The resistance of Muslims to shamanism began when lies of the shamans were exposed on social media. Many shamans practise fraud under the guise of religion. Magical objects such as luminous daggers or stones that emit smoke, used by shamans as occult actors are also known to be objects of magic tricks that are sold freely and can be used by anyone. Scholars also continuously preach that Muslims’ belief in shamans is forbidden. Therefore, Muslims in Indonesia fear that believing in (...) shamans degrades human dignity and makes worship unacceptable. The purpose of this research is to identify the factors that cause the resistance of Muslim youth to shamanism. This study used a cross-sectional design which was conducted by interviewing 3025 Muslim youths who had the desire to highlight shamanism phenomena in North Sumatra. The analysis in this study used a logistic regression test with Jeffreys’s Amazing Statistics Program (JAPS 16 software). The results of this study indicate that Muslim youths have a high resistance to shamanism. The resistance of young Muslims to shamanism is influenced by emancipative Islamic theology ( p < 0.001; Exp [β] = 2.504) and hifz al-din [maintaining religion] ( p = 0.001; Exp [β] = 2.293). Muslim youths have high resistance to shamanism due to the fear that this culture will reduce the dignity of the human caliphate if it is subject to anyone other than Allah. Muslim youth also have high resistance to shamanism because they are of the view that shamanism makes worship unacceptable to Allah SWT. Contribution: This article explains the resistance of Muslim youth to shamanism. It also demonstrates how Muslims live in a multicultural society. (shrink)

In this article, I critically engage with a vital assumption behind the work of Paulo Freire, and more generally behind any critical pedagogy, viz. the belief that education is fundamentally about emancipation. My main goal is to conceive of a contemporary critical pedagogy which stays true to the original inspiration of Freire’s work, but which at the same time takes it in a new direction. More precisely, I confront Freire with Jacques Rancière. Not only is the latter’s work on education (...) fully predicated on the idea of emancipation. For both Freire and Rancière, literacy initiation practice can be seen as an archetypical model for understanding the emancipatory moment in education. For both, educational practices are never neutral, as they decide to a great extent on the fate of our common world. Reflecting on similarities and differences in both their positions, I will propose to conceive of critical pedagogy in terms of a thing-centred pedagogy. As such, I take a clear position in the discussion between teacher- and student-centred approaches. According to Rancière, it is the full devotion to a ‘thing’, i.e. to a subject matter we study, which makes emancipation possible. Over and against Freire’s defense of emancipatory education, I highlight with Rancière the importance of educational emancipation. (shrink)

ABSTRACT‘Subjectification', the cornerstone concept of Biesta's philosophy of education, refers to how autonomy should be realized in educational settings and to the fact that explanation is irrelevant to emancipation. In this article a critical realist reading is provided of how Biesta links narrative learning to emancipation and of the shortcomings that spring from this connection. The central thesis of my argument is that truth and values should take center stage in an educational philosophy of emancipation and that these two concepts (...) are left out of Biesta's conception of emancipation. It is suggested that Biesta's philosophy of emancipation has no criteria for distinguishing what is true from what is false and valuable from invaluable. This happens because it cannot adequately address (i) how one passes from ‘is' to ‘ought’ (ii) the ways in which rational thinking could be emancipatory and (iii) the grounds on which emancipatory living is better than non emancipatory living. (shrink)

The Emancipation Proclamation is one of the most important documents in American history. As we commemorate its 150th anniversary, what do we really know about those who experienced slavery? In their pioneering book, Envisioning Emancipation, renowned photographic historian Deborah Willis and historian of slavery Barbara Krauthamer have amassed 150 photographs—some never before published—from the antebellum days of the 1850s through the New Deal era of the 1930s. The authors vividly display the seismic impact of emancipation on African Americans born before (...) and after the Proclamation, providing a perspective on freedom and slavery and a way to understand the photos as documents of engagement, action, struggle, and aspiration. Envisioning Emancipation illustrates what freedom looked like for black Americans in the Civil War era. From photos of the enslaved on plantations and African American soldiers and camp workers in the Union Army to Juneteenth celebrations, slave reunions, and portraits of black families and workers in the American South, the images in this book challenge perceptions of slavery. They show not only what the subjects emphasized about themselves but also the ways Americans of all colors and genders opposed slavery and marked its end. Filled with powerful images of lives too often ignored or erased from historical records, Envisioning Emancipation provides a new perspective on American culture. (shrink)

