The Idea of a Critical Political Theory
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Geuss-On-Rorty.Pdf
Richard Rorty at Princeton: Personal Recollections RAYMOND GEUSS When i arrived in Princeton during the 1970s my addiction to tea was already long-standing and very well entrenched, but I was so concerned about the quality of the water in town that I used to buy large containers of allegedly “pure” water at Davidson’s—the local supermarket, which seems now to have gone out of business. I didn’t, of course, have a car, and given the amount of tea I consumed, the trans- port of adequate supplies of water was a highly labor-inten- sive and inconvenient matter. Dick and Mary Rorty must have noticed me lugging canisters of water home, because, with characteristic generosity, they developed the habit of call- ing around at my rooms in 120 Prospect, often on Sunday mornings, offering to take me by car to fill my water bottles at a hugely primitive and highly suspicious-looking outdoor water tap on the side of a pumphouse which was operated by the Elizabethtown Water Company on a piece of waste land near the Institute Woods. This pumphouse with its copiously dripping tap was like something out of Tarkhovski’s film about Russia after a nuclear accident, Stalker, and the sur- rounding area was a place so sinister one half expected to be attacked by packs of dogs in the final stages of radiation sick- ness or by troops of feral children who had been left by their parents to fend for themselves while the parents went off to the library to finish their dissertations. -
Nietzsche and the Pathologies of Meaning
Nietzsche and the Pathologies of Meaning Jeremy James Forster Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2016 © 2016 Jeremy James Forster All rights reserved ABSTRACT NIETZSCHE AND THE PATHOLOGIES OF MEANING Jeremy Forster My dissertation details what Nietzsche sees as a normative and philosophical crisis that arises in modern society. This crisis involves a growing sense of malaise that leads to large-scale questions about whether life in the modern world can be seen as meaningful and good. I claim that confronting this problem is a central concern throughout Nietzsche’s philosophical career, but that his understanding of this problem and its solution shifts throughout different phases of his thinking. Part of what is unique to Nietzsche’s treatment of this problem is his understanding that attempts to imbue existence with meaning are self-undermining, becoming pathological and only further entrenching the problem. Nietzsche’s solution to this problem ultimately resides in treating meaning as a spiritual need that can only be fulfilled through a creative interpretive process. CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter I: The Birth of Tragedy and the Problem of Meaning 30 Part I: Background 33 Part II: Meaningfulness in Artistic Cultures 45 Part III: Meaningfulness in Tragic Cultures 59 Part IV: Meaningfulness in Socratic Cultures 70 Conclusion: The Solution to Socratism 78 Chapter II: Meaning, Science, and the “Perceptions of Science -
Aesthetic Interpretation and the Claim to Community in Cavell
CONVERSATIONS 5 Seeing Selves and Imagining Others: Aesthetic Interpretation and the Claim to Community in Cavell JON NAJARIAN Politics is aesthetic in principle. JACQUES RANCIÈRE From his early childhood, Stanley Cavell learned to tread carefully the intervening space between twin pillars: of aesthetic sensibility on the one hand, and political be- longing on the other. Early in his memoir Little Did I Know, Cavell establishes a set of differences between his mother and father that far exceed both gender and age (his father was ten years older than his mother), as he notes the starkly contrasting dis- pensations of their respective families: The artistic temperament of my mother’s family, the Segals, left them on the whole, with the exception of my mother and her baby brother, Mendel, doubt- fully suited to an orderly, successful existence in the new world; the orthodox, religious sensibility of my father’s family, the Goldsteins, produced a second generation—some twenty-two first cousins of mine—whose solidarity and se- verity of expectation produced successful dentists, lawyers, and doctors, pillars of the Jewish community, and almost without exception attaining local, some of them national, some even a certain international, prominence.1 From his mother’s family, Cavell would inherit the musical sensibility that, had he not ventured into the world of academic philosophy, might have led him towards a career as a musician or in music. In his father’s family Cavell observes a religious belonging that, in the decades in which Cavell is raised, becomes morally inseparable from politi- $1. Cavell, Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 3. -
Deep Contextualism and Radical Criticism: the Argument for a Division of Labor
