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166Abstraction and Self-Alienation in Mannheim and HusserlIn Andrej Božič (ed.), Thinking Togetherness: Phenomenology and Sociality, Institute Nova Reijva For the Humanities. pp. 31-44. 2023.In this paper, I explore the approaches to methodological abstraction and self-alienation developed respectively in Karl Mannheim’s early sociology of intellectuals and in Edmund Husserl’s late transcendental phenomenology. In Mannheim’s early and experimental works, the resistance to abstraction and alienation is located in a stratum of intellectuals able to meaningfully combine diverse cultural currents in a social process of cultivation (Bildung). In Husserl, to contrast, this resistance is g…Read more
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121Review of Duy Lap Nguyen, Walter Benjamin and the Critique of Political Economy: A New Historical Materialism (review)Marx and Philosophy Review of Books 2023. 2023.
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271Love, Mourning, and the Speculative Philosophy of Praxis (review)Radical Philosophy Review 23 (1): 169-173. 2023.
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353Climate Change and the Irrational SocietyTheory and Event 26 (3): 559-575. 2023.This essay considers the catastrophe of anthropogenic climate change in relation to two possible critical-theoretic dispositions. The first, represented by an emblematic passage from Adorno, retains the hope for the realization of a “rational society.” The second, represented by a complementary passage from Foucault, enjoins critical theory to abandon any ambition toward criticizing or transforming society at a totalizing level. We argue that the unfolding climate catastrophe demands a conceptio…Read more
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35Education for Political Life: Critique, Theory, and Practice in Karl Mannheim’s Sociology of KnowledgeRowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2023.Situating Karl Mannheim in a tradition of critical social philosophy, Iaan Reynolds argues that Mannheim’s early explorations in the sociology of knowledge offer a novel approach to this tradition, since they emphasize the need for social research to cultivate the critical self-awareness of social researchers.
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383Violence, Education, and the Tradition of the Oppressed in Benjamin and Du BoisRadical Philosophy Review 26 (1): 41-65. 2023.This paper discusses two thinkers who locate the possibility of revolutionary historical change in political projects oriented toward the formation of subjects and cultivation of sensibility. I begin by considering the relationship between historical violence and education in the works of Walter Benjamin. After introducing the provocative association of education with divine violence found in “Toward the Critique of Violence,” I expand on Benjamin’s conception of pedagogical force. Highlighting …Read more
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955The Critique of Social Reason in the Popper-Adorno DebateHistory of the Human Sciences 36 (3-4): 260-282. 2023.This paper examines the differences and affinities between Karl Popper’s critical rationalism and Theodor Adorno’s critical theory through renewed attention to the original documents of their 1961 debate. While commentaries often describe the Popper-Adorno encounter as a theoretical disappointment, I reveal a confrontation between conceptually opposed programs of social research. Though both theorists are committed to critique as a political and epistemological struggle for human freedom, their …Read more
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330Critical Phenomenology and Phenomenological CritiqueStudia Universitatis Babeş-Bolyai Philosophia 66 (1): 7-20. 2021.Phenomenological critique attempts to retrieve the lived experience of a human community alienated from its truthful condition and immersed in historical crises brought by processes of objectification and estrangement. This introductory article challenges two methodological assumptions that are largely shared in North American Critical Phenomenology: the definition of phenomenology as a first person approach of experience and the rejection of transcendental eidetics. While reflecting on the impo…Read more
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Ideology, Critique, and Political EducationDissertation, Villanova University. 2021.While philosophical engagement with ideology once necessitated a “critique of critics” and their social context, today the emphasis often lies in analyzing common and unreflective errors – whether espoused by unrepentant racists, conspiracy theorists, or others in the grip of ignorance. Though cases like these might help us understand the prevalence and persistence of modes of thought that strengthen an exploitative social order, an exclusive focus on such unambiguous examples of false conscious…Read more
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403Critique Without Normative Foundations: Response to Vogelmann and PrusikSocial Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 11 (8): 8-17. 2022.
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152Review of Sebastian Truskolaski, Adorno and the Ban on Images (review)Marx and Philosophy Review of Books. 2021.
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180Review of Charles A. Prusik, Adorno and Neoliberalism: The Critique of Exchange Society (review)Marx and Philosophy Review of Books. 2021.
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400The Dialectic of Progress and the Cultivation of Resistance in Critical Social TheorySocial Epistemology: A Journal of Knowledge, Culture, and Policy 1 1-12. 2021.Beginning with the influential discussion of the dialectic of progress found in Amy Allen’s The End of Progress, this paper outlines some difficulties encountered by critical theories of normative justification drawing on the early Frankfurt School. Characterizing Adorno and Horkheimer’s critical social theory as a dialectical reflection eschewing questions of normative foundations, I relate their well-known treatment of the dialectic of enlightenment reason and myth to their critique of capital…Read more
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462Immediacy and Experience in Lukács' Theory of ReificationMetodo: International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy 9 (2): 89-119. 2021.This paper studies the relationship between consciousness and social existence in Georg Lukács’ early Marxist works through a consideration of his concept of reification. Understanding reification as the process underlying capitalist society’s immediate form of objectivity, I designate dereification as the cultivation of a mediated form of consciousness. In order to better understand the experiential aspects of this cultivation, I supplement my reading of Lukács’ theory of reification with atten…Read more
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832Ambivalent Identifications: Narcissism, Melancholia, and SublimationConsecutio Rerum: Rivista Critica Della Postmodernità 11 (6): 161-186. 2022.Beginning with Freud’s treatment of identification as an ambivalent process, we explore identification’s polarization between narcissistic idealization and melancholic division. While narcissistic identification can be seen as a strategy adopted by the ego to avoid the educational development of its drives and to maintain itself either in whole or in part in an infantile state, melancholic identification activates a tension between the ego-ideal and the real ego at the expense of the latter. Aft…Read more
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566The Sociologist of Knowledge in the Positivism DisputeDistinktion: Journal of Social Theory 24 (1): 133-155. 2023.This paper studies the conflict between critical rationalism and critical theory in Karl Popper and Theodor Adorno’s 1961 debate by analyzing their shared rejection of Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge. Despite the divergences in their respective projects of critical social research, Popper and Adorno agree that Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge is uncritical. By investigating their respective assessments of this research program I reveal a deeper similarity between critical rationalism and…Read more
Orem, Utah, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Social and Political Philosophy |
Critical Theory |
20th Century Continental Philosophy |
Phenomenology |