The Emancipation Proclamation is one of the most important documents in American history. As we commemorate its 150th anniversary, what do we really know about those who experienced slavery? In their pioneering book, Envisioning Emancipation, renowned photographic historian Deborah Willis and historian of slavery Barbara Krauthamer have amassed 150 photographs—some never before published—from the antebellum days of the 1850s through the New Deal era of the 1930s. The authors vividly display the seismic impact of emancipation on African Americans born before (...) and after the Proclamation, providing a perspective on freedom and slavery and a way to understand the photos as documents of engagement, action, struggle, and aspiration. Envisioning Emancipation illustrates what freedom looked like for black Americans in the Civil War era. From photos of the enslaved on plantations and African American soldiers and camp workers in the Union Army to Juneteenth celebrations, slave reunions, and portraits of black families and workers in the American South, the images in this book challenge perceptions of slavery. They show not only what the subjects emphasized about themselves but also the ways Americans of all colors and genders opposed slavery and marked its end. Filled with powerful images of lives too often ignored or erased from historical records, Envisioning Emancipation provides a new perspective on American culture. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the possibility of the idea of emancipation within an educational philosophy that does not accept schooling as its first premise. The first part of the paper will take Sweden as an example of an educational state defined through educational policies such as life long learning, accountability and evidence-based research, and argue that these words are only meaningful within the myth of schooling and not in a language of education/emancipation. The second part of the paper discusses (...) different but related conceptions of emancipation by exploring its ambiguous nature. In the third part of the paper I specify the role and place of emancipation within a philosophy of education that seeks to articulate its social value. (shrink)

This article elicits two overlapping frameworks in which emancipation has been understood and applied to women. The first distinguishes between a) an original definition grounded in Roman Law and defined as release from slavery and b) an Enlightenment sense in which an emancipatory process is associated with a critical ethos. I derive this latter meaning from an analysis of Kant's and Foucault's respective essays on enlightenment. Although they agree that emancipation is an ongoing critical task, I emphasize two aspects of (...) Foucault's version: his attention to practices of liberty that entail bodily as well as subjective reconstruction and his inclusion, among topics for critique, of modernity's ontology of the human subject. In the case of women's emancipation, I argue that both aspects of emancipation must proceed simultaneously because of the distinctive nature of their oppression. For second-wave feminism, I note a continued, although reoriented, equation between women and slaves. But now I identify a further framework whereby emancipation emerges as a threefold although systemic undertaking in which legal, subjectivist, and economic dimensions are at stake. I argue in conclusion that each entails unfinished emancipatory projects that represent timely ways to revive emancipation in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

This paper explores the status of symbolic representation in the work of the Left Hegelians Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feuerbach. Hegel believed, contrary to his Romantic contemporaries, that symbols were too ambiguous to serve as means of philosophical communication; and as his followers turned against religion, they radicalized Hegel's critique of Romantic symbolism in the name of an emancipatory impulse toward clarity and full possession of the object of meaning. While Bauer insisted that the possibility of human emancipation depended on (...) overcoming the otherness of symbolic representation, Feuerbach reintroduced the symbolic as a crucial dimension of his humanist theory of religion and his account of embodied subjectivity. (shrink)

Divided he falls -- The path to contradiction: redefining emancipation -- Hegel after Freud -- What Hegel means when he says Vernunft -- The insubstantiality of substance: restoring Hegel's lost limbs -- Love and logic -- How to avoid experience -- Learning to love the end of history: freedom through logic -- Resisting resistance, or freedom is a positive thing -- Absolute or bust -- Emancipation without solutions -- Replanting Hegel's tree.