1 Deep Contextualism and Radical Criticism: The Argument for a Division of Labor Mathias Thaler [email protected] Abstract: Raymond Geuss has recently argued for a “realist” re‐orientation of political theory. This argument is based on a devastating critique of what he calls the “ethics first”‐approach, that is, an approach to politics that is essentially derived from, and thus tributary to, ethics. Geuss’s own account of realist political theory urges us to engage in two distinct activities: (1) embracing some form of deep contextualism and (2) exploiting the potential for radical criticism. This paper argues that these imperatives cannot be fully synthesized because they impose completely different requirements on the philosopher: the former forces the philosopher to immerse herself into the analysis of the real world so as to tailor her normative judgments to the particularities of the situation under scrutiny, while the latter might actually be served better if the principles of justice remained untainted by any considerations of the real world. To illustrate this claim about the structural incompatibility, I will start by unfolding a continuum of various positions in the debate about the relationship between deep contextualism and radical criticism. This continuum has at one extreme Michael Walzer’s notion of “immanent criticism”, and on the other extreme we can find G. A. Cohen’s suggestion that principles of justice should remain “fact‐insensitive”. The final part of this paper suggests that we best conceive of deep contextualism and radical criticism not as mutually exclusive, but rather as reciprocally complimentary. This idea is encapsulated in the notion that we need a division of labor between idealizing and realist approaches to politics. -
Dewey and the Project of Critical Social Theory*
..··:.:r.·.'· , DEWEY AND THE PROJECT OF CRITICAL ·,····.·.,·,·.·,1··,···",::·' :~ F. ~. r SOCIAL THEORY* ·',:1: ROBERT J. IZENT University of Kansas Social Thought & Research, 2000, Vol. 23, 1&2 Abstract The project of critical social theory shares with progressive (bllt not classical, free 1Harket) liberalism a value-orientation composed ofan egalitarian conception of socialjustice; a positive, delJelopmental vie1v of libertY as selfrealization; and a participatory notion of democracy. Differentiating critical theory fro»: all strains of liberalism is the comsction that capitalism cannot StljJport theinstitutionalieation of this value-orientation, and that tinder modern conditions onlY some form of democratic socialism can. Given thisualue-orientation, thispaperoutlines the mission and struaur: of theproject of critical theory. In its RJOSt recent retreat to the academy, practitioners have losttoud: not onlY 1vith its mission but also lvith the level ofhistorical specificity at wbicb the project can RIOSt effectivelY bepracticed. TIl/O proposals aresuggestedfor recoverilJg and executing its mission. Thefirst is to address citizens in particular societies about the mora! and political significance of contemporary social change. The second is that theory, description, critique, and vision should proceed at a level ofabstraction I callregi1lle analYsis. Here the object ofanalYsis is a specific society with its own history, institutionalfeatures; and cultura! identity. It is suggested that John Dewey': proposals for the retitalization of philosophy are relevant to the recovery of theproject of critical social theory. Following Dewf!Y j • For theirpatience and support over the years I wish to thank my friends Tom Skrtic, Bob Antonio, Mohamed El-Hodiri, Bardwell Smith, and the late Clifford Griffin. This work was supported in part by Grant No. -
Art and Emancipation: Habermas's
New German Critique Art and Emancipation: Habermas’s “Die Moderne— ein unvollendetes Projekt” Reconsidered Gili Kliger The Fate of Aesthetics While, by Habermas’s own admission, his remarks on aesthetic modernity always had a “secondary character to the extent that they arose only in the context of other themes,” aesthetics and aesthetic modernity do occupy an important position in his overall oeuvre.1 Much of Habermas’s work is charac- terized by an effort to restore the modern faith in reason first articulated by Enlightenment thinkers. It was, on Habermas’s terms, problematic that the cri- tique of reason launched by the first generation of Frankfurt School theorists, notably Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, left them without a basis on which any reasoned critique of society could be pursued.2 For those theo- rists, Adorno especially, aesthetic experience held the promise of a reconciled relation between the sensual and the rational, posing as an “other” to the dom- inating force of instrumental reason in modern society and offering a way to I wish to thank Martin Ruehl, the Department of German at the University of Cambridge, Peter Gordon, John Flower, and the anonymous reviewers for their indispensable guidance and helpful suggestions. 1. Jürgen Habermas, “Questions and Counterquestions,” in Habermas and Modernity, ed. Rich- ard J. Bernstein (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 199. 2. Jürgen Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), 138–39. New German Critique 124, Vol. 42, No. 1, February -
The Fear of Aesthetics in Art and Literary Theory Sam Rose
