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426The 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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360Realizing deliberative democracy as a mode of inquiry: Pragmatism, social facts, and normative theoryJournal of Speculative Philosophy 18 (1): 23-43. 2004.
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348Liberalism, Deliberative Democracy, and “Reasons that All Can Accept”Journal of Political Philosophy 17 (3): 253-274. 2009.No Abstract
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344Deliberative democracy and the epistemic benefits of diversityEpisteme 3 (3): 175-191. 2006.It is often assumed that democracies can make good use of the epistemic benefi ts of diversity among their citizenry, but difficult to show why this is the case. In a deliberative democracy, epistemically relevant diversity has three aspects: the diversity of opinions, values, and perspectives. Deliberative democrats generally argue for an epistemic form of Rawls' difference principle: that good deliberative practice ought to maximize deliberative inputs, whatever they are, so as to benefi t all…Read more
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340Survey article: The coming of age of deliberative democracyJournal of Political Philosophy 6 (4). 1998.
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299Deliberative TolerationPolitical Theory 31 (6): 757-779. 2003.Political liberals now defend what Rawls calls the "inclusive view" of public reason with the appropriate ideal of reasonable pluralism. Against the application of such a liberal conception of toleration to deliberative democracy "the open view of toleration is with no constraints" is the only regime of toleration that can be democratically justified. Recent debates about the public or nonpublic character of religious reasons provide a good test case and show why liberal deliberative theories ar…Read more
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247New Philosophy of Social Science: Problems of IndeterminacyMIT Press. 1993.This article defends methodological and theoretical pluralism in the social sciences. While pluralistic, such a philosophy of social science is both pragmatic and normative. Only by facing the problems of such pluralism, including how to resolve the potential conflicts between various methods and theories, is it possible to discover appropriate criteria of adequacy for social scientific explanations and interpretations. So conceived, the social sciences do not give us fixed and universal feature…Read more
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181Formal pragmatics and social criticism: The philosophy of language and the critique of ideology in Habermas's theory of communicative actionPhilosophy and Social Criticism 11 (4): 331-353. 1986.
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157Intelligibility, rationality and comparison: The rationality debates revisitedPhilosophy and Social Criticism 22 (1): 81-100. 1996.
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152Domination, Epistemic Injustice and Republican EpistemologySocial Epistemology 26 (2): 175-187. 2012.With her conception of epistemic injustice, Miranda Fricker has opened up new normative dimensions for epistemology; that is, the injustice of denying one?s status as a knower. While her analysis of the remedies for such injustices focuses on the epistemic virtues of agents, I argue for the normative superiority of adapting a broadly republican conception of epistemic injustice. This argument for a republican epistemology has three steps. First, I focus on methodological and explanatory issues o…Read more
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136Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant's Cosmopolitan Ideal (edited book)MIT Press. 1997.In 1795 Immanuel Kant published an essay entitled "Toward Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch." The immediate occasion for the essay was the March 1795 signing of the Treaty of Basel by Prussia and revolutionary France, which Kant condemned as only "the suspension of hostilities, not a peace." In the essay, Kant argues that it is humankind's immediate duty to solve the problem of violence and enter into the cosmopolitan ideal of a universal community of all peoples governed by the rule of la…Read more
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134The Democratic Minimum: Is Democracy a Means to Global Justice?Ethics and International Affairs 19 (1): 101-116. 2005.I argue that transnational democracy provides the basis for a solution to the problem of the “democratic circle”—that in order for democracy to promote justice, it must already be just—at the international level. Transnational democracy could be a means to global justice. First, I briefly recount my argument for the “democratic minimum.” This minimum is freedom from domination, understood in a very specific sense. Employing Hannah Arendt's conception of freedom as “the capacity to begin,” the fo…Read more
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123Theories, practices, and pluralism: A pragmatic interpretation of critical social sciencePhilosophy of the Social Sciences 29 (4): 459-480. 1999.A hallmark of recent critical social science has been the commitment to methodological and theoretical pluralism. Habermas and others have argued that diverse theoretical and empirical approaches are needed to support informed social criticism. However, an unresolved tension remains in the epistemology of critical social science: the tension between the epistemic advantages of a single comprehensive theoretical framework and those of methodological and theoretical pluralism. By shifting the grou…Read more
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119We, Heirs of enlightenment: Critical theory, democracy and social scienceInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 13 (3). 2005.My goal here is to come to terms with the Enlightenment as the horizon of critical social science. First, I consider in more detail the understanding of the Enlightenment in Critical Theory, particularly in its conception of the sociality of reason. Second, I develop an account of freedom in terms of human powers, along the lines of recent capability conceptions that link freedom to the development of human powers, including the power to interpret and create norms. Finally, I show the ways in wh…Read more
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118Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics (edited book)MIT Press. 1997.The contributions in this anthology address tensions that arise between reason and politics in a democracy inspired by the ideal of achieving reasoned agreement among free and equal citizens.