In this article, I critically engage with a vital assumption behind the work of Paulo Freire, and more generally behind any critical pedagogy, viz. the belief that education is fundamentally about emancipation. My main goal is to conceive of a contemporary critical pedagogy which stays true to the original inspiration of Freire’s work, but which at the same time takes it in a new direction. More precisely, I confront Freire with Jacques Rancière. Not only is the latter’s work on education (...) fully predicated on the idea of emancipation. For both Freire and Rancière, literacy initiation practice can be seen as an archetypical model for understanding the emancipatory moment in education. For both, educational practices are never neutral, as they decide to a great extent on the fate of our common world. Reflecting on similarities and differences in both their positions, I will propose to conceive of critical pedagogy in terms of a thing-centred pedagogy. As such, I take a clear position in the discussion between teacher- and student-centred approaches. According to Rancière, it is the full devotion to a ‘thing’, i.e. to a subject matter we study, which makes emancipation possible. Over and against Freire’s defense of emancipatory education, I highlight with Rancière the importance of educational emancipation. (shrink)

Introduction -- Vicissitudes and possibilities of critical theory today -- Global modernity : levels of analysis and conceptual strategies -- Existential social questions, developmental trends and modernity -- History, sociology and modernity -- Realism, trend-concepts and the modern state -- Family, modernization and sociological theory -- The basic forms of social interaction -- The imaginary and politics in modernity: the trajectory -- Critical social theory and developmental trends, emancipation -- References -- Index.

Following on from Roy Bhaskarâe(tm)s first two books, A Realist Theory of Science and The Possibility of Naturalism, Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation, establishes the conception of social science as explanatoryâe"and thence emancipatoryâe"critique. Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation starts from an assessment of the impasse of contemporary accounts of science as stemming from an incomplete critique of positivism. It then proceeds to a systematic exposition of scientific realism in the form of transcendental realism, highlighting a conception of science as explanatory (...) of a structured, differentiated and changing world. Turning to the social domain, the book argues for a view of the social order as conditioned by, and emergent from, nature. Advocating a critical naturalism, the author shows how the transformational model of social activity together with the conception of social science as explanatory critique which it entails, resolves the divisions and dualisms besetting orthodox social and normative theory: between society and the individual, structure and agency, meaning and behavior, mind and body, reason and cause, fact and value, and theory and practice. The book then goes on to discuss the emancipatory implications of social science and sketches the nature of the depth investigation characteristically entailed. In the highly innovative third part of the book Roy Bhaskar completes his critique of positivism by developing a theory of philosophical discourse and ideology, on the basis of the transcendental realism and critical naturalism already developed, showing how positivism functions as a restrictive ideology of and for science and other social practices. (shrink)

Feminist theory needs both explanatory-diagnostic and anticipatory-utopian moments in order to be truly critical and truly feminist. However, the explanatory-diagnostic task of analyzing the workings of gendered power relations in all of their depth and complexity seems to undercut the very possibility of emancipation on which the anticipatory-utopian task relies. In this paper, I take this looming paradox as an invitation to rethink our understanding of emancipation and its relation to the anticipatory-utopian dimensions of critique, asking what conception of emancipation (...) is compatible with a complex explanatory-diagnostic analysis of contemporary gender domination as it is intertwined and entangled with race, class, sexuality, and empire. I explore this question through an analysis of two specific debates in which the paradoxical relationship between power and emancipation emerges in particularly salient and seemingly intractable forms: debates over subjection and modernity. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, I argue that a negativistic conception of emancipation offers the best way for feminist critical theory to transform the paradox of power and emancipation into a productive tension that can fuel critique. (shrink)

ABSTRACT‘Subjectification', the cornerstone concept of Biesta's philosophy of education, refers to how autonomy should be realized in educational settings and to the fact that explanation is irrelevant to emancipation. In this article a critical realist reading is provided of how Biesta links narrative learning to emancipation and of the shortcomings that spring from this connection. The central thesis of my argument is that truth and values should take center stage in an educational philosophy of emancipation and that these two concepts (...) are left out of Biesta's conception of emancipation. It is suggested that Biesta's philosophy of emancipation has no criteria for distinguishing what is true from what is false and valuable from invaluable. This happens because it cannot adequately address (i) how one passes from ‘is' to ‘ought’ (ii) the ways in which rational thinking could be emancipatory and (iii) the grounds on which emancipatory living is better than non emancipatory living. (shrink)