The Fear of Aesthetics in Art and Literary Theory Sam Rose New Literary History, Volume 48, Number 2, Spring 2017, pp. 223-244 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2017.0011 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/663805 Access provided at 2 May 2019 15:33 GMT from University of St Andrews The Fear of Aesthetics in Art and Literary Theory Sam Rose eading the preface to the new edition of the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, one might think that the battle over the status of aes- Rthetics is over. According to the narrative of its editor Michael Kelly, aesthetics, held in generally low esteem at the time of the 1998 first edition, has now happily overcome its association with “an alleg- edly retrograde return to beauty,” or its representation as “an ideology defending the tastes of a dominant class, country, race, gender, sexual preference, ethnicity, or empire.”1 The previously “rather pervasive anti- aesthetic stance” of the 1990s passed away with that decade.2 Defined as “critical reflection on art, culture, and nature,” aesthetics is now a respectable practice once again.3 The publication of the Encyclopedia’s latest iteration is a timely moment to review the current state of its much-maligned subject. The original edi- tion of 1998 faced major difficulties, with Kelly writing that his requests for contributions were greeted not only with silence from some, but also with responses from angry callers keen to tell him how misguided the entire project was.4 And while Kelly emphasizes the change toward a more positive view, in some critics, it seems, the fear of aesthetics in art and literary theory has only increased. -
Nietzsche on Morality
Copyrighted Material-Taylor & Francis Copyrighted Material-Taylor & Francis Nietzsche on Morality Both an introduction to Nietzsche’s moral philosophy, and a sustained commentary on his most famous work, On the Genealogy of Morality, this book has become the most widely used and debated secondary source on these topics over the past dozen years. Many of Nietzsche’s most famous ideas – the “slave revolt” in morals, the attack on free will, perspectivism, “will to power,” and the “ascetic ideal”–are clearly analyzed and explained. The first edition established the centrality of nat- uralism to Nietzsche’s philosophy, generating a substantial scholarly literature to which Leiter responds in an important new Postscript. In addition, Leiter has revised and refreshed the book throughout, taking into account new scholarly literature, and revising or clarifying his treatment of such topics as the objectivity of value, epiphenomenalism and consciousness, and the possibility of “autonomous” agency. Brian Leiter is the Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the Center for Law, Philosophy and Human Values at the University of Chicago, USA, where he teaches and writes about moral, political, and legal philosophy in both the Anglophone and Continental European traditions. Copyrighted Material-Taylor & Francis This page intentionally left blank Copyrighted Material-Taylor & Francis Nietzsche on Morality Second Edition Brian Leiter ROUTLEDGE Routledge~~o~;!~n~~~up LONDON AND NEW YORK Copyrighted Material-Taylor & Francis First published as Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Nietzsche on Morality 2002 by Routledge This edition published as Nietzsche on Morality 2015 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2002, 2015 Brian Leiter The right of Brian Leiter to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. -
Impure Theorizing in an Imperfect World: Politics, Utopophobia and Critical Theory in Geuss's Realism
This is a repository copy of Impure theorizing in an imperfect world: Politics, utopophobia and critical theory in Geuss’s realism. White Rose Research Online URL for this paper: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/137091/ Version: Accepted Version Article: Verovsek, P.J. (2019) Impure theorizing in an imperfect world: Politics, utopophobia and critical theory in Geuss’s realism. Philosophy and Social Criticism, 45 (3). pp. 265-283. ISSN 0191-4537 https://doi.org/10.1177/0191453718794745 © 2018 The Author(s). This is an author produced version of a paper subsequently published in Philosophy and Social Criticism. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. Article available under the terms of the CC-BY-NC-ND licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Reuse This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND) licence. This licence only allows you to download this work and share it with others as long as you credit the authors, but you can’t change the article in any way or use it commercially. More information and the full terms of the licence here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ Takedown If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing [email protected] including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. [email protected] https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ Impure Theorizing in an Imperfect World: Politics, Utopophobia and Critical Theory in Geuss’s Realism1 Peter J. -
A Call to Act.Witness.Testimony.Politicalrenewal
