Arto Laitinen

In this Chapter (ch 5 of Strong Evaluation without Moral Sources), as well the following chapters, I defend a hermeneutical but nevertheless non-relativistic moral theory, taking Charles Taylor’s writings on this topic as my guide. Taylor is a realist concerning natural sciences, the ontology of persons and the ontology of goods (or meanings, significances or values). Yet, his realisms in these three areas differ significantly from one another, and therefore one has to be careful not to presuppose too rigid views of what “realism” must be like. Taylor’s moral realism can be called engaged, cultural, phenomenological, hermeneutical or even “expressivist” in a sense to be clarified. According to such value realism, cognitivism is the correct view of our ordinary moral and evaluative reactions and responses to situations. In the realm of evaluative judgements, genuinely correct and incorrect (and better and worse) judgements are possible. These judgements can be implicit in our moral emotions and tacit agent’s knowledge, or more explicit in different articulations. What makes evaluative judgements correct are evaluative properties or “imports” of the situation, and both the evaluative features of situations and our correct responses to them can be further understood in terms of a plurality of (conflicting and incommensurable) goods, ideals or values (section 5.1). In 5.2 I discuss some motivations for non-cognitivism, and try to show that cognitivism can preserve these motivations. I then ask whether value-properties are metaphysically “queer” and what the perspective from which goods are accessible is. I argue for a lifeworldly, engaged access. The evaluative realm is not accessible from a disengaged perspective, but only from within an engaged, lifeworldly perspective. Evaluative properties are not merely a matter of subjective projection nor merely a matter of objective properties independent of valuers. Evaluative properties are relational, and neither the objective nor the subjective pole has priority (5.3). Then I clarify the meaning of “good” and “value”, especially in relation to the central idea that each qualitative distinction of worth expressible in thick, strongly evaluative terms specifies a “value” or a “good” or a “good-making property”. I contrast this with other meanings of “good”. (5.4) After that, I defend the irreducible plurality of such goods against more uniform principles and value monism on the one hand, and I defend their generality against more radical particularisms on the other. Further, I discuss the “lumpy” character of the evaluative realm in relation to incompatibility, incommensurability and conflicts of goods. (5.5). These theses are reconstructed from Charles Taylor’s writings, but authors like John McDowell and Joseph Raz hold similar views. Not unimportantly, Charles Taylor would add a further thesis claiming that there are “constitutive goods” which constitute the goodness of “life goods”, or which in other words bring about the fact that evaluative properties have value. I try to defend the coherence and appeal of engaged, lifeworldly moral realism without taking at first any stand on this further claim about constitutive goods. J. Schneewind (1991, 422) writes in his perceptive review of Sources of the Self that Taylor does not really pay attention to the metaethical debates of 20th century value-theorists. While Taylor’s contribution could have benefited from the work already done in the field, and while Taylor’s philosophizing often leaves it open how his views relate to the views of others, his approach manages to be remarkably original. One might add that due to the theoretically “rhapsodic” nature of Taylor’s work, his theory has received criticism from opposing directions. He tries to defend several theses, which many critics seem to think cannot be held together. Taylor seems to be both communitarian and expressive individualist stressing authenticity; both historicist and universalist; both anthropocentricist and deep ecologist; a realist and a cultural relativist. In this work, some of these seemingly contradictory combinations are defended, while some of them are criticized.

The essays in this volume offer a range of new perspectives on Charles Taylor's philosophy. Part one addresses key metaphilosophical themes such as the role of transcendental arguments, the critique of representationalism, and the dialectics of Enlightenment. Part two critically examines Taylor's views on personhood, selfhood and interpersonal recognition. Part three discusses issues in Taylor's moral and political theory, including the nature of his moral realism, his theory of modernity, and his critical appropriation of the liberal tradition. The book concludes with an interview with Taylor in which he summarizes his work and comments on some key contemporary issues.

In this chapter I distinguish between a) recognition of persons, b) normative acknowledgement and c) institution-creating acceptance. All of these go beyond a fourth, merely descriptive sense of the word “recognition,” namely identification or re-identification of something as something. I distinguish four aspects of "taking someone as a person": R1 A Belief that the other is a person, and can engage in agency-regarding relations.R2 Moral Opinion that the choice whether and when to engage with persons is ethically significant.R3 Willingness to refrain from wronging the other person, and to respond adequately to the normatively relevant features of the other (regardless of whether the willingness is ultimately selfish or not).R4 Unselfish Recognitive Attitudes explaining such willingness; such as genuine respect or genuine concern or solidarity. The second section asks: is mutual recognition between individuals necessary, sufficient, paradigmatic or desirable for group agency? I also ask: is interaction or communication necessary for mutual recognition? I also ask what kinds of groups emerge from mutual recognition as persons? The third section studies more briefly acknowledgement and normativity (Reasons, Values, and Principles). The fourth section discusses the nature of acceptance necessary for the existence of institutions.