In this paper I succinctly outline the standpoint from which Marx criticizes capitalism, namely, by pointing to the difference between the transforming potentiality of technology as developed under the capitalist mode of production, and its effective reality in this same system . On these grounds, I argue that Marx's critique of the capitalist system consists mainly in the fact that the permanent valorization of capital is the goal of production, and that this is an irrational aim which creates as a (...) result an abstract form of domination over individuals . Finally, I reinterpret the meaning of emancipation in Marx's later thought, arguing that it refers to an emancipation from this abstract domination, culminating in an emancipation from work in favor of the creation of increased disposable time .No presente artigo, traço, rapidamente, a perspectiva a partir da qual Marx constrói sua crítica ao capitalismo, a saber, a diferença entre o potencial transformador da técnica tal como desenvolvida sob o modo capitalista de produção e a sua realidade efetiva nesse mesmo sistema . Com isso feito, argumento que a crítica de Marx ao sistema capitalista consiste em grande parte no fato de a valorização permanente do capital ser a meta da produção, uma finalidade irracional e que cria uma dominação abstrata desse mecanismo sobre os indivíduos , de modo a, por fim, repensar o sentido de emancipação no pensamento marxiano tardio, sustentando, sobretudo, que se trata de uma emancipação dessa dominação abstrata que culmina, também, em uma emancipação do trabalho em prol da criação de cada vez mais tempo disponível. (shrink)

Nietzsche has been accused by Habermas of abandoning the pursuit of emancipation and truth. Ironically, this pursuit is at the core of Nietzsche’s works, though radically transformed. The pursuit of knowledge requires emancipated sovereign individuality, a severe honesty, and the courage to follow one's most rigorous use of reason and creative insight wherever they may lead, including the most disturbing insights about truth, language and reason themselves. The first part of this paper discusses Nietzsche’s ideas of individual sovereignty and the (...) associated ideas of emancipation and transformation necessary to this. The next section entitled The Question of Truth: Beyond Universalism and the Quest for Foundations and Certainty deals with how knowledge and truth are intelligible notions in the absence of certainty and absolute standards of truth. The following section, Nietzsche, Habermas and Social Solidarity shows how Habermas’s attempt to ground morality in his discourse ethics cannot succeed once the Nietzchean insight into truth is understood. In the final part, The Irony of Sovereign Individuality, I argue that morality is inconsistent with the individuality that it is supposed to uphold. Nietzsche’s ethical ideal provides a model for concrete individuality that offers the most powerful ethical contribution to social solidarity, given the failure of any grounded morality. (shrink)

Although they are often used as synonyms, emancipation and liberation constitute two distinct normative horizons in critical theory of society. In this article, I offer an analysis of these two concepts, including their historical and epistemological characteristics, pointing out similarities, differences and the possibilities for their combined use as basis of models of normative social criticism. I argue that the critical horizon of human emancipation emerges in post-Kantian European thought, while the horizon of liberation was developed in Latin American decolonial (...) thinking in the second half of the 20th century. The horizon of emancipation arises with the critique of the primacy of systemic domination, while liberation emerges in the resistance to the primacy of the experience of oppression. The analytical distinction between these two normative horizons can be helpful to better understand both the foundations of epistemic decolonization and the potential for dialogue between the critical perspectives of center and periphery. (shrink)