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE A Call to Act: Witness, Testimony, and Political Renewal in Shakespeare’s Plays DISSERTATION submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in English By Tracy Clare Cummings Dissertation Committee: Professor Julia R. Lupton, Chair Associate Professor Rebeca Helfer Associate Professor Ian Munro 2015 © 2015 Tracy Clare Cummings DEDICATION To My family, my committee, and my friends in gratitude for their great help to me while I pursued my dreams and neglected theirs. “There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.” Zora Neale Hurston “The Puritans? The Puritans? I have no respect for them. They left England when Shakespeare was writing for the stage.” Virginia Berry Cummings ii TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS v CURRICULUM VITAE vii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION ix INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1: “Better play the orator”: III Henry VI 12 and the Power of Self-Disclosing Speech CHAPTER 2: “The time of good neighbors”: Much Ado 99 About Nothing and the Danger of Public Speech CHAPTER 3: “It nips me into listening”: Pericles and the 156 Power of Shared Narratives BIBLIOGRAPHY 208 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS It has been an honor and a pleasure to work with my committee, Julia R. Lupton, Rebeca Helfer, and Ian Munro. Their insights into literature, philosophy, and theater, as well as the patience they have shown me, have helped me learn what it takes to be a scholar and a person who treats others with respect and compassion. When I faltered, they stood firm, and when I achieved what grace I could, they welcomed my success. -
Adorno's Politics
This is the penultimate draft; the final version appears in Philosophy & Social Criticism 40.9 (November 2014): http://psc.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/08/05/0191453714545198.abstract; please cite that version. Adorno’s Politics: Theory and Praxis in Germany’s 1960s∗ Fabian Freyenhagen University of Essex [email protected] Adorno inspired much of Germany’s 1960s student movement, but he came increasingly into conflict with this movement about the practical implications of his critical theory. As early as 1964, student activist lamented what they saw as an unbearable discrepancy between his analysis and his actions.1 As one of his PhD students later expressed it: […] Adorno was incapable of transforming his private compassion towards the “damned of the earth” into an organized partisanship of theory engaged in the liberation of the oppressed. […] his critical option that any philosophy if it is to be true must be immanently oriented towards practical transformation of social reality, loses its binding force if it is not also capable of defining itself in organizational categories. […] Detachment […] drove Adorno […] into complicity with the ruling powers. […]. As he moved more and more away from historical ∗ This article was originally conceived as part of my Adorno’s Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), and should be considered as integral to it. My thanks go to all of those who have commented on earlier drafts, especially Gordon Finlayson, Raymond Geuss, Béatrice Han-Pile. Patrice Maniglier, Richard Raatzsch, Jörg Schaub, Dan Swain, and Dan Watts. 1 For example, they produced leaflets with passages from Adorno’s own work – passages such as the following: “There can be no covenant with this world; we belong to it only to the extent that we rebel against it” – and invited students to contact Adorno to complain that he did not act accordingly (see Esther Leslie, ‘Introduction to Adorno/Marcuse Correspondence on the German Student Movement’, New Left Review I/233, January- February 1999, pp. -
132 Raymond Geuss. Changing the Subject: Philosophy from Socrates
Philosophy in Review XXXIX (August 2019), no. 3 Raymond Geuss. Changing the Subject: Philosophy from Socrates to Adorno. Harvard University Press 2017. 368 pp. $29.95 USD (Hardcover ISBN 9780674545724). When Gerry Cohen reflected on how he acquired his enviable skill-set as a philosopher, he concluded that ‘nobody ever told me how to do it.’ He also thought that it may be ‘impossible to explain to anybody how philosophy is to be done.’ In light of these and other reflections, he concluded that ‘[t]he only way to teach people how to do [philosophy] is by letting them watch, and listen, and imitate’ (G.A. Cohen, On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice, and Other Essays in Political Philos- ophy, Princeton University Press, 2011, 225). We might see introductory texts on philosophy as giv- ing their readers opportunities to listen, if not to watch and imitate. In Changing the Subject: Philos- ophy from Socrates to Adorno, Raymond Geuss plainly has aspirations of this sort. For he seeks to convey to his readers an understanding of the circumstances in which ‘[p]hilosophy takes place’ (5). Philosophers have approached this tricky task in a variety of ways. José Ortega y Gasset sought to do it by focusing on what he took to be philosophy’s essence. This is, on his account, a ‘surging impulse toward clarification’ that he traces back to ancient Greece and identifies as the enduring achievement of a group of philosophers he calls ‘magistrate[s] of thought’ (The Origin of Philosophy, University of Illinois Press, 2000 [1967], 24 and 109).