All theories of critique rely on a – often implicit – description of the activity that doing critique is supposed to consist in. These “pictures of critique” frame all further distinctions and justifications in the debate about critique and critique’s normativity. After distinguishing three pictures of critique – measuring, disrupting and emancipating critique – I ask whether the theoretical reflection in which a certain conception of critique is elaborated is itself accurately captured by the picture of critique it employs. In (...) other words: Is the theoretical reflection of critique a critical activity according to its own picture of critique? I propose to call only those theories of critique critical theories the theoretical activity of which is a critical activity on their own picture of critique - which are surprisingly few. Most critical theories are thereby revealed to be rather traditional when it comes their own theorizing of critique. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the possibility of the idea of emancipation within an educational philosophy that does not accept schooling as its first premise. The first part of the paper will take Sweden as an example of an educational state defined through educational policies such as life long learning, accountability and evidence-based research, and argue that these words are only meaningful within the myth of schooling and not in a language of education/emancipation. The second part of the paper discusses (...) different but related conceptions of emancipation by exploring its ambiguous nature. In the third part of the paper I specify the role and place of emancipation within a philosophy of education that seeks to articulate its social value. (shrink)

Following on from Roy Bhaskarâe(tm)s first two books, A Realist Theory of Science and The Possibility of Naturalism, Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation, establishes the conception of social science as explanatoryâe"and thence emancipatoryâe"critique. Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation starts from an assessment of the impasse of contemporary accounts of science as stemming from an incomplete critique of positivism. It then proceeds to a systematic exposition of scientific realism in the form of transcendental realism, highlighting a conception of science as explanatory (...) of a structured, differentiated and changing world. Turning to the social domain, the book argues for a view of the social order as conditioned by, and emergent from, nature. Advocating a critical naturalism, the author shows how the transformational model of social activity together with the conception of social science as explanatory critique which it entails, resolves the divisions and dualisms besetting orthodox social and normative theory: between society and the individual, structure and agency, meaning and behavior, mind and body, reason and cause, fact and value, and theory and practice. The book then goes on to discuss the emancipatory implications of social science and sketches the nature of the depth investigation characteristically entailed. In the highly innovative third part of the book Roy Bhaskar completes his critique of positivism by developing a theory of philosophical discourse and ideology, on the basis of the transcendental realism and critical naturalism already developed, showing how positivism functions as a restrictive ideology of and for science and other social practices. (shrink)

This article elicits two overlapping frameworks in which emancipation has been understood and applied to women. The first distinguishes between a) an original definition grounded in Roman Law and defined as release from slavery and b) an Enlightenment sense in which an emancipatory process is associated with a critical ethos. I derive this latter meaning from an analysis of Kant's and Foucault's respective essays on enlightenment. Although they agree that emancipation is an ongoing critical task, I emphasize two aspects of (...) Foucault's version: his attention to practices of liberty that entail bodily as well as subjective reconstruction and his inclusion, among topics for critique, of modernity's ontology of the human subject. In the case of women's emancipation, I argue that both aspects of emancipation must proceed simultaneously because of the distinctive nature of their oppression. For second-wave feminism, I note a continued, although reoriented, equation between women and slaves. But now I identify a further framework whereby emancipation emerges as a threefold although systemic undertaking in which legal, subjectivist, and economic dimensions are at stake. I argue in conclusion that each entails unfinished emancipatory projects that represent timely ways to revive emancipation in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

The article argues that feminist emancipation, understood as practices and discourses of self-development and of solidarity as empowerment, has become entangled with the neoliberal project. Indeed, emancipation as self-improvement has become synonymous with moral regulation projects that seek to adapt women to global capitalism. The article explores the relation between emancipation and neoliberal regulation from a situated approach by addressing the experience of Latin American feminisms, with a particular focus on Chile. This approach recognizes by implication that Latin American feminisms (...) are co-extensive, or coeval, with North American and European ones, and are not merely derivative forms. (shrink)

In this comprehensive analysis of Jürgen Habermas's philosophy and social theory, Marie Fleming takes strong issue with Habermas over his understanding of rationality and the lifeworld, emancipation, history, and gender. Throughout the book she focuses attention on the various ways in which an idea of emancipation motivates and shapes his universalist theory and how it persists over several major changes in methodology. Her critique of Habermas begins from the view that universalism has to include a vision of gender equality, and (...) she asks why Habermas, despite deeply held concerns about equality and inclusiveness, repeatedly and systematically relegates matters of gender to secondary status in his social and moral theory. She extends her critique to a range of issues in his theory of rationality and examines what she views as his very problematical claims about truthfulness, art, and bourgeois intimacy. The point of Fleming's critique of Habermas is not to dispute universalism, but to build on the key universalist principles of inclusiveness and equality. She is not persuaded by the view, shared by both sympathizers of Habermas and his postmodern critics, that to be for or against Habermas is to be for or against universalism. Her intention rather is to show that Habermas's theory of modernity is so structured that it cannot achieve its universalist aims. Contending that his theory is not universalist enough, she claims that universalism has to be reconceived as a radical, critical, and historical project. (shrink)

