Although Axel Honneth's critical theory of recognition continues to resonate among political theorists, its relationship to the debate on political and moral cosmopolitanism remains unclear. The paper aims to fill this gap by defining a few guideposts to a ‘recognition-theoretical’ conception of the international. My argument is that Honneth's theory oscillates between a liberal-cosmopolitan model of the global spread of human rights and an alternative model that is closer to the anti-cosmopolitanism of the late Rawls. Both models reflect (...) certain assumptions about the moral standing of political communities or ‘peoples’, even if those assumptions remain implicit and unexamined. I begin by discussing the premise that recognition theory is all about ‘natural’ persons instead of ‘artificial’ persons such as states or peoples. I proceed by comparing Rawls's notion of a distinct logic of the international to Honneth's more ambiguous gestures toward an international political theory. Finally, I offer some thoughts on the place of peoples and sovereign statehood in the theory of recognition. (shrink)

The paper explores the philosophical anthropology and the moral grammar of recognition. It does so by examining how the formation of the self is informed by social recognition, the result of which can motivate individuals and groups to engage in struggles for recognition. To pursue this task, the discussion focuses on the insights of Honneth, who grounds his theory of recognition in the intersubjective relations between persons. The idea that recognition impacts the formation of (...) personal identity is regarded as susceptible to the charge of reducing recognition demands into demands for satisfying psychological needs. Contrary to this worry, the central claim of the paper is that such an identity-based understanding of recognition can still be salvaged. More precisely, this can be done by conceiving of demands of recognition as demands for inclusion into personhood through which the moral dimension of recognition struggles is properly understood. This article concludes that despite its potential ambiguities, the notion of personhood and its relation to recognition remains philosophically defensible. (shrink)

I argue that we get an account of social invisibility that best fits our practice of moral complaint if we reject orthodoxy and accept a quite different view of what it is to see another person as a person. On my view, seeing a person as a person is inseparable from caring about her in person-specific ways—hence from a disposition to a range of interpersonal emotional responses to her point of view. Thus, a person’s humanity is invisible to us, according (...) to this picture, when we are unreceptive to her power to influence our attitudes and will through her own attitudes and will. (shrink)

Gewirth has argued that rights are justified by their role in the “generic features” of action. Simply by virtue of being a purposive agent capable of voluntary action, one must accept the logic that all persons with such characteristics have certain moral rights. But the language of rights theories does not deal with the process by which rights are acknowledged. How do we go about recognizing those characteristics of human life that underlie the logic Gewirth claims is necessary? By (...) what process do I recognize, for example, your “right” to be told the truth? Acknowledging someone else's right involves two elements: a recognition of the content of the right and a recognition of the binding power of the right which is experienced by the agent as a sense of obligation. Analyzing the process by which these two factors are recognized and examining the foundation for that process will clarify some of the assumptions utilized in rights theories. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 29, Issue 3, Page 562-574, September 2021.

Ataxia is a kind of external characteristics when the human body has poor coordination and balance disorder, it often indicates diseases in certain parts of the body. Many internal factors may causing ataxia; currently, observed external characteristics, combined with Doctor’s personal clinical experience play main roles in diagnosing ataxia. In this situation, different kinds of diseases may be confused, leading to the delay in treatment and recovery. Modern high precision medical instruments would provide better accuracy but the economic cost is (...) a non-negligible factor. In this paper, novel non-contact sensing technique is used to detect and distinguish sensory ataxia and cerebellar ataxia. Firstly, Romberg’s test and gait analysis data are collected by the microwave sensing platform; then, after some preprocessing, some machine learning approaches have been applied to train the models. For Romberg’s test, time domain features are considered, the accuracy of all the three algorithms are higher than 96%; for gait detection, Principal Component Analysis is used for dimensionality reduction, and the accuracies of Back Propagation neural Network, Support Vector Machine, and Random Forest are 97.8, 98.9, and 91.1%, respectively. (shrink)

Witnessing the fate of the various definitions of truth, Donald Davidson has recently called the very drive to define truth a “folly.” Before him, Kant and Frege had given independent arguments why a general definition of truth is impossible. After a quick summary of their arguments, I recount several reasons that Gangeśa gave for not counting truth as a genuine natural universal. I argue that in spite of defining truth as a feature of personal and ephemeral awareness episodes, the Nyāya (...) ya realists such as Gangeśa could maintain that truth is independent of recognition of truth. In the course of my argument, I also show that Roy Perrett’s alleged proof against realism does not succeed. I conclude that realism does not need nonmental atemporal truth-bearers (propositions) which are eternally wholly true (or wholly false), and that knowledge-independence from truths and things can be shown without admitting the existence of unknowable things or truths. (shrink)

The multitude of facial expressions that humans are capable of is particularly potent in capturing attention. Facial expressions provide crucial information regarding a person's internal state and intentions and therefore the rapid recognition of these expressions can facilitate efficient social interaction. This article reviews evidence from a number of domains and argues that common personality traits—that are distributed normally in the general population—can have a profound influence on the processing of facial expressions. It synthesizes data from behavioral and neuroimaging (...) research to illustrate that these personality traits are an important determinant of emotion processing. The article focuses on the processing of facial emotional expressions paying particular attention to the influence of common personality traits in influencing emotion processing. A complete understanding of the cognitive and neural mechanisms involved in the processing of facial expressions, should take individual differences in personality traits into account. (shrink)

