In cognitive neuroscience, dissociating the brain networks that ing—has thus become one of the best empirical situations subtend conscious and nonconscious memories constitutes a through which to study the mechanisms of implicit learning, very complex issue, both conceptually and methodologically.

How do we find out whether someone is conscious of some information or not? A simple answer is “We just ask them”! However, things are not so simple. Here, we review recent developments in the use of subjective and objective methods in implicit learning research and discuss the highly complex methodological problems that their use raises in the domain.

Historically, companies have communicated taxes as a burden, as the benefits provided by governments are not perceived to be in proportion to their payments. With sustainable development becoming central in many policy areas, new discourses including ‘fair’ or ‘sustainable’ tax have become omnipresent in public talk on taxes. This paper analyzes tax discourses in corporate annual reports within this changing context to examine the use of language in the construction of the meaning of tax. By analyzing tax reporting by a (...) state-owned multinational company over two decades, we observe that the communication of taxes increased in both number and types of discourses. Importantly, this highlights the shift in tax discourses from one dominated by codified accounting discourse reinforcing the monolithic representation of tax as an unfair expense, to one where tax is given a multidimensional meaning within a broader discursive context, where tax is a meaningful corporate responsibility to society. (shrink)

Standard economic theory does not capture trust among anonymous Internet traders. But when traders are allowed to have social preferences, uncertainty about a seller’s morals opens t he door for trust, reward, exploitation and reputation building. We report experiments suggesting that sellers’ intrinsic motivations to be trustworthy are not sufficient to sustain trade when not complemented by a feedback system. We demonstrate that it is the interaction of social preferences and cleverly designed reputation mechanisms that solves to a large extent (...) the trust problem on Internet market platforms. However, economic theory and social preference models tend to underestimate the difficulties of promoting trust in anonymous online trading communities. (shrink)

Gauge symmetries play a central role, both in the mathematical foundations as well as the conceptual construction of modern (particle) physics theories. However, it is yet unclear whether they form a necessary component of theories, or whether they can be eliminated. It is also unclear whether they are merely an auxiliary tool to simplify (and possibly localize) calculations or whether they contain independent information. Therefore their status, both in physics and philosophy of physics, remains to be fully clarified. In this (...) overview we review the current state of affairs on both the philosophy and the physics side. In particular, we focus on the circumstances in which the restriction of gauge theories to gauge invariant information on an observable level is warranted, using the Brout-Englert-Higgs theory as an example of particular current importance. Finally, we determine a set of yet to be answered questions to clarify the status of gauge symmetries. (shrink)

Resumen: El presente documento tiene por objeto indagar en las publicaciones académicas de dos saberes: la filosofía y la literatura. A partir de allí, se identificó la influencia de las ideas del filósofo Slavoj Žižek en esos documentos -artículos y libros-. Esta revisión se centró en dos países de la región latinoamericana tal como lo son Chile y Perú. Se revisaron las producciones académicas que hacen menciones a las hipotesis del esloveno trazando un recorrido histórico que permite identificar cual es (...) el año en que las ideas comenzaron a ingresar a estos países y el contexto teórico-escritural en que se incluyeron, destacando en Chile el de las ciencias sociales y en Perú el del análisis literario. Debido a la falta de investigaciones de este tipo, este artículo pretende actuar como material inaugurador de futuras investigaciones enfocadas en el estudio del impacto de las ideas del filósofo oriundo de Eslovenia en las producciones locales. Palabras Clave : Filosofía; Literatura; Chile; Perú; Latinoamérica; Slavoj Žižek: The present document aims to investigate the academic publications of two knowledge: philosophy and literature. From there, the influence of the ideas of the philosopher Slavoj Žižek on those documents - articles and books - was identified. This review focused on two countries in the Latin American region such as Chile and Peru. The academic productions that mention the Slovenian's hypothesis were reviewed, tracing a historical route that allows identifying which is the year in which the ideas began to enter these countries and the theoretical-scriptural context in which they were included, highlighting in Chile the social sciences and in Peru the literary analysis. Due to the lack of research of this type, this article intends to act as inaugural material for future research focused on the study of the impact of the ideas of the philosopher from Slovenia on local productions. Keywords: Philosophy; Literature; Chile; Peru; Latin America; Slavoj Žižek. (shrink)