Emancipation serves not only as a midwife for progressive agendas such as greater equality and sustainability but also as their gravedigger. This diagnosis underpins Ingolfur Blühdorn’s ‘dialectic of emancipation’, which depicts a dilemma but offers no perspective on how to deal with it. By drawing on Foucault, this article suggests conceiving of emancipation as a task moderns are confronted with even if a given emancipatory project has come to devour its children. Claiming autonomy from given social constellations is key to (...) this task; key also is judging between legitimate and illegitimate claims to autonomy. In late modernity, the criteria for such judgement are no longer universally given. Instead of regarding the latter as entry into mere subjectivism, this article presents judgement as a key political, ‘world building’-activity, a critical social theory may join in, by not only observing the world but by also taking sides in it. (shrink)

Introduction -- Vicissitudes and possibilities of critical theory today -- Global modernity : levels of analysis and conceptual strategies -- Existential social questions, developmental trends and modernity -- History, sociology and modernity -- Realism, trend-concepts and the modern state -- Family, modernization and sociological theory -- The basic forms of social interaction -- The imaginary and politics in modernity: the trajectory -- Critical social theory and developmental trends, emancipation -- References -- Index.

In this paper I succinctly outline the standpoint from which Marx criticizes capitalism, namely, by pointing to the difference between the transforming potentiality of technology as developed under the capitalist mode of production, and its effective reality in this same system . On these grounds, I argue that Marx's critique of the capitalist system consists mainly in the fact that the permanent valorization of capital is the goal of production, and that this is an irrational aim which creates as a (...) result an abstract form of domination over individuals . Finally, I reinterpret the meaning of emancipation in Marx's later thought, arguing that it refers to an emancipation from this abstract domination, culminating in an emancipation from work in favor of the creation of increased disposable time .No presente artigo, traço, rapidamente, a perspectiva a partir da qual Marx constrói sua crítica ao capitalismo, a saber, a diferença entre o potencial transformador da técnica tal como desenvolvida sob o modo capitalista de produção e a sua realidade efetiva nesse mesmo sistema . Com isso feito, argumento que a crítica de Marx ao sistema capitalista consiste em grande parte no fato de a valorização permanente do capital ser a meta da produção, uma finalidade irracional e que cria uma dominação abstrata desse mecanismo sobre os indivíduos , de modo a, por fim, repensar o sentido de emancipação no pensamento marxiano tardio, sustentando, sobretudo, que se trata de uma emancipação dessa dominação abstrata que culmina, também, em uma emancipação do trabalho em prol da criação de cada vez mais tempo disponível. (shrink)

The text attempts to rethink the concept of emancipation and how it is structured as political action, while describing its historical origins and how it is further understood by the three important political philosophers: Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Rancière. All three of them – specifically and with substantial differences – understand politics as a space for political action that leads to emancipation in the name of equality. In order to determine the historical origin of the concept in more (...) detail, the argumentation of the text rely upon its elaboration within the school of “conceptual history”, which deals with the historical semantics of terms and sees the etymology of and the change in the meaning of terms as forming a crucial basis for a contemporary cultural, conceptual, and linguistic understanding, and afterwards it links this “pre-history” with Marx’s, Arendt’s, and Rancière’s understanding of the concept of emancipation, and see how they differ and are related to each other, considering what theoretical conclusions about the concept of emancipation we can take from these relations. Particular interest is aimed at how the concept of emancipation is perceived today, who the subject of emancipation is, what the method and final goal of emancipation is, and, finally, how these understandings can help us in the present time when it seems that we need emancipation more than ever. (shrink)

The ideal of emancipation has been traditionally grounded on the premise that human activity is not restrained by external boundaries. Thus the realisation of values such as autonomy or recognition has been facilitated by economic growth and material expansion. Yet there is mounting evidence that the human impact on natural systems at the planetary level, a novelty captured by the concept of the Anthropocene, endangers the Earth’s habitability. If human development is to be limited for the sake of global sustainability, (...) can emancipation be kept as a mobilising ideal? As opposed to alternative views such as that of degrowth, this article argues that it can. The key lies in the ability of the Anthropocene to produce planetary subjectivities. By recognising the bounded quality of human embeddedness, the possibility of a different emancipation is opened up. The latter does not give up material well-being, yet it makes sure that the latter does not endanger planetary habitability. (shrink)

