Rorty on the Compatibility of Science and Religion

On May 2, 2000, Richard Rorty gave a lecture at the West Valley College, Saratoga, on the question "Is Religion Compatible with Science?"

Here is a video of Rorty's lecture:

Thomas Scanlon - What is Morality? (video)

Professor Thomas Scanlon gave a lecture on "What is Morality?" at the University of Guelph, Canada, on March 21, 2013.

A video of the lecture is now available:


Introduction by Mark McCullagh.

Thomas Scanlon is Professor of "Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity" at the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University. His latest book is "Moral Dimensions" (Harvard University Press, 2008). His new book on "Being Realistic about Reasons" is coming out on Oxford University Press in 2014.

(Thanks to Das Philoblog for the pointer!)

Conference on "Facts and Norms"

The University of Copenhagen is hosting a conference on "Facts and Norms", August 22-23, 2013.

"The European financial crisis and the failures of climate politics call for a revisited political theory. What role do scientific facts about climate change and social facts about immigration and political identity play in the determination and justification of political and social norms? The purpose of this conference is to discuss two sets of questions. First, what relevance do facts have in normative political theory? Second, what relevance do norms have in the empirical political and social sciences?"

Among the papers are:

David Estlund 
”Bad Facts”

Pablo Gilabert 
“Dynamic Feasibility, Principles of Justice, and All-Things-Considered Political Judgment”

Jeffrey Lenowitz 
"Creating Legitimate Constitutions: The Possible Role of Procedures"

Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen 
"Facts, Norms, and the Nature of Justice: Reflections on Cohen and Anderson"

Christian F. Rostbøll
“Kant and the Critique of the Ethics-First Approach to Politics”

Eva Erman
"What to Expect (and not) from the Pragmatic Turn in Political Theory"

More information here.

Roundtable on Critical Theory of Transnational Justice (video)

A roundtable with Rainer Forst (Frankfurt) under the titel "Towards a Critical Theory of Transnational Justice" took place at the University of Hamburg on June 10, 2013. Four editors of the journal "Global Constitutionalism" participated in the discussion: James Tully (Victoria), Mattias Kumm (New York/Berlin), Antje Wiener (Hamburg), and Anthony F. Lang (St Andrews). Introductions by Antje Wiener and Maximilian Steinbeis.

A video of the roundtable is now available:


See Rainer Forst's paper on "Transnational Justice and Democracy" (2011, pdf) and his book "The Right to Justification" (Columbia University Press, 2011).

Paper on Conceptual Analysis & Justice

Matthew H. Kramer has posted a new paper at SSRN:

"Conceptual Analysis and Distributive Justice"

Abstract:    
"This paper, written for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Distributive Justice, ponders several understandings of conceptual analysis in the context of debates over distributive justice. The paper's first two main sections consider the concept/conception distinction in its multi-layered complexity in a couple of prominent recent accounts of justice. It explores how those theories of justice unfold over several levels of increasing specificity. Thereafter, the paper takes up the vexed question whether expositions of the concept of justice can ever be austerely analytical or formal rather than morally value-laden. A negative answer to that question emerges from an investigation of a major contemporary theory of justice. In a prelude to the substantiation of that negative answer, the paper distinguishes between value-independence and value-neutrality. Though some possible accounts of justice are at least partly value-neutral, no accounts are ever value-independent."

Contents

1. Concepts versus Conceptions: Rawls
2. Concepts versus Conceptions: Dworkin
3. Value-Independence versus Value-Neutrality
4. Justice from the Formal Constraint of Consistency?
5. Conflicts versus Contradictions
6. An Example of Conflicting Duties
7. From Formality to Substance

Matthew H. Kramer is Professor of Legal and Political Philosophy at Churchill College, Cambridge University.

