Decolonising Philosophy Curriculum resources by Paul Giladi
Co-creator team:
Aanya Aggarwal BSc PPE
Dr Paul Giladi
Dr Sîan Hawthorne
Dr Elvis Ima... more Co-creator team:
Aanya Aggarwal BSc PPE
Dr Paul Giladi
Dr Sîan Hawthorne
Dr Elvis Imafidon
Prof. Richard E. King
Danae Miserocchi, BA Anthropology and World Philosophies
Lizi Nzuki, BA History and International Relations
Xiangyi Qian, BSc PPE
Co-creator team:
Aanya Aggarwal BSc PPE
Dr Paul Giladi
Dr Sîan Hawthorne
Dr Elvis Ima... more Co-creator team:
Aanya Aggarwal BSc PPE
Dr Paul Giladi
Dr Sîan Hawthorne
Dr Elvis Imafidon
Prof. Richard E. King
Danae Miserocchi, BA Anthropology and World Philosophies
Lizi Nzuki, BA History and International Relations
Xiangyi Qian, BSc PPE
Monographs by Paul Giladi
Edited Volumes by Paul Giladi
This volume includes original essays that examine the underexplored relationship between recognit... more This volume includes original essays that examine the underexplored relationship between recognition theory and key developments in critical social epistemology. Its aims are to explore how far certain kinds of epistemic injustice, epistemic oppression, and types of ignorance can be understood as distorted varieties of recognition, and to determine whether contemporary work on epistemic injustice and critical social epistemology more generally has significant continuities with theories of recognition in the Frankfurt School tradition. Part I of the book focuses on bringing recognition theory and critical social epistemology into direct conversation. Part II is devoted to analysing a range of case studies that are evocative of contemporary social struggles.
The essays in this volume propose answers to a number of thought-provoking questions at the intersection of these two robust philosophical subfields, such as: How well can different types of epistemic injustice be understood as types of recognition abuses? How useful is it to approach different forms of social oppression as recognition injustices and/or as involving epistemic injustice? What limitations do we discover in either or both recognition theory and the ever-expanding literature on epistemic injustice when we put them into conversation with each other? How does the conjunction of these two accounts bear on specific domains, such as questions of silencing?
'Epistemic Injustice and the Philosophy of Recognition' promises to herald new directions for future research that will appeal to scholars and students working in critical social epistemology, social and political theory, Continental philosophy, and a wide range of critical social theories.
This collection of original essays discusses the relationship between Hegel and the Frankfurt Sch... more This collection of original essays discusses the relationship between Hegel and the Frankfurt School Critical Theory tradition. The book’s aim is to take stock of this fascinating, complex, and complicated relationship. The volume is divided into five parts: Part I focuses on dialectics and antagonisms. Part II is concerned with ethical life and intersubjectivity. Part III is devoted to the logico-metaphysical discourse surrounding emancipation. Part IV analyses social freedom in relation to emancipation. Part V discusses classical and contemporary political philosophy in relation to Hegel and the Frankfurt School, as well as radical-democratic models and the outline and functions of economic institutions.
This volume offers critical responses to philosophical naturalism from the perspectives of four d... more This volume offers critical responses to philosophical naturalism from the perspectives of four different yet fundamentally interconnected philosophical traditions: Kantian idealism, Hegelian idealism, British idealism, and American pragmatism. In bringing these rich perspectives into conversation with each other, the book illuminates the distinctive set of metaphilosophical assumptions underpinning each tradition’s conception of the relationship between the human and natural sciences. The individual essays investigate the affinities and the divergences between Kant, Hegel, Collingwood, and the American pragmatists in their responses to philosophical naturalism. The ultimate aim of Responses to Naturalism is to help us understand how human beings can be committed to the idea of scientific progress without renouncing their humanistic explanations of the world. It will appeal to scholars interested in the role idealist and pragmatist perspectives play in contemporary debates about naturalism.
Journal Articles by Paul Giladi
(Forthcoming) Journal of Social Philosophy, 2026
In this paper, I focus on applying Kristie Dotson’s 2011 critical social epistemological framewor... more In this paper, I focus on applying Kristie Dotson’s 2011 critical social epistemological framework to the topic of women’s sexual arousal. My paper is divided into three parts. In §I, I provide a brief history of the DSM sexological discourse about sexual arousal, and conclude by proposing that there is a mutually sustaining relationship between mainstream media, androcentric pornography, and the DSM-IV vocabulary, insofar as each of these feeds myths about arousal to each other. The mutually sustaining relationship between mainstream media, androcentric pornography, and the DSM-IV vocabulary (re)produces longstanding oppressive social norms and concomitant cultures of erotic expectation in western heteropatriarchal contexts. In §2, I contend that the epistemic harms of these erotically oppressive lifeworlds involve testimonial smothering as well as testimonial quieting. In §3, I conclude the paper with two critical responses to Richard Balon and Anita Clayton’s objection to DSM-5’s radical changes to conceptualising issues with women’s sexual arousal.
