Eduardo Mendieta

From George Floyd to Breonna Taylor, the brutal deaths of Black citizens at the hands of law enforcement have brought race and policing to the forefront of national debate in the United States. In The Ethics of Policing, Ben Jones and Eduardo Mendieta bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars across the social sciences and humanities to reevaluate the role of the police and the ethical principles that guide their work. With contributors such as Tracey Meares, Michael Walzer, and Franklin Zimring, this volume covers timely topics including race and policing, the use of aggressive tactics and deadly force, police abolitionism, and the use of new technologies like drones, body cameras, and predictive analytics, providing different perspectives on the past, present, and future of policing, with particular attention to discriminatory practices that have historically targeted Black and Brown communities. This volume offers cutting-edge insight into the ethical challenges facing the police and the institutions that oversee them. As high-profile cases of police brutality spark protests around the country, The Ethics of Policing raises questions about the proper role of law enforcement in a democratic society.

The Anthropocene must also be seen as the convergence of the historicization of nature and human historicity, not simply metaphorically, but factually. As historical time is injected in nature through anthropogenesis, resulting in our having to see nature as a product of a historical process, our understanding of time is being transformed. The Anthropocene must be understood as a temporalization of time tout court. The key concern is what could be called an Anthropocenic matrix of intelligibility and its corresponding image of Anthropos. In the time of the end of time and the time of the end, the new image of humanity is that of a destroyer of world.

Over a career spanning nearly seven decades, Jürgen Habermas - one of the most important European philosophers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries - has produced a prodigious and influential body of work. In this Lexicon, authored by an international team of scholars, over 200 entries define and explain the key concepts, categories, philosophemes, themes, debates, and names associated with the entire constellation of Habermas's thought. The entries explore the historical, philosophical and social-theoretic roots of these terms and concepts, as well as their intellectual and disciplinary contexts, to build a broad but detailed picture of the development and trajectory of Habermas as a thinker. The volume will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars of Habermas, as well as for other readers in political philosophy, political science, sociology, international relations, cultural studies, and law.

The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture. Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. Los atravesados live here: the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-breed, the half...

Jürgen Habermas’s recent book Die Zukunft der menschlichen Natur (2001) is discussed. Particular attention is paid to the central argument concerning the adverse effects the general acceptance of cloning and pre-implantation genetic diagnostics (PGD) would have on the moral and political self-understanding of present and future generations. The argument turns to a critique of Habermas’s central arguments against PGD, and develops at least two arguments that are in harmony with his general defense of procedural democracy and deontological morality. Appeal is made to Peter Singer and John Rawls to develop arguments that do not reject either PGD or genetic engineering and that are nonetheless in full compliance with the spirit of political modernity, as it is defended and defined by Habermas. The conclusion calls for less moralizing and more political-economic critique of the biotechnologies unleashed by the information revolution

Arthur Schopenhauer, in an essay titled “On Authorship and Style,” included in volume 2 of his Parerga and Paralipomena, writes, “First there are two kinds of authors, those who write for the sake of the subject and those who write for the sake of writing. The former have ideas or experiences which seem to them worth communicating; the latter need money and thus write for money.”1 Schopenhauer, however, changes his mind quickly a page later and writes: “Again, we can say that there are three kinds of authors; first those who write without thinking. They write from memory, from reminiscences, or even directly from the books of others. This class is the most numerous. Secondly, those who think while they are ..

In "The Frankfurt School on Religion," Eduardo Mendieta has brought together a collection of readings and essays revealing both the deep connections that the Frankfurt School has always maintained with religion as well as the significant contribution that its work has to offer. Rather than being unanimously antagonistic towards religion as has been the received wisdom, this collection shows the great diversity of responses that individual thinkers of the school developed and the seriousness and sophistication with which they engaged the core religious issues and major religious traditions. Through a careful selection of writings from eleven prominent theorists, including several new and previously untranslated pieces from Leo Lowenthal, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Jurgen Habermas, this volume provides much needed sources for religious leaders, philosophers, and social theorists as they grapple with the nature and functions of religion in the contemporary social, political, and economic landscape. "The Frankfurt School on Religion" recovers the religious dimensions of the Frankfurt School, for too long sidelined or ignored, and offers new perspectives and insights necessary to the development of a fuller and more nuanced critical theory of society. Selections and essays from: Ernst Bloch, Erich Fromm, Leo Lowenthal, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Johann Baptist Metz, Jurgen Habermas, Helmut Peukert, Edmund Arens

