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Recognition
No full textRecognition can be understood as a positive acknowledgment or affirmation of a person’s existence, identity, rights, or achievement. It is sometimes said to be a necessary condition for self-confidence, self-respect, and self-esteem. Although the concept has origins in Hobbes, Rousseau, Fichte, and Hegel, it has come to renewed prominence since the early 1990s, when philosophers such as Charles Taylor and Axel Honneth developed theories of recognition. These showed that the need for social recognition underlies many social and political movements from struggles for civil and labor rights to modern multiculturalism.
In social and political philosophy, Honneth has argued that three forms of social recognition—affective care, equal respect, and social esteem—are preconditions of individual autonomy and that the principles governing these three forms of recognition should be the core of a conception of social justice. According to the theory of recognition, modern capitalist society can be evaluated as a recognition order that institutionalizes the distribution of respect and social esteem according to people’s individual achievements in their contributions to socially shared goals. Methodologically, Honneth uses an approach of normative reconstruction. Rather than constructing principles of justice on the basis of hypothetical agreement, he reconstructs the normative principles that are immanent in our social practices and institutions and sometimes contain a “normative surplus” that points beyond the status quo. This approach has been very productive in elucidating the importance of social recognition in the sphere of work, but critics have suggested that it limits the scope of radical social criticism. Honneth has proposed the concept of ideological recognition, where there is a chasm between the evaluative promise entailed by a form of recognition and its material fulfilment, in order to address this problem. More generally, critics have questioned whether recognition must be understood as positive rather than ambivalent, because this limits the scope of misrecognition and means that phenomena such as interpellation or objectification cannot easily be analyzed as forms of misrecognition
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
What is Reification? A Critique of Axel Honneth
Get PDFIn this paper I criticise Axel Honneth's reactualization of reification as a concept in critical theory in his 2005 Tanner Lectures and argue that he ultimately fails on his own terms. His account is based on two premises: (1) reification is to be taken literally rather than metaphorically, and (2) it is not conceived of as a moral injury but as a social pathology. Honneth concludes that reification is “forgetfulness of recognition”, more specifically, of antecedent recognition, an emphatic and engaged relationship with oneself, others and the world, which precedes any more concrete relationship both genetically and categorially. I argue against this conception of reification on two grounds. (1) The two premises of Honneth's account cannot be squared with one another. It is not possible to literally take a person as a thing without this being a recognisable moral injury, and, therefore, I suggest that there are no cases of literal reification. (2) Honneth's account is essentially ahistorical, because it is based on an anthropological model of recognition that tacitly equates reification with autism. In conclusion, I suggest that any successful account of reification must (i) take reification metaphorically and (ii) offer a social-historical account of the origin(s) of reification
Science for Sale
No full textReview of: Hans Radder (ed.) (2010) The Commodification of Academic Research, University of Pittsburgh Press, 360 p.Review of: Hans Radder (ed.) (2010) The Commodification of Academic Research, University of Pittsburgh Press, 360 p
Adorno and Kant
No full textAdorno’s philosophy is deeply influenced by Kant. While Adorno criticises Kant’s philosophy throughout his writings, he is sympathetic to Kant’s “rescuing urge”, his attempt to salvage the achievements of traditional metaphysics under post-critical conditions. Adorno’s criticism of Kant is that he has reified the basic concepts of his philosophy and therefore cannot account for their historical context and their meaning in social and political struggles. This is true of concepts such as autonomy, the will and the “cardinal propositions of metaphysics”, freedom, the immortality of the soul, and the existence of God. Adorno argues that Kant’s philosophy, understood as a principled defence of human autonomy and dignity, codifies the self-understanding of an ascendent bourgeois class. However, the horrors of the twentieth century and especially the Holocaust force us to reconsider the achievements of the Enlightenment project, to acknowledge the limits of Kant’s abstract normative concepts and find new grounds for social hope
Sexual Objectification
No full textAccording to Martha Nussbaum, objectification is essentially a form of instrumentalization or use. I argue that this instrumentalization account fails to capture the distinctive harms and wrongs of sexual objectification, because it does not explain the relationship between instrumentalization and the processes of social stereotyping that make it possible. I develop an imposition account of sexual objectification that provides such an explanation and, therefore, should be preferred over the instrumentalization account. It draws on a contrast between imposition and self-presentation and explains why sexual objectification, understood as the imposition of sex object status on women, is harmful and wrong
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