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520This essay focuses on recent proposals to confer decisional status upon deliberative minipublics such as citizen juries, Deliberative Polls, citizen’s assemblies, and so forth. Against such proposals, I argue that inserting deliberative minipublics into political decision-making processes would diminish the democratic legitimacy of the political system as a whole. This negative conclusion invites a question: which political uses of minipublics would yield genuinely democratic improvements? Drawi…Read more
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467A militant defence of democracy: A few replies to my criticsPhilosophy and Social Criticism 47 (1): 69-82. 2020.In this essay, I address some questions and challenges brought about by the contributors to this special issue on my book ‘Democracy without Shortcuts’. First, I clarify different aspects of my cri...
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430The place of self-interest and the role of power in deliberative democracyJournal of Political Philosophy 18 (1): 64-100. 2009.No Abstract
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373Philosophical Foundations of Judicial ReviewIn David Dyzenhaus (ed.), Philosophical Foundations of Constitutional Law, Oxford University Press. pp. 265-282. 2016.
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332Against Anti-democratic Shortcuts: A Few Replies to CriticsJournal of Deliberative Democracy 16 (2): 96-109. 2020.In this essay, I address several questions and challenges brought about by the contributors to the special issue on my book Democracy without Shortcuts. In particular, I address some implications of my critique of deep pluralism; distinguish between three senses of ‘blind deference’: political, reflective, and informational; draw a critical parallelism between the populist conception of representation as embodiment and the conception of ‘citizen-representatives’ often ascribed to participants in…Read more
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322The Priority of Public Reasons and Religious Forms of Life in Constitutional DemocraciesEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 11 (4): 45-60. 2019.In this essay I address the difficult question of how citizens with conflicting religious and secular views can fulfill the democratic obligation of justifying the imposition of coercive policies to others with reasons that they can also accept. After discussing the difficulties of proposals that either exclude religious beliefs from public deliberation or include them without any restrictions, I argue instead for a policy of mutual accountability that imposes the same deliberative rights and ob…Read more
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229Review essay: Whose poor are the global poor?: Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008) (review)Philosophy and Social Criticism 35 (8): 1007-1013. 2009.
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196Moral Objectivity and Reasonable Agreement: Can Realism Be Reconciled with Kantian Constructivism?Ratio Juris 17 (1): 27-51. 2004.In this paper I analyze the tension between realism and antirealism at the basis of Kantian constructivism. This tension generates a conflictive account of the source of the validity of social norms. On the one hand, the claim to moral objectivity characteristic of Kantian moral theories makes the validity of norms depend on realist assumptions concerning the existence of shared fundamental interests among all rational human beings. I illustrate this claim through a comparison of the approaches …Read more
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161Procedural justice?: Implications of the Rawls-Habermas debate for discourse ethicsPhilosophy and Social Criticism 29 (2): 163-181. 2003.In this paper I focus on the discussion between Rawls and Habermas on procedural justice. I use Rawls’s distinction between pure, perfect, and imperfect procedural justice to distinguish three possible readings of discourse ethics. Then I argue, against Habermas’s own recent claims, that only an interpretation of discourse ethics as imperfect procedural justice can make compatible its professed cognitivism with its proceduralism. Thus discourse ethics cannot be understood as a purely procedural …Read more
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140Deliberation, Participation, and Democratic Legitimacy: Should Deliberative Mini‐publics Shape Public Policy?Journal of Political Philosophy 23 (1): 40-63. 2014.
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138Review essay: Communicative action and rational choicePhilosophy and Social Criticism 31 (2): 253-263. 2005.
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129Was Heidegger an externalist?Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 48 (6). 2005.To address the question posed in the title, I focus on Heidegger's conception of linguistic communication developed in the sections on Rede and Gerede of Being and Time. On the basis of a detailed analysis of these sections I argue that Heidegger was a social externalist but semantic internalist. To make this claim, however, I first need to clarify some key points that have led critics to assume Heidegger's commitment to social externalism automatically commits him to semantic externalism regard…Read more
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121Heidegger, language, and world-disclosureCambridge University Press. 2000.This book is a major contribution to the understanding of Heidegger and a rare attempt to bridge the schism between traditions of analytic and Continental philosophy. Cristina Lafont applies the core methodology of analytic philosophy, language analysis, to Heidegger's work providing both a clearer exegesis and a powerful critique of his approach to the subject of language. In Part One, she explores the Heideggerean conception of language in depth. In Part Two, she draws on recent work from theo…Read more
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117Heidegger on meaning and referencePhilosophy and Social Criticism 31 (1): 9-20. 2005.This paper is an attempt to criticize the reification of language present in Heideggers writings after the Kehre . The steps of the argument are as follows. First, it is argued that the specific features of Heideggers conception of language after the Kehre can be traced back to Heideggers conception of the ontological difference in Being and Time . The common element in both conceptions is the assumption that meaning determines reference (i.e. that the way entities are understood determines w…Read more
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106Meaning and Interpretation: Can Brandomian Scorekeepers be Gadamerian Hermeneuts?Philosophy Compass 3 (1): 17-29. 2007.In his book Tales of the Mighty Dead Brandom engages Gadamer’s hermeneutic conception of interpretation in order to show that his inferentialist approach to understanding conceptual content can explain and underwrite the main theses of Gadamer’s hermeneutics which he calls “the gadamerian hermeneutic platitudes”. In order to assess whether this claim is sound, I analyze the three types of philosophical interpretations that Brandom discusses: de re, de dicto and de traditione, and argue that they…Read more
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95Religion in the Public Sphere: Remarks on Habermas's Conception of Public Deliberation in Postsecular SocietiesConstellations 14 (2): 239-259. 2007.
