Maeve Cooke

La ficción narrativa tiene el poder de alterar nuestras más arraigadas intuiciones y expectativas acerca de lo que significa seguir una vida éticamente buena, así como del tipo de sociedad que facilitaría tal situación. A veces su poder disruptivo es develador, lo cual lleva a un cambio éticamente significativo en la percepción. Sostengo que los poderes disruptivos y develadores de una ficción narrativa constituyen un potencial para el conocimiento ético. Interpreto este conocimiento como un proceso de aprendizaje, orientado por una preocupación acerca de la verdad, que involucra la acción racional y el compromiso afectivo de un sujeto humano encarnado. Con el fin de mostrar esto, me enfrento de manera crítica a la lectura de Kafka realizada por Adorno, usando la historia de Kafka titulada “En la colonia penitenciaria” para desafiar tal análisis.

Revisiting Taylor's 1992 account of the politics of recognition, I argue that he is right to discern a strand in contemporary politics that goes beyond the demand for recognition of dignity. Against Taylor I contend that this is best understood as a concern not for recognition of difference but for the value of something that is not universally shared, such as a particular ethical conception, cultural tradition or religious belief and practice. Using the examples of three social movements I show the relevance of this for contemporary politics. My empirically based argument is supported normatively by a discussion of Hegel's critique of `morality as conscience' in his Phenomenology. Referring to Axel Honneth's theory of recognition I highlight the lack of attention to this kind of concern for recognition in contemporary political and social theory. I conclude by specifying the key features of the concept of recognition most appropriate for responding to it publicly under conditions of value-pluralism.

Narrative fiction has the power to unsettle our deep-seated intuitions and expectations about what it means to live an ethically good life, and the kind of society that best facilitates this. Sometimes its disruptive power is disclosive, leading to an ethically significant shift in perception. I contend that the disruptive and disclosive powers of narrative fiction constitute a potential for ethical knowledge. I construe ethical knowledge as a learning process, oriented by a concern for truth, which involves the rational agency and affective engagement of an embodied human subject. For the purposes of showing this, I engage critically with Adorno’s reading of Kafka, using Kafka's story ‘In the Penal Colony’ to challenge Adorno’s analysis.

In a widely publicized lecture in 2008, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, expressed his concern that the conception of law and democratic citizenship prevailing in England may lead to ghettoization. The problem, in his view, is that the bulk of the convictions and commitments that define a given citizen’s identity are seen as a matter of individual choice and relegated to the private realm. In diagnosing this problem, Williams tacitly distances himself from a privatizing view of democratic politics. In response to the problem, he calls for consideration of the possibility of supplementary jurisdictions, whereby certain legal functions would be delegated to the religious courts of a community. The article is broadly supportive of Williams’ concern to avoid privatization and his emphasis on the importance of openness to learning from other legal codes. However, it finds no convincing case for legally recognizing plural jurisdictions. It concludes that this aim is better served by Seyla Benhabib’s proposal for vibrant, ongoing exchanges between different legal codes, and between such codes and political and cultural beliefs, traditions and practices.

In liberal democracies it is now a commonplace that public debates in the institutionalized political sphere should involve only arguments and reasons that are in principle intelligible, accessible and acceptable to all citizens. Many political theorists take the view that religious arguments and reasons do not meet these requirements. My article interrogates this widely held position, considering each of the three requirements in turn. Motivating my discussion is the view that religious beliefs and practices should not be regarded as essentially private matters, with discussion of their validity confined to some antecedently demarcated sphere. Rather, claims made for the validity of religious beliefs and practices should be thematized and evaluated in public processes of deliberation, opening them to possible challenges from other citizens, irrespective of whether these other citizens are religious believers. My article offers a freedom-based argument for this position.

The value of a negatively defined private space is defended as important for the development of personal autonomy. It is argued that negative liberty is problematic when split off from its connection with this ideal. An ethical interpretation of personal autonomy is proposed according to which a private space is one of autonomy's preconditions. This leads to a conceptualization of privacy that is fruitful in two respects: it permits an account of privacy laws that avoids certain pitfalls, and it serves as a basis for criticizing privacy-related failures of autonomy together with the social forces that produce them. Negative liberty is, furthermore, rejected as an adequate basis for modern law and democracy. Here, too, an ethically defined personal autonomy, of which negative liberty is a precondition, is held to be the most convincing normative foundation. A critical reading of Habermas' cooriginality thesis is offered in support of this argument. Key Words: cooriginality thesis • Jürgen Habermas • Herbert Marcuse • negative liberty • personal autonomy • positive liberty • privacy • Martin Walser.