Axel Honneth draws a distinction between three types of recognition: (1) love, (2) respect and (3) social esteem. In his The Struggle for Recognition, the recognition of cultural particularity is situated in the third sphere. It will here be argued that the logic of recognition of cultural identity also demands a non-evaluative recognition, namely a respect for difference. Difference-respect is formal because it is a recognition of the value of a particular culture not "for (...) society" or "as such", but for the social group involved. Yet, although it is formal, difference-respect cannot be reduced to respect for personal autonomy and its preconditions, as Honneth wrongly suggests in Redistribution or Recognition? It is argued here that difference-respect is oriented towards another dimension of the person, namely social attachments. This kind of respect entails a separate register of formal recognition with a corresponding concept of personal identity and a parallel category of social disrespect. What morally justifies difference-respect from a recognition-theoretic approach is the practical relation-to-self that thus becomes possible, namely self-respect as a sense of belonging. The formal conception of the good life that Honneth articulates should include the insight that this sense of belonging is as much a necessary condition for the good life as is personal autonomy. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 29, Issue 3, Page 608-623, September 2021.

This is an attempt to describe and explain so-called timbre-based music as a special system of musicking, communication, and psychological and social usage, which along with its corresponding beliefs constitutes a viable alternative to “frequency-based” music. Unfortunately, the current scientific research into music has been skewed almost entirely in favor of the frequency-based music prevalent in the West. Subsequently, whenever samples of timbre-based music attract the attention of Western researchers, these are usually interpreted as “defective” implementations of frequency-based music. The (...) presence of discrete pitch is often regarded as the structural criterion that distinguishes music from non-music. We would like to present evidence to the contrary—in support of the existence of indigenous music systems based on the discretization and patterning of aspects of timbre, rather than pitch. This evidence comes mainly from extensive ethnographic research systematically conducted in eastern European and Asian parts of Russia from the 1890s. It involved the efforts of thousands of specialists and was coordinated by dozens of research institutions, and it has included not just ethnomusicology but linguistics, philology, organology, archaeology, anthropology, geography, and religious and social studies. Much of the data has not been translated into Western languages. Timbre-based tonal organization (TO) differs from that based on frequency in its personal orientation: musicking here occurs primarily for oneself and/or for close relatives/friends. Collective music-making is rare and exceptional. The foundation of timbre-based music seems to have vocal roots and rests on “personal song”—a system of personal identification through individualized patterns of rhythm, timbre, and pitch contour, utilized like a “human voice”—whose sound enables the recognition of a particular individual. The instrumental counterpart of the personalized singing tradition is the jaw harp tradition. The jaw harp is the principal musical instrument for at least 21 ethnicities in Russia, who occupy over half the territory of the country. The evolution of its TO forms the backbone for the development of timbre-based music art. Here, we provide the acoustic, socio-cultural, geographic, and chronological overview of timbre-based music. (shrink)

Solidarity has for a long time been referred to as the core value underpinning European health and welfare systems. But there has been debate in recent years about whether solidarity, with its alleged communitarian content, can be reconciled with the emphasis on individual freedom and personal autonomy. One may wonder whether there is still a place for solidarity, and whether the concept of justice should be embraced to analyse the moral issues regarding access to health care. In this article, I (...) will answer this question by analysing the normative foundations of the concept of justice, followed by a deeper examination of the concept of solidarity in continental philosophy. More specifically, I will compare the philosophical traditions rooted in Kant to approaches rooted in Hegel. In addition, I will present the work of Avishai Margalit on the decent society to criticize a predominantly liberal approach to access to health care. The importance of solidarity lies particularly in its emphasis on relational aspects and the role of recognition in care practices, which are usually ignored in liberal approaches to justice. However, the article will argue that solidarity is not an alternative to a rights-based concept of justice, but must be considered as a necessary complement to it. (shrink)

In this chapter I distinguish between a) recognition of persons, b) normative acknowledgement and c) institution-creating acceptance. All of these go beyond a fourth, merely descriptive sense of the word “recognition,” namely identification or re-identification of something as something. I distinguish four aspects of "taking someone as a person": R1 A Belief that the other is a person, and can engage in agency-regarding relations.R2 Moral Opinion that the choice whether and when to engage with persons is (...) ethically significant.R3 Willingness to refrain from wronging the other person, and to respond adequately to the normatively relevant features of the other (regardless of whether the willingness is ultimately selfish or not).R4 Unselfish Recognitive Attitudes explaining such willingness; such as genuine respect or genuine concern or solidarity. The second section asks: is mutual recognition between individuals necessary, sufficient, paradigmatic or desirable for group agency? I also ask: is interaction or communication necessary for mutual recognition? I also ask what kinds of groups emerge from mutual recognition as persons? The third section studies more briefly acknowledgement and normativity (Reasons, Values, and Principles). The fourth section discusses the nature of acceptance necessary for the existence of institutions. -/- . (shrink)