The goal of this study is to characterize observers’ abilities to detect gradual changes and to explore putative dissociations between conscious experience of change and behavioral adaptation to a changing stimulus. We developed a new experimental paradigm in which, on each trial, participants were shown a dot pattern on the screen. Next, the pattern disappeared and participants had to reproduce it. In some conditions, the target pattern was incrementally rotated over successive trials and participants were either informed or not of (...) this change. We analyzed both awareness of the changes and the dynamics of behavioral adaptation, in a way that makes it possible to assess both variability and accuracy as they change over time. Results indicate a dissociation between change awareness and behavioral adaptation to the changes, and support the notion that unconscious representations of visual stimuli are more precise and detailed than previously suggested. We discuss the implications of these results for theories of change detection. (shrink)

While the study of implicit learning is nothing new, the field as a whole has come to embody — over the last decade or so — ongoing questioning about three of the most fundamental debates in the cognitive sciences: The nature of consciousness, the nature of mental representation (in particular the difficult issue of abstraction), and the role of experience in shaping the cognitive system. Our main goal in this chapter is to offer a framework that attempts to integrate current (...) thinking about these three issues in a way that specifically links consciousness with adaptation and learning. Our assumptions about this relationship are rooted in further assumptions about the nature of processing and of representation in cognitive systems. When considered together, we believe that these assumptions offer a new perspective on the relationships between conscious and unconscious processing and on the function of consciousness in cognitive systems. (shrink)

Axel Honneth has been instrumental in advancing the work of the Frankfurt School of critical theorists, rebuilding their effort to combine radical social and political analysis with rigorous philosophical inquiry. These eleven essays published over the past five years reclaim the relevant themes of the Frankfurt School, which counted Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Jürgen Habermas, Franz Neumann, and Albrecht Wellmer as members. They also engage with Kant, Freud, Alexander Mitscherlich, and Michael Walzer, whose work on morality, (...) history, democracy, and individuality intersects with the Frankfurt School's core concerns. Collected here for the first time in English, Honneth's essays pursue the unifying themes and theses that support the methodologies and thematics of critical social theory, and they address the possibilities of continuing this tradition through radically changed theoretical and social conditions. According to Honneth, there is a unity that underlies critical theory's multiple approaches: the way in which reason is both distorted and furthered in contemporary capitalist society. And while much is dead in the social and psychological doctrines of critical social theory, its central inquiries remain vitally relevant. Is social progress still possible after the horrors of the twentieth century? Does capitalism deform reason and, if so, in what respects? Can we justify the relationship between law and violence in secular terms, or is it inextricably bound to divine justice? How can we be free when we're subject to socialization in a highly complex and in many respects unfree society? For Honneth, suffering and moral struggle are departure points for a new "reconstructive" form of social criticism, one that is based solidly in the empirically grounded, interdisciplinary approach of the Frankfurt School. (shrink)

In its original form due to Ian Hacking, entity realism postulates a criterion of manipulative success which replaces explanatory virtue as the criterion of justified scientific belief. The article analyses the foundations on which this postulate rests and identifies the conditions on which one can derive a form of entity realism from it. It then develops in detail an extensive class of counterexamples, drawing on the notion of quasi-particles in condensed matter physics. While the phenomena associated with quasi-particles pass the (...) entity realist's criterion of manipulative success, quasi-particles themselves are illusions, and can be seen to be so even on the basis of the largely non-theoretical "home truths" that one must be ready to admit as background knowledge. Hence, Hacking's entity realism is shown to be incoherent. (shrink)

This Introduction tells the story of intergerational justice and how it has influenced philosophers and political thinkers throughout history. The Introduction goes on to discuss the aims of the book, which is to offer a sustained discussion of intergenerational justice as seen by practical philosophers. The first part of the book focuses on the way in which various schools of thought in moral and political philosophy approach the domain of intergenerational justice, while the second part focuses on more specific aspects, (...) such as how these theories address the question of motivation, how they deal with demographic fluctuations, or how they can be applied to real-world issues such as climate change. (shrink)

