Tradition Of Critical Theory Research Articles

Technosystem: The Social Life of Reason by Andrew Feenberg

Reviewed by: Technosystem: The Social Life of Reason by Andrew Feenberg Don Ihde (bio) Technosystem: The Social Life of Reason. By Andrew Feenberg. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. Pp. 256. Hardcover $35. Many experts would rank Andrew Feenberg as the best contemporary philosopher of technology coming from the critical theory tradition. After this book, the number of readers so ranking him is bound to increase. Feenberg is a widely read, astute, and technology-sensitive writer. In Technosystem, he reviews critical theory from its Marxian beginnings, through the early Frankfort School, into today's technological scene. He redesigns critical theory, shifting it from its deterministic, revolutionary, and totalistic beginnings, adapting it to today's more pervasive but also more flexible technologies. In a move to fallibilism, he sees openings for reforms, resistances, and gestalt changes in technologies. If one looks at his author index, one will recognize his usual list of favored thinkers—Arendt, Foucault, Habermas, Hegel, Heidegger, Horkheimer, [End Page 506] Marcuse, Marx, and now Simondon—all with multiple citations. The "empirical turn" generation (including Feenberg) highlighted in Achterhuis's American Philosophy of Technology—Borgmann, Dreyfus, Ihde, Winner—all get a single citation. But a closer read shows a much deeper sophistication and sensitive re-reading, particularly of Heidegger, Lukacs, and Marcuse. He adds nuanced points from Foucault, Latour, and others. He sees that much in the critical theory tradition is now outdated regarding the shape of capitalism and the hopes for a socialist revolution, and he digs deeply into the new technologies which now dominate our world. He adds from his own experience, especially with regard to the Internet, and situates those experiences nicely in today's multicultural world. His insights into Japanese culture and his takes on today's social media mark high points in Technosystem. Although implicitly, Feenberg recognizes the dominance of the praxis philosophical systems in philosophy of technology (Marxism and critical theory, phenomenology from Husserl and Heidegger, pragmatism), he also deals with aspects of the analytic tradition. Technosystem primarily focuses upon the evolution of critical theory, though it also deals with the emergence of still-growing STS (science-technology studies) approaches, which has taken up its own critique of science and technology through the new sociologies, anthropologies, and philosophies of science and technology in the massive shift to praxis orientations in case studies, laboratory studies, and the newer feminist critiques. Were a criticism to be raised, I would point out that Feenberg underestimates the growing influences of STS alternatives to actor network theory, the presence of critical theory approaches such as both postphenomenology, with its multiple research panels, and an even newer neo-Heideggerian revival around "Anthropocene" rubrics. Those who read in the philosophy of technology are quite aware that the two extremes of utopianism (technology will solve all the problems) and dystopianism (technology will do us all in) have plagued its history. Feenberg wants to preserve progressivism, whereas Heidegger is now often seen as deeply dystopian. Feenberg's modification of critical theory, which includes saving a social rationality, is more modest than its revolutionary past—he sees in the social reason made possible by the technosystem, openings for reform, maintaining progressivism—as in the emergence of environmental, feminist, and egalitarian movements in contemporary times. Feenberg is often at his best when he states his insights in pithy form. For example in his conclusion, he locates where critical theory fits amongst the varied praxis philosophies of technology: "Critical Theory has always been based on utopian hopes. … This implies an understanding of history as progressive" (p. 187). Only Dewey and classical pragmatism would match such a tone. But Feenberg, too, sees that much critical theory has outlived its classical Marxian past, or for that matter, the dystopian totalization [End Page 507] of early philosophy of technology. In his chapter on the Internet, he observes, "Neither telephone companies nor social networking sites control users' conversations as labor is controlled by factory owners" (p. 92). Thus, supporting his stance for resistance as reforms, he opts for fallibilism: "Today we face processes of social change that are partial rather than total" (p. 116). [End Page 508] Don Ihde Don Ihde is distinguished professor of philosophy, emeritus at Stony...