Solidarity has for a long time been referred to as the core value underpinning European health and welfare systems. But there has been debate in recent years about whether solidarity, with its alleged communitarian content, can be reconciled with the emphasis on individual freedom and personal autonomy. One may wonder whether there is still a place for solidarity, and whether the concept of justice should be embraced to analyse the moral issues regarding access to health care. In this article, I (...) will answer this question by analysing the normative foundations of the concept of justice, followed by a deeper examination of the concept of solidarity in continental philosophy. More specifically, I will compare the philosophical traditions rooted in Kant to approaches rooted in Hegel. In addition, I will present the work of Avishai Margalit on the decent society to criticize a predominantly liberal approach to access to health care. The importance of solidarity lies particularly in its emphasis on relational aspects and the role of recognition in care practices, which are usually ignored in liberal approaches to justice. However, the article will argue that solidarity is not an alternative to a rights-based concept of justice, but must be considered as a necessary complement to it. (shrink)

ABSTRACT People who are paid to provide basic care for others are frequently undervalued, exploited and expected to reach often unrealistic standards of care. I argue that appropriate social recognition, support and fair pay for people who provide care for those who are disabled, frail and aged, or suffering ill health that impedes their capacity to negotiate daily activities without support, depends on a reconsideration of the paradigm of the citizen or and moral agent. I argue that by drawing (...) on the ideas of human vulnerability and dependency as central to our personhood, a more realistic conception of selves, citizens and persons can be developed that better recognises the inevitability of human dependency and the social value of care work. I also indicate the significance of this vulnerability‐focussed view for ethical evaluation of the emotional aspects of care relationships. (shrink)

In this introductory paper, I discuss the second-personal approach to ethics and the theory of recognition as two accounts of the fundamental sociality of the human form of life. The first section delineates the deep affinities between the two approaches. They both put a reciprocal social constellation front and center from which they derive the fundamental norms of moral and social life and a social conception of freedom. The second section discusses three points of contrast between the two approaches: (...) The accounts differ in that the second-personal approach opts for a narrower conception of recognition focusing on mutual moral accountability, whereas recognition theory suggests a broader conception including relations of love, respect, and esteem. Secondly, the accounts differ as to how they conceive of the interrelation of the I-thou and the I-We relationship. Finally, they differ with regard to the way they think of struggles for recognition. Whereas the second-personal approach suggests that we can understand struggles on the basis of a transcendental infrastructure of second-personal address, the theory of recognition considers norms of recognition as themselves constituted by dialectical social struggles. The paper closes with a reflection on the ways in which both approaches can help us understand the social vulnerability of the human form of life. (shrink)

The vast majority of philosophers of personal identity since John Locke have been convinced that the persistence of persons is not grounded in bodily continuity. Why? As numerous ‘textbooks’ on personal identity attest, their conviction rests, to a large extent, on an objection to the bodily approach, which concerns episodic memory. The objection invites us to a thought experiment in which we meet a person who experientially remembers events from the past of a person with a different body. The (...) nature of such first-personal memory-links is viewed as strongly suggesting that the rememberer is identical with the remembered, and hence, given the possibility of such a case, as suggesting that a person can transgress its bodily limits. The memory objection is as influential as it gets in the metaphysics of personal identity. Textbooks often portray it as the starting point of the contemporary debate about personal identity. And it has been widely perceived as a success. As everyone who has taught an introductory course on personal identity knows, the recognition of episodic-memory links in body-switching cases has the power to turn any group of novice students against bodily criteria of personal identity. In this essay, I shall specify and undermine the memory objection. I shall attempt to establish two theses. The first thesis is that the memory objection is only viable if construed as resting on the view that episodic memory contains a sense of personal identity, which teaches us about the reality of personal identity. The second thesis is that there is no such sense of personal identity, that episodic memory teaches us nothing at all about personal identity. (shrink)

In this article I argue that it does not make sense – either empirically or normatively – to speak of ‘authentic’ cultures. All we need when talking about cultures is a relatively weak concept that still carries enough normative weight to function as the meaningful background of a person’s identity, autonomy and good life. Discussing the authentic culture, I refer to the debates around the German Leitkultur as well as the Dutch populist movement as examples. However, I am interested not (...) only in the concept of the authenticity of a culture but also in the concept of the authenticity of persons: if an ‘authentic culture’ is not feasible, does this have repercussions on the concept of the autonomy and authenticity of persons? In suggesting that this might be the case, I argue that persons can be autonomous without always being fully authentic. (shrink)

Fast and accurate recognition of teammates is crucial in contexts as varied as fast-moving sports, the military, and law enforcement engagements; misrecognition can result in lost scoring opportunities in sport or friendly fire in combat contexts. Initial studies on teammate recognition in sport suggests that athletes are adept at this perceptual ability but still susceptible to errors. The purpose of the current proof-of-concept study was to explore the trainability of teammate recognition from very brief exposure to vision (...) of the whole-body form and motion of a previously unknown individual. Participants were divided into three groups: a 4-week training group who were also the actors for the test and training footage, a 2-week training group, and a no-training group. Findings revealed significant differences between the training groups and their improvement from the pre-to post-test on Response Accuracy and Movement Time. The current study found the best performance in the 4-week Training group. The biggest improvement was found in the 2-week training group, whilst no significant improvement was made in the Control group. These results suggest that training was effective, but also indicate that having initially performed the movements as actors may have led to improvements in baseline testing and ultimately the best results, thus physical performance of skills combined with video-based training may reduce the amount of time needed to improve teammate identification. (shrink)