Cognitive niche construction is the process whereby organisms create and maintain cause–effect models of their niche as guides for fitness influencing behavior. Extended mind theory claims that cognitive processes extend beyond the brain to include predictable states of the world. Active inference and predictive processing in cognitive science assume that organisms embody predictive (i.e., generative) models of the world optimized by standard cognitive functions (e.g., perception, action, learning). This paper presents an active inference formulation that views cognitive niche construction as (...) a cognitive function aimed at optimizing organisms' generative models. We call that process of optimization extended active inference. (shrink)

69 Thompson-Schill, S.L. _et al. _(1997) Role of left inferior prefrontal cortex 59 Buckner, R.L. _et al. _(1996) Functional anatomic studies of memory in retrieval of semantic knowledge: a re-evaluation _Proc. Natl. Acad._ retrieval for auditory words and pictures _J. Neurosci. _16, 6219–6235 _Sci. U. S. A. _94, 14792–14797 60 Buckner, R.L. _et al. _(1995) Functional anatomical studies of explicit and 70 Baddeley, A. (1992) Working memory: the interface between memory implicit memory retrieval tasks _J. Neurosci. _15, 12–29 and cognition (...) _J. Cogn. Neurosci. _4, 281–288 61 Bäckman, L. _et al. _(1997) Brain activation in young and older adults 71 Petrides, M. (1994) Frontal lobes and behavior _Curr. Opin. Neurobiol._ during implicit and explicit retrieval _J. Cogn. Neurosci. _9, 378–391. (shrink)

In the early 20th century, Marxist theory was enriched and rejuvenated by adopting the concept of reification, introduced by the Hungarian theorist Georg Lukács to identify and denounce the transformation of historical processes into ahistorical entities, human actions into things that seemed part of an immutable "second nature." For a variety of reasons, both theoretical and practical, the hopes placed in de-reification as a tool of revolutionary emancipation proved vain. In these original and imaginative essays, delivered as the Tanner Lectures (...) at the University of California, Berkeley in 2005, the distinguished third-generation Frankfurt School philosopher Axel Honneth attempts to rescue the concept of reification by recasting it in terms of the philosophy of recognition he has been developing over the past two decades. Three distinguished political and social theorists: Judith Butler, Raymond Geuss, and Jonathan Lear, respond with hard questions about the central anthropological premise of his argument, the assumption that prior to cognition there is a fundamental experience of intersubjective recognition that can provide a normative standard by which current social relations can be judged wanted. Honneth listens carefully to their criticism and provides a powerful defense of his position. (shrink)

Questo volume raccoglie alcuni dei più importanti scritti pubblicati da Axel Honneth nel periodo precedente a "Lotta per il riconoscimento". Essi documentano i passaggi fondamentali dell'itinerario filosofico attraverso il quale Honneth è giunto ad elaborare la sua teoria del riconoscimento: le riflessioni sul lavoro sociale e sul conflitto di classe svolte in un orizzonte di pensiero ancora marxista, l'interlocuzione con la teoria di Habermas, l'indagine sulle forme della moralità quotidiana, il progressivo emergere della "logica morale del riconoscimento". Tutti questi (...) elementi, le cui tracce sono ancora chiaramente ravvisabili negli scritti honnethiani della maturità, compongono un panorama teorico ricco e interessante, che i testi qui raccolti (per la prima volta resi disponibili in traduzione italiana) consentono di conoscere nella sua evoluzione. (shrink)

The theory of justice is one of the most intensely debated areas of contemporary philosophy. Most theories of justice, however, have only attained their high level of justification at great cost. By focusing on purely normative, abstract principles, they become detached from the sphere that constitutes their “field of application” - namely, social reality. Axel Honneth proposes a different approach. He seeks to derive the currently definitive criteria of social justice directly from the normative claims that have developed within (...) Western liberal democratic societies. These criteria and these claims together make up what he terms “democratic ethical life”: a system of morally legitimate norms that are not only legally anchored, but also institutionally established. Honneth justifies this far-reaching endeavour by demonstrating that all essential spheres of action in Western societies share a single feature, as they all claim to realize a specific aspect of individual freedom. In the spirit of Hegel’s _Philosophy of Right_ and guided by the theory of recognition, Honneth shows how principles of individual freedom are generated which constitute the standard of justice in various concrete social spheres: personal relationships, economic activity in the market, and the political public sphere. Honneth seeks thereby to realize a very ambitious aim: to renew the theory of justice as an analysis of society. (shrink)

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.