Like Frege's distinction of sense and force in semantics, the central distinction of pragmatics is that between perlocutions and illocutions. All speech acts theorists offer a version of this distinction, including Habermas in his theory of communicative action. However, whether or not there is such a distinction at all remains an essentially disputed issue. In this paper I consider the importance of this distinction for analyzing both ideology and rhetoric, but in particular for analyzing one species of rhetorical speech for (...) the purpose of changing beliefs, that engaged in by the social critic. To make these substantive points, I must first consider important recent criticisms of Habermas's distinction, especially those of Erling Skjei and Allen Wood. While I agree with the core of both criticisms, I still think the distinction can be made along the lines that Strawson proposed. I argue that there is not a completely disjunctive, mutually exclusive set of properties defining each type of speech act. There are, and must be, overlapping, nontrivial features common to both. These common features are in fact crucial to the analysis of the sort of speech engaged in by social critics and emancipators. To show this, I argue for the existence of an intermediate class that I call "communicative perlocutions." This class, in turn, overcomes the traditional, Platonic enmity to rhetoric which ought not be imported unquestioned into the philosophy of language or the justification of rational social criticism. (shrink)

Dans cet article je me propose d’analyser dans quelle mesure les droits humains peuvent constituer un outil d’émancipation et de construction de nos démocraties compte tenu des critiques fortes qui leur ont été adressées depuis le XIXe siècle et notamment au cours du XXe siècle, en particulier, à partir du paradigme dit postmoderne. Plus spécifiquement, j’essaierai de répondre à cette question à partir de la position foucaldienne à l’égard de la production de droits, notamment de ce que le philosophe (...) appelle les « droits des gouvernés », liés, dans sa production, à la notion de « nouveau droit », comme stratégie de résistance et comme « pratique de liberté ». Ma réponse sera également orientée, en dernière instance, par le besoin d’examiner la potentialité et la portée des droits humains dans l’arène politique actuelle. (shrink)

All theories of critique rely on a – often implicit – description of the activity that doing critique is supposed to consist in. These “pictures of critique” frame all further distinctions and justifications in the debate about critique and critique’s normativity. After distinguishing three pictures of critique – measuring, disrupting and emancipating critique – I ask whether the theoretical reflection in which a certain conception of critique is elaborated is itself accurately captured by the picture of critique it employs. In (...) other words: Is the theoretical reflection of critique a critical activity according to its own picture of critique? I propose to call only those theories of critique critical theories the theoretical activity of which is a critical activity on their own picture of critique - which are surprisingly few. Most critical theories are thereby revealed to be rather traditional when it comes their own theorizing of critique. (shrink)

Emancipation serves not only as a midwife for progressive agendas such as greater equality and sustainability but also as their gravedigger. This diagnosis underpins Ingolfur Blühdorn’s ‘dialectic of emancipation’, which depicts a dilemma but offers no perspective on how to deal with it. By drawing on Foucault, this article suggests conceiving of emancipation as a task moderns are confronted with even if a given emancipatory project has come to devour its children. Claiming autonomy from given social constellations is key to (...) this task; key also is judging between legitimate and illegitimate claims to autonomy. In late modernity, the criteria for such judgement are no longer universally given. Instead of regarding the latter as entry into mere subjectivism, this article presents judgement as a key political, ‘world building’-activity, a critical social theory may join in, by not only observing the world but by also taking sides in it. (shrink)

This reflection on the topic of emancipation stems from an ongoing project in tune with a wider development in pragmatic philosophy. Specifically, the project aims to piece together some of the consequences of pragmatism’s reconstruction of the tradition of philosophical inquiry, from the angle of human imagination. More recently this project has taken a different direction, in light of our critical situation under intensifying anti-democratic forces in the US, but also in many parliamentary democracies. Emancipation from forces that undermine democratic (...) transformation is arguably a goal that anyone gathering under the banner of pragmatism shares. The use of the pronoun ‘our’ in modifying ‘critical situation’ above is intended. It points to the scope of the problem. The problematic situation of ‘intensifying anti-democratic forces’ that sets the agenda for pragmatic inquiry is most aptly termed ‘neoliberal global hegemony’. Neoliberalism is a much-used technical term and its meaning is hotly contested. For the purposes of this paper, then, I would like to lift out several features common to almost all parties in the contest to provide a definition. This description will then be employed for the purposes of determining the character of the contemporary social context in which emancipatory practices take place. Second, by tying this description of the ‘background’ of our practices to the primacy of practical reason thesis, and specifically the role of imagination in practical reason, the pragmatic conception of agency comes into relief. A pragmatic conception of this social context of agency, the contemporary neoliberal imaginary, contributes to articulating prospects for emancipatory practice in a non-abstract sense. An example of experimentalist democratic practices of emancipation responding to crises generated by neoliberal practices is provided by recent efforts in worker co-operatives in Argentina. (shrink)