Australia experienced the most devastating bush-fire season in recorded history, and right after that the world economy stalled due to a global virus outbreak the severity of which has no modern precedent. Crises tend up speed paradigm shifts, and the one begun in 2020 certainly will. In this paper I will contribute to a shift that has been gathering momentum for some time now, the need for which the current crisis has made all too obvious. This is a shift in (...) Kant and Hegel influenced philosophy from thinking of ‘spirit’ (Geist) as an abstract realm or dimension insulated from nature—frictionlessly spinning without touching it, or at least with a tendency to do this as essential to it—to thinking of spirit as a life-form, situated in nature at large, just as all life is. I will work on this theme by elaborating on three broadly Hegelian ideas. Firstly, that the subjective and objective aspects of ‘spirit’, that is to say the psychological and social structures distinctive of persons and their life, are co-constitutive elements of a whole. This whole is the human life-form, or as I call it more technically ‘the life-form of persons’. Secondly, that recognition (Anerkennung) as self-transcendence and inclusion of otherness is ontologically constitutive of both, and key to their internal interrelations. Thirdly, that though freedom as collective autonomy is distinctive of this life-form, thought on the model of abstraction from necessarily determining otherness it is theoretically mistaken and put in practice pathological of the life-form in a literal sense of ‘pathology’. (shrink)

Solidarity has for a long time been referred to as the core value underpinning European health and welfare systems. But there has been debate in recent years about whether solidarity, with its alleged communitarian content, can be reconciled with the emphasis on individual freedom and personal autonomy. One may wonder whether there is still a place for solidarity, and whether the concept of justice should be embraced to analyse the moral issues regarding access to health care. In this article, I (...) will answer this question by analysing the normative foundations of the concept of justice, followed by a deeper examination of the concept of solidarity in continental philosophy. More specifically, I will compare the philosophical traditions rooted in Kant (with emphasis on autonomy and individual rights) to approaches rooted in Hegel (with emphasis on individual relations of recognition). In addition, I will present the work of Avishai Margalit on the decent society to criticize a predominantly liberal approach to access to health care. The importance of solidarity lies particularly in its emphasis on relational aspects and the role of recognition in care practices, which are usually ignored in liberal approaches to justice. However, the article will argue that solidarity is not an alternative to a rights-based concept of justice, but must be considered as a necessary complement to it. (shrink)

This research project seeks to discover whether certain characteristics of a moral issue facilitate individuals’ abilities to detect violators of a conditional rule. In business, conditional rules are often framed in terms of a social contract between employer and employee. Of significant concern to business ethicists is the fact that these social contracts are frequently breached. Some researchers in the field of evolutionary psychology argue that there is a biological basis to social contract formation and dissolution in business. However, although (...) it is inescapable that biological forces shaped a fixed neural structure that guides and limits humans’ abilities, we argue that characteristics of the situation in which the person finds himself or herself moderate the activation of these neural circuits in ordinary business social contract situations. Specifically, the moral intensity associated with the social contract conditional rule is likely to influence peoples’ abilities to detect violators of the rule. This study utilizes adapted versions of the Wason selection task and manipulates the issue-contingent moral intensity characteristics of magnitude of consequences, proximity, and social consensus to assess if moral intensity facilitates detection of rule violators. Results from this empirical study indicate no relationship between moral intensity characteristics and issue recognition but do provide insights into the evolutionary psychology approach. (shrink)

Kant wants to show that freedom is possible in the face of natural necessity. Transcendental idealism is his solution, which locates freedom outside of nature. I accept that this makes freedom possible, but object that it precludes the recognition of other rational agents. In making this case, I trace some of the history of Kant’s thoughts on freedom. In several of his earlier works, he argues that we are aware of our own activity. He later abandons this approach, as (...) he worries that any awareness of our activity involves access to the noumenal, and thereby conflicts with the epistemic limits of transcendental idealism. In its place, from the second Critique onwards, Kant argues that we are conscious of the moral law, which tells me that I ought to do something, thus revealing that I can. This is the only proof of freedom consistent with transcendental idealism, but I argue that such an exclusively first-personal approach precludes the recognition of other rational agents. I conclu.. (shrink)

The present paper critically reconstructs Honneth’s recognition-theoretical conception of justice modelled on the formation of intact personal identity or self-realization. It looks into the status of using psychological evidence as a basis for a theory of justice, and whether or not such an approach of justice fails the publicity criterion.The claim is that although Honneth’s thesis is potentially susceptible to the charge of psychologization of injustice as Fraser alleges, the idea that recognition impacts on the formation or malformation (...) of personal identity should not be denied a critical role in a theory of justice. Doing so prevents a faceless or subject-less discourse of injustice.The paper also argues that recognitive justice founded on very specific moral-psychological assumptions passes the test of publicity. The challenge is how to establish the necessary conditions that enable victims of misrecognition to have a language and name their experience of suffering publicly. (shrink)

