examines Soren Kierkegaard's view about the concept of love. It suggests that Kierkegaard's ideas about love can be found in Works of Love, which contains a series of deliberations on the Judeo-Christian commandment to love one's neighbour as oneself. The chapter also discusses episodes of the story of human love in Kierkegaard's earlier works, his Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, and Philosophical Fragments. It also argues that Kierkegaard's philosophical, literary, and theological explorations reveal that love is filled with paradox.

In this pathbreaking study, Axel Honneth argues that "the struggle for recognition" is, and should be, at the center of social conflicts. Moving smoothly between moral philosophy and social theory, Honneth offers insights into such issues as the social forms of recognition and nonrecognition, the moral basis of interaction in human conflicts, the relation between the recognition model and conceptions of modernity, the normative basis of social theory, and the possibility of mediating between Hegel and Kant.

In this pathbreaking study, Axel Honneth argues that "the struggle for recognition" is, and should be, at the center of social conflicts.

First Published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In his _Duino Elegies,_ Rainer Maria Rilke suggests that animals enjoy direct access to a realm of being—the open—concealed from humans by the workings of consciousness and self-consciousness. In his own reading of Rilke, Martin Heidegger reclaims the open as the proper domain of human existence but suggests that human life remains haunted by vestiges of an animal-like relation to its surroundings. Walter Benjamin, in turn, was to show that such vestiges—what Eric Santner calls the _creaturely_—have a biopolitical aspect: they (...) are linked to the processes that inscribe life in the realm of power and authority. Santner traces this theme of creaturely life from its poetic and philosophical beginnings in the first half of the twentieth century to the writings of the enigmatic German novelist W. G. Sebald. Sebald’s entire oeuvre, Santner argues, can be seen as an archive of creaturely life. For Sebald, the work on such an archive was inseparable from his understanding of what it means to engage ethically with another person’s history and pain, an engagement that transforms us from indifferent individuals into neighbors. An indispensable book for students of Sebald, _On Creaturely Life_ is also a significant contribution to critical theory. (shrink)

In Less Than Nothing, the pinnacle publication of a distinguished career, Slavoj i ek argues that it is imperative that we not simply return to Hegel but that we repeat and exceed his triumphs, overcoming his limitations by being even more ...

ncongruous places often inspire anomalous stories. In early 1984, I spent several nights at the Vatican housed in a hotel built for itinerant priests. While pondering over such puzzling issues as the intended function of the bidets in each bathroom, and hungering for something other than plum jam on my breakfast rolls (why did the basket only contain hundreds of identical plum packets and not a one of, say, strawberry?), I encountered yet another among the innumerable issues of contrasting cultures (...) that can make life so interesting. Our crowd (present in Rome for a meeting on nuclear winter sponsored by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences) shared the hotel with a group of French and Italian Jesuit priests who were also professional scientists. (shrink)

Introduction: Eurocentrism, capitalism and modernity -- The emergence of Eurocentrism: fragments and contradictions -- Anthropocentrism and Europic universals -- Marxism and the Europic problematic -- The dual dialectics of Europic theory -- Critique of the Eurocentrism of civil society -- Ethical economic symbolic representation: Eurocentrism and imaginary dialectical universalisation -- Capital: Marx's anti-Europic theory of modernity -- Conclusion: Eurocentrism, capitalism and the end of modernity (and post-modernity).

This series of interviews, conducted in the form of exchanges between Roy Bhaskar and Mervyn Hartwig, tells a riveting story of the formation and development of critical realism. Three intersecting and interweaving narratives unfold in the course of this unfinished story: the personal narrative of Roy Bhaskar, born of an Indian father and English mother, a child of post-war Britain and Indian partition and independence; the intellectual narrative of the emergence and growth of critical realism; and a world-historical story, itself (...) theorized by critical realism in its discussion of the development of modernity. This book gives an invaluable account of the development of critical realism, and its consolidation as a leading philosophy of our times. It takes us through the major moments of its formation, the principal objections to and controversies within critical realism, the establishment of its institutions, and considers its limits and future development. Special features of the book include discussion of the genesis of critical realism, and the origins and nature of the so-called dialectical and spiritual turns. The informal dialogical style of The Formation of Critical Realism makes it compelling reading and an invaluable source for students of critical realism as well as all those interested in the intellectual story of our times. (shrink)

First published in 1997, Alain Badiou's _Deleuze: The Clamor of Being_ cast Gilles Deleuze as a secret philosopher of the One. In this work, Clayton Crockett rehabilitates Deleuze's position within contemporary political and philosophical thought, advancing an original reading of the thinker's major works and a constructive conception of his philosophical ontology. Through close readings of Deleuze's _Difference and Repetition_, _Capitalism and Schizophrenia_ (with Felix Guattari), and _Cinema 2_, Crockett argues that Deleuze is anything but the austere, quietistic, and aristocratic (...) intellectual Badiou had portrayed. Instead, Crockett underscores Deleuze's radical aesthetics and innovative scientific, political, and mathematical forms of thought. He also refutes the notion Deleuze retreated from politics toward the end of his life. Using Badiou's critique as a foil, Crockett maintains the profound continuity of Deleuze's work and builds a general interpretation of his more obscure formulations. (shrink)

In this radical book, Roy Bhaskar expands his philosophy of critical realism with an audacious re-synthesis of many aspects of Western and Eastern thought. Arguing that the existence of God provides the fundamental structure of the world, he renders plausible ideas of reincarnation, karma and moksha or liberation. Originally published in the year of the millennium, From East to West continues to be a groundbreaking and fundamental work within the critical realist tradition. Stimulating debate in ontology, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy (...) and the philosophy of religion, this book has been influential as a major new development in critical realism. This second edition contains a new introduction from Mervyn Hartwig, who is the founding editor of the _Journal of Critical Realism_ and editor and principal author of the _Dictionary of Critical Realism_. (shrink)