Danielle Petherbridge

Axel Honneth: Critical Essays

Axel Honneth: Critical Essays brings together critical interpretations of the work of Axel Honneth, from his earliest to his most recent writings, together with a comprehensive reply by Honneth that provides significant insights and clarifications into his project overall.

How Do We Respond? Embodied Vulnerability and Forms of Responsiveness

The notion of vulnerability has become a central category through which feminist philosophers such as Judith Butler and Adriana Cavarero have sought to examine the complexity of embodied interdependence and corporeal openness to others. In this chapter, I engage with J.M. Coetzee’s texts The Lives of Animals and Waiting for the Barbarians to explore the intricacies of embodied vulnerability and bring these texts into dialogue with the philosophical approaches of Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond and Bernard Waldenfels. The chapter examines the relation between embodied knowledge, vulnerability and responsiveness, and raises questions about the kinds of responses we are called to make in the face of the other’s vulnerability.

Between thinking and action: Arendt on conscience and civil disobedience

Within contemporary debates on civil disobedience, Hannah Arendt’s work offers an alternative to both moral and legal approaches by offering a political view of disobedience based on what she terms a principle of dissent at the heart of constitutional democracies. In this sense, she separates disobedience from the moral claims of individual conscience as well as the restrictions imposed by legalistic conceptions. In this article, I first consider Arendt’s views on conscience and the arguments she makes for a Socratic notion of conscience understood as a by-product of thinking, as well as her arguments against conscience-based versions of disobedience such as that developed by Kimberley Brownlee. Second, I consider Arendt’s defence of a political notion of disobedience and her arguments against legal approaches such as those advocated by John Rawls and William Scheuerman.

Editorial: Others as Strangers

One of the ways in which Critical Horizons was first conceived was to provide a forum in which debates between protagonists with diverse views might occur across a range of intellectual and political positions. This issue of Critical Horizons can be imagined as a critical roundtable discussion that brings together a number of diverse essays that seek to conceptualise Ôthe otherÕ from various positions which draw on recent continental philosophy, critical and postcolonial theories.