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77Accountability and global governance: challenging the state-centric conception of human rightsEthics and Global Politics 3 (3): 193-215. 2010.In this essay I analyze some conceptual difficulties associated with the demand that global institutions be made more democratically accountable. In the absence of a world state, it may seem inconsistent to insist that global institutions be accountable to all those subject to their decisions while also insisting that the members of these institutions, as representatives of states, simultaneously remain accountable to the citizens of their own countries for the special responsibilities they have…Read more
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75Universalization or Threat Advantage? The Difficult Dialogue between Discourse Ethics and the Theory of Rational ChoiceDialogue 44 (2): 373-382. 2005.InA Theory of Justice, Rawls claims that “to each according to his threat advantage is not a conception of justice.” Although it may indeed seem intuitively plausible that a principle based on “threat advantage” cannot count as a principle of justice, it is an altogether different matter to explain why this is so. The question is especially pressing if one bears in mind that such a principle of bargaining in fact underlies many institutionally regulated interactions. Moreover, to the extent that…Read more
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69Democracy without Shortcuts. A participatory conception of deliberative democracyOxford University Press. 2020.This book articulates a participatory conception of deliberative democracy that takes the democratic ideal of self-government seriously. It aims to improve citizens' democratic control and vindicate the value of citizens' participation against conceptions that threaten to undermine it. The book critically analyzes deep pluralist, epistocratic, and lottocratic conceptions of democracy. Their defenders propose various institutional ''shortcuts'' to help solve problems of democratic governance such…Read more
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69Alternative visions of a new global order: what should cosmopolitans hope for?Ethics and Global Politics 1 (1-2). 2008.In this essay, I analyze the cosmopolitan project for a new international order that Habermas has articulated in recent publications. I argue that his presentation of the project oscillates between two models. The first is a very ambitious model for a future international order geared to fulfill the peace and human rights goals of the UN Charter. The second is a minimalist model, in which the obligation to protect human rights by the international community is circumscribed to the negative duty …Read more
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66Dilemas en torno a la verdadTheoria 10 (2): 109-124. 1995.This article argues for an intermediate standpoint concerning the theory of truth which finds an equilibrium between realist an epistemic conceptions of truth. At the same time it is accepted that truth is a notion with an ultimate realist sense, but it is made clear that this intuitive sense does only have a non-trivial (i.e. non-“disquotational”), reading if the function of “truth” is seen from within the epistemic framework of our practices of belief-formation (i.e. of confirmation and revisi…Read more
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63Religion and the public sphere: What are the deliberative obligations of democratic citizenship?Philosophy and Social Criticism 35 (1-2): 127-150. 2009.In this article I analyze Rawls' and Habermas' accounts of the role of religion in political deliberations in the public sphere. After pointing at some difficulties involved in the unequal distribution of deliberative rights and duties among religious and secular citizens that follow from their proposals, I argue for a way to structure political deliberation in the public sphere that imposes the same deliberative obligations on all democratic citizens, whether religious or secular. These obligat…Read more
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59Referencia Y verdadTheoria 9 (2): 39-60. 1994.The main thesis of this article consists in that the two concepts “reference” and “truth” have an ultimate realist sense of which all epistemologizing conceptions -like relativism and incommensurabilist theses- necessarily have to come short. The arguments for this thesis are embedded in a revision of the ‘direct’-reference-position as well as of recent arguments against epistemic notions of truth, to show in the next,evaluating step how it is exactly the realist kernel of both concepts that mak…Read more
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57Agreement and consent in Kant and Habermas: Can Kantian constructivism be fruitful for democratic theory?1Philosophical Forum 43 (3): 277-295. 2012.
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55Can democracy go global?Ethics and Global Politics 3 (1): 13-19. 2010.In his Democracy across borders, Bohman articulates an ambitious political proposal for a future international order. Perhaps its most salient feature is the promise of global democracy without a world government. Global democracy is usually associated with the ideal of a world community unified under a set of global democratic institutions. Fear of the totalitarian consequences that such a concentration of power would generate often leads even the staunchest cosmopolitans to limit their democra…Read more
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52Pre´cis of Heidegger, Language, and World-disclosureInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 45 (2). 2002.This Article does not have an abstract
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52Neoliberal globalization and the international protection of human rightsConstellations 25 (3): 315-328. 2018.
University of Frankfurt (Germany)
Alumnus, 1992
Evanston, Illinois, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Social and Political Philosophy |
European Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Law |