Alessandro Ferrara

The separation of religion and politics in a post-secular society

This article examines recent theories of democratic citizenship as well as the institutional separation of religion and politics in light of shortcomings with the traditional secularization thesis. Due to the fact that juridical norms and forms of consciousness develop at a more rapid pace than religious ones, received accounts of both democratic equality and toleration need to be reconceptualized. Questions concerning the legitimacy and neutrality of religious reasoning in democratic politics, as pursued in the work of Rawls and Habermas, also need to be informed by further reflection on the confessional context and other empirical features of post-secular societies. Comparing the politics of same-sex marriage in Canada and Italy helps to illustrate this point.

Public reason and the normativity of the reasonable

The main purpose of the paper is to contribute to reconstructing the kind of normativity underlying Rawls’s notion of public reason and of the reasonable. The implicit target is the somewhat popular view according to which the transition from the framework of A Theory of Justice to that of Political Liberalism would entail a loss of normativity. On the contrary, the related ideas of public reason and the reasonable are argued to presuppose a notion of normativity – linked with judgment – far more consistent with the premise of the fact of pluralism. After reconstructing Rawls’s notion of public reason, the two following problems are addressed: the problem of determining when allegedly shared truths, the building stones of public reason, are really such and, second, the problem of what it means for one reason to follow or proceed from a shared basis. In the context of such discussion three distinct meanings of the term ‘reasonable’ are identified, and the normatively more demanding one – the notion of some thesis or proposal being not just reasonable, but comparatively ‘more reasonable’ than another – is found to require that the reasonable be understood as the exemplary and, consequently, that we find ways to translate the Kantian doctrine of the exemplary yet universalist validity of aesthetic judgments into a non-aesthetic vocabulary.

‘Political’ Cosmopolitanism and Judgment:

This article addresses the issue of future cosmopolitanism, building on a minimal reconstruction of what cosmopolitanism has been in the past. It will elucidate the notion of ‘political’ cosmopolitanism in its relation to a certain methodological option which is designated by the shorthand term ‘judgment’. Cosmopolitanism is not a new idea but a new version of it is constituted by ‘political’ cosmopolitanism, bound up with a judgmentbased, as opposed to principle-based, understanding of normativity.

the unbearable seriousness of irony

In a series of recent papers as well as in his latest book, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Richard Rorty has added more and more details to the picture drawn in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Stimulating though questionable, his overall proposal for a postmetaphysical philosophy now can be assessed. Focusing especially on his last writings, in the following notes I move some steps in this direction and bring out a number of weaknesses that continue to haunt Rorty’s postmodernist enterprise.

Hyper-pluralism and the multivariate democratic polity

In the global world, momentous migratory tides have produced hyper-pluralism on the domestic scale, bringing citizens with radically different conceptions of life, justice and the good to coexist side by side. Conjectural arguments about the acceptance of pluralism, the next best to public reason when shared premises are too thin, may not succeed in convincing all constituencies. What resources, then, can liberal democracy mobilize? The multivariate democratic polity is the original answer to this question, based on an interpretation of Rawls which revisits Political Liberalism in the light of The Law of Peoples. The unscrutinized assumption is highlighted, often read into Rawls’s Political Liberalism, that a polity moves homogeneously and all of a piece from religious conflict to modus vivendi, constitutional consensus and finally to overlapping consensus. Drawing on The Law of Peoples, a different picture can be obtained.

Varieties of Transcendence and Their Consequences for Political Philosophy

Abstract In this essay I argue that the notion of religious transcendence was a latecomer in human evolution. It did not appear before the Axial Age, and in its extreme form as a realm of ultimate meanings beyond human reach it had only a locally and temporally bounded existence. Once it appeared, however, the idea of religious transcendence set an evolutionary dynamic in motion, which soon led to various forms of “immanent transcendence,” starting from the “Papal Revolution” and continuing with the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Kantian notion of the transcendental and its Hegelian and Habermasian modifications. In my conclusion I briefly discuss two alternative versions of modern immanent transcendence—cognitive and exemplary—and their consequences for political philosophy.

Democracies in the Plural A Typology of Democratic Cultures

This article aims at exploring one specific facet of pluralism: How can we conceive of a variety of democratic cultures that are not just local adaptations of one basic western-centric understanding of the democratic ethos? Drawing on Islamic, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist and Confucian sources, a convergence among diverse democratic cultures is cursorily highlighted on such elements as the priority of the common good, the acceptance of pluralism, the desirability of collegial deliberation, the equality of citizens, and the value of individuality. Then two important points of dissonance are analysed in greater detail – (1) the idea of the priority of rights over duties and (2) the role of political conflict within a democratic polity – and shown not to be correlative with a divide between western and non-western contexts. Finally a typology of 4 kinds of democratic cultures is outlined.

Faith, market and law in democracy-making

Contributors to this issue initially were invited to the _ Istanbul Seminars at Bilgi University to explore ‘the Promises of Democracy in Troubled Times’. Initiated by Reset-Dialogues on Civilization, _ Istanbul seminars tackle contemporary issues of democracy within a broader perspective of intercultural dialogue. On a yearly basis, the seminars host academicians, public figures and politicians from different horizons to cultivate an East–West debate across the established frontiers of knowledge and culture. Each year an intellectual agenda is set for discussion. The task of agenda-setting is crucial. First, it requires a critical awareness of the contemporary issues that need to be raised. Second, to ensure the intercultural vivacity of the seminars the selected topic needs to appeal to concerns of participants coming from different parts and horizons of the world. It is paramount therefore to approach the contemporary issues of democracy not exclusively from the western perspective. _ Istanbul, by its very location, is a global city that defies the East-West divide and facilitates the ability to think across the European and the Asian continents. Turkish democracy provides a privileged site for thinking in new ways the religious and the secular divide. Characterized by a strong secular legacy, Turkey witnesses the ascension of AKP [the Party of Justice and Development] to political power. Furthermore Turkey as a candidate for joining the European Union and with a migrant minority in Europe has developed intense ties, both economic and legal, with European countries. Turkey offers an anchor-experience for _ Istanbul seminars to the extent that she is at the crossroads of a series of dynamics that are common both to the European and the Middle Eastern countries. ‘The Promises of Democracy in Troubled Times’, the topic selected for the fifth year of the _ Istanbul Seminars, conveys the importance of the two major events that marked the 2010s, namely the economic crisis in Europe and the political transformation in the Middle East, referred to as the Arab Spring. Two seemingly independent events are thought to be of major importance for revisiting democracy from different perspectives.

Review Symposium on 'The Force of the Example'

Ferrara, A. (2008) The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment. New York: Columbia University Press.

justice and the good from a eudaimonistic standpoint

In this paper, I will elucidate one aspect of an alternative to the deontological notions of justice which are often misperceived as the quintessential liberal ones. The aspect on which I will focus is the assumption-central to the prudential, reflective-judgment or eudaimonistic view of justice-that the meaning of justice cannot be understood apart from the meaning of the selfrealization of a collective identity, and indeed is strictly connected with it. If we take &dquo;self-realization&dquo; as one way of understanding the good, possibly the way most appropriate to our postmetaphysical context, we can understand why this view of justice can be called &dquo;eudaimonistic.&dquo; The eudaimonistic view of justice runs against the prejudice, shared by deontological liberals, that what justice requires is something radically different from the pursuit of the good on the part of a collective identity-a prejudice which appears plausible only to the extent that we understand the term &dquo;collective identity&dquo; atom istically, as it were. In fact, only against the atomistic backdrop of a number of collective identities, each struggling for its own, independently defined, good and coming into conflict with one another in the