(Forthcoming) Philosophy & Social Criticism
My aim in this paper is to argue, contra Axel Honneth, that 'the summons' (Aufforderung), the cen... more My aim in this paper is to argue, contra Axel Honneth, that 'the summons' (Aufforderung), the central pillar of Fichte's transcendentalist account of recognition, is best made sense of not as an 'invitation', but rather as a second-personal demand, whose illocutionary content draws attention to the demandingness of responsibilities towards vulnerable agents. Because of this, the summons has good explanatory force in terms of disclosing the phenomenological dynamics of psychosocially and politically significant reactive attitudes. Under my reading, then, Fichte's position, contra Honneth's 'negative' treatment of it, is anything but an empty formalism that "fails to refer to subjects of flesh and blood".
European Journal of Philosophy, 2023
In this paper, I argue that, for the purpose of developing an effective critical social ontology ... more In this paper, I argue that, for the purpose of developing an effective critical social ontology about gender groups, it is not simply sufficient to carve gender groups at their joints: one must have in view whether themetaphysical categories we use to make sense of gender groups are prone to ideological distortion and vitiation.The norms underpinning a gender group’s constitution as a type of social class and the norms involved in gender identity attributions, I propose, provide compelling reason to think critical social ontological discourse is more processist-orientated, rather than substantival-orientated. The advantages of a processist critical social ontologyof gender groups are that, unlike substance-discourse, process-discourse recognises how gender group talk andgender identity talk are often messy and therefore require a conceptual scheme that can transform vocabulary for the emancipatory purpose of ending oppression, domination, and marginalisation
Philosophical Inquiries, 2022
In ‘Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man’ (1962), Wilfrid Sellars contends that there is te... more In ‘Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man’ (1962), Wilfrid Sellars contends that there is tension between manifest image (MI) and scientific image (SI) discursive formations. To end the tension and resolve the clash between the MI and the SI, Sellars does not aim to reconcile the two images. Rather, through the application of his functional classification semantics, typified by his distinction between logical irreducibility and causal reducibility, he aims to join the normative category of persons to the SI, to enrich and complete the SI. In other words, the way all things hang together stereoscopically in one unified and coherent image is by integrating persons into Peirceish. My principal aim in this paper is to argue that, rather than resolve the clash between the MI and the SI by joining the ‘lifeworldy’ conceptual framework of persons to the SI for the purpose of enriching and completing the SI, what Sellars ought to have done is adopt a negative dialectical ‘resolution’ of the clash between the images. This strategy invites one to dismantle the Placement Problem through the logic of “disintegration”. I take Sellars to have curiously hinted at this Adornian intellectual orientation in the concluding sentence of ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’ (1956).
Filosofický časopis, 2021
In this paper, I propose a programme for future critical responses to naturalism. The paper is di... more In this paper, I propose a programme for future critical responses to naturalism. The paper is divided into two principal parts. In Part I, after providing a topography of contemporary critical approaches to the Placement Problem, which is the operational logic of naturalism, I provide an overview of a burgeoning critical response to naturalism, which, to date, may be predominantly individuated by hostility towards the Placement Problem in two interconnected manners: an epistemic concern and a political concern. Part II of the paper focuses on four areas of future research on critical responses to naturalism arising from themes identified in Part I: the first is a challenge set by Antonio Nunziante concerning the historical and political aspects of American humanism and naturalism; the second involves centring and combining decolonial and queer theoretic discursive formations to enhance critical theoretic responses to naturalism; the third emphasises the need to put Hegel and Otto Neurath in direct conversation about anti-foundationalism, pragmatism, and the (dis)unity of science, in part to dismantle the long-standing hostility between Hegelians and logical empiricists; the fourth is on the subject of developing a critique of sexology’s scientific naturalist framework for making sense of sexual arousal.
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review, 2021
In this paper, I argue that John Dupré and Daniel Nicholson's 'process manifesto' is ironically m... more In this paper, I argue that John Dupré and Daniel Nicholson's 'process manifesto' is ironically more sympathetic to descriptive metaphysics than to revisionary metaphysics. Focusing on their argument that any process philosophy automatically slides into Whiteheadian obscurantism if it does not just rest content with revealing the problematic features of ordinary language, I argue that their position occludes a logical space, one in which revisionary metaphysics is articulated without any Whiteheadian obscurantism and involves no dereliction of critical/revisionary orientation. I argue that key features of the respective critical social ontologies of Judith Butler and Talia Mae Bettcher occupy such a logical space.
Dans cet article, je soutiens que le «manifeste du processus» de John Dupré et Daniel Nicholson est ironiquement plus sympathique à la métaphysique descriptive qu’à la métaphysique révisionniste. En me concentrant sur leur argument selon lequel toute philosophie du processus glisse automatiquement dans l’obscurantisme whiteheadien lorsqu’elle ne se contente pas de révéler seulement les caractéristiques problématiques du langage ordinaire, je soutiens que leur position dissimule un espace logique dans lequel la métaphysique révisionniste s’articule sans aucun obscurantisme whiteheadien et n’implique aucun apauvrissement de l’orientation critique/révisionniste. Je soutiens que les caractéristiques clés des ontologies sociales critiques respectives de Judith Butler et Talia Mae Bettcher occupent un tel espace logique.
