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Author: Raymond Geuss
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1981-10-30
Total Pages: 118
ISBN-13: 9780521284226
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe purpose of this series is to help make contemporary European philosophy intelligible to a wider audience in the English-speaking world, and to suggest its interest and importance in particular to those trained in analytical philosophy.
Author: Max Horkheimer
Publisher: A&C Black
Published: 1972-01-01
Total Pages: 313
ISBN-13: 0826400833
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThese essays, written in the 1930s and 1940s, represent a first selection in English from the major work of the founder of the famous Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. Horkheimer's writings are essential to an understanding of the intellectual background of the New Left and the to much current social-philosophical thought, including the work of Herbert Marcuse. Apart from their historical significance and even from their scholarly eminence, these essays contain an immediate relevance only now becoming fully recognized.
Author: Fred Leland Rush
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2004-08-26
Total Pages: 406
ISBN-13: 9780521016896
DOWNLOAD EBOOKCritical Theory constitutes one of the major intellectual traditions of the twentieth century, and is centrally important for philosophy, political theory, aesthetics and theory of art, the study of modern European literatures and music, the history of ideas, sociology, psychology, and cultural studies. In this volume an international team of distinguished contributors examines the major figures in Critical Theory, including Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Benjamin, and Habermas, as well as lesser known but important thinkers such as Pollock and Neumann. The volume surveys the shared philosophical concerns that have given impetus to Critical Theory throughout its history, while at the same time showing the diversity among its proponents that contributes so much to its richness as a philosophical school. The result is an illuminating overview of the entire history of Critical Theory in the twentieth century, an examination of its central conceptual concerns, and an in-depth discussion of its future prospects.
Author: Robyn Marasco
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2015-03-24
Total Pages: 241
ISBN-13: 0231538898
DOWNLOAD EBOOKHegel's "highway of despair," introduced in his Phenomenology of Spirit, is the tortured path traveled by "natural consciousness" on its way to freedom. Despair, the passionate residue of Hegelian critique, also indicates fugitive opportunities for freedom and preserves the principle of hope against all hope. Analyzing the works of an eclectic cast of thinkers, Robyn Marasco considers the dynamism of despair as a critical passion, reckoning with the forms of historical life forged along Hegel's highway. The Highway of Despair follows Theodor Adorno, Georges Bataille, and Frantz Fanon as they each read, resist, and reconfigure a strand of thought in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Confronting the twentieth-century collapse of a certain revolutionary dialectic, these thinkers struggle to revalue critical philosophy and recast Left Hegelianism within the contexts of genocidal racism, world war, and colonial domination. Each thinker also re-centers the role of passion in critique. Arguing against more recent trends in critical theory that promise an escape from despair, Marasco shows how passion frustrates the resolutions of reason and faith. Embracing the extremism of what Marx, in the spirit of Hegel, called the "ruthless critique of everything existing," she affirms the contemporary purchase of radical critical theory, resulting in a passionate approach to political thought.
Author: Amy Allen
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2016-01-12
Total Pages: 305
ISBN-13: 0231540639
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhile post- and decolonial theorists have thoroughly debunked the idea of historical progress as a Eurocentric, imperialist, and neocolonialist fallacy, many of the most prominent contemporary thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School—Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, and Rainer Forst—have defended ideas of progress, development, and modernity and have even made such ideas central to their normative claims. Can the Frankfurt School's goal of radical social change survive this critique? And what would a decolonized critical theory look like? Amy Allen fractures critical theory from within by dispensing with its progressive reading of history while retaining its notion of progress as a political imperative, so eloquently defended by Adorno. Critical theory, according to Allen, is the best resource we have for achieving emancipatory social goals. In reimagining a decolonized critical theory after the end of progress, she rescues it from oblivion and gives it a future.
Author: Stijn De Cauwer
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2018-07-31
Total Pages: 240
ISBN-13: 0231546831
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWe are living in an age of crisis—or an age in which everything is labeled a crisis. Financial, debt, and refugee “crises” have erupted. The word has also been applied to the Arab Spring and its aftermath, Brexit, the 2016 U.S. election, and many other international events. Yet the term has contradictory political and strategic meanings for those challenging power structures and those seeking to preserve them. For critics of the status quo, can the rhetoric of crisis be used to foment urgency around issues like climate change and financialization, or does framing a situation as a “crisis” play into the hands of the existing political order, which then seeks to tighten the leash by creating a state of emergency? Critical Theory at a Crossroads presents conversations with prominent theorists about the crises that have marked the past years, the protest movements that have risen up in response, and the use of the term in political discourse. Tariq Ali, Rosi Braidotti, Wendy Brown, Maurizio Lazzarato, Angela McRobbie, Jean-Luc Nancy, Antonio Negri, Jacques Rancière, Saskia Sassen, and Joseph Vogl offer their views on contemporary challenges and how we might address them, candidly discussing the alternatives that new social movements have offered, alongside an exchange between Zygmunt Bauman and Roberto Esposito on theories of community. Sparring over crucial developments in these past years of catastrophe and the calamity of everyday life under capitalism, they shed light on how crises and the discourse of crisis can both obscure and reveal fundamental aspects of modern societies.