This is the introductory chapter to a book. This study has two parts. The first part concerns some central concepts in philosophical anthropology and the second part some of the central questions in ethics. One of today’s leading philosophers, Charles Taylor (b. 1931), suggests with his notion of “strong evaluation” that these two areas should be studied in tandem: the self and the good are interrelated, and the nature of persons is intertwined with the nature of values.1 Strong evaluations, i. e. value-judgements and convictions, or “evaluations based on qualitative distinctions concerning worth”, are in Taylor’s view internally related to identity and human agency. The questions I ask in this study are, first, what exactly is strong evaluation and what is its role in relation to human agency, personhood, identity, selfhood and subjectivity? Secondly, can a moral theory be developed, which is realist concerning strong evaluations and yet rejects Taylor’s idea of constitutive “sources” of morality? The goal is first of all to defend the general relevance of strong evaluation in philosophical anthropology and to make contributions to more specific ongoing debates (concerning personhood and identity). Secondly, the goal is to argue that a realist moral theory need not rely on anything that Taylor calls moral sources or constitutive goods, and to outline such a “source-less” theory (which I call “engaged value realism”) and in so doing to contribute to various specific questions of practical philosophy (for example concerning cultural diversity, universality and validity; subject-dependence, subject-independence and reality of values; the nature of individual orientations, commitments and general goods).

This article suggests first that the concept of interpersonal recognition be understood in a multidimensional (as opposed to one-dimensional), practical (as opposed to symbolic), and strict (as opposed to broad) way. Second, it is argued that due recognition be seen as a reason-governed response to evaluative features, rather than all normativity and reasons being seen as generated by recognition. This can be called a response-model, or, more precisely, a value-based model of due recognition. A further suggestion is that there is a systematic basis for distinguishing three dimensions of recognition, depending on whether recognition is given to someone qua a person, qua a certain kind of person, or qua a certain person. Finally, it is argued that recognition is a necessary condition of personhood, but whether it is of direct or indirect relevance depends on our theories of personhood (social vs. capacity-theory) and practical identity (dialogical definition model vs. feature-model). Despite the apparent opposition, it is shown that interpersonal recognition is both a response to value and a precondition of personhood.

Any view stressing the relevance of the engaged perspective for value realism must face the fact of diversity of moral views. There is significant intercultural diversity in people’s beliefs about values. Skeptics like Mackie argue that the diversity results from there being nothing for people to know, or at least nothing they can know. In this chapter I try to show that engaged value realism is compatible with universal, unrestricted validity of values. In 6.1 and 6.2 I discuss various possible ways of facing the intercultural diversity of value-convictions. Then I discuss in more detail the central question of whether the validity of some evaluative considerations should be restricted to cultural communities in some relativistic fashion (6.3 and 6.4). The chapter ends with some clarifications concerning universality and validity, as well as the nature of internal criticism (6.5 and 6.6).

HR/AL: Professor Taylor, what are you working on these days? CT: Well, several things. One of the things I am working on is something I was lecturing this fall at the New School University, and that I have called ‘modern social imaginaries’. It is an attempt to understand western modernity in terms of the different ways in which people imagine their social existence. These imaginaries are a condition for new kinds of practices that are characteristic of modernity. This research is an internal part of a larger project to understand modern secular civilization, the modern west as a secular civilization. What does that notion exactly mean? What does it amount to? How did it happen?

The Philosophy Now series promises to combine rigorous analysis with authoritative expositions. Ruth Abbey’s book lives up to this demand by being a clear, reliable and more than up-to-date introduction to Charles Taylor ’s philosophy. Although it is an introductory book, the amount of footnotes and references ought to please those who want to study the original texts more closely. Abbey’s book is structured thematically: morality, selfhood, politics and epistemology get 50 pages each. The focus is on the internal coherence of Taylor ’s work, not in its critique of or defence against other positions. The chapters are self-containing, but together they give a good total picture of Taylor ’s position. The concluding chapter is a highly interesting preview of Taylor ’s unpublished work-in-progress on secularity, which according to Abbey is comparable in magnitude to Sources of the Self.