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements, 2021
In this paper, we would like to offer some compelling reasons to think that while Axel Honneth ex... more In this paper, we would like to offer some compelling reasons to think that while Axel Honneth explicitly links intersubjectivity to bodily and psychological vulnerability, issues relating to vulnerability play a significant – albeit thus far implicitly acknowledged – role in Jürgen Habermas’s notions of communicative action and discourse. We shall argue that the basic notions of discourse and communicative action presuppose a robust conception of vulnerability and that recognising vulnerability is essential for (i) making sense of the social character of knowledge, on the epistemic side of things, and for (ii) making sense of the possibility of deliberative democracy, on the political side of things.
Our paper is divided into 4 principal parts. In Part I, we provide a basic outline of Habermas on communicative action and discourse. In Part II, we develop an account of vulnerability and communication in the context of speaker/hearer relations. We specifically focus on distorted communication, vulnerability and speech (i.e. the ‘uptake’ of utterance – to use J. L. Austin’s term), the intimate sphere, and the wider public sphere. In Part III, we focus on elaborating the pathologies of misrecognition and nonrecognition in the context of epistemic injustice. In Part IV, we focus on detailing how Habermasian resources help vulnerability theory, and how introducing vulnerability theory to Habermas broadens or deepens his theory of communication action and his discourse ethics theory.
Hypatia, 2021
This paper has two aims: (i) to bring Judith Butler and Wilfrid Sellars into conversation; and (i... more This paper has two aims: (i) to bring Judith Butler and Wilfrid Sellars into conversation; and (ii) to argue that Butler’s post-structuralist critique of feminist identity politics has metaphilosophical potential, given her pragmatic parallel with Sellars’s critique of conceptual analyses of knowledge. With regard to (i), I argue that Butler’s objections to the definitional practice constitutive of certain ways of construing feminism is comparable to Sellars’s critique of the analytical project geared towards providing definitions of knowledge. Specifically, I propose that moving away from a definition of ‘woman’ to, what one may call, post-structuralist ‘sites of woman’ parallels moving away from a definition of knowledge to a pragmatic account of ‘knowledge’ as a recognizable standing in the normative space of reasons. With regard to (ii), I argue that the important parallels between Butler’s post-structuralist feminism and Sellars’s anti-representationalist normative pragmatism about knowledge enable one to think of her post-structuralist feminism as mapping out pragmatic cognitive strategies and visions for doing philosophy. This paper starts a conversation between two philosophers whom the literature has yet to fully introduce to each other.
Critical Horizons, 2020
My aim in this paper is to articulate and challenge a Foucauldian critique of scientific naturali... more My aim in this paper is to articulate and challenge a Foucauldian critique of scientific naturalism, and, in particular, a Foucauldian critique of the nomothetic framework underlying the Placement Problem. What I hope to achieve is to bring Foucauldian post-structuralist theory into the conversation concerning scientific naturalism and the Placement Problem. My Foucauldian post-structuralist critique of scientific naturalism questions the relations between our society’s imbrication of economic-political power structures and knowledge in such a way that also effects some constructive critical alignment between Foucault and Habermas, helping to undermine the traditional view of their respective social critiques as incompatible. First, I will outline a brief genealogical backstory for the rise of scientific naturalism, and I will then reconstruct the Placement Problem. In the second part of the paper, I introduce Foucault’s notion of pouvoir-savoir (‘power-knowledge’), namely his account of the interconnection between power and knowledge. I then go on to articulate the Foucauldian critique of scientific naturalism by arguing that the levelling nature of nomothetic rationality and its conservative naturalistic vocabulary involves regulative discourse: anything that resists placeability/locatability is labelled ‘odd’. By being thus visibly marked, ‘odd’ phenomena become ‘queer’ phenomena, which then become ‘problematic’ phenomena. They are, thereby, construed in need of discipline (and even punishment). Understood in this Foucauldian way, the most pressing problem with the disciplinary framework of scientific naturalism is that the erasure of the sui generis features of the normative space of reasons amounts to a debilitating variety of alienation in which humanity is estranged from its pluralist matrix of sense-making practices. Thus, scientific naturalist disciplinarity produces subjected and practised minds, ‘docile’ minds.
International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2020
Philosophy & Social Criticism, 2018
My aim in this paper is to propose that an insightful way of articulating the feminist concept of... more My aim in this paper is to propose that an insightful way of articulating the feminist concept of epistemic injustice can be provided by paying significant attention to recognition theory. The paper intends to provide an account for diagnosing epistemic injustice as a social pathology and also attempts to paint a picture of some social cure of structural forms of epistemic injustice. While there are many virtues to the literature on epistemic injustice, epistemic exclusion, and silencing, current discourse on diagnosing as well as explicating and overcoming these social pathologies can be improved and enriched by bringing recognition theory into the conversation: under recognition theory, social normative standards are constructed out of the moral grammar of recognition attributions. I shall argue that the failure to properly recognise and afford somebody or a social group the epistemic respect they merit is an act of injustice in the sense of depriving individuals of a progressive social environment in which the epistemic respect afforded to them plays a significant role in enabling and fostering their self-confidence as a rational enquirer. Testimonial injustice is particularly harrowing, because it robs a group or individual of their status as a rational enquirer, thereby creating an asymmetrical cognitive environment in which they are not deemed one’s conversational peer. Hermeneutical injustice is particularly harrowing, because asymmetrical cognitive environments further entrench the normative power of ideology.
