The Loss of Nature in Axel Honneth's Social Philosophy. Rereading Mead with Merleau-Ponty

Abstract

This paper analyses the model of interaction at the heart of Axel Honneth's social philosophy. It argues that inter action in his mature ethics of recognition has been reduced to intercourse between human persons and that the role of nature is now missing from it. The ethics of recognition takes into account neither the material dimensions of individual and social action, nor the normative meaning of non-human persons and natural environments. The loss of nature in the mature ethics of recognition is made visible through a comparison with Honneth's initial formulation of his project. As an anthropology of intersubjectivity combining the teaching of the German philosophical anthropologists and G.H. Mead, his first model sought to ground social theory in the natural preconditions of human action. The last part of the article argues that a return to Mead's theory of practical intersubjectivity informed by Merleau-Ponty's germane theory of intercorporeity provides essential conceptual tools to enable the integration of the natural and the material within the theory of recognition.     

Pragmatism and Radical Democracy

Abstract

This paper suggests that pragmatism makes a distinctive contribution to the theory and practice of radical democracy. It investigates the relation ship between the renewal of interest in pragmatism and the recent attempts to develop radical democratic alternatives to political liberalism. With particular reference to the contemporary critical social theory of Habermas and Honneth, the paper outlines key dimensions of the civic republican, deliberative democratic and reflexive cooperative reconstructions of John Dewey's conception of democracy. These reconstructions are shown to have explicated important pragmatist insights concerning public participation in civic associations, the discursive practices of deliberation, and the cooperative organization of the division of labour. However, it is argued that each of these reconstructions pre suppose some facet of the additional pragmatist understanding of the creativity of action and that the most distinctive contributions of pragmatism to radical democratic theory and practice derive from a notion of democracy as instituted and emergent meaning.     

论米德对文化人类学的贡献

米德是美国著名的女性人类学家之一,她与本尼迪克特一起创立了美国的文化心理学学派。她的主要研究贡献有三个方面:一是通过搜集大量不同文化背景下儿童生理及心理发展的资料,研究文化和教育对儿童成年后人格形成的影响;二是用大量民族志资料来证实文化决定论,并提出了文化在儿童人格塑造方面具有不可替代的作用;三是将影视方法首次用于田野调查,丰富和发展了文化人类学的研究方法。