In this paper I analyze interpersonal and institutional recognition and discuss the relation of different types of recognition to various principles of social justice (egalitarianism, meritarianism, legitimate favouritism, principles of need and free exchange). Further, I try to characterize contours of good autonomous life, and ask what kind of preconditions it has. I will distinguish between five kinds of preconditions: psychological, material, cultural, intersubjective and institutional. After examining what the role of recognition is among such preconditions, and how they figure in the work of Axel Honneth, Nancy Fraser and Charles Taylor, I suggest a somewhat complex and hopefully rich picture of interpersonal and institutional recognition as a precondition of autonomous good life.

An encyclopedia entry on "solidarity". Around the 1840’s the term was adopted in German and English, and was politicized, adopted to social sciences, and came to be used in a broader meaning of emotionally and normatively motivated readiness for mutual support, as in the slogan “one for all and all for one”. In rival meanings, the concept has been used in four main contexts: first, in the context of explaining or understanding the nature of social cohesion, social order, ‘groupness’ or the ‘glue’ that keeps societies or groups together (social solidarity, group solidarity). Second,related to the ideal of fraternité, as a desirable feature of societies, political communities or welfare states (social solidarity, civic solidarity). Third, as an attitude or demand relevant in struggles for liberation and against injustice or oppression (political solidarity,workers’ solidarity, black solidarity, women’s solidarity). Fourth, as a universalistic ethical ideal of responsiveness to the human moral standing (human solidarity, moral solidarity, global solidarity). This entry focuses especially on the first use, and then briefly discusses the other three.

In this chapter I pursue the connection between humans as strong evaluators and humans as strongly valued. The connection is, quite simply, that strong evaluators are valued because they are strong evaluators. Yet, this valuing is of two kinds: someone’s achievements as a strong evaluator can be esteemed, or he can be respected as a person. Personhood is a specific kind of moral status, but it is based on personhood in the descriptive sense. Taylor’s views on persons can be seen as trying to incorporate the Kantian view of the dignity or worth of persons to the more Aristotelian- Hegelian ontology. The distinction between moral and descriptive personhood, and between two senses in which personhood is an “end” serves as an introduction to this theme (3.1). In 3.2 I will ask what the nature of persons is in the descriptive sense. I try to outline and clarify Taylor’s position in relation to some central positions in the contemporary discussions about personhood. I do not argue in detail against rival views about descriptive personhood, I merely hope to map some issues in rough outline. My goal in defending Taylor’s position is modest, I hope that merely stating the position clearly shows some of its appeals. The main point is that persons are certain kind of agents, machines could become persons only through becoming living beings first. The most fundamental idea in Taylor’s view of personhood is that of living responsively and dialogically in a world, which is a “moral space” or a “space of concerns”. Machines do not have a world, and the world of other animals is not a moral space. Taylor’s persons are strong evaluators and respondents, being moved by the world and the other people, and being responsible for their own action. So in this sense one can agree with Jeff Sugarman’s (2005, 809) way of summing it up: “not only are persons at the center of moral inquiry, but also, as Taylor’s work reveals, moral inquiry is at the center of personhood”. In 3.3 I discuss different ways of seeing the basis of the moral status of persons, and defend the direct view: moral personhood is directly grounded in descriptive personhood. (Thus various other options I discuss are “mute formalism”, arbitrary historicism, status-view, instrumentalism and desert-view). In sections 3.4 and 3.5 I ask whether such a suggestion works for those humans, who (at the moment) are not actual persons in the full sense. I further strengthen Taylor’s view and defend it against Feinberg’s criticism.

