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2017
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(2017): Social Conceptions of Moral Agency in Hegel and Sellars. In: International Journal of Philosophical Studies 25 (2), S. 249-265. DOI: 10.1080/09672559.2016.1276950
Abstract: This essay contributes to our understanding of the relation between the philosophies of Hegel and Sellars. While most treatments of this relation have focused on metaphysics or epistemology, I focus on ethics, and in particular on the formulation of moral agency. I argue that Hegel and Sellars arrive at a similar metaphilosophical rejection of individual moral agency in favor of conceptions of moral agency as the outcome of social mediation. To demonstrate this, I trace how Hegel and Sellars offer parallel resolutions of the Kantian paradox': the apparent problem that, in Kantian ethics, moral agents must both freely self-legislate the moral law unto themselves and stand in a dutiful relation to the moral law as a necessary function of practical reason. Drawing Hegel and Sellars together in this way casts new light on Sellars's understudied ethical theory and further evidences the contemporary relevance of Hegel's moral philosophy.
2016
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(2016): Hegel's social and political philosophy. Recent debates. In: Philosophy Compass 11 (12), S. 804-817. DOI: 10.1111/phc3.12384
Abstract: This article discusses three topics that have been the subject of debate in recent scholarship on Hegel's social and political philosophy: first, the relevance of Hegel's systematic metaphysics for interpreting Hegel's social and political writings; second, the relation between recognition (Anerkennung), social institutions, and rational agency; and third, the connection between the constellation of institutions and norms that Hegel calls ethical life (Sittlichkeit) and Hegel's theory of freedom. This article provides a critical overview of the positions in these three debates. In the case of the first debate, I clarify the conceptual terrain by distinguishing between several kinds of systematicity that are at issue. In the case of the second debate, I argue that the views of two of the major participants, Axel Honneth and Robert Pippin, are in fact compatible. In the case of the third debate, I seek to clarify the connection in Hegel between two different ideas of freedom in ethical life, each of which has been emphasized by different interpreters of Hegel: the idea of freedom as non-alienation and the idea of freedom as social freedom. I conclude with a discussion of the ways in which ethical life, for Hegel, enables the freedom of individuals.
2015
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(2015): Hegelian recognition. In: Thesis Eleven 126 (1), S. 100-122. DOI: 10.1177/0725513614567342
Abstract: If we think of recognition as the practical relation consciously enacted by concerned individual subjects as social actors, which allows them to fulfil their intersubjectively valid social roles, this by no means exhausts the significance that recognition is accorded by Hegel. In fact the problem of recognition is central to the understanding and evaluation of Hegel's metaphysical system. Thus a close scrutiny of the presentation of self-consciousness in Phenomenology of Spirit and the interpretative difficulties it poses leads on to the question of the subject and Hegel's distinction between finite, accidental individuals and the true subject in his system: the concept of Spirit, understood not as a separate entity but as a system of relations, objectified in the historical forms of the Absolute Spirit. But what is the price of Hegel's metaphysics of subjectivity? Hegelian recognition signifies the recognition by individuals of recognition in its truth, that is, the self-recognition by finite individuals that they participate in Spirit as the true universal subject to the degree that they recognize their shared world of actions as the world of their own making. Modernity is therefore defined for Hegel as the recognition and realization of 'conscious freedom', whose telos lies in the actualization of universal reciprocal recognition that brings the unfreedom of history to an end. The idea of freedom and the thesis of the 'end of history' remain, however, the preserve of the thinking few. Hegelian recognition and with it Hegel's whole metaphysical system founders on the rock of finitude, on the unfreedom of finite human beings.
2013
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(2013): Intimacy and the Possibility for Self-Knowledge in Hegel's Dialectic of Recognition. In: Idealistic Studies 43 (3), S. 133-152. DOI: 10.5840/idstudies201411710
Abstract: Abstract The achievement of self-consciousness in Hegel's Phenomenology hinges on establishing a relationship with another self-conscious being. How this is accomplished, and even that it is accomplished in Hegel's text, are topics of dispute and misunderstanding in the literature. I show how Hegel argues for this intersubjective origin of self-consciousness, first, by comparing Hegel's analysis of lord and bondsman to Sartre's analysis of intimacy. Second, I focus on two interpretive challenges. First, I argue that the staking of life comes from an other-oriented epistemological relation, and not simply from an immediate concern with dominating the other. Second, contrary to many interpretations which see the bondsman's development arising out of an isolated activity merely between himself and the products of his labor, I argue that the slave's ability to gain knowledge of himself as a self is only possible by establishing a relationship with the lord. This point is essential because, if readings of the bondsman's development as isolated from the lord are correct, then Hegel has in fact not succeeded in showing that self-consciousness only develops out of intersubjective recognition.