New book by Habermas: "Im Sog der Technokratie"

 
Im Sog der Technokratie
Kleine politische Schriften XII

von Jürgen Habermas

(Suhrkamp Verlag, Juli 2013)

193 S.

 


Kurzbeschreibung

"Seit 1980 versammeln die Bände der Reihe Kleine politische Schriften Analysen, Stellungnahmen und Zeitdiagnosen Jürgen Habermas‘. Titel wie Die neue Unübersichtlichkeit sind längst in den allgemeinen Sprachgebrauch übergegangen. Im titelgebenden Aufsatz  dieser Folge knüpft Habermas an seine viel beachteten europapolitischen Interventionen der letzten Jahre an. Angesichts der Gefahr, dass technokratische Eliten die Macht übernehmen und die Demokratie auf Marktkonformität zurechtstutzen könnten, plädiert er für grenzüberschreitende Solidarität. Neben Habermas‘ hochaktueller Heine-Preis-Rede enthält der Band Porträts von Denkern wie Martin Buber, Jan Philipp Reemtsma und Ralf Dahrendorf sowie einen Aufsatz, in dem der Philosoph sich mit der prägenden Rolle jüdischer Remigranten nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg auseinandersetzt. Mit Band XII beschließt der Autor eine Buchreihe, die kaleidoskopisch Grundzüge einer intellektuellen Geschichte der Bundesrepublik widerspiegelt.

Englische Titel: "The Lure of Technocracy".

Inhalt [pdf]

Vorwort [pdf]

I. Deutsche Juden, Deutsche und Juden

1. Jüdische Philosophen und Soziologen als Rückkehrer in der frühen Bundesrepublik
2. Martin Buber – Dialogphilosophie im zeitgeschichtlichen Kontext
3. Zeitgenosse Heine: »Es gibt jetzt in Europa keine Nationen mehr«

II. Im Sog der Technokratie

4. Stichworte zu einer Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des demokratischen Rechtsstaates
5. Im Sog der Technokratie. Ein Plädoyer für europäische Solidarität [Kurzfassung in Englisch]

III. Europäische Zustände. Fortgesetzte Interventionen

6. Der nächste Schritt. Ein Interview
7. Das Dilemma der politischen Parteien
8. Drei Gründe für »Mehr Europa«
9. Demokratie oder Kapitalismus?

IV. Momentaufnahmen

10. Rationalität aus Leidenschaft. Ralf Dahrendorf zum 80. Geburtstag
11. Bohrungen an der Quelle des objektiven Geistes. Hegel-Preis für Michael Tomasello
12. »Wie konnte es dazu kommen?« Eine Antwort von Jan Philipp Reemtsma
13. Kenichi Mishima im interkulturellen Diskurs
14. Aus naher Entfernung. Ein Dank an die Stadt München


Rezensionen:

* Uwe Justus Wenzel - "Überschwang und Misere" 
(Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Juli 17, 2013)

* Stefan Müller-Doohm - "Eine zerrissene Union an der Schwelle"
(Süddeutsche Zeitung, Juli 17, 2013)

* Rudolf Walther - "Fortschritte und Probleme bei der Zivilisierung"
(Die Tageszeitung, Juli 20, 2013)

* Dieter Kaltwasser - "Plädoyer für eine europäische Solidarität"
(Glanz & Elend, Juli 25, 2013)

* Alexander Cammann - "Sechzig Jahre am Nerv der Zeit"
(Die Zeit, August 1, 2013)

* Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR5)

* Journal 21 (Stephan Wehowsky)

Jeremy Waldron's tribute to Ronald Dworkin

Jeremy Waldron has posted a tribute to the late Ronald Dworkin at SSRN:

"Ronald Dworkin: An Appreciation"

Waldron's tribute was presented at the Memorial Service for Professor Ronald Dworkin, at St. John's Smith Square, London, on June 5, 2013.

