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Situating Johann P. Árnason's civilizational analysis within left-HeideggerianismIn Ľubomír Dunaj, Jeremy Smith & Kurt Cihan Murat Mertel (eds.), Civilization, modernity, and critique: engaging Jóhann P. Árnason's macro-social theory, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. 2023.
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7Civilization, modernity, and critique: engaging Jóhann P. Árnason's macro-social theory (edited book)Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. 2023.Civilization, Modernity, and Critique provides the first comprehensive, cutting edge engagement with the work of one of the most foundational figures in civilizational analysis: Johann P. Arnason. In order to do justice to Arnason's seminal and wide-ranging contributions to sociology, social theory and history, it brings together distinguished scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds and geographical contexts. Through a critical, interdisciplinary dialogue, it offers an enrichment and…Read more
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15Herder's Hermeneutics: History, Poetry, Enlightenment by Kristin GjesdalJournal of the History of Philosophy 56 (4): 758-759. 2018.In spite of his status as a highly original thinker whose views were, in many ways, ahead of his time and anticipate those of more famous successors, the work of Johann Gottfried von Herder has not received the attention it deserves in mainstream philosophical discourse. In Herder's Hermeneutics, Kristin Gjesdal successfully addresses this deficit by exploring the enlightenment origins of the hermeneutic tradition through a careful and compelling reconstruction of Herder's theory of interpretati…Read more
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32Re-Thinking Gareth Evans’ Approach to Indexical Sense and the Problem of Tracking ThoughtsGrazer Philosophische Studien 94 (1-2): 173-193. 2017.In “Understanding Demonstratives”, Gareth Evans bites the bullet regarding Rip van Winkle cases in cognitive dynamics: the fact that Rip sleeps for twenty years and completely loses track of time means he is unable to retain his original belief that “Today is a fine day”. In this paper, the author argues that Evans need not bite this bullet because there are resources in his account of the cognitive dynamics involved in belief retention developed in The Varieties of Reference to successfully con…Read more
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14Secularism vs. Post-Secularism: A Critical Examination of Cooke’s Post-Secular AlternativeCritical Horizons 19 (2): 93-110. 2018.ABSTRACTIn recent work, Maeve Cooke has criticised Jürgen Habermas’s post-metaphysical model in order to motivate an alternative “post-secular” conception of the state, which involves the replacement of the “institutional translation proviso” with the “nonauthoritarian reasoning requirement”. I provide a qualified defence of the Habermasian model by arguing that it does not lead to the kind of negative consequences regarding legitimacy and solidarity Cooke attributes to it. This, in turn, means …Read more
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9Thesis (Master, Philosophy) -- Queen's University, 2007-09-19 12:00:15.908.
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24Self-appropriation vs. self-constitution: Social philosophical reflections on the self-relationHuman Affairs 27 (4): 416-432. 2017.It is widely held that reflexivity is the defining feature of selfhood: the ability of the self to stand in a certain relation to itself. The question of how exactly to theorize this self-relation, however, has been the source of ongoing debate. In recent years, Kantian and post-Kantian approaches such as Christine Korsgaard’s constitutivism and Richard Moran’s commitment view, have attempted to establish the priority of the agential over the epistemic self-relation, thereby re-orientating the d…Read more
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21Two ways of being a left-Heideggerian: The crossroads between political and social ontologyPhilosophy and Social Criticism 43 (9): 966-984. 2017.This article is concerned with the question of the relative priority between political and social ontology within left-Heideggerianism, a tradition recently reconstructed by Oliver Marchart. Although the title seems to imply that this question is an open and live one within left-Heideggerianism – that the two paths at the crossroads have been clearly delineated when, in fact, the current predicament of left-Heideggerianism resembles more a one-way street – this is somewhat misleading: the identi…Read more
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48Historicism and Critique in Herder's Another Philosophy of History: Some Hermeneutic ReflectionsEuropean Journal of Philosophy 24 (2): 397-416. 2016.In Another Philosophy of History, J.G. Herder claims that his aim is not to compare and judge different cultures, but merely to describe and explain how each came into being and thus to adopt the standpoint of an impartial observer. I argue, however, that there is a tension between Herder's understanding of his own project—his stated doctrine of historicism and cultural relativism—and the way in which it is actually put into practice. That is, despite Herder's stated aims, he is nevertheless una…Read more
Kurt C. M. Mertel
American University of Sharjah
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American University of SharjahAssistant Professor