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(2013): Recognition in Capital. In: Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 16 (4), S. 713-727. DOI: 10.1007/s10677-013-9410-y
Abstract: In this paper it is shown that in his conception of value, published in the first volume of Capital, Marx relies on Hegel's concept of pure recognition to organise the relations between use- and exchange-value on the one hand and the relation between the social relations between things (goods) and actors (sellers) on the other hand. Establishing this thesis is important in three respects: Firstly it demonstrates that there is a strong continuity in the philosophical thought of Karl Marx, making visible an essential relation between his Economic-philosophical Manuscripts and his later writings. Secondly it helps to better understand Marx's conception of value; and thirdly it shows that "recognition" is an important conception in his critique of political economy.
2011
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(2011): Pathologies of recognition. In: Philosophy & Social Criticism 37 (8), S. 851-887. DOI: 10.1177/0191453711413701
Abstract: Recognition is not only a response to social pathologies. It is also an unstable and often ambivalent relationship that has its own pathologies. Owing to the intertwining between recognition and power, certain forms of recognition turn out to be forms of alienation in or from the world. Such pathologies affect inter-individual recognition as well as the recognition between individuals and the socio-political institutions. The article proposes a joint reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and Philosophy of Right, which provide norms for identifying and dealing with these pathologies. The norm for inter-individual recognition is set out in the Phenomenology of Spirit, the norm for state/citizen recognition in the Philosophy of Right. The analysis envisages two other aspects of recognition: the interference of the 'I-Me' with the 'I-You' relationship and the incorporation of the 'I-We' into the 'We-Us' dimension of recognition. As regards the interpretation of Hegel's practical philosophy, the article analyses the link between Hegel's concept of recognition and his theory of action. In this view, the highest form of recognition has more to do with reconciliation - reconciliation between human beings, reconciliation with the 'finitude of action' - than with the problematic of individual and collective identity.
Keywords: alienation, alienation and recognition, Anerkennung, Anerkennung als menschliche Grundkategorie, Disziplin, Entfremdung, Entfremdung bei Hegel, finitude of action, Hegel, Hegels Begriff der Anerkennung, Menschsein als Voraussetznug für soziale Angemessenheit?, Philosophie, power relationships, RECOGNITION, Soziale Angemessenheit, Sozialphilosophie, universal freedom 2005
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(2005): Hegel's Concept of Mutual Recognition. The Limits of Self-Determination. In: The Philosophical Forum 36 (2), S. 213-220. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9191.2005.00201.x
2002
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(2002): Reason, Recognition, and Internal Critique. In: Inquiry 45 (4), S. 479-498. DOI: 10.1080/002017402320947568
Abstract: Normative political philosophy always refers to a standard against which a society's institutions are judged. In the first, analytical part of the article, the different possible forms of normative criticism are examined according to whether the standards it appeals to are external or internal to the society in question. In the tradition of Socrates and Hegel, it is argued that reconstructing the kind of norms that are implicit in practices enables a critique that does not force the critic's particular views on the addressee and can also be motivationally effective. In the second part of the article, Axel Honneth's theory of recognition is examined as a form of such reconstructive internal critique. It is argued that while the implicit norms of recognition made explicit in Honneth's philosophical anthropology help explain progressive social struggles as moral ones, his theory faces two challenges in justifying internal critique. The Priority Challenge asks for the reasons why the implicit norms of recognition should be taken as the standard against which other implicit and explicit norms are to be judged. The Application Challenge asks why a social group should, by its own lights, extend equal recognition to all its members and even non-members. The kind of functional, prudential, conceptual, and moral considerations that could serve to answer these challenges are sketched.
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