The philosophical concept of anxiety, which is usually associated with Kierkegaard and Heidegger's existential philosophy, seems to be an underestimated notion in Paul Ricoeur's phenomenological hermeneutics, while its role is important - anxiety appears to serve as the grounding for hope in his hermeneutics of self. The article aims to show how the anxiety is explained in Ricoeur's philosophy through attention and recognition, and how the anxiety is reflected in the narrative forms, or descriptions of vivencia. These descriptions may (...) be seen as the verbal explanation of the so-called affective niche or affective scaffolding, which is a form of cultural adaptation, attempting to interpret and comprehend one's state of mind and way of the perception of the world as such in the given moment. The research and further dialogue based on these narrations may become an important source to recover from anxiety disorder, by discovering its existential meaning and, at the same time, accepting personal responsibility for it. Ricoeur's phenomenological hermeneutics made an important theoretical contribution in understanding the essential aspects of anxiety and hope; but it also developed prolific methods of interpretation, that could be practically applied in health care and psychotherapy; these can be shown on the example of the psychotherapeutic method of the usage of so-called 'anxiety protocols', which aim to arrange the hermeneutical co-research to help patient/client to recognize and overcome its anxiety disorders. (shrink)

The work of T.H. Green provides a justificatory argument for human rights which is a powerful alternative to the still prevailing account of rights, which sees them as somehow tied to human nature and argues that humans have rights qua humans, and independent of society. Green's account of rights turns on the process of social recognition. However, the precise mechanism for recognition is left slightly ambiguous. This paper argues that recognition in Green can be usefully divided into (...) two stages, 'recognition of persons' and 'recognition of rights'. It will be argued that the two are separate and that the first is a necessary prerequisite for the second. Recognition of persons is the recognition of moral action based on the use of language; recognition of rights occurs in societies of persons and is the dialogical recognition of certain rights claims. (shrink)

This article suggests first that the concept of interpersonal recognition be understood in a multidimensional (as opposed to one-dimensional), practical (as opposed to symbolic), and strict (as opposed to broad) way. Second, it is argued that due recognition be seen as a reason-governed response to evaluative features, rather than all normativity and reasons being seen as generated by recognition. This can be called a response-model, or, more precisely, a value-based model of due recognition. A further suggestion (...) is that there is a systematic basis for distinguishing three dimensions of recognition, depending on whether recognition is given to someone qua a person, qua a certain kind of person, or qua a certain person. Finally, it is argued that recognition is a necessary condition of personhood, but whether it is of direct or indirect relevance depends on our theories of personhood (social vs. capacity-theory) and practical identity (dialogical definition model vs. feature-model). Despite the apparent opposition, it is shown that interpersonal recognition is both a response to value and a precondition of personhood. (shrink)

It is commonly held that since non-human animals are not persons, they are not objects of due regard and care in the same way that humans are. But how might we begin to think about recognizing animals as persons? This chapter attempts to reconstruct an answer by drawing on the resources of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra (the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali, 200-400 CE). Animals are persons from the perspective of this tradition, and so animals are proper objects of due (...) regard and care. According to classical Yoga philosophy, however, this form of recognition is not easy to attain. The discerning insight that allows one to “see” the personhood of other living beings requires a discipline of attention, one that constitutes the practice of yoga itself. (shrink)

The emergence of personal assistants in the form of smart speakers has begun to significantly alter people’s everyday experiences with technology. The rate at which household Intelligent Personal Assistants such as Amazon’s Echo and Google Home emerged in household spaces has been rapid. They have begun to move human–computer interaction from text-based to voice-activated input, offering a multiplicity of features through speech. The supporting infrastructure connects with artificial intelligence and the internet of things, allowing digital interfaces with domestic appliances, lighting (...) systems, thermostats, media devices and more. Yet this also constitutes a significant new production of situated and sensitive data. This study focuses on how users negotiate and make choices about household Intelligent Personal Assistant use in connection with their data. This study is based on empirical research in Europe with early adopters in Germany and potential users in the Netherlands. This examination of users’ early stage technology acceptance considerations highlights particular practices and choices of users to either preserve their privacy or determine what is acceptable use for their data. Drawing on a simplified version of Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology 2, a quantitative model for technology acceptance, we demonstrate how acceptance of a household Intelligent Personal Assistants does not imply access to all household data, how users see usefulness in relation to a proliferation of devices, and note the recognition by users regarding the efforts needed for full use and acceptance. The study highlights the complexity of data production at a household level and how these devices produce myopic views of users for platforms. (shrink)

To introduce the issue of the tracking and identification of human agents, I examine the ability of an agent to track a human person and distinguish this target from other individuals: The ability to perform person identification. First, I discuss influential mechanistic models of the perceptual recognition of human faces and people. Such models propose detailed hypotheses about the parts and activities of the mental mechanisms that control the perceptual recognition of persons. However, models based on perceptual (...) recognition are incomplete theories of person identification because they do not explain several identification behaviors that are fundamental to human social interactions. Furthermore, recognition-based models tend to appeal to the controversial concept of the “identity” of a person without explaining what determines personal identity and persistence. To overcome these limitations, I propose to integrate the face-recognition program into a broader causal-historical theory of identification. The causal-historical theory of identification complements models focused on perceptual recognition because it can account for the types of non-perceptual identification overlooked by the face-recognition program. Moreover, it can decompose the identification behaviors into tracking processes that succeed or fail to be sensitive to causal characteristics of a target. I illustrate these advantages with a discussion of the difference between the tracking of a person understood as either a causally continuous biological organism or a psychologically continuous mind. Finally, I argue that the causal-historical theory provides a theoretical framework for investigating the tracking of relations between a target and its contextual and historical attributes, such as a target's possessions. (shrink)