Critical research is becoming increasingly accepted as a valid approach to research in information systems. It is deemed to be particularly suitable for situations where researchers want to address conspicuous injustice, such as in areas of development or the digital divide. Critical research in information systems (CRIS), I will argue, is a possible approach to some of the ethical problems arising in the context of information and communication technology (ICT). It can be sensitive to the question of culture and therefore (...) suitable for researching cross-cultural ethical questions in ICT. It is often unclear, however, what exactly critical research stands for and to what extent critical approaches are applicable across cultural boundaries. This paper will address these problems by proposing a definition of critical research as focused on changing the status quo and aiming for emancipation. It will then look at the question whether different cultures are compatible and comparable and what the role of culture in research on information systems is. The paper will then return to the question whether the critical intention to emancipate and empower humans is an expression of cultural imperialism or whether there are valid ways of promoting emancipation across cultural divides. (shrink)

The ideal of emancipation has been traditionally grounded on the premise that human activity is not restrained by external boundaries. Thus the realisation of values such as autonomy or recognition has been facilitated by economic growth and material expansion. Yet there is mounting evidence that the human impact on natural systems at the planetary level, a novelty captured by the concept of the Anthropocene, endangers the Earth’s habitability. If human development is to be limited for the sake of global sustainability, (...) can emancipation be kept as a mobilising ideal? As opposed to alternative views such as that of degrowth, this article argues that it can. The key lies in the ability of the Anthropocene to produce planetary subjectivities. By recognising the bounded quality of human embeddedness, the possibility of a different emancipation is opened up. The latter does not give up material well-being, yet it makes sure that the latter does not endanger planetary habitability. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 23 (2003) 35-37 [Access article in PDF] Seeking Emancipation through Engagement:One Nichiren Buddhist's Approach to Practice Bill Aiken SGI-USA I was born and raised Roman Catholic, which meant attending Catholic schools, first in the local parish schools and later at a private academy in suburban Philadelphia. As a child I was serious about my religion. I served as an altar boy and had serious thoughts about becoming (...) a priest.That was until the mid-1960s, when my hormones took over, my voice changed, and I converted to hedonism. I hadn't so much turned against my Catholic upbringing as I was temporarily distracted from it.It was when I went away to college that the religious questions began to resurface. Friends and classmates wanted to know what I believed in, and I really didn't know. The old form of Catholicism, with its stern, patriarchal vision of God, didn't seem to fit anymore. But the mystery remained as a palpable presence, and it seemed to require an answer. Was I an atheist? That seemed so negative. How about an agnostic? Possibly. They seemed to believe in something, even if they didn't know what it was. That seemed about right for the moment.My first encounter with Buddhism came during that freshman year at Penn State University in the fall of 1968. While attending a rather psychedelic party, a friend asked me if I knew anything about Buddhism. Replying that I didn't, I asked what Buddhism had to say for itself. My friend said that it spoke of the oneness and interrelatedness of everything. All I can say is that at that particular moment this made sense to me and started me on what would at first be a pretty casual exploration of Buddhism.But it would be in the bedridden summer of 1970, while recovering from a lifestyle-inflicted illness, that I started to reflect on my life in earnest and began to read as though Buddhism had something to say directly to me. More books by Alan Watts led to D. T. Suzuki, which in turn led to collections of sutras and finally to Phillip Kapleau and the Three Pillars of Zen. This would be my guide for the next year as I struggled to bring focus to my mind and my life.Being the poor and struggling student that I was, I could not afford the cost of a [End Page 35] retreat or sesshin training. So I struggled as well as I could with a combination of self-instruction and whatever I could learn from those who did attend these sessions.I should say at this point that while I may have had a highly developed religious sense, I never wanted to become a religious virtuoso or a renunciate. From the depths of my adolescent angst and confusion, I longed for an awakening, but I had conditions. And chief among them was that I would not be pried apart from my life as I knew it. The quietude of the monastery and hours of prayer or meditation held absolutely no appeal for me. If I were going to attain enlightenment it would have to be in Times Square (before Disney took it over). And so, through my daily stumbling efforts at zazen, I began struggling to bring about this awakening.So this is where I was spiritually when on a late summer day in 1971, a pleasant though somewhat scattered young woman approached me on the streets of downtown Philadelphia, invited me to a Buddhist meeting, and introduced me to the chanting of Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. The first meeting I attended was a rather large one on the campus of Columbia University in NewYork. Everyone seemed pleasant enough, but the meeting seemed more like a pep rally than a serious discussion about the profound teachings of the Buddha. When the main speaker finally took the stage, I found it nearly impossible to understand his broken English. So I'm afraid that I don't remember a single word he... (shrink)