The Pacifist Tradition and Pacifism as Transformative and Critical Theory

Pacifism is often painted into a corner as an absolute rejection of all violence and war. Such a dogmatic and negative formulation of pacifism does leave us with pacifism as a morally problematic position. But pacifism is not best understood as a negative claim. Nor is pacifism best understood as a singular or monistic concept. Rather, there is a “pacifist tradition” that is grounded in an affirmative claim about the importance of nonviolence, love, community building, and peaceful conflict resolution. This more positive conception of pacifism aims to transform social and political life. When understood in this way, pacifism is a robust and useful critical social theory. This paper explores the philosophy of pacifism in an attempt to reconceptualize pacifism as a tradition of normative critical theory. The paper argues that pacifism ought to be understood on analogy with other critical theories—such as feminism; that pacifism should be understood in terms of the “pacifist tradition”—along lines familiar from interpretations of the “just war tradition”; and that pacifism should be seen as offering interesting themes and ideas that are worthy of philosophical attention.

CRITICAL THEORY, RELATIONS OF DOMINATION, AND A CERTAIN IDEA OF SOCIAL JUSTICE

Nowadays, many authors claim to belong to the critical theory tradition although their research focuses on a heterogeneity of topics and not all of them refer to the Frankfurt School. Within this debate, this paper shows how relations of domination could be considered the main object of investigation of critical theory. This could help us not only to delineate its methodology, but also, and mainly, to provide a compelling answer to some objections critical theory seems to face. Last but not least, it could additionally show that this object is strictly related to a certain idea of social justice. In this way, critical theory could remain consistent with its immanent or reconstructive methodology, and, in the same way, it could be better grounded in its emancipatory intention, thus avoiding falling into relativism. Obviously, we are aware that the critical theory tradition is concerned with a huge number of issues. It focuses on highly differentiated social phenomena, addressing its criticism to capitalism, ideologies, unjust socio-economic distribution, a certain idea of individual freedom, ways of conceiving identity, and many others. This paper, however, argues that it is possible to view how critical theory tackles all these topics from the same essential perspective: it criticizes eminently the relations of domination that these social phenomena reproduce. Moreover, by considering relations of domination as critical theory’s main object of investigation, we can draw a particular grammar of justice which is imminently relational or intersubjective.

Changing the world, one word at a time: The struggles of higher education and communicative action in a capitalist world

Debates within critical educational theory and its relation to capitalism have often been heavily influenced by the tradition of critical social theory. For instance, Jurgen Habermas’ communicative action approach has proven to be a valuable theory that combines both analytical considerations regarding the conflict between the ‘lifeworld’ and ‘system’, and a decisively normative theory for deliberative and democratic discourse. However, Habermas’ communicative action does not go without problems, as a critical linguistic approach may prove. As such, in this paper I attempt to analyse the issues of communicative action in the context of anti-capitalist discourse and debate within and about higher education. To do this, I first outline Habermas’ and Fleming’s theories on the colonization of higher education, followed by a critique by means of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language. As such, I attempt to argue that, in order to decolonize higher education from the ‘logic of capital’, we must reflect upon the language-games used when speaking about education.

Theorising Racism: <i>Exploring the Swedish racial regime</i>

Sociologists Bonilla-Silva and Baiocchi (2001) assert that sociologists, protected by a myth of neutrality and objectivity, follow the understandings of racism in their analysis of inequality as relegated to a secondary status, either according to the Marxist tradition as the superstructure or within a Weberian framework as a form of status difference. The aim of the article is to put the study of racism, a fundamental principle of social organisation in modern society, at the centre of social theory. The aim is also to develop a productive dialogue with the traditions of Critical Race Theory (CRT), neo-Marxism and Black feminism; traditions that we will argue are highly relevant for the analysis of the Swedish racial regime.