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Decolonising Philosophy Curriculum resources by Paul Giladi
Aanya Aggarwal BSc PPE
Dr Paul Giladi
Dr Sîan Hawthorne
Dr Elvis Imafidon
Prof. Richard E. King
Danae Miserocchi, BA Anthropology and World Philosophies
Lizi Nzuki, BA History and International Relations
Xiangyi Qian, BSc PPE
Aanya Aggarwal BSc PPE
Dr Paul Giladi
Dr Sîan Hawthorne
Dr Elvis Imafidon
Prof. Richard E. King
Danae Miserocchi, BA Anthropology and World Philosophies
Lizi Nzuki, BA History and International Relations
Xiangyi Qian, BSc PPE
Monographs by Paul Giladi
Edited Volumes by Paul Giladi
The essays in this volume propose answers to a number of thought-provoking questions at the intersection of these two robust philosophical subfields, such as: How well can different types of epistemic injustice be understood as types of recognition abuses? How useful is it to approach different forms of social oppression as recognition injustices and/or as involving epistemic injustice? What limitations do we discover in either or both recognition theory and the ever-expanding literature on epistemic injustice when we put them into conversation with each other? How does the conjunction of these two accounts bear on specific domains, such as questions of silencing?
'Epistemic Injustice and the Philosophy of Recognition' promises to herald new directions for future research that will appeal to scholars and students working in critical social epistemology, social and political theory, Continental philosophy, and a wide range of critical social theories.
Journal Articles by Paul Giladi
Dans cet article, je soutiens que le «manifeste du processus» de John Dupré et Daniel Nicholson est ironiquement plus sympathique à la métaphysique descriptive qu’à la métaphysique révisionniste. En me concentrant sur leur argument selon lequel toute philosophie du processus glisse automatiquement dans l’obscurantisme whiteheadien lorsqu’elle ne se contente pas de révéler seulement les caractéristiques problématiques du langage ordinaire, je soutiens que leur position dissimule un espace logique dans lequel la métaphysique révisionniste s’articule sans aucun obscurantisme whiteheadien et n’implique aucun apauvrissement de l’orientation critique/révisionniste. Je soutiens que les caractéristiques clés des ontologies sociales critiques respectives de Judith Butler et Talia Mae Bettcher occupent un tel espace logique.
Our paper is divided into 4 principal parts. In Part I, we provide a basic outline of Habermas on communicative action and discourse. In Part II, we develop an account of vulnerability and communication in the context of speaker/hearer relations. We specifically focus on distorted communication, vulnerability and speech (i.e. the ‘uptake’ of utterance – to use J. L. Austin’s term), the intimate sphere, and the wider public sphere. In Part III, we focus on elaborating the pathologies of misrecognition and nonrecognition in the context of epistemic injustice. In Part IV, we focus on detailing how Habermasian resources help vulnerability theory, and how introducing vulnerability theory to Habermas broadens or deepens his theory of communication action and his discourse ethics theory.
Aanya Aggarwal BSc PPE
Dr Paul Giladi
Dr Sîan Hawthorne
Dr Elvis Imafidon
Prof. Richard E. King
Danae Miserocchi, BA Anthropology and World Philosophies
Lizi Nzuki, BA History and International Relations
Xiangyi Qian, BSc PPE
Aanya Aggarwal BSc PPE
Dr Paul Giladi
Dr Sîan Hawthorne
Dr Elvis Imafidon
Prof. Richard E. King
Danae Miserocchi, BA Anthropology and World Philosophies
Lizi Nzuki, BA History and International Relations
Xiangyi Qian, BSc PPE
The essays in this volume propose answers to a number of thought-provoking questions at the intersection of these two robust philosophical subfields, such as: How well can different types of epistemic injustice be understood as types of recognition abuses? How useful is it to approach different forms of social oppression as recognition injustices and/or as involving epistemic injustice? What limitations do we discover in either or both recognition theory and the ever-expanding literature on epistemic injustice when we put them into conversation with each other? How does the conjunction of these two accounts bear on specific domains, such as questions of silencing?
'Epistemic Injustice and the Philosophy of Recognition' promises to herald new directions for future research that will appeal to scholars and students working in critical social epistemology, social and political theory, Continental philosophy, and a wide range of critical social theories.
Dans cet article, je soutiens que le «manifeste du processus» de John Dupré et Daniel Nicholson est ironiquement plus sympathique à la métaphysique descriptive qu’à la métaphysique révisionniste. En me concentrant sur leur argument selon lequel toute philosophie du processus glisse automatiquement dans l’obscurantisme whiteheadien lorsqu’elle ne se contente pas de révéler seulement les caractéristiques problématiques du langage ordinaire, je soutiens que leur position dissimule un espace logique dans lequel la métaphysique révisionniste s’articule sans aucun obscurantisme whiteheadien et n’implique aucun apauvrissement de l’orientation critique/révisionniste. Je soutiens que les caractéristiques clés des ontologies sociales critiques respectives de Judith Butler et Talia Mae Bettcher occupent un tel espace logique.