The recent Dutch homo-emancipation policy has identified religious communities, particularly within migrant populations, as a core target group in which to make homosexuality more ‘speakable’. In this article we examine the paradoxical silencing tendencies of this ‘speaking out’ policy on queer Muslim organisations in the Netherlands. We undertake this analysis as the Dutch government is perhaps unique in developing an explicit ‘homo-emancipation’ policy and is often looked to as the model for sexuality politics and legal redress in relation to inequalities (...) on the basis of sexual orientation. We highlight how the ‘speakability’ imperative in the Dutch homo-emancipation policy reproduces a paradigmatic, ‘homonormative’ model of an ‘out’ and ‘visible’ queer sexuality that has also come to be embedded in an anti-immigrant and specifically anti-Muslim discourse in the Netherlands. Drawing on the concept of habitus, particularly in the work of Gloria Wekker, we suggest that rather than relying on a ‘speakability’ policy model, queer Muslim sexualities need to be understood in a more nuanced and intersecting way that attends to their lived realities. (shrink)

The article describes the obstacles to the emancipation of Roma women in the family and Czech society. The theoretical side deals with the recent changes in gender roles in the Roma family, changes in the position of Roma women and their discrimination as well as the concept of emancipation. The article aims to describe the obstacles a Roma woman must overcome in the course of emancipation. The data are based on qualitative socio-ethnographic research conducted through narrative interviews with 30 women (...) of different ages and classes who identify as Roma and live in three Czech regional capitals. The research sample was compiled using the snowball method. The data collected in the field research were analyzed in Atlas.ti using anchored theory. We identified five main obstacles to the emancipation of Roma woman. They include obstacles emanating from the family and the majority society as well as obstacles caused by the hegemony of masculinity and those emanating from the woman. By gaining an understanding of relations in Roma families, the situation regarding the emancipation of Roma women and the associated barriers may help those who come into daily contact with the Roma minority to take appropriate actions and apply the right interventions. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to articulate a conception of emancipation for the Anthropocene. First, the Kantian roots of emancipation understood as the capacity of rational beings to act according to self-chosen ends are explained. It is shown that this conception of emancipation sets the realm of autonomous beings humans over the realm of heteronomous beings. Accounts of the ‘humanisation of nature’ are analysed as incomplete attempts to overcome this dualism. It is argued that the root of this incompleteness (...) lies in the application of analytical rather than dialectical reason to the human–nature interaction. The Anthropocene is presented as the geological–historical moment when at the same time as nature is being humanised, humans are being made aware of themselves as animal. This gives way to a conception of Anthropocene emancipation which will be described in a fourth section. The article concludes with reflections on COVID-19 as a ‘disease of the Anthropocene’ and as an opportunity reflexively, and at unprecedented scale, to internalise our heteronomy and to live an emancipation fit for a terraforming species. (shrink)