Over the past few years numerous proposals have appeared that attempt to characterize consciousness in terms of what could be called its computational correlates: Principles of information processing with which to characterize the differences between conscious and unconscious processing. Proposed computational correlates include architectural specialization (such as the involvement of specific regions of the brain in conscious processing), properties of representations (such as their stability in time or their strength), and properties of specific processes (such as resonance, synchrony, interactivity, or (...) information integration). In exactly the same way as one can engage in a search for the neural correlates of consciousness, one can thus search for the computational correlates of consciousness. The most direct way of doing is to contrast models of conscious versus unconscious information processing. In this paper, I review these developments and illustrate how computational modeling of specific cognitive processes can be useful in exploring and in formulating putative computational principles through which to capture the differences between conscious and unconscious cognition. What can be gained from such approaches to the problem of consciousness is an understanding of the function it plays in information processing and of the mechanisms that subtend it. Here, I suggest that the central function of consciousness is to make it possible for cognitive agents to exert ?exible, adaptive control over behavior. From this perspective, consciousness is best characterized as involving (1) a graded continuum de?ned over quality of representation, such that availability to consciousness and to cognitive control correlates with properties of representation, and (2) the implication of systems of meta-representations. (shrink)

The present paper argues for a more complete integration between recent “genealogical” approaches to the problem of knowledge and evolutionary accounts of the development of human cognitive capacities and practices. A structural tension is pointed out between, on the one hand, the fact that theexplicandumof genealogical stories is a specifically human trait and, on the other hand, the tacit acknowledgment, shared by all contributors to the debate, that human beings have evolved from non-human beings. Since humans differ from their predecessors (...) in more ways than just the lack of a particular concept or cognitive ability, this casts doubt on the widely shared assumption (the “Constancy Assumption”) that, when constructing a genealogical narrative for a particular concept (e.g., our contemporary concept of knowledge), it is permissible to hold all other factors (e.g., individual “on-board” cognitive capacities) fixed. What is needed instead, I argue, is an ecological perspective that views knowledge as an adaptive response to an evolutionary constellation that allows for a diversity of selective pressures. Several examples of specific conceptual pressures at different stages in human evolution are discussed. (shrink)

Die Theorie der Gerechtigkeit gehört zu den am intensivsten bestellten Feldern der zeitgenössischen Philosophie. Allerdings haben die meisten Gerechtigkeitstheorien ihr hohes Begründungsniveau nur um den Preis eines schweren Defizits erreicht, denn mit ihrer Fixierung auf rein normative, abstrakte Prinzipien geraten sie in beträchtliche Distanz zu jener Sphäre, die ihr”Anwendungsbereich“ist: der gesellschaftlichen Wirklichkeit. Zur Begründung dieses weitreichenden Unterfangens weist Honneth zunächst nach, daß alle wesentlichen Handlungssphären westlicher Gesellschaften ein Merkmal teilen: Sie haben den Anspruch, einen jeweils besonderen Aspekt von individueller Freiheit (...) zu verwirklichen. Im Geiste von Hegels Rechtsphilosophie und unter anerkennungstheoretischen Vorzeichen zeigt das zentrale Kapitel, wie in konkreten gesellschaftlichen Bereichen - in persönlichen Beziehungen, im marktvermittelten Wirtschaftshandeln und in der politischen Öffentlichkeit - die Prinzipien individueller Freiheit generiert werden, die die Richtschnur für Gerechtigkeit bilden. Das Ziel des Buches ist ein höchst anspruchsvolles: die Gerechtigkeitstheorie als Gesellschaftsanalyse neu zu begründen. (shrink)

Complete URL to this document: http://srsc.ulb.ac.be/axcWWW/93-Principles.html.