Our paper is divided into 4 principal parts. In Part I, we provide a basic outline of Habermas on communicative action and discourse. In Part II, we develop an account of vulnerability and communication in the context of speaker/hearer relations. We specifically focus on distorted communication, vulnerability and speech (i.e. the ‘uptake’ of utterance – to use J. L. Austin’s term), the intimate sphere, and the wider public sphere. In Part III, we focus on elaborating the pathologies of misrecognition and nonrecognition in the context of epistemic injustice. In Part IV, we focus on detailing how Habermasian resources help vulnerability theory, and how introducing vulnerability theory to Habermas broadens or deepens his theory of communication action and his discourse ethics theory.
My aim in this paper is to counter the claim that Hegel’s idea of the concrete universal fails to properly explain the real uniqueness of individuals. In what follows, I argue that whilst the Continental critique (as it is particularly expressed by Adorno) is prima facie attractive, it is ultimately misguided. This is because the critics of Hegel fail to correctly understand (i) his principal argument in Sense-Certainty; (ii) crucial features of his logico-metaphysics; and (iii) his notion of wholeness. I contend that carefully explicating these important parts of the Hegelian system not only shows that Hegel’s metaphysical commitments are not those which do not leave meaningful room for or make adequate sense of individuality, but that they also reveal a sophisticated treatment of the interdependency between the categories of individuality, particularity and universality in a way which conceives of individuality ontologically robustly.
between Bas van Fraassen and Hegel, by focusing on their respective notions of ‘stance’ and ‘form of consciousness’. In Section I, I run through five ways of understanding van Fraassen’s idea of a stance. I argue that a ‘stance’ is best understood as an intellectual disposition. This, in turn, means that the criteria for assessing a stance are ones which ask whether or not a stance adequately makes sense of things. In Section II, the discussion turns to Hegel’s notion of a ‘form of consciousness’. I argue that Hegel’s notion of a ‘form of consciousness’ is best understood as comprising a worldview. The principal advantage of articulating stances in a Hegelian way is that such an interpretation explicitly details both the theoretical and affective attitudes that van Fraassen is after. Therefore, why Hegel is potentially an especially illuminating source of understanding stances is that, unlike the other accounts, forms of consciousness most clearly illustrate the pragmatist elements of a stance.
My aim in this chapter is argue that aspects of Hegel's metaphysics, as an example of 'speculative naturalism', can and should be seen as offering a powerful conceptual resource for explicating the cognitive pathology of scientism, and for also painting a picture of how to decolonise the space of reasons. By 'scientism', I mean the view that the ways in which we make sense of things are ultimately justifiable only by the methods and practices of the Naturwissenschaften. I argue that if one is to overcome scientism, one must develop speculative sense-making practices, in which epistemic power can be rooted in the communicative power of discourse about sense-making. Debunking the colonising framework in favour of a pluralist dialectical framework involves reversing the circulation of epistemic power.
Broadly speaking, Hegel and Dewey respectively reject the early modern framework that sees the individual as fundamentally separate from the societal domain. Contra the Hobbesian picture of the individual and the Hobbesian picture’s corresponding conception of freedom, Hegel and Dewey aim to eliminate the picture of a radical separation of the individual and social institutions by advocating a nuanced socio-political holism. According to Hegel and Dewey, freedom is articulated as a positive capacity to realise oneself. Crucially, such individual self-realisation can only be achieved by construing individuality as necessarily embedded in a reflective social environment. Not only do Hegel and Dewey lament the fragmented and rampant individualism of modernity, they are also committed to the view that modern democratic social institutions must be structured in a way that establishes conditions for enabling the realisation of autonomy. Conceived in such a manner, both Hegel and Dewey anticipate the Honnethian concept of a ‘relational institution’, namely an institution which realises social freedom through symmetrical recognitive practices. In this way, for Honneth, the emphasis on intersubjectively constituted and realised Geistigkeit sheds diagnostic light on a plurality of contemporary social pathologies and misdevelopments, by revealing how current social institutions fail to promote intersubjective recognition.
The chapter begins with charting a genealogical story in which Kant himself anticipates an intersubjective turn that is then robustly developed in the post-Kantian tradition. I argue that Kant’s social conception of agentive subjectivity in An Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim and in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View can be viewed as paving the way for Hegel’s and Dewey’s robust intersubjectivism. I then move on to discussing central features of Sittlichkeit and Deweyan democracy, which offer a powerful critique of liberalism. I argue that there are two important positive connections between Hegel and Dewey: (i) social processes and modern institutions are structured for the purposes of fostering the development of unique subjectivities that help individuals achieve self-realisation; and (ii) social processes and modern institutions are assessed in terms of how well (if at all) they enable the development of unique subjectivities that help individuals achieve self-realisation/growth. In the third section of the chapter, I argue that there is compelling reason to suppose there is critical uptake in Hegel’s notion of Sittlichkeit and Dewey’s notion of democracy.
philosophical projects such as reductionism, eliminativism, instrumentalism, and nonfactualism.
