John Dewey (Handbuch Anerkennung) (original) (raw)

Although John Dewey never developed an explicit “Theory of Recognition,” he did contribute vastly to at least three fields of recognition-theoretical inquiry: the ontology of personhood, social ontology, and the political theory of struggles for recognition. The closest Dewey comes to developing something like an explicit theory of recognition is in his lectures on social and political philosophy in China 1919-1920 (Dewey 1973 & 2015). There he presents a theory of struggles for public recognition as the basic social-ontological framework for an experimentalist social and political philosophy.

Politics of Recognition

The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Wiley., 2018

Rooted in social, political and moral philosophy, theories of social recognition constitute a paradigm made up of various approaches and conceptions associated with recognition (Taylor; Honneth; Fraser). This paradigm's essential contribution to anthropology, which has been little exploited compared to its heuristic potential, is in the area of political anthropology, when it comes to reflecting on contemporary issues related to social struggles—whether for rights, minority visibility, or social esteem.

The Struggle for the Legacy of Recognition: four Models

Hegel’s first explicit use of the notion of the struggle for recognition occurred in his 1801 essay on the Essence of philosophical criticism, where a life and death struggle (Kampf) – involving the need for recognition as well as affirmation of power – concerns the relation between philosophical systems in the development of the history of philosophy and in contemporary debate. Nowadays the notion of recognition is at the centre of a struggle between different philosophical traditions for the heritage of the concept itself and of this or that aspect of the Hegelian theory. This struggle could itself be described as a chapter of that first model of the struggle for recognition outlined by the young Hegel: a battle where different traditions (critical theory, american pragmatism, neo-aristotelism, french phenomenology) aimed at reciprocal recognition, come into contact with each other and so are transformed by this conflict.

A political turn in recognition theory

Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2022

Clayton Chin and Geoffrey Brahm Levey’s article on “Recognition as acknowledgement” offers a timely reconsideration of the theoretical category of recognition. They propose to understand multicultural recognition as acknowledgment. Their proposal offers both an alternative view regarding the object of recognition and the stance the agent of recognition is supposed to take to this object. Whereas classic recognition theory understood recognition as directed at cultures or cultural identities, towards which the state was supposed to take a positive evaluative stance, Chin and Levey follow Tariq Modood in focusing recognition on negative differences experienced by minorities. Chin and Levey furthermore understand acknowledgment as linked to symbolic inclusion of minorities as equal members. I argue that the focus on negative difference sits uneasily with the continued framing of recognition in terms of identities and that recognition as acknowledgment can be understood as a political turn in recognition theory.

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