In this chapter I discuss Taylor’s claim that strong evaluation is inevitable for human agency: without a framework of strong evaluations human agents would be in a crisis which Taylor calls, perhaps misleadingly, “an identity crisis”. With a broad brush I introduce some of the essential background in first three sections, and scrutinize the inevitability of strong evaluation more closely in the last three sections. I introduce first the distinction between the engaged perspective, which in Taylor’s view provides the correct approach to humans and values, and two kinds of disengaged perspectives (objectivist and subjectivist ones) (2.1). Taylor’s ideal typical distinction (engaged and disengaged) resembles Sellars’s (1963) distinction between manifest and scientific image, but Taylor takes the scientific worldview to be only one objectivist variant of disengaged views: the Cartesian view of mind is detached from the lifeworldly reality, and is a variant of a subjectivist disengaged view. There are many aspects to Taylor’s philosophical anthropology, based on such an engaged perspective. He defends many “human constants” related to humans as social, self-interpreting, embodied language animals. Although here the focus is merely on one of the human constants, namely on the claim that humans are essentially strong evaluators, I give a sketchy account of the essentials of the broader picture in section 2.2. Taylor uses transcendental argumentation in trying to show the inescapability of strong evaluation in human life. I will, following Nicholas Smith’s reconstruction, discuss Taylor’s reasons for adopting such argumentative strategy in relation to this issue, as opposed to socalled ordinary language philosophy, phenomenological description, hermeneutical interpretation, or strict Hegelian dialectics (2.3). The central point is that although we may want to stress the hermeneutical or interpretive nature of being-in-the-world, and the constitutive nature of human self-interpretations, the few human constants are true whether explicitly taken to be true or not: humans are self-interpreting animals, or strong evaluators, even though they may hold opposing theories in their self-interpretations (cf. Abbey 2000, 4). In a sense, Taylor’s label for his claim, which he terms a “transcendental argument”, may seem to make heavy weather of a simple point: without strong evaluation those aspects of life and experience which presuppose strong evaluation would not be possible. These aspects of life include more or less everything that is peculiarly human. The arguments try to bring into focus these dependencies: strong evaluations are inescapable for our lives as humans or as persons, as opposed to “mere” animals. To be fully outside the scope of strong evaluation is to be in a pathological state. Various disengaged theories of humans neglect this. These are theories of human agency, subjectivity, personhood or identity which have ignored this dimension of human life, or have not taken it to be essential. Taylor’s arguments are directed against such views. In this chapter I will clarify the nature of Taylor’s argument by distinguishing different concepts (human agency, personhood, subjectivity, selfhood, and identity) and asking what it is exactly that strong evaluation is necessary for (2.4). The notions of personhood and identity will be discussed in more detail in the next two chapters. The crucial point in Taylor’s argumentation is made by the claim that for someone capable of strong evaluation, the lack of a framework of strong evaluations involves them in a terrible, frightening crisis, an identity-crisis. I will distinguish several meanings of this claim and discuss their validity in 2.5. I suggest that some “identity-crises” are not at all what Taylor has in mind. But the point itself is valid: without a framework of strong evaluations, human agents would be in a state of crisis. In the last section, I defend Taylor’s view against possible counterexamples, posed by Owen Flanagan and Paul Johnston.

ABSTRACT. This article presents theories of group belief with a problem. It is conceptually and psychologically impossible for there to be a believer with just one belief. For conceptual reasons, a single belief could not have any content without the background of other beliefs. Or even if it could, it would for psychological reasons be impossible for the believer to know or understand the content of its sole belief. With certain plausible assumptions, however, groups would at some point of time have to have only one belief so far. (Especially the assumption of discontinuity between the group’s and its members’ commitments leads to this.). If it is conceptually or psychologically impossible for the group to acquire its first belief, it can never come to acquire any beliefs at all. The article ends by discussing various ways out. KEYWORDS: Group belief, Philip Pettit, belief formation, holism, content of beliefs, problem of the first belief

Charles Taylor has written three big books on the self-understandings of modern age andmodern individuals. Hegel (1975) focused on one towering figure, and held that Hegel ’ saspirations to overcome modern dualisms are still ours, but Hegelian philosophicalspeculation is not the way to do it. Sources of the Self (1989) ran the intellectual historyfrom peak to peak, stressing the continuous presence of modern tensions and cross- pressures between Enlightenment and Romanticism. A Secular Age (2007) aims to cover the valleys as well, trying to explain how certain “ secular ” understandings have come toexistence and have managed to spread themselves from the elites into the prevailing taken-for-granted background imaginaries.Taylor begins by distinguishing three senses of secularity. The first can be called “ political ” , focusing on the separation of state and church, while the second one is “ sociological ” , focusing on the statistics of religious belief and practice. The third one can perhaps be called “ existential ” and it seems to be harder to define. It concerns what Taylor calls broad background conditions of belief and spiritual searching: something like thegeneral assumptions implicit in one ’ s lived experience, social and cosmic imaginary, whichmake a difference to what form (if any) one ’ s religious aspirations take. Taylor focuses onthis third sense and asks what has changed in that respect between 1500 when lack of belief in God was unimaginable, and 2000, when belief is one option among many.