Husserl focused perhaps more than any other philosopher on the relationship between philosophy and psychology. This problem was important to him because the European project of universal science must include sciences of consciousness that address questions of meaning, value and purpose so crucial for humanity. This paper provides a sketch of the later Husserl’s thinking on this issue in order to clarify the relationships among transcendental philosophy as the mother of the sciences, psychology as the foundational mental science, and the (...) various regional sciences of persons. Radicalizing and extending the transcendental tradition to free philosophy from naturalism, Husserl developed methods and fundamental concepts for understanding consciousness in its distinctive world constituting function. In parallel fashion, Husserl traced the historical failures of psychology to its naturalistic philosophy, from which he liberated the discipline by means of phenomenological reflections on the intentional property of its subject matter. This pure focus on mental processes resulted in the clarification of the transcendental phenomenological foundation of psychology as well as a recognition of the paradoxical manner in which psychological processes are both world constituting and mundanely present in the lives of persons. The apperceptive synthesis of transcendental consciousness and mundane embodiment in the identification of the person is proposed as essential for a non-naturalistic, intentional psychology, which provides appropriate concepts and the method of intentional analysis for such sciences of persons as sociology, history, literary studies, and religious studies. The problems, means, and inevitable inadequacies of communicating transcendental insights in language are discussed. Analysis of the complexity of living persons discloses their transcendental dimension in the manifolds their mundane activities and in their products, including use, cultural, and art objects as well as social institutions. Attention is drawn to resources in phenomenology beyond Husserl and in the genuine psychological intuitions of non-phenomenologists for generating non-naturalistic, phenomenologically grounded person sciences. (shrink)

The concept of recognition has been in the center of intensive interest and debate for some time in social and political philosophy, as well as in Hegel-scholarship. The first part of the article clarifies conceptually what recognition in the relevant sense arguably is. The second part explores one possible route for arguing that the 'recognitive attitudes' of respect and love have a necessary role in the coming about of the psychological capacities distinctive of persons. More exactly, it (...) explores the possibility that they are necessary in the kind of intersubjective relationship in which normal human infants engage in the pre-linguistic communicative practice of pointing things to others, as described by Michael Tomasello. If an incapacity to participate in the already Gricean communicative practices of pointing makes it also impossible for the infant to learn symbolic communication, and if without the immediately intrinsically motivating other-regarding attitudes of recognition communicative pointing does not get off the ground, then the capacity for recognition may be a decisive difference between humans and their closest non-human relatives. That is, it may be why only human infants, but no other animals, are capable of embarking on a developmental journey that normally leads to full-fledged psychological personhood. If this is so, then the concept of recognition, today mostly discussed in social and political philosophy and Hegel-studies, could turn out to be a very useful tool in cognitive scientific work interested in specifically human forms of social intentionality, cognition, volition and so forth. (shrink)

Most people accept that if they can save someone from death at very little cost to themselves, they must do so; call this the ‘duty of easy rescue.’ At least for many such people, an instance of this duty is to allow their vital organs to be used for transplantation. Accordingly, ‘opt-out’ organ procurement policies, based on a powerfully motivated responsibility to render costless or very low-cost lifesaving aid, would seem presumptively permissible. Counterarguments abound. Here I consider, in particular, objections (...) that assign a moral distinctiveness to the physical boundaries of our bodies and that concern autonomy and trust. These objections are singled out as they seem particularly pertinent to the stress I place on a distinctive benefit of the particular policy I defend. An opt-out system, resting not on the authority of ‘presumed consent’ but on the recognition of a duty to one another, has the prospect of prompting people to understand more richly the ways in which they are both physically embodied and communally embedded. (shrink)

Recognition plays a central role in international affairs and in moral and political theory. Hegel noted the connections between these two contexts, and this article explores Hegel's approach with reference to the work of two political philosophers (Honneth and Rawls) and debates in international law. The conclusion is that while recognition has a constitutive role in international affairs, it has a different role in moral and political theory: morality is the evaluative recognition of the significance of individual (...) autonomy. (shrink)

The central fact about the problem of personal identity is that it is a problem posed by an apparent dichotomy: the dichotomy between the objective, third-person viewpoint on the one hand and the subjective perspective provided by the first-person viewpoint on the other. Everyone understands that the mind/body problem is precisely the problem of what to do about another apparent dichotomy, the duality comprising states of consciousness on the one hand and physical states of the body on the other. By (...) contrast, contemporary discussions of the problem of personal identity generally display little or no recognition of the divide which to my mind is at the heart of the problem. As a consequence, there has been a relentlessly third-personal approach to the issue, and the consequent proposal of solutions which stand no chance at all of working. I think the idea that the problem is to be clarified by an appeal to the idea of a human being is the latest manifestation of this mistaken approach. I am thinking in particular of the claim that what ought to govern our thinking on this issue is the fact that human beings constitute a natural kind, and that standard members of this kind can be said to have some sort of essence. Related to this is the idea that ‘person’, while not itself a natural kind term, is not a notion which can be framed in entire independence of this natural kind. (shrink)

