Anastasia Marinopoulou

The aim of the present paper is to carry out a comparative study of Immanuel Kant and Jürgen Habermas on democratic governance and citizenship. Both thinkers focus on these two factors but the extent to which these contribute to reinforcing the state and peace has not been investigated by researchers. The present paper questions how cosmopolitanism in comparative and consequential mode: Safeguards peace by presupposing a level of interstate institutional convergence as presented by Kant and Habermas; and Reinforces and innovates democracy on an interstate level not only within the state; and Instead of just safeguarding peace, re‐discovers the political sphere, as presented by Habermas, who on this point develops an array of departures from Kant. The originality of the research derives from the symmetries and asymmetries in Kant and Habermas that extend their arguments on cosmopolitanism to the solidification of democracy and the avoidance of war.

The aim of the present study is to articulate a comparative study of Zeno of Citium and Immanuel Kant. The main reason for the comparative form of the study is that the full extent of the selective affiliations, continuities and discontinuities in the philosophers’ thought with regard to democracy under a cosmopolitan condition, as they define it, has not yet been explored. Studying their political arguments does not entail, in the present study, a historical examination of their ideas. Historical research has, to date, been the norm in the examination of the thought of these thinkers. However, although both thinkers focus both on citizenship as an indispensable condition for democratic governance, a systematic comparison of what citizenship and democracy are as major political concerns in Zeno and Kant remains unquestioned by researchers. The originality of the present research derives, first, from the comparison of both thinkers that has not been critically presented so far. Second, it derives from the critique of the political views of Zeno according to the research conducted in the Gregory Vlastos Archive (that has never been conducted and presented so far) and is followed by tracing symmetries and asymmetries in the works of Kant that extend their arguments on cosmopolitanism to the solidification of democracy and the avoidance of war. As for the focus of the study on Kant, the novelty that is being argued for is the priority attributed to the cosmopolitan agenda as a precondition of a sovereign democratic state instead of the opposite being presented and claimed so far.

Epistemology should be the axe that breaks the ice of a traditionalism that covers and obstructs scientific enlightenment. This book explores the arguments between critical theory and epistemology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Focusing on the first and second generations of critical theorists and Luhmann's systems theory, it examines how each approaches epistemology. The book offers a critique of the Kantian base of critical theory's epistemology in conjunction with the latter's endeavour to define political potential through the social function of science. The concept of dialectics is explored as the negation of the irrational and, furthermore, as the open field of epistemological conflict between rationality and irrationality. The book traces the course of arguments that begin with Dilthey's philosophy of a rigorous science, develop with Husserl's phenomenology, Simmel's and Weber's interest in the scientific element within the social concerns of scientific advance. In structuralism, the fear of dialogue prevails. The book discusses the epistemological thought of Pierre Bourdieu and Gilles Deleuze in terms of their persistence in constructing an epistemological understanding of social practice free from the burdens of dialectics, reason and rationality. It also enquires into issues of normativity and modernity within a comparative perspective on modernism, postmodernism and critical theory. Whether in relation to communication deriving from the threefold schema of utterance- information- understanding or in relation to self- reflexivity, systems theory fails to define the bearer or the actor of the previous structural processes. Critical realism attempted to ground dialectics in realism.

Critical theory situates science within the quest for social and political rationality. It indicates that science’s normativity – which answers the question “what should science do?” – orients itself in relation to the a priori potential of society. The latter for critical theory transforms itself into concrete political vindications for science. Adorno’s Gesamtgesehen, which differentiates from any total and, therefore, totalitarian conception of what science is, along with Horkheimer’s dialectical approach to science through interdisciplinarity and Habermas’ notion of communicative rationality in science, finds themselves in marked contrast to the rest of modern epistemology. The chapter traces the epistemology of critical theory of the Frankfurt School through the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries via the concepts of dialectics, critique, reason, interdisciplinarity, communicative action and rationality, and their social and political function and role within modernity. The main aims of twenty-first-century epistemology of critical theory become as follows: formulate a theory of normative rationality, reclaim commitments to rational praxis, and educate the sciences to maintain dialectics as their pivotal scope and method of advance.