Book review: On Negativity and Democracy: Negativity and Democracy: Marxism and the Critical Theory Tradition

Book review: On <i>Negativity and Democracy</i>: Negativity and Democracy: Marxism and the Critical Theory Tradition

Re-Hegelianizing Marx on Rights

AbstractWhile much has been written in recent years about the significance of Hegel’s Logic for Marx’s method in Capital, less attention has been given to the relevance of Hegel’s method for understanding Marx’s outlook on rights. The dominant view among political theorists across the Anglo-American, Marxist and critical theory traditions is that the revolutionary transformation of capitalism would pave the way for the disappearance of rights in communist society. The aim of this article is to question the orthodoxy concerning the fate of rights in communist society by bringing into relief the relevance of Aufhebung. When applied to Marx’s social theory, this Hegelian concept sheds valuable light on the transformation of rights in communist society and points to an alternative conclusion than the one proposed by leading commentators. A re-Hegelianized reading of Marx’s cumulative reflections on rights shows the possibility of a reconstituted notion of rights in communist society.

Post Media Literacy: Menyaksikan Kuasa Media Bersama Michel Foucault

This article would like to present Michel Foucault’s idea concerning Knowledge and Power in media industry. As a contemporary intellectual, Foucault’s thought has a unique style of postmodernism. His thought had gone beyond traditional critical theory whose trying to disclose the relation of power and economic behind the ideology of media. Foucault’s thought had given new perspective in understanding how the media produce truth under tightly control process into something that seems normal. With the assumption of media has the power to create mass culture, which has to be studied critically by media literacy approach, Foucault’s thought had given new space of discursive. An alternative thought on how to estimate the work of mass media as supervisor of truth and creator of information trough normalization practice.

The Normativity of Work: Retrieving a Critical Craft Norm

ABSTRACTRecent social theory has begun to reconsider how the activity of work can contribute to well-being or autonomy under the right conditions. However, there is no consensus on what this contribution consists in, and so on precisely which normative principles should be marshalled to critique harmful or repressive forms of workplace organisation. This paper argues that Richard Sennett’s concept of work as craft provides a normative standard against which the organisation of work can be assessed, especially when explained within a broadly Aristotelian account of the conditions of human flourishing. More precisely, the paper argues that a craft norm can meet the standards of social critique within the Frankfurt School tradition of Critical Theory, as this tradition has been interpreted by Axel Honneth. Honneth himself now rejects craft norms as too utopian and parochial to inform Critical Theory under contemporary economic conditions. In reply, this paper uses sociological studies of call centre workers to illustrate how work motivated by craft ideals can be sustainable rather than utopian, and how craftsmanship can inform social critique across a wide variety of industries and management practices.

Lawlessness Controls the Laws: Nomos, “The Ethical,” and the (Im)possibilities of Anarchia in Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis

Lawlessness Controls the Laws: Nomos, “The Ethical,” and the (Im)possibilities of Anarchia in Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis* Nicolas Lema Habash Is it possible to understand the sacrifice of one’s child? In Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis (IA henceforth),1 Agamemnon is required to sacrifice his daughter, Iphigenia, under the compulsion of an oracle so that the Greek army could travel to Troy. The question about the intelligibility of such an event seems to be crucial in Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (1983) when he compares Abraham’s paternal anguish to Agamemnon’s. Kierkegaard concludes that Agamemnon’s deed is perfectly understandable since the sacrifice of Iphigenia lies within the ethical parameters of his tragic context. Through a reading of Kierkegaard’s reflections, I would like to suggest that the sacrifice of Iphigenia lies within an ethical context that permits violence and death to take place. This ethical context, which we can also conceptualize as nomos, participates in the action of IA by shattering the possibility of a critical contestation by the individual characters of the play who are opposed to the sacrifice. These individuals become an object of the nomos and thus fail to oppose death. The objectification [End Page 169] of Iphigenia has convincingly been analyzed from a feminist perspective. Nonetheless, the argument about the objectification of the characters of the play, I maintain, can be studied beyond a gender perspective. The nomic prescription and order that governs the play—related to characters whom we do not see on stage such as Calchas, Odysseus, or the Greek army—appears to be so beyond the control of the characters that not only women suffer objectification but also men. Thus I will argue that Agamemnon is also a figure who is shattered by the violence that his nomos requires. His sacrifice of Iphigenia becomes a duty to be fulfilled and not a willing action supporting Pan-Hellenism and the War of Troy. In order to seek for a way out of the dilemma of violence that this play advances, one must look for a notion of subjectification (or de-objectification) that could not be fulfilled within the parameters of the established law or nomos. Opposing death in this context requires an interpretation of a kind of subjectivity formed in the activity of opposing the law: effectively, that is, an act of anarchia or refusal to comply with the law. Even though Euripides does not show us this possibility within the actions of the play, he at least provides us with the opportunity to imagine what I will call a process of anarchistic subjectification, something that, I maintain, an Aristotelian ethics fails to do. Therefore, my intention in this article is certainly to attempt a literary interpretation of IA, but also, and most importantly, to reflect on the philosophical implications and outcomes that Euripides’ play proposes for thinking about law within a critical theory tradition. I Iphigenia’s decision to sacrifice herself so that the Greek army may be sent a good wind in order to leave Aulis and travel to Troy has been a matter of discussion since Aristotle.2 Political and personal reasons have been provided to explain Iphigenia’s decision to die voluntarily after she had begged her father Agamemnon not to kill her.3 One powerful interpretation explores the fact that Iphigenia is not really “free” when she makes her decision, and her apparent freedom is a kind of failure. Herbert Siegel (1980) argues against those who interpret Iphigenia’s change of mind as an act of free will. That [End Page 170] Iphigenia decides to die after her begging fails to convince her father (1211–52), after Agamemnon reasserts the need for the sacrifice (1255–75), and after Achilles does not succeed in his attempt to rescue her and is violently rejected by the Greek army for his effort (1345–70), means, for Siegel, that Iphigenia becomes a hostage. She does not want to die, but her decision is motivated by self-delusion. In a process of complete detachment from reality, she convinces herself that her sacrifice is for a noble cause, therefore idealizing the whole expedition to Troy. Thus “viewing her change of...