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116Cosmopolitan RepublicanismThe Monist 84 (1): 3-21. 2001.Cosmopolitanism and republicanism are both inherently political ideals. In most discussions, they are taken to have contrasting, if not conflicting, normative aspirations. Cosmopolitanism is “thin” and abstractly universal, unable to articulate the basis for a “thick” citizenship in a republican political community. This commonly accepted way of dividing up the conceptual and political terrain is, however, increasingly misleading in the age of the global transformation of political authority. Ra…Read more
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116Formal Theories, Pragmatic Purposes: Inferentialism, Rational Choice, and Communicative ActionCommunicative Action and Rational Choice (review)Canadian Journal of Philosophy 33 (3): 423-440. 2003.In his long attempt to solve the vexing and diverse problems of formulating a critical social science of modern societies, Habermas has along the way borrowed from many and quite diverse theoretical and philosophical resources, including Anglo-American analytic philosophy of language, ethics and political philosophy. Initially, Habermas borrowed extensively from American Pragmatism, first Peirce’s philosophy of inquiry and then later from George Herbert Mead, whose thought his own enterprise mos…Read more
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108Public Deliberation: Pluralism, Complexity, and DemocracyMIT Press. 2000.Bohman develops a realistic model of deliberation by gradually introducing and analyzing the major tests facing deliberative democracy: cultural pluralism, social inequalities, social complexity, and community-wide biases and ideologies.
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102Pluralism, Pragmatism and Self-knowledge: Comments on Baert’s Philosophy of the Social Sciences: Towards PragmatismHuman Studies 32 (3): 375-381. 2009.
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101Participation through publics: did Dewey answer Lippmann?Contemporary Pragmatism 7 (1): 49-68. 2010.John Dewey's Public and its Problems provides his fullest account of democracy under the emerging conditions of complex, modern societies. While responding to Lippmann's criticisms of democracy as self-rule, Dewey acknowledges the truth of many of the social scientific criticisms of democracy, while he defends democracy by reconstructing it. Dewey seeks a new public in a “Great Community” based on more face-to-face communication about nonlocal issues. Yet Dewey fails to consistently apply his ow…Read more
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98After Philosophy: End or Transformation? (edited book)MIT Press. 1986.The selectionsfrom the work of fourteen contemporary philosophers not only display the multiplicity of approachesbeing pursued since the breakup of any consensus on what philosophy is, but also help to clarifythis proliferation of views and ...
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96"System" and "lifeworld": Habermas and the problem of holismPhilosophy and Social Criticism 15 (4): 381-401. 1989.
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93Reflexive public deliberation: Democracy and the limits of pluralismPhilosophy and Social Criticism 29 (1): 85-105. 2003.Deliberative democracy defends an ideal of equality as political efficacy. Jorge Valadez offers a defense of such an ideal given cultural pluralism of ethnopolitical groups. He develops an epistemological account of the fact of pluralism as entailing incommensurable conceptual frameworks. While his account goes a long way towards identifying the problems with neutrality and many other liberal solutions to the problem of pluralism, it is still too liberal in certain ways. First, he draws the limi…Read more
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90Is Hegel a Republican? Pippin, Recognition, and Domination in the Philosophy of RightInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 53 (5): 435-449. 2010.Robert Pippin's masterful account of rational agency in Hegel emphasizes important dimensions of freedom and independence, where putative independence is always bound up with a profound dependence on others. This insistence on the complex relationships between freedom, dependence and independence raise an important question that Pippin does not consider: is Hegel a republican? This is especially significant given the fact that modern republicanism has explored this same conceptual terrain. I arg…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
Social and Political Philosophy |
Philosophy of Social Science |
Areas of Interest
Social and Political Philosophy |
Philosophy of Social Science |