These theories, it is thought, are united by vocabularies and conceptual schemes better suited than their more metaphysically-inclined rivals to make sense of things, since reductionism and eliminativism are thought to be prices very much worth paying to avoid supernaturalism.
However, rather than solve the Placement Problem by arguing in favour of either reductionism or supernaturalism, I think we should dissolve the Placement Problem in an Hegelian manner: I argue that the explanation for why the Placement Problem grips the philosophic imagination with such force is that rational activity is exclusively articulated in terms of the kind of inferential patterns definitive of analytical thinking, namely the kind of thinking symptomatic of Verstand.
This, in turn, leads to conceiving of the space of reasons and the space of nature as fundamentally in tension with another, and to regarding the manifest image and scientific image as metaphilosophical antagonists. However, central to Hegelianism is a committed opposition to treating the nomothetic qualities of the Laplacian model of rationality which Verstand instantiates most explicitly as exhaustive of critical thinking.
This is because Hegel places significant emphasis on the dialectical function of Vernunft, which does not conceive of rational activity as a detached, voyeuristic critical reason. Why Vernunft is favoured here over analytical reflection is that Verstand fails to be completely illustrative of our phenomenology, our Erlebnis, and our sense of ourselves as self-interpreting rational agents engaging in multifaceted forms of enquiry. For Hegel, one must go beyond a particular kind of naturalism, namely a narrow naturalism which alienates us from ourselves. The ultimate advantage of this broader naturalism is that it is a remarkable improvement over the emaciated empiricism of reductionism and eliminativism, as it is defended as part of a properly scientific understanding of the world. Conceived in this way, the game played by narrow naturalism turns on itself: reductionism and eliminativism, rather than
serve science, are in fact anti-scientific.
metaphysical commitments to Hegel, and, second, to argue that the kind of
metaphysics one ought to ascribe to Hegel is of a robust yet immanent or naturalist
variety. I begin by exploring two reasons why one may think Hegel’s philosophical
system has no metaphysical commitments. I argue that one of these
reasons is based on a particular understanding of Hegel as a post-Kantian philosopher, whereas the second reason is centred on a particular understanding
of the philosophical viability of metaphysics as a form of enquiry simpliciter.
My discussion of these reasons for regarding Hegel in a non-metaphysical way
concludes with a rejection of conceiving Hegelianism without metaphysics. I
then move on to address what I take to be the more pertinent and serious
issue of what kind of metaphysician Hegel is. To this end, I argue that the
best way of understanding Hegelian metaphysics is by conceiving of it as a combination of Aristotelian first philosophy and Kantian critique. To put this in the
form of a slogan: Hegel’s metaphysics is a form of speculative naturalism.
The aim of this chapter is to (i) articulate and defend a perfectionist dimension of Kantian ethics; and (ii) propose that an insightful way of articulating Kantian Cosmopolitanism can be provided by paying significant attention to recognition theory. Following Honneth’s model of diagnostic social philosophy, I argue that armed conflict is best understood in terms of a particularly complex form of social pathology, where the peaceful resolution of such conflict requires a complex form of diagnosis and therapy. Under such an account, leadership involves taking the lead in diagnosing armed conflict as arising from an especially traumatic asymmetrical recognition order, and in proposing genuinely practical therapeutic solutions to resolving conflict by advocating specific progressive transformations to the current asymmetrical recognition order.
Taking this into account, then, strigas, plague maidens, and necrophages are not just mutations or distortions of the human – they are horror-inducing because they are metaphysical aberrations. Every aspect of these horrifying things’ existence typically prompts human agents to freeze in fear upon seeing them. As Colin Milburn has observed, monsters are “denizens of the borderland … extremities of transgression and the limits of the order of things … with its unprecedented deformation of the norm and its threat to the boundaries of conventional thought”. By ‘transgression’, I take Milburn to refer to how the category of monstrosity points to something that is wrong, insofar as it breaks with established and ordered conventions. Indeed, thinking about monsters as metaphysical aberrations and extremities of transgression also goes some distance in helping explain why the saying “There is no God …” is a common utterance when coming face-to-face with monstrous creatures.
In this chapter, I propose that perhaps the most sophisticated and powerful conceit in the worlds of The Witcher is the juxtaposition of the cultural propensity to construct the world in terms of strict dualities – “human” and “monster” – with what I call “the dialectics of monstrosity.”
This strict distinction between “human” and “monster” is most clearly expressed by a Witcher’s two swords: a silver sword and a steel sword. The former is only used to slay monsters. The latter is only for fighting humans. A Witcher’s medallion also evidences the categorial separation of “human" and "monster” with respect to how it vibrates only around the presence of monsters and magic. In the video games themselves, this fundamental division is woven into the programming: players, when combatting monster and human foes, must switch between silver and steel by pressing different buttons if they wish to land any hits on the target.