This paper critically examines Christopher Zurn’s suggestion mentioned above that various social pathologies (pathologies of ideological recognition, maldistribution, invisibilization, rationality distortions, reification and institutionally forced self-realization) share the structure of being ‘second-order disorders’: that is, that they each entail ‘constitutive disconnects between first-order contents and secondorder reflexive comprehension of those contents, where those disconnects are pervasive and socially caused’ (Zurn, 2011, 345-346). The paper argues that the cases even as discussed by Zurn do not actually match that characterization, but that it would be premature to conclude that they are not thereby social pathologies, or that they do not have a structure in common. It is just that the structure is more complex than originally described, covering pervasive socially caused evils (i) in the social reality, (ii) in the first order experiences and understandings, (iii) in the second order reflection as discussed by Zurn, and also (iv) in the ‘third order’ phenomenon concerning the pre-emptive silencing or nullification of social criticism even before it takes Place. Research Interests: Critical Theory, Social Theory, Political Theory, Recognition - Social Pathologies, Axel Honneth, Mutual recognition and Dani Zubair

This essay examines Paul Ricœur’s views on recognition in his book The Course of Recognition . It highlights those aspects that are in some sense surprising, in relation to his previous publications and the general debates on Hegelian Anerkennung and the politics of recognition. After an overview of Ricœur’s book, the paper examines the meaning of “recognition” in Ricœur’s own proposal, in the dictionaries Ricœur uses, and in the contemporary debates. Then it takes a closer look at the ideas of recognition as identification and as “taking as true.” Then it turns to recognition (attestation) of oneself, in light of the distinction between human constants (and the question “What am I?”), and human variables (and the question “Who Am I?”). The last section concerns the dialectics of struggles for recognition and states of peace, and the internal relationship between the contents of a normative demand and what counts as satisfying the demand.  .

Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose? Not for Axel Honneth,whose Hegelian reconstruction sees freedom as the central, even sole, driving force of Western modernity. Other apparently central values are mere modifications of freedom. Nothin’ don’t mean nothin’ if it ain’t free. In his deliberately grand narrative, Honneth follows Hegel's Philosophy of Right in developing an account of social justice by means of an analysis of society. The end result is an outline of society in terms of roles and ethical relations through which individuals can achieve freedom and self-realization.The construal is at the same time a description of the constitutive spheresof contemporary society, in terms of its less than fully realized potentialsand promises. In Hegelian parlance, the "rational" is in the process of becom-ing "actual" in modern history, but owing to misdevelopments and social pathologies, there is still ample room for social criticism, in light of the veryconcept that these institutions (are meant to) embody, namely, social freedom.

What is the relationship of “strong evaluation” and self-identity? What exactly is personal identity? Does identity consist of interpretations or facts? Do strong evaluations have a constitutive role in identity-formation? If there is no given individual essence or true self waiting to be found, but identity is dialogically construed in self-interpretation, then can identities be criticized at all, when there is no pre-given true self, which would serve as the basis of criticism? I follow Charles Taylor in defending an interpretational and evaluational conception of self-identity, but I hope to be more precise in distinguishing several meanings of “identity” and correspondingly several different roles that strong evaluation has for identity in different senses. Further, I try to show that identities are criticizable despite the lack of pre-given essences. I will first differentiate between various meanings of identity: idem-identity, ipse-identity, collective identity and species identity (4.1). Then I take a closer look at ipse-identity in four different meanings: practical identity, biographical identity, qualitative identity and “singularity” (4.2). This survey tries to capture the most important meanings of the concept, but the concept of identity is used in philosophy, social psychology and human sciences in so many different ways that a comprehensive survey is probably impossible. However, this survey may help to sort out what sense of identity is relevant for strong evaluation, or for what “identities” strong evaluations are crucial. Having distinguished these several meanings, I turn to the formation of identity in self-interpretations. Charles Taylor has been (wrongly) accused of presupposing a pre-political identity that persons or groups are supposed to have, and for which they want recognition. That would overlook the way in which identities are constituted dialogically, and in interpretations. I will defend the view that personal identity is a matter of self-interpretation, and collective identity is a matter of collective selfinterpretations. While dialogues and recognition by others plays a crucial role in the formation of one’s identity, the views of others are not directly constitutive of a person’s identity, unless the contents are known or accepted by the person herself. Being a person or a self is an active business. Having a self in a fullfledged sense means having a conception of oneself, and having conceptions is an active business. People don’t have beliefs like things have properties. As Sellars (1963) has stressed, the relation of two mental episodes has to be normative if it is to count as knowledge; it cannot be merely causal. And as the “transcendental tradition” from Kant onwards has stressed, being a subject is not merely a matter of having mental contents (which could possibly be caused by the world) but being aware of the reality, taking the mental contents to be about the world.144 In addition to normativity and intentionality, the activity of self-defining is one aspect of the spontaneous activity of the subject. One’s self-identity does not rest simply on having features, but on one’s activity, on identification with some actual or possible features. In this sense, everyone’s identity is self-made. The point in saying this is not to overlook the cultural and social mediations that are intertwined in this self-definition, but to stress the fact that one’s identity is not a matter of natural features. Self-identity is a tentative result of an ongoing process of self-interpretation. Depending on the precise meaning of self-identity, strong evaluation has a more or less central role (4.3). In the last section I ask whether identities can be criticized, or whether (in the absence of pre-given true selves) self-interpretations are the ultimate “court of appeal” not only in the sense of what constitutes identity, but also in questions about their ethical and existential worth, or coherence, or authenticity or epistemic adequacy. I hope to show that self-interpretations stand open for criticism in these respects, even though self-interpretations are directly constitutive of one’s identity (4.4).