Over the last 30 years, representationalist and dynamicist positions in the philosophy of cognitive science have argued over whether neurocognitive processes should be viewed as representational or not. Major scientific and technological developments over the years have furnished both parties with ever more sophisticated conceptual weaponry. In recent years, an enactive generalization of predictive processing – known as active inference – has been proposed as a unifying theory of brain functions. Since then, active inference has fueled both representationalist and dynamicist (...) campaigns. However, we believe that when diving into the formal details of active inference, one should be able to find a solution to the war; if not a peace treaty, surely an armistice of a sort. Based on an analysis of these formal details, this paper shows how both representationalist and dynamicist sensibilities can peacefully coexist within the new territory of active inference. (shrink)

What should maximin egalitarians think about seniority privileges? We contrast a good-specific and an all-things-considered perspective. As to the former, inertia and erasing effects of a seniority-based allocation of benefits from employment are identified, allowing us to spot the categories of workers and job-seekers made involuntarily worse off by such a practice. What matters however is to find out whether abolishing seniority privileges will bring about a society in which the all-things-considered worst off people are better off than in the (...) seniority rule's presence. An assessment of the latter's cost-reduction potential is thus needed, enabling us to bridge a practice taking place within a firm with its impact on who the least well off members of society are likely to be. Three accounts of the profitability of seniority privileges are discussed: the “(firm specific) human capital”, the “deferred compensation” and the “knowledge transfer” ones. The respective relevance of “good-specific” and “all-things-considered” analysis is discussed. It turns out that under certain circumstances, a maximin egalitarian case for seniority privileges could be made. Senior: Do you know that they are planning layoffs? Of course, it is only fair that they lay-off the newcomers first! After all, I have been loyal to the company for many years. Junior: Did I choose to be a newcomer? Footnotes1 Many thanks to two anonymous referees, to P.-M. Boulanger, B. Cockx, C. Fabre, L. Jacquet, E. Lazear, I. Robeyns, G. Vallée, Y. Vanderborght, Ph. Van Parijs, V. Vansteenberghe and J. de Wispelaere for their help and critical comments. Earlier versions of this paper were presented in Louvain-la-Neuve, Ghent, Montevideo and London. I am very grateful to these audiences. Special thanks to G. Brennan for his extensive and extremely valuable comments on earlier drafts of this paper. The usual disclaimers apply. (shrink)

6. The Method of Equality: Politics and Poetics, by Jacques Rancière -- 7. Of the Poverty of Our Liberty: The Greatness and Limits of Hegel's Doctrine of Ethical Life, by Axel Honneth -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.

Consciousness remains a mystery—“a phenomenon that people do not know how to think about—yet” (Dennett, , p. 21). Here, I consider how the connectionist perspective on information processing may help us progress toward the goal of understanding the computational principles through which conscious and unconscious processing differ. I begin by delineating the conceptual challenges associated with classical approaches to cognition insofar as understanding unconscious information processing is concerned, and to highlight several contrasting computational principles that are constitutive of the connectionist (...) approach. This leads me to suggest that conscious and unconscious processing are fundamentally connected, that is, rooted in the very same computational principles. I further develop a perspective according to which the brain continuously and unconsciously learns to redescribe its own activity itself based on constant interaction with itself, with the world, and with other minds. The outcome of such interactions is the emergence of internal models that are metacognitive in nature and that function so as to make it possible for an agent to develop a (limited, implicit, practical) understanding of itself. In this light, plasticity and learning are constitutive of what makes us conscious, for it is in virtue of our own experiences with ourselves and with other people that our mental life acquires its subjective character. The connectionist framework continues to be uniquely positioned in the Cognitive Sciences to address the challenge of identifying what one could call the “computational correlates of consciousness” (Mathis & Mozer, ) because it makes it possible to focus on the mechanisms through which information processing takes place. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 103, Issue 3, Page 714-721, November 2021.

