University of Frankfurt (Germany)
Alumnus, 1992
Evanston, Illinois, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Law
  •  9
    Este artículo analiza el impacto del giro lingüístico en la transformación de la concepción kantiana de los juicios sintéticos a priori. Se centra para ello en dos concepciones contemporáneas de los mismos, a saber, el a priori hermenéutico de Heidegger y el a priori contextual de Putnam, y saca a relucir expresamente tanto sus rasgos similares como sus importantes diferencias: mientras que la concepción heideggeriana mantiene el idealismo transcendental de Kant a través de la suposición hermené…Read more
  •  11
    Alternative visions of a new global order
    Philosophical Inquiry 42 (1-2): 92-114. 2018.
    In this essay, I analyze the cosmopolitan project for a new international order that Habermas has articulated in recent publications. I argue that his presentation of the project oscillates between two models. The first is a very ambitious model for a future international order geared to fulfill the peace and human rights goals of the UN Charter. The second is a minimalist model, in which the obligation to protect human rights by the international community is circumscribed to the negative duty …Read more
  •  14
    Realismus und Konstruktivismus in der kantianischen Moralphilosophie - das Beispiel der Diskursethik Habermas und Kant
    with Reinhard Brandt
    Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 50 (1): 39-52. 2002.
  •  12
    InA Theory of Justice, Rawls claims that “to each according to his threat advantage is not a conception of justice.” Although it may indeed seem intuitively plausible that a principle based on “threat advantage” cannot count as a principle of justice, it is an altogether different matter to explain why this is so. The question is especially pressing if one bears in mind that such a principle of bargaining in fact underlies many institutionally regulated interactions. Moreover, to the extent that…Read more
  •  8
    Referencia y verdad
    Theoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 9 (2): 39-60. 1994.
    The main thesis of this article consists in that the two concepts “reference” and “truth” have an ultimate realist sense of which all epistemologizing conceptions -like relativism and incommensurabilist theses- necessarily have to come short. The arguments for this thesis are embedded in a revision of the ‘direct’-reference-position as well as of recent arguments against epistemic notions of truth, to show in the next,evaluating step how it is exactly the realist kernel of both concepts that mak…Read more
  •  192
    In this paper I analyze the tension between realism and antirealism at the basis of Kantian constructivism. This tension generates a conflictive account of the source of the validity of social norms. On the one hand, the claim to moral objectivity characteristic of Kantian moral theories makes the validity of norms depend on realist assumptions concerning the existence of shared fundamental interests among all rational human beings. I illustrate this claim through a comparison of the approaches …Read more
  •  343
    Philosophical Foundations of Judicial Review
    In David Dyzenhaus (ed.), Philosophical Foundations of Constitutional Law, Oxford University Press. pp. 265-282. 2016.
  •  499
    This essay focuses on recent proposals to confer decisional status upon deliberative minipublics such as citizen juries, Deliberative Polls, citizen’s assemblies, and so forth. Against such proposals, I argue that inserting deliberative minipublics into political decision-making processes would diminish the democratic legitimacy of the political system as a whole. This negative conclusion invites a question: which political uses of minipublics would yield genuinely democratic improvements? Drawi…Read more
  •  9
    World-renowned specialists in contemporary critical theory address the recent crises and transformations of the global political and economic order.
  •  56
    In this article I analyze Rawls' and Habermas' accounts of the role of religion in political deliberations in the public sphere. After pointing at some difficulties involved in the unequal distribution of deliberative rights and duties among religious and secular citizens that follow from their proposals, I argue for a way to structure political deliberation in the public sphere that imposes the same deliberative obligations on all democratic citizens, whether religious or secular. These obligat…Read more
  •  72
    In this essay I analyze some conceptual difficulties associated with the demand that global institutions be made more democratically accountable. In the absence of a world state, it may seem inconsistent to insist that global institutions be accountable to all those subject to their decisions while also insisting that the members of these institutions, as representatives of states, simultaneously remain accountable to the citizens of their own countries for the special responsibilities they have…Read more
  •  98
    In his book Tales of the Mighty Dead Brandom engages Gadamer’s hermeneutic conception of interpretation in order to show that his inferentialist approach to understanding conceptual content can explain and underwrite the main theses of Gadamer’s hermeneutics which he calls “the gadamerian hermeneutic platitudes”. In order to assess whether this claim is sound, I analyze the three types of philosophical interpretations that Brandom discusses: de re, de dicto and de traditione, and argue that they…Read more
  •  113
    Heidegger on meaning and reference
    Philosophy and Social Criticism 31 (1): 9-20. 2005.
    This paper is an attempt to criticize the reification of language present in Heidegger’s writings after the Kehre . The steps of the argument are as follows. First, it is argued that the specific features of Heidegger’s conception of language after the Kehre can be traced back to Heidegger’s conception of the ontological difference in Being and Time . The common element in both conceptions is the assumption that meaning determines reference (i.e. that the way entities are understood determines w…Read more
  •  12
    Cristina Lafont draws upon Hilary Putnam's work in particular to criticize the linguistic idealism and relativism of the German tradition, which she traces back to the assumption that meaning determines reference.
  •  2
    Democracia y deliberación pública
    In Rodolfo Arango Rivadeneira (ed.), Filosofía de la Democracia: Fundamentos Conceptuales, Ediciones Uniandes, Ceso. pp. 125--146. 2007.
  •  50
    Pre´cis of Heidegger, Language, and World-disclosure
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 45 (2). 2002.
    This Article does not have an abstract
  • Kommunikatives Handeln
    In Hauke Brunkhorst, Regina Kreide & Cristina Lafont (eds.), Habermas-Handbuch, Metzler. pp. 332--336. 2009.
  •  126
    Was Heidegger an externalist?
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 48 (6). 2005.
    To address the question posed in the title, I focus on Heidegger's conception of linguistic communication developed in the sections on Rede and Gerede of Being and Time. On the basis of a detailed analysis of these sections I argue that Heidegger was a social externalist but semantic internalist. To make this claim, however, I first need to clarify some key points that have led critics to assume Heidegger's commitment to social externalism automatically commits him to semantic externalism regard…Read more
  •  3
    Heidegger and the synthetic a-priori
    In Steven Galt Crowell & Jeff Malpas (eds.), Transcendental Heidegger, Stanford University Press. pp. 104--118. 2007.
  •  16
    Spannungen im Wahrheitsbegriff
    Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 42 (6): 1007-1024. 1994.
  •  64
    Dilemas en torno a la verdad
    Theoria 10 (2): 109-124. 1995.
    This article argues for an intermediate standpoint concerning the theory of truth which finds an equilibrium between realist an epistemic conceptions of truth. At the same time it is accepted that truth is a notion with an ultimate realist sense, but it is made clear that this intuitive sense does only have a non-trivial (i.e. non-“disquotational”), reading if the function of “truth” is seen from within the epistemic framework of our practices of belief-formation (i.e. of confirmation and revisi…Read more
  •  59
    In this essay, I analyze the cosmopolitan project for a new international order that Habermas has articulated in recent publications. I argue that his presentation of the project oscillates between two models. The first is a very ambitious model for a future international order geared to fulfill the peace and human rights goals of the UN Charter. The second is a minimalist model, in which the obligation to protect human rights by the international community is circumscribed to the negative duty …Read more