ORCID Profile
0000-0002-4989-4792
Current Organisations
University of Connecticut
,
Macquarie University
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Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 2009
Abstract: This article examines a neglected but crucial feature of Honneth's critical theory: its use of a concept of recognition to articulate the norms that are apposite for the contemporary world of work. The article shows that from his first writings on the structure of critical social theory in the early 1980s to the recent exchange with Nancy Fraser on recognition and redistribution, the problem of grounding a substantive critique of work under capitalism has been central to Honneth's enterprise. This answers the routine objection that the recognition paradigm fails to take into account economic or material realities. At the same time, Honneth's approach to the critique of work has undergone significant shifts, and it is yet to be fully developed. The article traces these changes in direction, and it proposes an expressivist conception of work that builds upon the `normative content' of the concept of work described by Honneth in his 1980 essay `Work and Instrumental Action'.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 17-08-2022
DOI: 10.1111/EJOP.12696
Abstract: Best known as a political philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre is also a critic of the modern university. The paper examines the grounds of MacIntyre's criticism of modern universities it offers an assessment of the philosophical debate occasioned by MacIntyre's writings on the topic and it proposes a way of taking this debate forward. The debate is shown to be centered around three objections to MacIntyre's normative idea of the university: that it is overly intellectualist, parochial, and moralizing. The merits of these objections are considered and a different interpretation of the normative core of MacIntyre's conception of the university is presented: realization and promotion of the common good. An analysis is offered of the kinds of common good universities may serve to realize, including practices internal to the institution, education of a public, and flourishing relationships in various social roles. The implications of this neo‐Aristotelian analysis of the normative core of universities are also shown to be at odds with some of MacIntyre's explicitly stated views on the role of universities in forming an educated pubic and educating students for work.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 11-2009
Abstract: After characterizing Taylor’s general approach to the problems of solidarity, we distinguish and reconstruct three contexts of solidarity in which this approach is developed: the civic, the socio-economic, and the moral. We argue that Taylor’s distinctive move in each of these contexts of solidarity is to claim that the relationship at stake poses normatively justified demands, which are motivationally demanding, but insufficiently motivating on their own. On Taylor’s conception, we need some understanding of extra motivational sources which explain why people do (or would) live up to the exacting demands. Taylor accepts that our self-understanding as members of either particular communities or humanity at large has some motivational power, but he suspects that in many cases the memberships are too thin to resonate deeply and enduringly within us. In Taylor’s view, a realistic picture of what moves people to solidarity has to account for the extra motivation, when it happens. We propose an alternative view in which morality, democracy and socio-economic cooperation can be seen as separate spheres or relations which are normatively justified, motivationally demanding, but also sufficiently motivating on their own.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Date: 26-01-2004
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 26-08-0026
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-2005
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 05-02-2007
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 09-04-2008
DOI: 10.1558/CRIT.V9I1.1
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Date: 2012
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 21-02-2005
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 07-2008
Abstract: This article examines Levinas as if he were a participant in what Habermas has called `the philosophical discourse of modernity'. It begins by comparing Levinas' and Habermas' articulations of the philosophical problems of modernity. It then turns to how certain key motifs in Levinas' later work give philosophical expression to the needs of the times as Levinas diagnoses them. In particular it examines how Levinas interweaves a modern, post-ontological conception of `the religious' or `the sacred' into his account of subjectivity. Finally, the article looks at some problems that arise for Levinas once his position in the philosophical discourse on modernity is made explicit.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 1997
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 24-01-2022
Publisher: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden
Date: 2018
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 21-02-2005
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 13-12-2017
Abstract: The aim of this article is to situate Arendt’s account of labour as a critical response to humanisms of labour, or put otherwise, to situate it as an anti-humanism of labour. It compares Arendt’s account of labour with that of the most prominent humanist theorist of labour at the time of the composition of The Human Condition: Georges Friedmann. Arendt’s and Friedmann’s accounts of labour are compared specifically with respect to the range of capacities, social relations, and possibilities of fulfilment at stake in the activity of labour. The comparison provides a previously unexplored context for understanding Arendt’s account of labour and her distinction between labour and work. The relevance of Arendt’s and Friedmann’s theories of labour for the contemporary debate about the meaning of work in an age of automation is also briefly discussed.
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 2016
DOI: 10.4324/9780415249126-DD104-1
Abstract: McDowell taught philosophy at Oxford from 1967 to 1986, where he established himself as a key figure in analytic philosophy, mounting forceful arguments in favour of a realist stance in the theory of meaning, philosophy of mind and metaethics, and challenging a variety of noncognitivist and antirealist positions that had become orthodox in those fields. In 1986 he took up a position at the University of Pittsburgh, where he has worked since. In his most highly acclaimed work, Mind and World (1994), McDowell sought to diagnose a transcendental anxiety, characteristic of modern philosophy, in which it seems mysterious that thought is answerable to reality at all. McDowell’s proposed cure for the anxiety turned on embracing the idea that there is no gap between reality and the reach of thought, no contact with reality that does not bring conceptual capacities into play, capacities that are acquired not by magic but naturally through education into a form of life. Much of McDowell’s work since Mind and World has been aimed at clarifying and refining the idea that conceptual capacities permeate the human life form. Increasingly, he has turned to Sellars, Kant and Hegel for guidance in pursuing that task.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 02-2012
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH
Date: 09-2012
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH
Date: 05-2019
Abstract: This article argues that a pragmatist ambition to transcendence undergirds Richard Rorty’s metaphilosophy. That transcendence might play a positive role in Rorty’s work might seem implausible given his well-known rejection of the idea that human practices are accountable to some external, Archimedean standpoint, and his endorsement of the historicist view that standards of rationality are products of time and chance. It is true that Rorty’s contributions to epistemology, philosophy of mind and metaphysics have this anti-transcendentalist character. But in his metaphilosophy, Rorty shows great respect for pre-philosophical impulses aimed at transcendence of some kind, in particular the romantic (and indeed religious) experience of awe at something greater than oneself, and the utopian striving for a radically better world. These impulses do not disappear in Rorty’s metaphilosophy but are reshaped in a pragmatist iteration of transcendence which, we argue, can be characterised as horizontal (rather than vertical) and weak (rather strong). We use this characterization to distinguish Rorty’s metaphilosophy from other accounts that share a postmetaphysical ambition to transcendence.
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 23-08-2013
DOI: 10.1017/HGL.2013.10
Abstract: The article examines John McDowell's attempt to rehabilitate the classical idea of the rational animal and Hubert Dreyfus's criticisms of that attempt. After outlining the ‘engaged’ conception of rationality which, in McDowell's view, enables the idea of the rational animal to shake off its intellectualist appearance, the objections posed by Dreyfus are presented that such a conception of rationality is inconsistent with the phenomena of everyday coping, characterised by non-conceptual ‘involvement’, and expertise, characterised by non-conceptual ‘absorption’. Drawing on Michael Fried's reflections on the representation of absorption in Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno's film Zidane, and invoking other considerations concerning the ‘mindedness’ of skilful activity, the sharp contrast between conceptuality and rationality on the one side and absorption and skilled coping on the other that frames Dreyfus's position in the debate is questioned. The paper concludes by suggesting that in order to see why Dreyfus is so firmly committed to that contrast, we need to widen the lens so that a broader range of philosophical motivations comes into view. For it is not just that there are phenomena that go missing or are mis-described in McDowell's account, according to Dreyfus there are ideals and excellences that go missing too.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 05-1996
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 2017
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 27-02-2019
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 08-2015
Publisher: CAIRN
Date: 16-09-2013
No related grants have been discovered for Nicholas Smith.