The idea that we are mutually dependent on the recognition of our peers is at least as old as modernity. Across Europe, this idea has been understood in different ways from the very beginning, according to each country's different cultural and political conditions. This stimulating study explores the complex history and multiple associations of the idea of 'Recognition' in Britain, France and Germany. Demonstrating the role of 'recognition' in the production of important political ideas, Axel Honneth explores how our (...) dependence on the recognition of others is sometimes viewed as the source of all modern, egalitarian morality, sometimes as a means for fostering socially beneficial behavior, and sometimes as a threat to 'true' individuality. By exploring this fundamental concept in our modern political and social self-understanding, Honneth thus offers an alternative view of the philosophical discourse of modernity. (shrink)

I argue that joint attention solves the “base problem” as it arises for Schiffer’s and Lewis’s theories of common knowledge. The problem is that an account is needed of the perceptual base of some forms of common knowledge that gets by without itself invoking common knowledge. The paper solves the problem by developing a theory of joint attention as consisting in the exercise of joint know-how involving particular and sometimes distal targets and arguing that certain joint perceivers can always have (...) a minimal form of propositional common knowledge about the location of these targets. On such a view, perceptual common knowledge is based on the experience of a process that is maintained by way of perceivers’ exercise of an object-involving form of joint know-how. Some reductive theories of collective intentionality require that agents’ intentions and subplans are common knowledge (or “out in the open”) between them. For these theories the base problem arises again. The enacted theory of joint attention can solve the problem. The argument is exactly parallel to the common knowledge case. The openness of joint agents’ intentions and meshing subplans is explained by appeal to their practical knowledge of how to maintain the process by way of which they pursue the collective intention. They can then make this knowledge explicit by linguistic communication. When they succeed in communicating knowledge of their meshing subplans as pursued in a joint action context, they necessarily have this knowledge in common. For theories of collective intentionality that include a common knowledge condition, the experience of participating in a perceptually constituted joint action provides the base that renders harmless the regress that otherwise threatens reductive analyses. (shrink)

On the basis of the finding that perfectibility for Pufendorf had a cultural as well as an anti-essentialist meaning, the perfectibility debate of the early German Enlightenment will be discussed. Central to this debate is the principle of “generative absence”, one that has heretofore received little attention, but proves to be constitutive of both Pufendorf′s and Pietism′s argumentation in opposition to mechanical materialism and religious orthodoxy. My account of this context will go over the positions of Christian Thomasius′s empirical eclecticism (...) and Christian Wolff′s rationalist metaphysics and end with Georg Forster′s and Immanuel Kant′s reception of the Rousseauian concept of perfectibility. In so doing, I will advance the thesis that, much more extensively than most have assumed, the German Enlightenment prepared German Idealism′s dialectical constitution of the modern concept of progress. (shrink)

I put forward an externalist theory of social understanding. On this view, psychological sense making takes place in environments that contain both agent and interpreter. The spatial structure of such environments is social, in the sense that its occupants locate its objects by an exercise in triangulation relative to each of their standpoints. This triangulation is achieved in intersubjective interaction and gives rise to a triadic model of the social mind. This model can then be used to make sense of (...) others’ observed actions. Its possession plays a vital role in the development of the capacity for false belief reasoning. The view offers an integrated account of the development of social cognition from primary intersubjectivity to level-2 perspective taking. It incorporates insights from interactionism and mindreading theories of social cognition and thus offers a way out of the stalemate between defenders of the two views. Because psychological sense making is perspectival, the frame problem does not arise for social reasoners: the perspective they bring to bear on the action that is to be interpreted constrains the information they can select to make sense of what others do. (shrink)

The aim of my contribution is to outline three points of overlap between Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and Durkheim’s sociology of morality in their respective views on social ethics: I will start by characterizing their shared conviction that the foundation of any form of morality cannot be found in some abstract principles but in actually existing, institutionalized normative rules that inform us about our role-obligations. In the second step I will show that Hegel and Durkheim also share the social-theoretical conviction (...) that we should differentiate modern societies into three different spheres all entailing different sorts of role-obligations; a part of this step will also specifically deal with the question of how both thinkers conceive of the problems raised by the modern, capitalist market economy. In the third part of my contribution I will consider the question of whether we find in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right a placeholder for what Durkheim refers to as a kind of cosmopolitan ethics, a standpoint beyond the role-obligations connected to membership in individual states. In my conclusion I will raise the question of the relevance of Hegel’s and Durkheim’s shared views on the basis for social ethics for contemporary discussions in political and social philosophy. (shrink)