The resistance of Muslims to shamanism began when lies of the shamans were exposed on social media. Many shamans practise fraud under the guise of religion. Magical objects such as luminous daggers or stones that emit smoke, used by shamans as occult actors are also known to be objects of magic tricks that are sold freely and can be used by anyone. Scholars also continuously preach that Muslims’ belief in shamans is forbidden. Therefore, Muslims in Indonesia fear that believing in (...) shamans degrades human dignity and makes worship unacceptable. The purpose of this research is to identify the factors that cause the resistance of Muslim youth to shamanism. This study used a cross-sectional design which was conducted by interviewing 3025 Muslim youths who had the desire to highlight shamanism phenomena in North Sumatra. The analysis in this study used a logistic regression test with Jeffreys’s Amazing Statistics Program (JAPS 16 software). The results of this study indicate that Muslim youths have a high resistance to shamanism. The resistance of young Muslims to shamanism is influenced by emancipative Islamic theology ( p < 0.001; Exp [β] = 2.504) and hifz al-din [maintaining religion] ( p = 0.001; Exp [β] = 2.293). Muslim youths have high resistance to shamanism due to the fear that this culture will reduce the dignity of the human caliphate if it is subject to anyone other than Allah. Muslim youth also have high resistance to shamanism because they are of the view that shamanism makes worship unacceptable to Allah SWT. Contribution: This article explains the resistance of Muslim youth to shamanism. It also demonstrates how Muslims live in a multicultural society. (shrink)

In his classic work The Mind and its Place in Nature published in 1925 at the height of the development of quantum mechanics but several years after the chemists Lewis and Langmuir had already laid the foundations of the modern theory of valence with the introduction of the covalent bond, the analytic philosopher C. D. Broad argued for the emancipation of chemistry from the crass physicalism that led physicists then and later—with support from a rabblement of philosophers who knew as (...) much about chemistry as etymologists—to believe that chemistry reduced to physics. Here Broad’s thesis is recast in terms more familiar to chemists. In the hard sell of particle physics, several prominent figures in chemistry—Hoffmann, Primas, and Pauling—have had their views interpreted to imply that they were sympathetic to greedy reductionism when in fact they were not. Indeed, being chemists without physicists as alter egos, they could not but side with Broad’s contention that chemistry, as a science that deals primarily in emergent phenomena which are beyond the purview of physicalism, owes no acquiescence to particle physics and its ethereal wares. Historically, among the most widely used expediencies in chemistry and materials science are additivity or mixture rules and their cohort transferability, all of which are devised and used under the mantle of naive reductionism. Here it is argued that while the transfer of functional groups between molecules works empirically to an extent, it is strictly outlawed by the no-cloning theorem of quantum mechanics. Several illustrative examples related to chemistry’s irreducibility to physics are presented and discussed. The failure of naive reductionism exhibited by the deep-inelastic scattering of leptons by A > 2 nuclei is traced to the same flawed reasoning that was the original basis of Moffitt’s ‘atoms in molecules’ hypothesis, the neglect of context, nuclei in the case of high-energy physics and molecules in the case of chemistry. A non-exhaustive list of other contexts from physics, chemistry, and molecular biology evidencing similar departures from the ideal of additivity or reductionism is provided for the perusal of philosophers. Had the call by the mathematician J. T. Schwartz for developments in mathematical linguistics possessed of a less single, less literal, and less simple-minded nature been met, perhaps it might have persuaded scientists to abandon their regressive fixation with unphysical reductionism and to adapt to new methodologies that engender a more nuanced handling of ubiquitous emergent phenomena as they arise in Nature than is the case today. (shrink)

This essay is about the emancipatory potential of the protest song A Rapist in Your Path The theoretical assumptions for this analysis are a listening’s esthetical-political set up from the philosophy of Jacques Rancière and the structure of patriarchal-colonial-modernity of Rita Laura Segato in the form of census, guardianship, ownership and proscription of the voices of the being a woman. What is postulated is that this song-performance is the bursting into a heteronormative world of a singular oneself position through the (...) voice with the aim of inaugurate a new form of community making. What is to be emphasized is that this song sets in motion a stasis against the rape’s order and thus transgresses disciplinary notions and attitudes that prescribe the ontic annihilation of dissenting voices. (shrink)

