Titus Stahl

Habermas and the Project of Immanent Critique

Constellations (at the moment only in online-first)]. The intellectual property arrangement of the publisher Wiley makes it impossible for me to put the article as published online for public access. The article has changed considerably as compared to this version and contains many improvements suggested by the reviewers. If you quote, please refer to the published article. Subscribers of Constellations can access the article under: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12057

Indiscriminate mass surveillance and the public sphere

Recent disclosures suggest that many governments apply indiscriminate mass surveillance technologies that allow them to capture and store a massive amount of communications data belonging to citizens and non-citizens alike. This article argues that traditional liberal critiques of government surveillance that center on an individual right to privacy cannot completely capture the harm that is caused by such surveillance because they ignore its distinctive political dimension. As a complement to standard liberal approaches to privacy, the article develops a critique of surveillance that focuses on the question of political power in the public sphere.

The Conditions of Collectivity: Joint Commitment and the Shared Norms of Membership

Collective intentionality is one of the most fundamental notions in social ontology. However, it is often thought to refer to a capacity which does not presuppose the existence of any other social facts. This chapter critically examines this view from the perspective of one specific theory of collective intentionality, the theory of Margaret Gilbert. On the basis of Gilbert’s arguments, the chapter claims that collective intentionality is a highly contingent achievement of complex social practices and, thus, not a basic social phenomenon. The argument proceeds in three steps. First, Gilbert’s thesis that certain kinds of collective intentionality presuppose joint normative commitments is introduced. Second, it is argued that, on this view, individual commitments can only constitute the relevant kinds of collective intentional states if there are socially shared “principles of membership” that connect the force of individual commitments to a shared content. Third, it is shown that strong collective intentionality depends on the practical acceptance of shared norms and on the establishment of authority relations through mutual recognition.

Immanent Critique and Particular Moral Experience

Critical theories often express scepticism towards the idea that social critique should draw on general normative principles, seeing such principles as bound to dominant conceptual frameworks. Howe...

Anerkennung, Subjektivität und Gesellschaftskritik

Abstract The Hegelian insight that subjectivity depends on recognition has been taken up by two competing traditions: Post-Hegelian theories (Honneth, Brandom) take recognition to be a precondition for a critical stance of subjects towards society. In contrast, theories of subjection (Althusser, Butler) take the dependency of subjects on subordinating relations of recognition as undermining their capacity for critique. I argue that this worry has not been taken seriously enough by the post-Hegelian tradition, especially by its model of immanent critique. However, theories of subjection ignore that the very structure of recognitive relations supports critical capacities that can never be fully effaced by ideology.

Sharing the Background

In regard to the explanation of actions that are governed by institutional rules, John R. Searle introduces the notion of a mental “background” that is supposed to explain how persons can acquire the capacity of following such rules. I argue that Searle’s internalism about the mind and the resulting poverty of his conception of the background keep him from putting forward a convincing explanation of the normative features of institutional action. Drawing on competing conceptions of the background of Heidegger and Wittgenstein, I propose to revise Searle’s conception. The background of institutional agency can only provide a convincing explanation if it includes the context of actions and intersubjective structures of a shared life-world. I suggest that a further development of this idea would lead to the identification of the background with a web of social recognition.

Practices, Norms and Recognition

Practices, Norms and Recognition The problem of the social foundations of normativity can be illuminated by discussing the narrower question whether rule-following is necessarily a social matter. The problems with individualistic theories of rule-following seem to make such a conclusion unavoidable. Social theories of rule-following, however, seem to only push back one level the dilemma of having to choose either an infinite regress of interpretations or a collapse into non-normative descriptions. The most plausible of these models, Haugelands conformism, can avoid these objections if it is supplemented with an ontologically reasonable concept of the collective attitude of a group. Groups of individuals who are bound to shared norms by recognizing each other as equipped with a standard authority of criticism have the necessary properties for ascribing to those groups such collective attitudes. Given such a weak notion of a collective attitude, there is hope for a plausible collectivist theory of rule-following.

The Metaethics of Critical Theories

Critical theories, from their beginning in Marx’s philosophy to the Frankfurt School with its different generations, have always been characterized by a certain ambivalence toward moral questions. They often conceive themselves as an alternative to traditional moral philosophy, which is criticized both for separating context-free normative justification and empirical descriptions too strictly and for its seeming commitment to moral and normative standards developed independently from historical and social contingency. The different generations of critical theory have all attempted to develop a theory of normative judgment which is appropriately critical but which nevertheless does not require any commitment to naive moral naturalism or context-free realism. In the chapter, the author traces this through the different stages of the development of critical theories, and argues that at least some of the answers we can find in this tradition do not fit into the usual division between realist and antirealist theories in contemporary metaethics.

Fundamental Hope and Practical Identity

Abstract This article considers the question ‘What makes hope rational?’ We take Adrienne Martins recent incorporation analysis of hope as representative of a tradition that views the rationality of hope as a matter of instrumental reasons. Against this tradition, we argue that an important subset of hope, ‘fundamental hope’, is not governed by instrumental rationality. Rather, people have reason to endorse or reject such hope in virtue of the contribution of the relevant attitudes to the integrity of their practical identity, which makes the relevant hope not instrumentally but intrinsically valuable. This argument also allows for a new analysis of the reasons people have to abandon hope and for a better understanding of non-fundamental, ‘prosaic’ hopes.

Grundbegriffe und Konzeptionen

Es ist schwer, eine Liste von philosophischen Grundbegriffen bei Marx vorzustellen. Marx entwickelt seine Philosophie lebenslang in durchaus unterschiedlichen Phasen, bei denen sich seine Begriffe, Argumente und Anliegen durchweg eine Familienahnlichkeit bewahren. Viele Texte von Marx sind bestimmten Detailproblemen gewidmet. Viele Texte sind fragmentarisch und blos rudimentar ausformuliert. Marx arbeitet sich uberdies meistens an seinen Gegnern philosophisch ab. Es gibt fur keine der Phasen ein ausformuliertes Werk, das die ganze Philosophie systematisch erschopfend behandelt. Der Interpret muss also aus verschiedenen Phasen, unterschiedlichen Fragmenten und teilweise aus Stichwortsammlungen sowie Argumentationsschnipseln ein System erarbeiten.