Janaway , Christopher , and Robertson , Simon , eds. Nietzsche, Naturalism, and Normativity . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. 280. $75.00 (cloth) (original) (raw)
Related papers
In this rich and manifold collection, Sally Haslanger has gathered seventeen groundbreaking essays in which the conceptual resources of analytic metaphysics, social ontology and philosophy of language are put into play in order to deal with issues of gender and race. The common denominator of the papers is the attempt to outline a general framework of "social critique." The overall aim relies on the idea that philosophy has a potential for "unmasking ideology, not simply articulating it," (379) but also for constructing alternative ontologies that enable us to come "to more adequate and just visions of what is, what might be and what should be." In pursuing such a critical, or "debunking" project, Haslanger's main strategy consists in putting forth an account of social constructionism about gender and race that claims not to be antirealist, antiobjectivist or antinaturalist. This is precisely what the double-barreled title, Resisting Reality, intends to suggest. On the one hand, in contrast to antirealist approaches, Haslanger maintains that the social categories of race and gender are real. She intends thus to challenge the "common resistance to recognize the reality of the social world," (29) to recognize, that is, how categories like race and gender do de facto materially organize and influence our practices, interactions and institutions. On the other hand, Haslanger sees contemporary realities as the product of unjust social structures and asymmetries of power, which have therefore to be resisted (and possibly transformed): "We should not resist seeing the reality that we should, in fact, resist; in fact, disclosing that reality is a crucial precondition for successful resistance." (30)
Preface to French Edition of Categorization and Moral Order 2010
It is particularly pressing in the contemporary moment to understand the practical work of membership categorization: the descriptions of persons produced from within the manifold and ongoing contexts of social life. The complex weave of moral order (and its intricate ties with the epistemic and the practical) is produced , reconstituted, recast and made intelligible in and through the ways persons and their actions and relationships get described. As one peruses any newspaper today, the details of accounts, and of the lived world which they claim, shape, embody and produce, seem in fundamental ways to be organized by category work. More than ever, the practical edge of categorizational work and the performative character of language use (in Austin's sense) becomes evident.
Stratification, Dependence, and Nonanthropocentrism: Nicolai Hartmann’s Critical Ontology
Ontology of Nature: Continental Perspectives and Environmental Reorientations, 2017
"Epigraph: Ontology has become such a suspicious and even impertinent enterprise for contemporary philosophy, largely due to the Kantian critique and its impact, that the mere name “ontology” elicits unease—the kind of unease involuntarily evoked by the reemergence of atavisms long overcome. A value judgment is concealed in this reactive emotional response. The question is whether that value judgment is justified. (Hartmann) Introduction Despite the recent resurgence of interest in ontology in some circles (of which the current volume is evidence), these words, penned in 1923, could just as much characterize our time as the earlier epistemology-obsessed era in which they were written. This derisive reaction to ontology will be regarded here as a symptom masking a denial. A denial of what? Denial of human asymmetrical diffuse dependence on nonhuman biotic and abiotic nature characterizing the (post)Modern era. This is another way of saying that “environmentalism” bears ontological as well as axiological significance: the significance of environmentalism is nothing less than a definitive challenge to the reigning anthropocentrism of classical western philosophy, and raises specific axiological, ontological, and epistemological questions about our concepts of human nature, of value, and of nature. It has urged acknowledgment of the substantive existential dependence of human life on the nonhuman biotic and abiotic world. Moreover, it casts new light on the thorny debate between idealism and realism, another philosophical problematic supposedly “long overcome.” "
The Discrimination Imbedded in Social Theory
International Perspectives on Social Theory, 2019
This paper seeks to underscore how present sociological characteristics favour the naturalizing of current discriminations. Starting with the example of the axiological discrimination between experts (observers) and the groups they themselves stratify (objects of study). Favouring the naturalization of the normal (i.e. objects of study whose behaviour is similar to that of the observers') and of moralism (i.e. the implicit strangeness imbedded in the social theories and the classifications of the objects of study). Favouring the search for the causes of misery and violence in individual free will, evading the configurational co-responsibility of social conditions in the construction of the mechanisms and environments with which people live and to which they react. The dissimulation of intentions and socio-political views that legitimize institutional violence is one of the characteristics of our times. It is worthwhile remembering how the separation between the action and its representations, the nomination of those against whom violence may be exercised, is ancestral. What should the role of the social sciences be: simply to monitor stigmatized violence (its negative form) or to participate in the construction of violence as instrument of social orientation (sometimes positive others negative)?
The Somatechnics of Social Categorisations
Somatechnics, 2019
Editorial of a combined issue of Somatechnics that includes the guest edited issue 'Data Matters: (Un)doing Data and Gender in the Life Sciences' and an issue comprised of general submissions entitled 'Pharmacological and Carceral Bodies'. In a contribution to 'Data Matters', Diana Schellenberg coins the term 'the somatechnics of social categorisations' that formed the inspiration for our editorial.