The article examines Habermas’s formal‐pragmatic theory of meaning from the point of view of his attempt to defend a postmetaphysical yet context‐transcendent conception of validity. It considers his attempt to develop a pragmatic account of understanding utterances that emphasises the mediation of knowledge through socio‐cultural practices while simultaneously stressing that understanding has a cognitive dimension that is inherently context‐transcendent. It focuses on his recent “Janus‐faced” conception of truth, looking more briefly at his purely epistemic conception of moral validity. It raises three objections: the first to his attempt to maintain a notion of “unconditionality” that has no otherworldly origins but is purely immanent to this world, the second to the alleged non‐arbitrary status of his conception of truth, and the third to his rejection of metaphysical thinking. It concludes that the objections, if valid, have profound implications for Habermas’s postmetaphysical enterprise and for his programme of formal pragmatics.

The question of civil disobedience has preoccupied philosophical discourse at least since Thoreau's articulation of disobedience as a form of non-compliance and Rawls' classic definition outlined in the wake of the civil rights and student protest movements of the 1960s. It has become increasingly clear, however, that these classic definitions are being challenged and rethought from a variety of traditions in the wake of contemporary protests. These articles engage with the most recent debates surrounding civil disobedience and conscientious objection, opening up original new paths for thinking about forms of protest. They also reveal disagreements about how to understand civil disobedience and about the place of conscience in political protest, inviting further discussion on these questions and issues.

Critical social theories look critically at the ways in which particular social arrangements hinder human flourishing, with a view to bringing about social change for the better. In this they are guided by the idea of a good society in which the identified social impediments to human flourishing would once and for all have been removed. The question of how these guiding ideas of the good life can be justified as valid across socio-cultural contexts and historical epochs is the most fundamental difficulty facing critical social theories today. This problem of justification, which can be traced back to certain key shifts in the modern Western social imaginary, calls on contemporary theories to negotiate the tensions between the idea of context-transcendent validity and their own anti-authoritarian impulses. Habermas makes an important contribution towards resolving the problem, but takes a number of wrong turnings.

Habermas' view that contemporary philosophy and social theory can learn from religious traditions calls for closer consideration. He is correct to hold that religious traditions constitute a reservoir of potentially important meanings that can be critically appropriated without emptying them of their motivating and inspirational power. However, contrary to what he implies, his theory allows for learning from religion only to a very limited degree. This is due to two core elements of his conceptual framework, both of which are key features of his account of postmetaphysical thinking. The first is the requirement of ethical agnosticism; this requires philosophy and social theory to refrain from offering guidance on questions of the good life. The second is his language-immanent conception of truth in the domain of practical reason; this follows from his rejection of any source of validity beyond human communication in this domain. I make the case for a more robust account of learning from religious traditions and metaphysical worldviews, arguing that for this purpose Habermas must modify his requirement of ethical agnosticism and relinquish his language-immanent conception of truth.

Critical social theory has an uneasy relationship with utopia. On the one hand, the idea of an alternative, better social order is necessary in order to make sense of its criticisms of a given social context. On the other hand, utopian thinking has to avoid ‘bad utopianism’, defined as lack of connection with the actual historical process, and ‘finalism’, defined as closure of the historical process. Contemporary approaches to critical social theory endeavour to avoid these dangers by way of a post metaphysical strategy. However, they run up against the problem that utopian thinking has an unavoidable metaphysical moment. Rather than seeking to eliminate this moment, therefore, they should acknowledge its inevitability. The challenge is to maintain a productive tension between closure and contestability and between attainability and elusiveness. The paper outlines a strategy for meeting this challenge, a strategy that is based on a distinction between the metaphysical content of utopian projections and their fallible claims to validity. Key Words: critical social theory • fallibilism • metaphysical closure • postmetaphysical thinking • reflexivity • regulative idea • utopia.