Agonist Recognition, Intersections, and the Ambivalence of Family Bonds: John Dewey's Critical Theory Manifesto in China

John Dewey’s lectures in China, delivered at Peking University in 1919–1920, are currently available to us in two different forms: as a translation into English from a Chinese transcript of Dewey’s oral English talks, and as the notes Dewey wrote for himself as “plot outline” for the lectures. In the paper, I argue that a conjunct reading of the two texts conveys the unique opportunity to reconstruct Dewey’s outline of a critical social philosophy. I suggest to call this outline a “critical theory manifesto,” since it presents many significant similarities with other critical-theoretical motives belonging to the Hegelian-Marxian tradition of Critical Theory. In the first part of the article, I expound on the similarities between Dewey and, in particular, Marx, Horkheimer, Adorno, and Honneth. In the second part of the paper, I highlight three original points made by Dewey that represent an improvement of Marxian-Hegelian critical theory, since they allow to build bridges between this particular critical-theoretical “school” and other critical approaches to society and politics. These points consist in: (a) Dewey’s idea of struggle for public recognition between groups; (b) the inter-sectionalist inspiration of Dewey’s social philosophy; (c) Dewey’s ambivalent assessment of intimate relationships.

On Reconciling Biopolitics and Critical Theory

This article examines attempts to reconcile biopolitics and Critical Theory, by drawing on Miguel Vatter’s The Republic of the Living (2014). Vatter contends that modern neoliberal government has become biopolitical by incorporating biological life into the calculations of political rationality. To counteract its “normalising” impacts, he recommends an “affirmative politics” of the living, one that escapes the techniques envisaged to administer and govern life. Only a dual approach, he suggests, that fuses both democratic and critical political and economic arguments, can contest neoliberalism. Vatter asserts that the basis of such a critique was first established by the Critical Theory tradition. However, for a biopolitical critique to become effective today, it is crucial to enhance the descriptive and normative understanding of the concept of Zoë or species life within the critical theoretical discourse. This shift in emphasis, however, raises several interpretative tensions with the fundamental perspectives and values of Critical Theory that are not fully acknowledged in Vatter’s proposed reconciliation of biopolitics and Critical Theory.