Any complete theory of “what we owe to each other” must be able to adequately accommodate directed or bipolar obligations, that is, those obligations that are owed to a particular individual and in virtue of which another individual stands to be wronged. Bipolar obligations receive their moral importance from their intimate connection to a particular form of recognition respect that we owe to each other: respect of another as a source of valid claims to whom in particular we owe (...) certain treatment and, at the very least, an apology if we fail to accord that treatment. While some of the most prominent accounts of interpersonal morality fail to adequately accommodate bipolar obligations, I here investigate a recent proposal that explicitly seeks to improve on these accounts—Stephen Darwall’s second-personal theory of morality. Ultimately, I object to Darwall’s theory on the grounds that his second-personal theory normatively ties bipolar obligations too closely to non-directed moral obligations or those that we are under, period. The problem for Darwall’s account is that any obligations that at first appear to be bipolar and owed to someone in particular turn out to be instances of non-directed moral obligations period that have their normative source in the representative authority of the moral community. Adequately accommodating bipolar obligations requires taking seriously a novel second-personal approach, according to which we locate the normative sources of our interpersonal obligations in the claims and demands particular persons and deliberate from what I call the pairwise or bipolar standpoint. (shrink)

In this article, we give an overview over both past and present as well as possible future debates around recognition in and in connection with feminist thought. In principle, recognition can involve persons, collectives, and institutions, but here we are primarily concerned with the recognition of persons by other persons. In the first section, we start with a discussion of care as a form of recognition and the recognition of care work. In (...) the second section, we turn to critiques of recognition in feminist thought. In the third section, we outline a new field of research that should be of interest to both feminist and recognition theorists, namely our credibility economy. Since there is a separate article on Judith Butler and queer feminism in this handbook, we exclude their contributions from our discussion here. (shrink)

Psychiatric diagnosis serves many functions in the struggle for recognition, such as access to public mental health systems and legal compensation, but it is not necessarily well-equipped for the task of self-understanding and reconfiguration of personal values in the recovery process – and the likelihood of optimal outcome that is geared to the individual person's quality of life. Call this the transformative dimension of recognition in the complex journey from diagnosis to therapeutic empathy in the doctor–patient relationship.Patients who (...) are diagnosed with a serious and enduring mental health condition often find it difficult to make sense of themselves in relation to their... (shrink)

The intuitive core of moral individualism is the belief in the supreme moral importance of the individual. The task of the advocate of moral individualism is to provide a coherent explication of what is encompassed within this moral importance—an explication which extends and rationally reinforces the original intuitive core. My view is that there are two distinct, albeit fundamentally complementary, facets within a well-articulated doctrine of moral individualism. These two facets correspond to the common division of ethical theory into the (...) theory of the good and the theory of the right. At the base of moral individualism’s theory of the good is the claim that value is always agent-relative. It is always individuated; it is always value-for this or that particular individual. For each agent, value-for that agent is his ultimate good. Thus, there are as many ultimate goods as there are persons; and what each agent, in the final analysis, has reason to bring about is the fullest or most adequate realization of value-for that agent. The doctrine of the agent-relativity of value privatizes the good. There is, according to this view, no unitary, shared, public, agent-neutral good which constitutes the ultimate good. The good of each individual stands on its own as a separate ultimate good. The good of each can be an ultimate good in its own right, and not merely a component within a single, all-encompassing, public, agent-neutral good, precisely because the good of any given agent is the good-for that particular agent. (shrink)

Judith Butler is often referred to as a thinker who disputes the positive view of recognition shared by many social and political philosophers today and advances a more "ambivalent" account of recognition. While I agree with this general characterization of Butler’s account, I think that it is not yet adequately understood what precisely makes recognition ambivalent for Butler. Usually, Butler is read as providing an ethical critique of recognition. According to this reading, Butler believes that it (...) is important for persons to be recognized but that recognition is at the same time experienced as oppressive and hence is ethically ambivalent. Against this reading, I advance the view that Butler does not develop an ethical critique but rather an ideology critique of recognition. What makes recognition ambivalent for Butler is, as I will argue, that it can serve social functions behind the backs of the participants and be implicated in the reproduction of problematic social orders. I elaborate this argument by drawing on Butler’s analyses of the violent exclusion of genders that are not unambiguously male or female from the social realm, which, on my reading, is directly connected to the recognition of persons as male or female in everyday life. (shrink)

