Category Archives: Volume 7, no. 3 (2012)

Papers from the conference “Ethical imagination and social theory”

Introductory note

During the first week of August 2012 the second summer meeting of the Nordic Summer University’s study group Towards a New Ethical Imagination in cosmopolitan world society was held at Brandbjerg Højskole in Denmark. In this special issue of Nordicum-Mediterraneum we have collected some of the papers presented at this summer conference. The papers look at the topic of the study group from the point of view of different concepts of social theory.

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The documentary “Enemies of the People” (2009) and the question of ethics

Conference proceedings (multiple non-blind peer review), , , ,

Documentary film has ubiquitous presence in our culture. The mechanics of its production are often hidden, just as they are in any other films. However, in documentary film the filmmakers deal with real people and the issues of ethics are critical to the documentary project. The relationship ‘inside’ the film will influence the final text and therefore the audience and our culture as a whole. The issue of the ethics of the production of testimony in documentary remains a controversial issue. This paper looks at possible ethical paradigms which one could deploy in a discussion of an acclaimed. documentary which deals with the atrocities of Khmer Rouge: Enemies of the People (2009)

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On Truth and Emancipation

Conference proceedings (multiple non-blind peer review), , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

This article has two main currents. First, it argues that an affinity or similarity can be identified between the philosophy of Gianni Vattimo (the so-called “Weak Thinking”) and the “Discourse Theory” of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. The two theorizations are engaged with related problems, but have conceptualized them differently; they share central insights, but understand them with different vocabularies. The article furthermore illuminates in what this affinity consists in, and it discusses the differences and similarities between the two theoretical positions. The second current of the article takes the ‘postmodern’ philosophical problems of anti-foundationalism and nihilism as its point of departure. It raises the questions of: 1) how it is possible at the same time to take the critique of universality and objectivity seriously and still believe in the value of ethics and science; and, 2) how we are to understand emancipation if there is no necessary relationship between truth and freedom. The article investigates the status, meaning and interconnection of the categories of truth, knowledge, ethics, politics and emancipation in the light of the absence of metaphysical first principles. The article concludes that: A) faith can constitute a “weak foundation” of knowledge and ethics; and, B) nihilism can be combined with the political and ethical ambitions of universal human emancipation and radical democracy.

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The economic sociology of late capitalism: The Contributions from Boltanski, Thévenot and Chiapello

Conference proceedings (multiple non-blind peer review)

Together with his colleagues Laurent Thévenot and Eve Chiapello, Luc Boltanski has written two books on the economic sociology of late capitalist society: De la justification. Les economies de la grandeur (1991; Paris: Gallimard; On Justification. The economics of worth) with the economist Thévenot from the Paris convention school and Le Nouvel Esprit du capitalisme (The New Spirit of Capitalism) with Chiapello (1996; Paris: Gallimard). Together these books propose an economic sociology and analysis of the ethics of capitalism that we will briefly discuss and in this paper.

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Refugees, nationalism, and political membership

Conference proceedings (multiple non-blind peer review)

This essay aims to understand how refugees present a problem for liberal nation-states. The point of departure is Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, where she argues that the continual existence of refugees within liberal nation-states threatens to break down the principle of equality before the law thereby enabling the rise of police-states and totalitarianism. In light of this diagnosis, three of Arendt’s philosophical heirs—Giorgio Agamben, Seyla Benhabib and Peg Birmingham—argue that it is necessary to think political membership in different and broader terms than national citizenship if we are to avoid a new rise of totalitarianism.

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Praxis, Sittlichkeit and Communicative Action. On the connection between praxis, Sittlichkeit and communicative action in Aristotle, Hegel, Habermas and Honneth

Conference proceedings (multiple non-blind peer review), , , ,

The concept of praxis is one of the most fundamental concepts in the history of political philosophy. The most famous example may be Marx’s statement in the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach. The close relation between praxis and polis was grounded in Aristotle’s political philosophy. Hegel leads this concept further with his concept of praxis as Sittlichkeit. Honneth and Habermas are both grounded in the young Hegel’s writings when they try to extrapolate what is essential in Hegel’s concept of praxis and generate a new concept, which may be valid for our time. Honneth is standing by Hegel’s concept of recognition, which he then is forced to leave many years later when rediscovering Hegel’s concept of Sittlichkeit. However, Honneth fails to reconcile praxis and Sittlichkeit. In contrast, Habermas sets in a hermeneutic maneuver language as a substitute for Hegel’s concept of spirit. With this new, effectively metaphysical concept, he is able to formulate a practical philosophy in which both praxis and Sittlichkeit are summarized in communicative action. Habermas’s practical philosophy follows Hegel’s and extends its roots into the history of ideas, back to Aristotle’s foundation of the concept of praxis and, in a broader sense, to the antique democracy of Athens.

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