Though to deny the geological impact of human force on nature is now essentially quasi-criminal, many theorists remain, nonetheless, unimpressed with what this “new era” has afforded us in terms of critical potential. This article is concerned with what Srinivas Aravamudan deems “the escapist philosophy of various dimension of the hypothesis concerning the Anthropocene.” Following Erik Swyngedouw's indictment of apocalyptic discourses' vital role in displacing social antagonisms and nurturing capitalism, this article argues that the new regimes of Anthropocenean consciousness have (...) been powerful in disavowing racial antagonisms. It discusses the ways in which Anthropocene ethics have foreclosed proper political framings by promoting a moral philosophy unequipped to face the racial histories of our current ecological predicament. It contends that the “political Anthropocene” will remain an impossibility until it is able to wrestle with the problem of black suffering. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant is often regarded as an exponent of the ‘individualist’ tradition in epistemology, according to which testimony is not a fundamental source of knowledge. The present paper argues that this view is far from accurate. Kant devotes ample space to discussions of testimony and, in his lectures on logic, arrives at a distinct and stable philosophical position regarding testimony. Important elements of this position consist in (a) acknowledging the ineliminability of testimony; (b) realizing that testimony can establish empirical knowledge (...) with certainty; (c) establishing a presumptive principle regarding the acceptance of testimony; (d) arguing for a symmetry between knowledge based on experience and knowledge based on testimony. Rejecting testimony as a fundamental source of knowledge merely on the basis that no theoretically necessary ground for its truth can be given, would, as Kant puts it, indicate ‘a lack of moral interest’. Such ‘incredulity’ would be a form of ‘logical egoism’: it demonstrates an unwillingness or inability to think oneself in the place of others, yet this we must do if we are to trust our own judgements. While Kant strongly endorses testimony as a source of empirical knowledge, he does, however, make one important restriction: ‘Propositions of reason’ (Vernunftwahrheiten), such as universal moral principles, may not be adopted on the basis of testimony. I argue that this distinction, between testimonial knowledge of empirical matters of fact and individual knowledge of propositions of reason, is an important element of Kant’s epistemology of testimony, as it explains how his strong endorsement of testimony as a source of knowledge can be squared with his equally strong demand for intellectual autonomy. Finally, I comment on the overall implications of this account for Kant’s discussion, elsewhere in his work, of the public nature of communication. (shrink)

In this article, we analyze both M. J. Wainwright and E. M. Reingold's view of the process dissociation measurement models presented by A. Buchner, E. Erdfelder, and B. Vaterrodt-Plunnecke and their suggestions on that topic. This analysis reveals a number of problems in Wainwright and Reingold's approach. Some of these problems are more subtle than others, but they are nevertheless consequential. Thus, researchers working with the process dissociation procedure should be aware of these problems.

The essays in this book weave together insights and arguments from such diverse traditions as German critical theory, French philosophy and social theory, and recent Anglo-American moral and political theory, offering a unique approach to the political and theoretical consequences of the modernism/postmodernism discussion. Through an analysis of central themes in classical Marxism and early critical theory, the author shows how recent work in a variety of traditions converges on the need to question familiar distinctions between material production and culture, (...) the public and the private, and the political and the social, and to reconsider the conceptions of agency and power that have informed them. (shrink)

Over the last decade, Axel Honneth has established himself as one of the leading social and political philosophers in the world today. Rooted in the tradition of critical theory, his writings have been central to the revitalization of critical theory and have become increasingly influential. His theory of recognition has gained worldwide attention and is seen by some as the principal counterpart to Habermass theory of discourse ethics. In this important new volume, Honneth pursues his path-breaking work on recognition (...) by exploring the moral experiences of disrespect that underpin the conduct of social and political critique. What we might conceive of as a striving for social recognition initially appears in a negative form as the experience of humiliation or disrespect. Honneth argues that disrespect constitutes the systematic key to a comprehensive theory of recognition that seeks to clarify the sense in which institutionalized patterns of social recognition generate justified demands on the way subjects treat each other. This new book by one of the leading social and political philosophers of our time will be of particular interest to students and scholars in social and political theory and philosophy. (shrink)