Excerpt:
Dworkin's "vision was unified, in his great ethical work, Justice for Hedgehogs, by a principle of dignity. Each person, said Ronnie, has a certain responsibility for the precious shape of his or her own life, and everyone has a duty to respect the conditions under which others are able to discharge that responsibility. That’s what “human dignity” meant for Ronnie and it underpinned both the principles of responsibility that were so important in the luck-egalitarian side of his account of equality and the principles of mutual respect that are represented in the rule of law. His great work of synthesis, Justice for Hedgehogs revealed this as the foundation of all his positions — and I do mean “foundation,” which is not the same as the fortification that allows a philosopher to see off contrary intuitions. I mean that Justice for Hedgehogs bravely identified the very deep underpinning of his various positions, even though that explicit identification made each of them somewhat more vulnerable, by presenting a deeper as well as a wider and more integrated target."

See also Waldron's article on Dworkin in "The Chronicle of Higher Education", February 19, 2013.

See also Will Hutton's tribute to Dworkin in "The Guardian", June 9, 2013: "I despair as I watch the erosion of the liberal views I hold dear."

I have made a collection of links to other tributes to Dworkin here.

Jonathan Quong on Public Reason

Jonathan Quong has written an entry on "Public Reason" at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

"Public Reason"

Excerpt
"Public reason requires that the moral or political rules that regulate our common life be, in some sense, justifiable or acceptable to all those persons over whom the rules purport to have authority. It is an idea with roots in the work of Hobbes, Kant, and Rousseau, and has become increasingly influential in contemporary moral and political philosophy as a result of its development in the work of John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, and Gerald Gaus, among others. Proponents of public reason often present the idea as an implication of a particular conception of persons as free and equal. Each of us is free in the sense of not being naturally subject to any other person's moral or political authority, and we are equally situated with respect to this freedom from the natural authority of others. How, then, can some moral or political rules be rightly imposed on all of us, particularly if we assume deep and permanent disagreement amongst persons about matters of value, morality, religion, and the good life? The answer, for proponents of public reason, is that such rules can rightly be imposed on persons when the rules can be justified by appeal to ideas or arguments that those persons, at some level of idealization, endorse or accept."

Jonathan Quong is Senior Lecturer in Political Philosophy at the University of Manchester. He is the author of "Liberalism Without Perfection" (Oxford University Press, 2011). See my post on his book here.

(Thanks to Reza Javaheri for the pointer!)

Essays on Honneth's "Das Recht der Freitheit"

The new issue of "Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Philosophy" (2013 no, 1) features essays on Axel Honneth's lastest book "Das Recht der Freitheit" (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2011) and a reply by Honneth:

René Gabriels
In Search of a Critical Theory of World Society [pdf]

Thomas Nys
Which Justice, Whose Pathology? [pdf]

Beate Rössler
Kantian Autonomy and its Social Preconditions [pdf]

Joel Anderson
The Fragile Accomplishment of Social Freedom [pdf]

Bert van den Brink
From Personal Relations to the Rest of Society [pdf]

Rutger Claassen
Justice: Constructive or Reconstructive? [pdf]

Yolande Jansen
The ‘Us' of Democratic Will-Formation and Globalization [pdf]

Axel Honneth
Replies [pdf]

Dworkin on "A New Philosophy for International Law"

The latest issue of "Philosophy and Public Affairs" (2013 no. 1) features an article by the late Ronald Dworkin:

"A New Philosophy for International Law" [pdf]

The reconciliation of Habermas and Derrida in 1999-2000

Benoît Peeters's biography "Derrida" (Polity Press, 2013) contains a short description of the reconciliation of Jacques Derrida and Jürgen Habermas in 1999-2000:

"As he grew older and the thought of death obsessed him more, Derrida seemed eager to come to a rapprochement with some of his former adversaries. In October 1999, in New York, he again met Jürgen Habermas at the home of their common friend Giovanna Barradori. At this unexpected encounter, Habermas had the ‘smiling kindness’ to propose that he and Derrida hold a discussion. Derrida accepted immediately: ‘It’s high time,’ he said, ‘let’s not wait until it’s too late.’ The meeting took place in Paris shortly afterwards. During a friendly lunch, Habermas did all in his power to ‘wipe out the traces of the previous polemic, with an exemplary probity’ for which Derrida would always be grateful. The two men had not been on good terms for over twelve years, because of the two ‘unfair and hasty’ chapters that Habermas had written on Derrida in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity and Derrida’s stinging response in Mémoires: For Paul de Man and Limited Inc. [......] For Derrida, the quarrel with Habermas had had serious consequences: since the mid-1980s, access to the most important German publishers had been blocked, and his influence in the German-speaking world had been greatly hampered.