The dialectics of monstrosity is a challenging and “messy” conceptual space which subverts the propensity to construct the world in terms of dualities: it does so by blurring the distinction between “monster” and “human” in such a way that reveals the great extent to which the category of ‘monstrosity’ is philosophically complex: it can be used to not only refer to those biologically deformed and frightening entities like necrophages, but also to ethically distorted and twisted human agents with abhorrent sensibilities and actions such that they are best construed as moral monsters. What distinguishes moral monsters from generically immoral agents is the way in which morally monstrous agents are cruel through-and-through, disparaging of vulnerability, contemptuous of compassion, and invested in practices of especially violent dehumanization. In what follows, I focus on the dialectics of monstrosity as it appears in several places in the worlds of 'The Witcher'.
The two varieties of explanation appear to compete. They appear to compete, because both give rival explanations of the same action. To use another example: why did Caesar cross the Rubicon? Because of his leg movements? Or because he wanted to assert his authority in Rome over his rivals? But, there is a way in which scientific explanations (e.g. bodily movements) and humanistic explanations (e.g. motives/goals) need not compete. When we seek to interpret the actions of Caesar and Socrates and ask what reasons they had for acting so, we do not want their actions to be explained as we might explain the rise of the tides, or the motion of the planets, i.e. as physical events dictated by natural laws. Our curiosity is satisfied when the explanation enables us to see the purpose of their action, rather than treating them as simply another material entity. Providing an account of their physiology here would not adequately make sense of things.
Our aim in this article is to introduce a highly neglected tradition in the philosophy of mind, epistemological idealism, to see how scientific and humanistic explanations can co-exist.
In this contribution, my aim is to discuss the struggle for recognition of Brienne of Tarth, by examining the complex ways her character poses significant challenges to the moral grammar of Westerosi society out of which various ways of constituting intersubjectivity are developed and established.
I shall argue that Brienne represents a specific struggle for recognition, insofar as Brienne explicitly challenges various long-standing attitudes towards women: she does so by embodying as far as is reasonable the value-system and physical capacities of the chivalrous knight, where such a value-system and physical capacities can only be possessed by men according to Westerosi society — for example, she becomes Kingsguard to Renly Baratheon; she pledges oaths of loyalty to Catelyn Stark; she is able to overcome Sandor Clegane in brutal combat; and she exercises judicial authority on Stannis Baratheon.
That Brienne is often mocked and denigrated — either by having sexualised comments levelled at her, or by being threatened with gang-raped as a way of preventing her from maintaining her autonomy (as was the case when she and Jaime Lannister were captured by Bolton banner men) — indicate the great extent to which she represents a powerful challenge to the current recognition order and its corresponding metaphysical as well as moral commitments.
However, on the other hand, there is compelling reason to contend that Rorty’s pragmatism lends itself quite naturally to posthumanism. Indeed, I argue that reflecting on Rorty’s lifelong aversion to metaphysics (in Haraway’s postmodernist terminology, this would be a type of ‘transcendent authorisation’), epistemic infallibilism, epistemic foundationalism, and political authoritarianism – an aversion which is neatly encapsulated in his idea of democracy’s priority over philosophy – enables one to recognise at least four interconnected things. First, that his concept of contingency and his radical postmetaphysical position have much in common with Haraway’s posthumanist preference for deconstructing longstanding dualisms that persist in Western philosophical traditions. Second, that his anti-representationalism and proto-left-wing Sellarsian undercutting of the Myth of the Given and consequent playfulness about the function of language is very similar in important ways to Haraway’s posthumanist idea of the Cyborg as ‘recoding communication’ (i.e., language as shifting from representation to simulation) to overcome the language of domination embedded in Western philosophical orthodoxy. Third, that Rorty’s commitment to a utopian model of solidarity, despite his own self-avowed bourgeois dismissal of Marx-inspired critical social theory, curiously stands in a substantive positive relationship with Haraway’s Rubin-inspired feminist Marxist contention that completely being at home with Cyborg political identity is necessary to realising a possible future in which oppression (of minds and gendered bodies) is no longer a constitutive feature of social reality. Four, that Rorty’s valorisation of the ‘strong poet’ and Haraway’s argument that “writing is pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs” bear on one another in interesting ways.
The problem of the relation between the explanatory practices of the human and natural sciences was addressed by Kant who sought to reconcile theoretical and practical reason by showing that theoretical/scientific knowledge rests on abstract formal conditions which disclose reality as causally determined. Kant’s philosophy aimed to reconcile the claims of theoretical and practical reason by showing that theoretical/scientific knowledge does not yield unconditioned knowledge of reality; it rather discloses reality from the perspective of finite beings whose knowledge is conditioned. Within Kant’s framework of transcendental idealism the task of defending the autonomy of practical reason is thus closely linked to a conception of philosophy as a second-order enquiry whose task is to make explicit the formal conditions of theoretical/scientific knowledge.