Secondary Antisemitism, the Economic Crisis and the Construction of National Identity in the Austrian Print Media

This paper deals with the question of antisemitism in relation to the construction of national identity in late capitalist and post-Nazi societies. Its argument centres on the concept of ‘secondary antisemitism’, as developed within the Critical Theory tradition. Thus, I will elaborate on the complex relationships between post-Nazi antisemitism, the culture industry and the radical destruction of memory in late capitalist societies. The aim is to show the contemporary relevance of secondary antisemitism beyond the immediate context of the task of remembering the Nazi past. In the second section of this paper I will illustrate this by an analysis of examples from print media debates in Austria on the recent financial crisis and show that instances of secondary antisemitism are utilized for the discursive construction of an exclusive national(ist) unity.

Protecting Rights, Restoring Respect and Strengthening Relationships: A European Model for Restorative Justice with Children and Young People

This article summaries the research undertaken to produce a European Model of Restorative Justice for Children and Young People published by the International Juvenile Justice Observatory. The Model is based upon a survey of the 28 European Union member states, in-depth cases studies of restorative justice in Belgium, Finland and Northern Ireland, and a review of relevant directives and policies of the EU and the Council of Europe and of current research and theory. It argues that a European model is distinguished by its commitment to rights, its long experience of mediation, its use of social pedagogy and the tradition of social and critical theory in Europe. These distinctions enable the field of restorative justice to be extended beyond criminal justice and extend to families, schools and communities. The model asks: How do we wish to raise and nurture our children so that they can flourish in the democratic, diverse and interdependent Europe of the future? Its response is to emphasise how restorative justice offers a pragmatic way of enabling people to deal with harm that contributes to a culture based upon rights and respect and enables diverse and interdependent societies to be both socially inclusive and cohesive. Restorative processes are also valuable ways of supporting young people to learn the values and skills required in democratic societies. While most European countries are implementing restorative justice, there is still great potential for development. The European Model offers guidelines on policy, organizational arrangements and practice to support European countries to deliver the full benefits of restorative justice to their citizens.

As enfermidades da sociedade: Aproximação a um conceito quase impossível

Though the idea of social pathologies or diseases of a whole society has been quite common since Rousseau's Second Discourse and especially prominent within the tradition of critical theory, it is not really clear who precisely is proposed to have fallen ill here in the first place. Is it only some sufficient number of individual

The Mothership Strikes Back

The Mothership Strikes Back Andrew Parker's The Theorist's Mother, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012I am your mother, Luke, said no Star Wars character ever. While Luke Skywalker negotiates relationships with a succession of father figures (Uncle Owen, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Yoda) before Darth Vader declares himself to be Luke's true father and hacks off his son's hand with a castrating blow from his phallic lightsaber, Luke's remains obscured in his incestuous romance with Princess Leia, who is ultimately revealed to be his twin sister. Just as it would have been unthinkable for Darth Vader- much less any Jedi Knight-to have been Luke's in the Star Wars universe, when Jacques Derrida was asked, What philosopher would you have liked to be your mother? he responded, It's impossible for me to have any philosopher as a . . . my couldn't be a philosopher. [Switches to French] A philosopher couldn't be my mother (Derrida 2007). Derrida's horrified reaction is used by Andrew Parker as a launching point for his own proposal in The Theorist's Mother, which suggests what unifies the otherwise disparate traditions of critical theory and philosophy from Karl Marx to Jacques Derrida is their troubled relation to (1).With fifty-six pages devoted to notes and a bibliography, the dense but elegant in the other one hundred fourteen pages of this accidental provide both a challenging and pleasurable reading of Jacques Lacan and Gyorgy Lukacs in their roles as legitimate heirs to the traditions fathered by Freud and Marx. Preceding the three main chapters and a coda, the introduction in which Parker lays out his theoretical groundwork is the most compelling portion of the book. While claims to paternity have always been doubtful, those of maternity were assumed to be unambigu- ous until advances in reproductive technology made it possible for motherhood to be split along genetic, biological, and social axes. Because the identity of the has been revealed to be a social construction instead of a biological cornerstone, Parker concludes that such indeterminacy reveals three problems with employing the as a signifier: the distinction of the literal (procreating body) from the figurative (creativity), the relationship of the singular (my mother) to the general (the Mother), and the border between a theorist's life and writing (22-25).More or less corresponding to the three kinds of trouble identified in the introduction, the main chapters of The Theorist's Mother deconstruct the relationship between texts and their supplements-becoming supplements themselves, located both inside and outside of the original texts. If the work of Freud and Marx were to be compared to the Star Wars original trilogy, and the work of Lacan and Lukacs to the Star Wars sequel trilogy, then Parker's book could be viewed as a highly sophisticated form of fan fiction that exposes the assumptions of canonical readings by rereading them from the perspective of a minor character. In the Star Wars sequel, the drama is driven by Chancellor Palpatine's tug-of-war with ObiWan Kenobi over Anakin's loyalty as a disciple; yet the death of Anakin's and his brief romance with Luke's function as fulcrums in the transformations of both Darth Vader's pathology and the political economy of the Star Wars universe. Returning to the universe of The Theorist's Mother, Parker's work tries to locate the role of the Queen as a unif ying agent-both biological and social-in the reproduction of modern theory.In the first main chapter, Parker attempts to ground this project in his own experience by describing his original exploration of the boundary between the mind and the body in a 1985 essay he wrote about his mother's hypochondria. Parker then segues into a discussion of Lacan reading his critics' responses to his earlier work while he was giving his famous seminar on female sexuality. …