Their rapprochement was initially brought about on political terrain. Even during the years when they had been at odds, they had frequently been signing the same petitions and the same manifestoes. Derrida later acknowledged this in a fine homage that he wrote for the seventy-fifth birthday of his former enemy: ‘I had always had more than just sympathy, but an admiring approval for the argued positions that Habermas had adopted in Germany itself, on problems in German history, on numerous occasions.’

In 2000, Habermas and Derrida organized a seminar together in Frankfurt on problems in the philosophy of law, ethics, and politics. Alexander García Düttmann remembers the disquiet that this ‘reconciliation’ spread among the disciples of the two philosophers. ‘This rapprochement irritated me. Philosophically, they had nothing to say to one another. But politically, okay, they agreed on several points. Also, we shouldn’t underestimate tactical considerations. Derrida could be very trenchant, but he could also be a skilled negotiator when the occasion called for it. Depending on the context, he could be radical or almost consensual, courageous or calculating.’ Avital Ronell confirms that this episode caused their respective associates some heart-searching: ‘One could write an entire history of great men or women [. . .] and their disciples, a history of associations or dissociations, of gravitational pull. [. . .] Small groups quarrel and suddenly their leader, Mafi alike, perhaps, proposes a truce.’ One thing is certain: making up with Habermas meant that Derrida quickly reassumed a position in Germany that he had lost. Several plans for translation and re-publication saw the light. But other factors also helped to thaw the situation. After many years spent in the United States, Werner Hamacher, a follower of Derrida, had returned to teach in Frankfurt in 1998; he soon invited Derrida there, to give the lecture ‘The university without condition’. On this occasion, Derrida met up with Bernd Stiegler – not to be confused with Bernard Stiegler –, who had attended his seminar in Paris a few years earlier and now had an important position with the great publisher Suhrkamp. The Adorno Prize would soon seal Derrida’s reconciliation with Germany." ["Derrida",  p. 501f].

In 2003 Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida published together "A Plea for a Common Foreign Policy, Beginning in the Core of Europe".

Paper on Deliberative Democracy & Its Poststructuralist Critics

The latest issue of the journal "Javnost - The Public" (2013, no. 1) features an article by Lincoln Dahlberg on the theory of deliberative democracy:

"Exclusions of the Public Sphere Conception: Examining Deliberative and Discourse Theory Accounts" [pdf]

Abstract
The deliberative conception of the public sphere has proven popular in the critical evaluation of the democratic role of media and communication. However, the conception has come under sustained critique from poststructuralist- influenced theorists, amongst others, for failing to fully account for the exclusions that result from it being defined as a universal norm of public sphere deliberation. This paper examines how this critique may be answered. It does so first by exploring how (sophisticated) deliberative theory can reply to the critique, and second by turning to the poststructuralist-influenced critics – specifically post-Marxist discourse theorists – and asking how they might provide a way forward. With respect to the first, the paper finds that deliberative theory can, and often does, account for the exclusions in question much more than critics suggest, but that there remains concern about the conception’s radical democratic status given that exponents (seem to) derive it extra-politically. With respect to the second, the paper finds that a post-Marxist discourse theory reading – that embraces radical contingency – of the deliberative public sphere conception provides a purely political framework for theorising deliberative exclusion (and associated politics), and thus offers an ontological and democratic radicalisation of the public sphere conception. However, given the embrace of radical contingency, and thus acceptance of inelminable power, the paper concludes by indicating that this radicalisation may illicit concern about its radical democratic status.

Lincoln Dahlberg is Visiting Fellow at the Center for Critical and Cultural Studies, The University of Queensland.