This conception of philosophy has come under attack from increasingly naturalistic views of the role and character of philosophical analysis. As a result, the defence of the autonomy of the human sciences has also changed and it is now almost exclusively articulated from a naturalistic standpoint. The question for non-reductivists does not tend to be: “what are thepostulates and heuristic principles at work in the natural and the human sciences?” But rather: “how can mind fit in the natural world?” The task of philosophy is no longer that of uncovering the presuppositions underpinning different “forms of experience”, and show how they enable different ways of knowing, but rather to assume the methodological superiority of the natural sciences and then to articulate forms of non-reductivism which do not upset the presuppositions of scientific knowledge. Even when such naturalistic assumptions are relaxed, as in the case of “liberal naturalism”, non-reductivism is still predominantly articulated from a naturalistic platform.
This project explores a form of non-reductivism which has its roots in the idealist tradition and which challenges the view that a defence of the autonomy of the human sciences must be launched from a naturalistic platform. It explores a form of post-Kantian non-reductivism in the philosophy of mind which articulates the defence of the human sciences from the perspective of a conception of philosophy as a second-order enquiry whose task is to make explicit the heuristic principle at work in different forms of enquiry. From this perspective philosophy does not seek to reconcile the claims of theoretical and practical reason by accommodating the mind in the natural world, or by blurring the boundaries between the explanatory practices of the human and the natural sciences. It rather seeks to show that different forms of experience are made possible by different presuppositions. In doing this it enables ordinary people to understand how they can be committed to the idea of scientific progress without renouncing the attempt to make sense of their lives through humanistic explanations which are different in kind and not only in degree from those found in the natural sciences.
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We invite abstracts between 500 and 1,000 words for presentation at the Idealism and Metaphilosophy of Mind conference, London 15th and 16th September 2016. The conference is part of the Idealism and Philosophy of Mind project, John Templeton New Directions in the Philosophy of Mind, led by Giuseppina D’Oro, Paul Giladi and Alexis Papazoglou.
Keynote speakers: Paul Redding and David Macarthur.
Deadline: Anonymized abstracts in PDF should be emailed to Idealism and the Philosophy of Mind (idealismandthephilosophyofmind@gmail.com) by March 31st 2016. Decisions by the end of April.
Authors of selected abstracts will be asked to submit the full draft of the papers by mid August.
Selected papers will be considered for publication as part of a planned special issue of Inquiry on Idealism and the Metaphilosophy of Mind.
Graduate students: there will a section for graduate students. Graduate students should indicate (next to the title) that their abstract should be considered for the graduate section.
Description
Are explanations of human actions which appeal to reasons compatible with the causal explanations used to account for natural phenomena such as hurricanes, volcanic explosions and the like?
The problem of the relation between the explanatory practices of the human and natural sciences was addressed by Kant who sought to reconcile theoretical and practical reason by showing that theoretical/scientific knowledge rests on abstract formal conditions which disclose reality as causally determined. Kant’s philosophy aimed to reconcile the claims of theoretical and practical reason by showing that theoretical/scientific knowledge does not yield unconditioned knowledge of reality; it rather discloses reality from the perspective of finite beings whose knowledge is conditioned. Within Kant’s framework of transcendental idealism the task of defending the autonomy of practical reason is thus closely linked to a conception of philosophy as a second-order enquiry whose task is to make explicit the formal conditions of theoretical/scientific knowledge.
This conception of philosophy has come under attack from increasingly naturalistic views of the role and character of philosophical analysis. As a result, the defence of the autonomy of the human sciences has also changed and it is now almost exclusively articulated from a naturalistic standpoint. The question for non-reductivists does not tend to be: “what are the postulates and heuristic principles at work in the natural and the human sciences?” But rather: “how can mind fit in the natural world?” The task of philosophy is no longer that of uncovering the presuppositions underpinning different “forms of experience”, and show how they enable different ways of knowing, but rather to assume the methodological superiority of the natural sciences and then to articulate forms of non-reductivism which do not upset the presuppositions of scientific knowledge. Even when such naturalistic assumptions are relaxed, as in the case of “liberal naturalism”, non-reductivism is still predominantly articulated from a naturalistic platform.
This conference explores a form of non-reductivism which has its roots in the idealist tradition and which challenges the view that a defence of the autonomy of the human sciences must be launched from a naturalistic platform. It explores a form of post-Kantian non-reductivism in the philosophy of mind which articulates the defence of the human sciences from the perspective of a conception of philosophy as a second-order enquiry whose task is to make explicit the heuristic principle at work in different forms of enquiry.
Possible topics and questions include (this is not an exhaustive list):
What are the metaphilosophical assumptions that govern contemporary attempts to defend the autonomy of the mental?
Are softer forms of naturalism, such as liberal naturalism, in a better position to solve the various location problems which have been encountered by forms of non-reductivism launched from a more traditional naturalistic platform?
To what extent is a metaphilosophical commitment to the continuity of philosophy and the natural sciences responsible for the under-representation of forms of non-reductivism (such as Kantian-inspired ones) which presuppose a conception of philosophy as an epistemologically first science?
Can forms of non-reductivism which reject the assumption that a defence of the autonomy of the mental must be articulated from a naturalistic starting point succeed in their task without committing to a form of supernaturalism?
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