Visuality, photography, and media in international relations theory: A review

The way we see war – its visuality – is ever changing and dynamic. Despite the theoretical variety in International Relations (IR) scholarship, the themes of visuality, photography, and media have not been considered in a systematic fashion. The positivist core of IR is limited in its capacity to consider these themes outside of a cause-and-effect framework. This results in media mainly discussed in terms of its influence on international politics via its impact on (primarily American) foreign policy. The media and foreign policy literature follows this legacy; it arose as a response to post Cold War events and technological shifts. Similarly, the Revolution in Military Affairs of the 1990s opened up a space for strategic studies to address media and visuality. Recent literature from strategic studies engages with cultural and social theory in a way that shows how such tools may be used for exploitation as well as emancipation. In opposition, the post-positivist research tradition of critical IR theory problematizes the world created by rationalist–objectivist social science and seeks answers to constitutive questions about the construction, production, and performance of actors and structures in International Politics. Flowing from this, the visual securitization program rejects the rationalism of the media and foreign policy literature, while still investigating the links between media and decision-makers. Overall, critical IR theory has carved a productive space for dealing with these themes by breaking away completely from the rationalist legacy and putting forward a more hermeneutic – as opposed to positivistic – approach to the subject. This review concludes that the way IR has so far dealt with these themes narrows our field of vision and prevents us from envisioning the broader regime of representation of war photography, a claim to be upheld in future research.

Introduction: Climate Change, Cosmopolitanism, and Media Politics

The four papers shown in this special section have been chosen out of the 20 papers presented in an international conference on the overall topic of Change and Risk Society: New Trends of Megacity Transformation held at Seoul National University from July 9-11, 2014, with Professor Ulrich Beck who delivered a keynote public lecture Emancipatory Catastrophism: What does it mean to Climate Change and Risk Society at Press Center in the downtown of Seoul in the afternoon of July 8, 2014.Beck's concept of global risk society starts from the recognition that modernization has produced new forms of risks that cannot avoid with advanced technology development. Modernization became a root cause of modern risks which are deeply embedded in modern society itself. In particular, global ecological risks threaten the survival of humanity. Perhaps, one of the most critical type of such global risks is climate change, a representative cross-boundary and inter-generational environmental problem. Material growth of the modern society has boosted by fossil fuel combustion, leading to climate disruption. Another representative global risk is driven by radioactive disaster. The Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011 has clearly demonstrated how vulnerable the nuclear power plant system is and how globally dangerous the leakage of radiation is once it breaks out. Even though the nuclear damages depends on the distance from the source and direction of the wind, no country cannot be free since we all share air and ocean, as in the case of climate change. As long as we live on this planet, there is no way to escape from these global risks. We are locked in this shared ecological condition.Within this background, however, Beck raised two points decisively in his Seoul public address. First, he made a sharp confrontation with all kinds of pessimistic, apocalyptic outlooks of climate change and defended a European tradition of critical theory by advancing an interesting claim that climate change tends to produce emancipatory consequences on politics, social movements, human action and norms. Second, while departing from the apocalyptic inclination of climate catastrophism, he also made a sharp confrontation with a technologically oriented, top-down, an elite-centered approach to climate change, in the form of scientific solution and emancipation, and instead defended a practical, bottom-up, and action-theoretical approach to emancipation.There are numerous examples of international consultation aiming at a technological solution of climate change. For example, the 20th Conference of Parties (COP-20) of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was held in Lima, Peru in December 2014. Delegates from 196 countries just managed to reach a new global climate change agreement, called Call for Climate Action. The agreement requires every nation in the world to commit itself to cutting planet-warming greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, with no divide between developed countries and developing countries in terms of GHG emissions reduction obligation. However, this agreement has to be signed by world leaders in Paris next year in COP-21. Every nation is required to submit a detailed domestic policy plan which will be published on the United Nations website for transparency and accountability. As we know, scientists have argued 2°C increase above the pre-industrial level is dangerous. The global society already reached agreement not to exceed the tipping point at COP-15 held in Copenhagen in 2009. Could we then be rescued from emerging and eminent climate risk through aggressive cooperation? Even though the Lima Accord lays the foundation for a possible agreement in Paris, unresolved questions and huge divisions among countries still remain.It is here that Beck intervenes decisively. Indeed, climate change has become the most challenging global risk in the 21st century. It is experimenting human survival on this planet. …