Starting from the observation that there is a gap between knowledge of the environmental sciences and practical engagement, for example, in climate change or biodiversity loss, this article explores one possible explanation for this situation—namely, the process of objectification inherent in science. It then proposes to remedy the situation by defending the idea of a ‘first-person ecology’. This term refers to a field of research and practice that looks at the relationship between humans and nature from the point of view (...) of the embodied and situated nature of lived experience. The lived experience of nature at the heart of a first-person ecology is first studied from an epistemic perspective using the concept of recognition, inspired by the Frankfurt School philosopher and sociologist Axel Honneth. It is then approached from a phenomenological perspective, using the emerging field of ecospirituality to describe the characteristics of this experience. (shrink)

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) is being used to argue for wider recognition of the legal capacity of people with mental disabilities. This raises a question about the implications of the Convention for attributions of criminal responsibility. The present paper works towards an answer by analysing the relationship between legal capacity in relation to personal decisions and criminal acts. Its central argument is that because moral and political considerations play an essential (...) role in setting the relevant standards, legal capacity in the context of personal decisions and criminal acts should not be thought of as two sides of the same coin. The implications of particular moral or political norms are likely to be different in these two legal contexts, and this may justify asymmetries in the relevant standards for legal capacity. However, the analysis highlights a fundamental question about how much weight moral or political considerations should be given in setting these standards, and this is used to frame a challenge to those calling for significantly wider recognition of the legal capacity of people with mental disabilities on the basis of the Convention. (shrink)

In approximately the last 20 years, the self-protection capacity of many American Indian tribes has significantly increased to include the review of research requests by a tribally based IRB. While these tribal IRBs are trained using a curriculum derived from the Belmont Report, there is need to recognize the cultural specificity of the Belmont Report and its potential for conflict or inappropriateness when applied to populations with deep differences in cultural constructs compared to the majority population. However, recognition of (...) the sometimes paradigmatically different culture of American Indian tribes compared to the U.S. culture at large seldom occurs. Moreover, significant and subtle factors of researchers' professional, organizational, and personal cultures that relate to the research enterprise are essentially never addressed by themselves or the tribal IRB. Nonetheless, tribal IRBs continue and serve as a procedural guide for investigators intending to conduct respectful research with American Indian populations. (shrink)

Recognition of legal personhood in contemporary international and domestic law is a matter of signs. Those signs identify the existence of the legal person: human animals, corporations and states. They also identify facets of that personhood that situate the signified entities within webs of rights and responsibilities. Entities that are not legal persons lack agency and are thus invisible. They may be acted on but, absent the personhood that is communicated through a range of indicia and shapes both (...) legal and popular understanding of powers and obligations, they lack standing in judicial fora. They are signified as entities that are the subjects of action by legal persons, for example exploitation through rights regarding natural resources or commodification of ‘wild’, companion and other non-human animals. They are also signified as members of a diverse class of non-persons such as ‘nature’ and ‘the environment’. This article explores the consequences of law’s signification of personhood and the natural world before asking whether we both should and could recognise domains such as specific rivers, forests or even Antarctica as a type of legal person. Recognition might acknowledge the salience of nature in the ontologies of colonised First Peoples. It might also underpin a global response to climate change as the existential crisis of the Anthropocene. In understanding law as a matter of signifiers and syntaxes the article cautions that ostensible recognition of some domains as persons has been aspirational rather than substantive, with observers misreading the sign as necessarily transforming power relationships. The article also cautions that personhood for nature or particular domains may be contrary to the self-determination of colonised First Peoples. (shrink)

There has been a debate, popularized by Ifenyi Menkiti and Kwame Gyekye, regarding philosophical understandings of the human person in Africa. The debate revolves around the saying "So and so is not a person." Gyekye convincingly argues that the saying is a manner of speech, intended to be a moral evaluation of a person's actions. Menkiti, however, goes further and suggests that many of the African conceptions of a person are based on a dynamic understanding of the self. Similar findings (...) were made of Maasai concepts of personhood in the study done by Patrick Dikirr. The "potential self" is not given but is always being constructed by one's deeds and one's relations. While it is certainly a romanticization to imagine Africans as harmoniously communal in contrast to the "isolated individuals" who supposedly inhabit the West, nevertheless, for a Maasai one gains self-identity and status to a large extent through one's relations to other persons and to animals. However, the paper illustrates the many ways in which Maasais still emphasize individual achievement and thought, debunking notions of African "group-think" and conformity. The paper then draws on Axel Honneth's insights into "recognition" to note the extent to which Maasai recognition of each other prevents the community's capitulation to the value system of other ethnic groups in Kenya or Western influence. (shrink)

Facial recognition is a promising emerging technology, but it sometimes fails to recognize people adequately. Facial recognition applications have been found to regularly misidentify certain demographics, misinterpret traits like gender, age, beliefs, or emotions, and categorize individuals in ways that do not resonate with their own sense of identity. In this paper, I argue that in each of these cases, the person who has their face analyzed is not merely misidentified or misunderstood, but misrecognized in an ethically relevant (...) sense. Following Charles Taylor’s The Politics of Recognition (1992) and Axel Honneth’s The Struggle for Recognition (1996), I describe how those subjected to facial recognition systems on the one hand struggle to obtain adequate recognition on a universal level, as being equally important to others, and lack recognition for their individual uniqueness, on the other hand. These forms of misrecognition are of ethical concern, because they can harm a person’s identity formation. So, ironically, facial recognition technology can give rise to a struggle for recognition. (shrink)