The case for an eco-emancipatory politics to release the Earth from human domination and free us all from lives that are both exploitative and exploited Human domination of nature shapes every aspect of our lives today, even as it remains virtually invisible to us. Because human beings are a part of nature, the human domination of nature circles back to confine and exploit people as well—and not only the poor and marginalized but also the privileged and affluent, even in the (...) world’s most prosperous societies. Although modern democracy establishes constraints intended to protect people from domination as the arbitrary exercise of power, it offers few such protections for nonhuman parts of nature. The result is that, wherever we fall in human hierarchies, we inevitably find ourselves both complicit in and entrapped by a system that makes sustainable living all but impossible. It confines and exploits not only nature but people too, albeit in different ways. In Eco-Emancipation, Sharon Krause argues that we can find our way to a better, freer life by constraining the use of human power in relation to nature and promoting nature’s well-being alongside our own, thereby releasing the Earth from human domination and freeing us from a way of life that is both exploitative and exploited, complicit and entrapped. Eco-emancipation calls for new, more-than-human political communities that incorporate nonhuman parts of nature through institutions of representation and regimes of rights, combining these new institutional arrangements with political activism, a public ethos of respect for nature, and a culture of eco-responsibility. (shrink)

This paper seeks to answer the following question: does it still make sense today to speak of political emancipation, in particular in the sense bequeathed to us by Marx, as emancipation from capitalism? I consider three serious objections to this possibility: the objection that reference to “capitalism” is unduly essentialist in view of the multiplicity of historical situations; the anti-utopian objection according to which the programme of emancipation from capitalism lacks any precise, practical content; and the normative objection that emancipation (...) in and of itself does not specify the norms of the putative post-capitalist society. In the final section of the paper, I attempt to respond to these three objections, and seek to outline the different levels at which something like an emancipatory project, understood as a surpassing of capitalism, can still make sense today. (shrink)

The article argues that feminist emancipation, understood as practices and discourses of self-development and of solidarity as empowerment, has become entangled with the neoliberal project. Indeed, emancipation as self-improvement has become synonymous with moral regulation projects that seek to adapt women to global capitalism. The article explores the relation between emancipation and neoliberal regulation from a situated approach by addressing the experience of Latin American feminisms, with a particular focus on Chile. This approach recognizes by implication that Latin American feminisms (...) are co-extensive, or coeval, with North American and European ones, and are not merely derivative forms. (shrink)

Ecology and Human Emancipation Tim Hayward Humanism vs Prometheanism The entry of ecological considerations into political thought raises new questions about the meaning of human emancipation.* In particular, traditional socialist conceptions of emancipation as a move from a sphere of...

This highly original book examines, for the first time, how the patient movement, which works to improve the quality of healthcare, can actually be considered an emancipation movement when led by its radical elements.

Todd McGowan is professor of film studies at the University of Vermont and author of The Impossible David Lynch and Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets. This most...

When we consider the social and political disarray of the moment, we are forced to recognize how hard it is, in periods of crisis, to clarify the changes taking place. So it is an urgent and necessary task to return to Michel de Certeau's work, whose central aim is to clarify the transformations that abruptly emerge during times of crisis, transformations that undermine our most tenacious assumptions. Certeau's project is the work of constant reconnaissance. He expressed his need to elucidate (...) what he would call `generating flashes'. The meaning of that need for inventive distancing can be informed by psychoanalysis. From this perspective, the obligation to clarify the most heterogeneous ruptures appears as the echo of an ancient need to express the desire to be with the Other. But Certeau's attitude provoked incomprehension and irritation, so much so that in order to correctly approach his legacy we must first explain the different reception Certeau's texts receive in French-speaking countries compared with, say, the USA. (shrink)