Author: Steven Vogel
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 1996-01-01
Total Pages: 238
ISBN-13: 9780791430453
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAgainst Nature examines the history of the concept of nature in the tradition of Critical Theory, with chapters on Lukacs, Horkheimer and Adorno, Marcuse, and Habermas. It argues that the tradition has been marked by significant difficulties with respect to that concept; that these problems are relevant to contemporary environmental philosophy as well; and that a solution to them requires taking seriously--and literally--the idea of nature as socially constructed.
Author: Helen Pluckrose
Publisher: Pitchstone Publishing (US&CA)
Published: 2020-05-05
Total Pages: 353
ISBN-13: 1634312031
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWall Street Journal, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly Bestseller! Times, Sunday Times, and Financial Times Book-of-the-Year Selection! Have you heard that language is violence and that science is sexist? Have you read that certain people shouldn't practice yoga or cook Chinese food? Or been told that being obese is healthy, that there is no such thing as biological sex, or that only white people can be racist? Are you confused by these ideas, and do you wonder how they have managed so quickly to challenge the very logic of Western society? In this probing and intrepid volume, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay document the evolution of the dogma that informs these ideas, from its coarse origins in French postmodernism to its refinement within activist academic fields. Today this dogma is recognizable as much by its effects, such as cancel culture and social-media dogpiles, as by its tenets, which are all too often embraced as axiomatic in mainstream media: knowledge is a social construct; science and reason are tools of oppression; all human interactions are sites of oppressive power play; and language is dangerous. As Pluckrose and Lindsay warn, the unchecked proliferation of these anti-Enlightenment beliefs present a threat not only to liberal democracy but also to modernity itself. While acknowledging the need to challenge the complacency of those who think a just society has been fully achieved, Pluckrose and Lindsay break down how this often-radical activist scholarship does far more harm than good, not least to those marginalized communities it claims to champion. They also detail its alarmingly inconsistent and illiberal ethics. Only through a proper understanding of the evolution of these ideas, they conclude, can those who value science, reason, and consistently liberal ethics successfully challenge this harmful and authoritarian orthodoxy—in the academy, in culture, and beyond.
Author: Amy Allen
Publisher: Penn State Press
Published: 2018-06-12
Total Pages: 308
ISBN-13: 0271081643
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe wide-ranging work of Rahel Jaeggi, a leading voice of the new generation of critical theorists, demonstrates how core concepts and methodological approaches in the tradition of the Frankfurt School can be updated, stripped of their dubious metaphysical baggage, and made fruitful for critical theory in the twenty-first century. In this thorough introduction to Jaeggi’s work for English-speaking audiences, scholars assess and critique her efforts to revitalize critical theory. Jaeggi’s innovative work reclaims key concepts of Hegelian-Marxist social philosophy and reads them through the lens of such thinkers as Adorno, Heidegger, and Dewey, while simultaneously putting them into dialogue with contemporary analytic philosophy. Structured for classroom use, this critical introduction to Rahel Jaeggi is an insightful and generative confrontation with the most recent transformation of Frankfurt School–inspired social and philosophical critical theory. This volume features an essay by Jaeggi on moral progress and social change, essays by leading scholars engaging with her conceptual analysis of alienation and the critique of forms of life, and a Q&A between Jaeggi and volume coeditor Amy Allen. For scholars and students wishing to engage in the debate with key contemporary thinkers over the past, present, and future(s) of critical theory, this volume will be transformative.
Author: David Gartman
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013
Total Pages: 190
ISBN-13: 0415524202
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis volume focuses on developing a theory of culture that reveals how ideas create and legitimize social inequality, using empirical case studies ranging from automobile design to architecture to compare and critique two of the most influential theories of culture in contemporary sociology. It questions to what extent our culture reflects class inequality, and to what extent our culture masks those inequalities through the sameness of unified mass culture.