Social Ontology encompasses a wide variety of inquiries into the nature, structure and perhaps essence of social phenomena, and their role and place in our world. Topics of research in Social Ontology range from small-scale interactions to large-scale institutions, from spontaneous teamwork to the functioning of formal organizations, and from unintended consequences to institutional design. Social Ontology brings together theoretical work from a large number of disciplines. This rapidly evolving field of research has attracted increasing attention over the last couple of decades, and the conceptual tools recent research in Social Ontology has provided have proved to be useful in a large number of domains, such as the study of the evolution of communication, the structure of social norms, social structure, and social change, the nature of collective responsibility, and the status of corporate agents. The Journal of Social Ontology aims to further this research. It provides a forum of exchange between scholars of diverse disciplinary, scholarly, and methodological backgrounds, and invites submissions from all branches of Social Ontology. The Journal of Social Ontology adopts strict standards of selection and relies heavily on its carefully selected referees. In a world in which publication strategies and outlets are changing at a tremendous pace, it is difficult to say what the future of scholarly publication will look like. With a generous grant from the University of Vienna for the start-up phase, the Journal of Social Ontology now appears as an Open Access Journal with De Gruyter, thus combining professional support by an established publisher with unlimited accessibility. In addition, the Journal of Social Ontology has been founded together with the International Social Ontology Society (ISOS) that supports the work of this journal. We wish to express our thanks to our supporters, contributors, and referees; we hope that our joint effort will grant the work published in this journal the impact it deserves.

There is today a wide consensus that ‘recognition’ is something that we need a clear grasp of in order to understand the dynamics of political struggles, and, perhaps the constitution and dynamics of social reality more generally. Yet, the discussions on ‘recognition’ have so far often been conceptually rather inexplicit, in the sense that the very key concepts have remained largely unexplicated or undefined. Since the English word ‘recognition’ is far from unambiguous, it is possible, and to our mind also actually the case, that different authors have meant partly different things with this word. In what follows, we will make a number of conceptual distinctions and clarificatory proposals that are meant to bring to sharper focus the field of phenomena that are being discussed under the catchword ‘recognition’. This is meant to serve a dual purpose: to suggest a number of distinctions which are of help in formulating rival views, and to propose what strikes us as the best overall position formulated in terms of those distinctions.

This study compares Philip Pettit’s account of freedom to Hegelian accounts. Both share the key insight that characterizes the tradition of republicanism from the Ancients to Rousseau: to be subordinated to the will of particular others is to be unfree. They both also hold that relations to others, relations of recognition, are in various ways directly constitutive of freedom, and in different ways enabling conditions of freedom. The republican ideal of non-domination can thus be fruitfully understood in light of the Hegelian structure of ‘being at one with oneself (Beisichsein) in another’. However, while the Hegelian view converges with Pettit on non-domination and recognition, their comprehensive theories of freedom are based on radically different metaphysics. One key difference concerns the relationship between freedom and nature, and there is a further difference between Pettit’s (ahistorical) idea of the concept dependence of freedom, and the Hegelian (historical) idea of the conception dependence of freedom. -/- Keywords: Pettit; Hegel; freedom; non-domination; mutual recognition; republicanism; ‘being at one with oneself’; social freedom.