Feuerbach and the Philosophy of Critical Theory

It is a hallmark of the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory that it has consistently made philosophical reflection a central component of its overall project. Indeed, the core identity that this tradition has been able to maintain arguably stems from the fact that a number of key philosophical assumptions have been shared by the generations of thinkers involved in it. These assumptions form a basic ‘philosophical matrix’, whose main aim is to allow for a ‘critique of reason’, the heart of the critique of modern society, which emphasises the collective, historically situated and naturalistically grounded nature of rationality. In this matrix, Feuerbach's place has been only a minor one. This paper aims to show that there is more to be retrieved from Feuerbach for critical theory than at first meets the eye. The first section identifies key conceptual features that are shared by the central authors of the Frankfurt School. They signal a collectivist and materialist shift from Kant to Marx via Hegel. This shift is well adumbrated in Feuerbach's emphasis on the ‘intersubjective’ and social dependency of the subject. However, Feuerbach's decisive philosophical contribution lies in his insistence on the ‘sensuous’ modalities of intersubjectivity, that is, on the fact that the dependency of subjects on others for the formation of their capacities is mediated and expressed not only through language and other symbolic forms, but also and primarily through embodiment. This Feuerbachian ‘sensualism’ is a rich, original philosophical position, which is not soluble in Marx's own version of materialism. In sections II and III, I highlight the legacy of Feuerbach's sensualism in two areas of critical theory: first, in relation to the critical epistemology that grows out of the ‘philosophical matrix’ consistently used by critical theorists; and secondly, in relation to the arguments in philosophical anthropology that are mobilized to promote the critical project. In these two areas, Feuerbach's sensualism – his insistence on the embodied dimensions of cognition and action – represents a useful resource to resist the tendency of critical theory to translate its foundation in the critique of reason into a narrowly rationalistic enterprise.

Racializing the Discourse of Adult Education

Adult education scholarship has been racialized through the lens of Eurocentric theory and research. Theoretical paradigms such as Africentrism struggle to gain academic legitimacy as discourses of transformative learning, critical thinking and self-direction - all grounded in the European Enlightenment tradition of the individual pursuit of rational self-knowledge - hold sway. This article reviews the way that repressive tolerance serves to broaden the field of adult education by including racially based perspectives on adult learning, yet simultaneously ensures that they are always seen as an exotic alternative to what is clearly the mainstream Eurocentric perspective. It reviews the way that discourses of criticality can be reinterpreted from the perspective of the African American lifeworld and explores in detail the work of Lucius T. Outlaw Jr. and Cornel West. Both scholars draw partly from the tradition of European critical theory in their attempts to use its central analytical categories (such as alienation, lifeworld, objectification and hegemony) to understand the African American experience. The piece ends with a consideration of how the dominant Eurocentric perspective in adult education can be critiques and challenged.