Jorge Valadez’s important contribution to political theory in general, and multicultural citizenship in particular, is assessed from the standpoint of the duplicitous role ‘culture’ plays in contemporary political theory. After underscoring its virtues, the essay turns to a discussion of three major concerns that the book raises: its negativistic view of the culture of the oppressed; its anachronistic proposal about universal property rights; and the way the author might have to revise its view of the ethnogroups in order to deal appropriately with Latinos in the USA.

Philosophy projects a certain understanding of reason that is related to the ways in which the city figures in its imaginary. Conversely, the city is a practice of spatialization that determines the ways in which agents are able, or unable, to live out their social agency. This essay focuses on the ways in which philosophy and the city's spatializing practices and imaginaries inform differential ways of living out social agency. The thrust of the investigation is to discern the ways in which sexism - differential engendering - results from the relationship that exists between philosophy and the city. To illustrate this link between philosophy, the city, and differential engendering, the work turns to a consideration of Jean-Paul Sartre's phenomenology, which is taken as an exemplary illustration of the entwinement between the philosophical imaginary, and the perception and reception of the city

This important new volume brings together Habermas' key writing on religion and religious belief. Habermas explores the relations between Christian and Jewish thought, on the one hand, and the Western philosophical tradition on the other. In so doing, he examines a range of important figures, including Benjamin, Heidegger, Johann Baptist Metz and Gershom Scholem. In a new introduction written especially for this volume, Eduardo Mendieta places Habermas' engagement with religion in the context of his work as a whole. Mendieta also discusses Habermas' writings in relation to Jewish Messianism and the Frankfurt School, showing how the essays in Religion and Rationality, one of which is translated into English for the first time, foreground an important, yet often neglected, dimension of critical theory. The volume concludes with an original extended interview, also in English for the first time, in which Habermas develops his current views on religion in modern society. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in theology, religious studies and philosophy, as well as to all those already familiar with Habermas' work.

Zur Anwendung der Diskursethik in Politik, Recht und Wissenschaft suggests that something like a critique of practical reason, or at least its foundations—from the perspective of transcendental semiotics—is in the works, and in addition that it is something possible, desirable and even necessary. The suggestion is that a semiotically transformed transcendental philosophy, as the theoretical aspect of a philosophical system, has its complement in a practical philosophy whose main tenets have come to be known as discourse ethics, or the discourse theory of ethics. Historically, Karl-Otto Apel was the first to formulate some of the main arguments of a communicative, discursive, semiotical, or pragmatic theory of morality, and he did so as far back as the late sixties and early seventies. In the United States, in contrast to European and Latin American countries where Apel's work is better known, Habermas' name is the one most frequently associated with the discourse theory of ethics. This state of affairs may be due to a dearth of translations of primary sources, though Benhabib's and Dallmayr's The Communicative Ethics Controversy provides an excellent selection of primary texts. Consequently, today in the United States we stand not only quite behind the times in terms of the primary sources of discourse ethics, but also of the growing secondary literature on the subject. Neither Apel, nor Habermas, can be said to provide the only discourse-ethical approach within philosophy and political theory, exhaust the consequences and possibilities of an application of discourse ethics by their respective attempts to link it directly to either a theory of politics, or a theory of the democratic state that is circumscribed by both a specifically German historical horizon and a European-First World outlook. Indeed what makes this book particularly interesting, helpful, and above all timely is that it makes a conscious effort to represent the various positions that fall under the rubric of communicative, or discourse oriented practical philosophy, and the many ways in which problems of practical philosophy can be approached—while it attempts to give us a distinct sense that this approach has in fact graduated to an international status, that is, that it is no longer, if it ever was, exclusively an affair of German philosophy.

: María Pía Lara's two books, La Democracia como proyecto de identidad ética and Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere are described and analyzed. Her contribution to a feminist left-Habermasian theory of the relationship between the aesthetic dimension and the political imaginary are discussed. Questions and concerns, however, are raised regarding the assumptions of universal pragmatics and Lara's attempt to offer a positive reading of the dependence of the political imaginary on literary acts and genres.