"Commodification", "propertization", and "objectification" are all concepts which serve both as descriptive tools for certain tendencies in the historical development of modern, capitalistic social relations and as critical diagnoses of their particular distortions or pathologies. In the seminar, we will first try to highlight the analytic specificity of each phenomenon...
Seit einigen Jahrzehnten – und heute mit neuer Vehemenz – gibt es von feministischer, postkolonialer und rassismustheoretischer Seite Interventionen in den philosophischen Kanon und das Selbstverständnis der Philosophie. Nicht nur stecken die klassischen philosophischen Texte voller misogyner und rassistischer Anekdoten und Andeutungen, sondern auch die scheinbar neutralen Begriffe und Themen,...
The aim of this course is to introduce some central methods and motifs in critical theory. In this seminar, the term “critical theory” is not limited to particular traditions or philosophical schools (like the “Frankfurt School”) but has a broader meaning: a theory is to be called ‘critical’ if it...
Michel Foucaults erster Band seines Projekts einer »Geschichte der Sexualität« ist längt ein moderner Klassiker der politischen Theorie/Philosophie. Sein seit Anfang der 1970er Jahre entwickelter Machtbegriff wird darin systematisch expliziert und zugleich in Auseinanderset-zung mit dem historischen Material seiner Untersuchungen weiterentwickelt. Mithilfe dieser methodologischen Begriffsentwicklung kommt Foucault dann zu seinen...
Dass Gewalt ein intrinsisches Element moderner westlicher Gesellschaften ist, wurde von vielen politischen Theoretiker*innen dargelegt. Was aber ist Gewalt? Ist die Verhinderung von Lebenschancen Gewalt? Ist Gewalt eine Struktur? Gibt es eine Gewalt der Normen? Wie verhalten sich Politik und Gewalt? Kann der Staat Schutz vor Gewalt bieten? Wie unterscheidet...
This dissertation addresses inter alia the problem of certain intertextual discontinuities across Thomas Hobbes’s oeuvre regarding the issue of ecclesiology. I find that these disparities did not result from a change in Hobbes’s private opinions, but from the regicide of 1649 as an event that liberated Hobbes to unveil his...
This dissertation addresses two distinct but related questions. First, how should we conceive of social freedom? Second, given this conception, what ideals would best satisfy the demands we are under as citizens and moral agents? In answer to the first question, I defend a novel account of social freedom, where...
This dissertation reorients political theory to the concepts of use and utility for a more critical and emancipatory perspective on contemporary communal life. The reorientation entails a recovery of Aristotle’s and Marx’s overlapping approaches to use, whose contemporary reception indexes the surprising alignment of critical political theory with economics. That...
To be tempted is to be conflicted, but the conflict is not one of oscillation between two good options. Rather, it is normally easy to act on temptation and difficult to act against it. But this is puzzling, because unless temptation is a force that acts on us, it’s not...
This dissertation develops a causal theory of the relevant alternatives in a situation and applies this theory to the semantics and epistemology of conditionals, the theory of knowledge, and the epistemology of stereotyping. The first chapter presents the theory of causal models and causal alternatives. The second chapter applies this...
Does race matter globally, beyond national and regional contexts? If yes, then how exactly? I argue that race matters globally and develop an account for understanding that significance. I call the account “global racial capitalism.” In chapter 1, I offer background to motivate and defend the thesis that race matters...
In Essential Vulnerabilities, Deborah Achtenberg contests Emmanuel Levinas’s idea that Plato is a philosopher of freedom for whom thought is a return to the self. To the contrary, she agrees, Plato, like Levinas, is a philosopher of the other. While they share the view that human beings are essentially vulnerable... and An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. More information about the initiative can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org.
An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. More information about the initiative can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org. and In this highly original study of the nature of performance, Spencer Golub uses the insights of Ludwig Wittgenstein into the way language works to analyze the relationship between the linguistic and the visual in the work of a broad range of dramatists, novelists, and filmmakers, among them Richard Foreman, Mac...
An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. More information about the initiative can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org. and Kierkegaard’s psychological thought has always been acknowledged as very rich—Reinhold Niebuhr hailed him as the greatest psychologist of the soul since Augustine—and has had a major influence on Heidegger, Sartre, and existential psychoanalysis. Nevertheless, his accomplishment has not always been fully appreciated, in part because it is so scattered across...
An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. More information about the initiative can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org. and In this volume fifteen eminent scholars illuminate the broad and often underappreciated variety of the nineteenth‑century Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard’s engagements with literature and the arts.
The essays in Kierkegaard, Literature, and the Arts, contextualized with an insightful introduction by Eric Ziolkowski, explore Kierkegaard’s relationship to literature (poetry, prose,...
The Middle Included is the first comprehensive account of the Ancient Greek word logos in Aristotelian philosophy. Logos means many things in the Aristotelian corpus: essential formula, proportion, reason, and language. Surveying these meanings in Aristotle’s logic, physics, and ethics, Ömer Aygün persuasively demonstrates that these divers meanings of logos... and An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. More information about the initiative can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org.
Contemporary decolonial criticism and critical phenomenological thought may be characterized as proceeding from a disenchantment with the philosophical aspiration towards universality. The overarching argument put forward in this dissertation is that there is, to the contrary, an intimate and even necessary connection between the decolonization of philosophy and the affirmation...
Aristotle says that true assertions in practical philosophy are true “for the most part.” I argue an assertion is true “for the most part” if it refers to the hypothetical realization of a substance’s essential capacities under some set of impediments. The removal of impediments to the full realization of...
My dissertation defends a hermeneutic conception of ideology and its critique that situates both in the world-disclosing function of language.I argue that we must conceive of ideologies as world-disclosing embodied interpretive schemas insofar as they guide our cognitive, affective, and conative access to reality by providing the background knowledge, meanings,...