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32Explanation and understanding revisited: Bohman and the new philosophy of social science (review)Human Studies 20 (4): 413-428. 1997.James Bohman has succeeded in reinvigorating the old debate over explanation and understanding by situating it within contemporary discussions about sociological indeterminacy and complexity. I argue that Bohman's preference for a paradigm based on Habermas's theory of communicative action is justifiable given the explanatory deficiencies of ethnomethodological, rational choice, rule-based, and functionalist methodologies. Yet I do not share his belief that the paradigm is preferable to less for…Read more
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31Response to Andrew Cutrofello's comments on reason, history, and politics by David IngramSocial Epistemology 12 (2). 1998.
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31Reason, History, and Politics: The Communitarian Grounds of Legitimation in the Modern AgeState University of New York Press. 1995.The author shows that conceptions of rationality in current theories of science and law can account for neither the legitimacy of paradigm shifts nor the communitarian integrity internal to paradigms generally. He proposes an alternative conception of rationality that does
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30Calhoun, Craig , "Habermas and the Public Sphere" (review)International Philosophical Quarterly 33 (n/a): 249-250. 1993.
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30Response to James Swindal and bill Martin on reason, history, and politics (review)Human Studies 23 (2): 203-210. 2000.
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29Letters to the EditorProceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 72 (2). 1998.
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27Human rights belong to individuals in virtue of their common humanity. Yet it is an important question whether human rights entail or comport with the possession of what I call group-specific rights, or rights that individuals possess only because they belong to a particular group. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights says they do. Article 15 asserts the right to nationality, or citizenship. Unless one believes that the only citizenship compatible with a universal human rights regime is cos…Read more
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26Habermas: Introduction and Analysis (edited book)Cornell University Press. 2010."This is a marvelous resource for anyone interested in better understanding the difficult and voluminous work of jurgen Habermas.
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26This essay proposes recognition theory as a preferred approach to explaining poor women’s puzzling preference for patriarchal subordination even after they have accessed an ostensibly empowering asset: microfinance. Neither the standard account of adaptive preference offered by Martha Nussbaum nor the competing account of constrained rational choice offered by Harriet Baber satisfactorily explains an important variation of what Serene Khader, in discussing microfinance, dubs the self-subordinati…Read more
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25Exceptional Justice? A Discourse Ethical Contribution to the Immigrant QuestionCritical Horizons 10 (1): 1-30. 2009.I argue that the exception must be a legitimate possibility within law as a revolutionary project, in much the same way that civil disobedience is. In this sense, the exception is not outside law if by "law" we mean not positive law as defined by extant legal documents (statutes, legislative committee reports, written judgments, etc.) but law as a living tradition consisting of both abstract norms and a concrete historical understanding of them. So construed, the exception is what can be exempla…Read more
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25Toward a Cleaner White(Ness): New Racial Identities1Philosophical Forum 36 (3): 243-277. 2005.The article re-examines racial and ethnic identity within the context of pedagogical attempts to instill a positive white identity in white students who are conscious of the history of white racism and white privilege. The paper draws heavily from whiteness studies and developmental cognitive science in arguing (against Henry Giroux and Stuart Hall) that a positive notion of white identity, however postmodern its construction, is an oxymoron, since whiteness designates less a cultural/ethnic eth…Read more
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23Revisiting Marcuse on Repressive Tolerance: A Twenty-First Century RetrospectiveIn The Marcusean Mind, Routledge. forthcoming.Herbert Marcuse’s essay Repressive Tolerance (RP) has been praised by the Left and vilified by the Right for its alleged promotion of censorship targeting reactionary opinions and actions. I argue that this interpretation of the text is mistaken. According to my alternative reading of the text, RP should be understood as an exercise in provocation and irony aimed at defending civil disobedience and dissent. Marcuse’s defense of dissent, however, appeals to a critique of pure tolerance that expos…Read more
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23Habermas claims that an inclusive public sphere is the only deliberative forum for generating public opinion that satisfies the epistemic and normative conditions underlying legitimate decision-making. He adds that digital technologies and other mass media need not undermine – but can extend – rational deliberation when properly instituted. This paper draws from social epistemology and technology studies to demonstrate the epistemic and normative limitations of this extension. We argue that curr…Read more
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23What an Ethics of Discourse and Recognition Can Contribute to a Critical Theory of Refugee Claim Adjudication: Reclaiming Epistemic Justice for Gender-Based Asylum SeekersIn Gottfried Schweiger (ed.), Migration, Recognition and Critical Theory, Springer Verlag. pp. 19-46. 2021.Thanks to Axel Honneth, recognition theory has become a prominent fixture of critical social theory. In recent years, he has deployed his recognition theory in diagnosing pathologies and injustices that afflict institutional practices. Some of these institutional practices revolve around specifically juridical institutions, such as human rights and democratic citizenship, that directly impact the lives of the most desperate migrants. Hence it is worthwhile asking what recognition theory can add …Read more
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22The article situates Vico's hermeneutical science of history between a hermeneutics of suspicion and a redemptive hermeneutics. It discusses Vico's early writings and his ambivalent trajectory from Cartesian rationalism to counter-enlightenment historicist and critic of natural law reasoning. The complexity of Vico's thinking belies some of the popular treatments of his thought developed by Isaiah Berlin and others
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21Review of Theodor W. Adorno, History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965 (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2007 (9). 2007.
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20Developments in Anglo-American philosophy during the first half of the 20th Century closely tracked developments that were occurring in continental philosophy during this period. This should not surprise us. Aside from the fertile communication between these ostensibly separate traditions, both were responding to problems associated with the rise of mass society. Rabid nationalism, corporate statism, and totalitarianism posed a profound challenge to the idealistic rationalism of neo-Kantian and …Read more
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20Blumenberg and the Philosophical Grounds of HistoriographyHistory and Theory 29 (1): 1-15. 1990.Blumenberg's rejection of Karl Lowith's secularization thesis, as presented in Lowith's The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, and Blumenberg's defense of an alternative theory of functional reoccupations raises questions about the kind of progress he finds operant in historiography and historical understanding. These questions are best addressed within the framework of his recent Work on Myth, which defines the legitimacy of an age or myth in terms of progressive adaptability rather than autonomy. N…Read more
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19The possibility of a communication ethic reconsidered: Habermas, Gadamer, and Bourdieu on discourse (review)Man and World 15 (2): 149-161. 1982.
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19Recognition and Positive FreedomIn John Christman (ed.), Positive Freedom: Past, Present, and Future, Cambridge University Press. 2021.A number of well-known Hegel-inspired theorists have recently defended a distinctive type of social freedom that, while bearing some resemblance to Isaiah Berlin’s famous description of positive freedom, takes its bearings from a theory of social recognition rather than a theory of moral self-determination. Berlin himself argued that recognition-based theories of freedom are really not about freedom at all but about solidarity, More strongly, he argued that recognition-based theories of freedom,…Read more
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18Imaginaries of modernity: politics, culture, tensionsTandf: Critical Horizons 20 (1): 88-94. 2017.Volume 20, Issue 1, February 2019, Page 88-94.
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17European and American PhilosophersIn Robert L. Arrington (ed.), A Companion to the Philosophers, Blackwell. 2017.Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categ…Read more
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17Appendix F: Systems TheoryIn Habermas: Introduction and Analysis, Cornell University Press. pp. 345-350. 2016.
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Loyola University, ChicagoProfessor
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Chicago, Illinois, United States of America
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