A wide-ranging analysis of the Mokṣopāya, the Indian literary classic that teaches through storytelling how to enjoy an active, successful, worldly life in a spiritually enlightened way. In the Mokṣopāya (also known as the Yogavāsiṣṭha), an eleventh-century Sanskrit poetic text, the great Vedic philosopher Vāsiṣṭha counsels his young protégé Lord Rāma about the ways of the world through sixty-four stories designed to bring Rāma from ignorance to wisdom. Much beloved, this work reflects the philosophy of Kashmir Śaivism. Precisely because all (...) worldly pursuits are dreamlike and fiction-like, the human soul must first come to an experience of non-dualistic, mind-only metaphysics, and after attaining this wisdom, promote moral activism. _Engaged Emancipation_ is a wide-ranging consideration of this work and the philosophical and spiritual questions it addresses by philosophers, Sanskritists, and scholars of religion, literature, and science. Contributors allow readers to walk with Rāma as his melancholy and angst transform into connectivity, peace, and spiritual equipoise. (shrink)

Nietzsche has been accused by Habermas of abandoning the pursuit of emancipation and truth. Ironically, this pursuit is at the core of Nietzsche’s works, though radically transformed. The pursuit of knowledge requires emancipated sovereign individuality, a severe honesty, and the courage to follow one's most rigorous use of reason and creative insight wherever they may lead, including the most disturbing insights about truth, language and reason themselves. The first part of this paper discusses Nietzsche’s ideas of individual sovereignty and the (...) associated ideas of emancipation and transformation necessary to this. The next section entitled The Question of Truth: Beyond Universalism and the Quest for Foundations and Certainty deals with how knowledge and truth are intelligible notions in the absence of certainty and absolute standards of truth. The following section, Nietzsche, Habermas and Social Solidarity shows how Habermas’s attempt to ground morality in his discourse ethics cannot succeed once the Nietzchean insight into truth is understood. In the final part, The Irony of Sovereign Individuality, I argue that morality is inconsistent with the individuality that it is supposed to uphold. Nietzsche’s ethical ideal provides a model for concrete individuality that offers the most powerful ethical contribution to social solidarity, given the failure of any grounded morality. (shrink)

Academic and public debate is continuing about whether digital nomadism, a new Internet-enabled phenomenon in which digital workers adopt a neo-nomadic global lifestyle, represents ‘real’ emancipation for knowledge workers—or if it is, instead, the opposite. Based on a field study of digital nomadism, and accepting a pluralist approach to emancipation, we analyse the ‘emancipatory project(s)’ that digital nomads engage in. This analysis, following Weberian idealtypes, employs a tripartite structure: unsatisfactory conditions (what people want to overcome); emancipatory means (actions taken); and (...) emancipatory ends (desired outcomes). We critically compare digital nomadism to the traditional descriptions of emancipatory projects in nation-state contexts, as found in prior literature, using the same analytical framework. Juxtaposing these idealtypes, we discuss similarities and differences and analyse their inherent assumptions, logics and ethical stances. We conclude that digital nomadism generates an emancipation that is very much ‘real’ for digital nomads, whose experience cannot be disregarded, but with a ‘postmodern’ ethos that is at odds with modernity and its ethos originating from the Enlightenment. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to articulate a conception of emancipation for the Anthropocene. First, the Kantian roots of emancipation understood as the capacity of rational beings to act according to self-chosen ends are explained. It is shown that this conception of emancipation sets the realm of autonomous beings humans over the realm of heteronomous beings. Accounts of the ‘humanisation of nature’ are analysed as incomplete attempts to overcome this dualism. It is argued that the root of this incompleteness (...) lies in the application of analytical rather than dialectical reason to the human–nature interaction. The Anthropocene is presented as the geological–historical moment when at the same time as nature is being humanised, humans are being made aware of themselves as animal. This gives way to a conception of Anthropocene emancipation which will be described in a fourth section. The article concludes with reflections on COVID-19 as a ‘disease of the Anthropocene’ and as an opportunity reflexively, and at unprecedented scale, to internalise our heteronomy and to live an emancipation fit for a terraforming species. (shrink)

Although they are often used as synonyms, emancipation and liberation constitute two distinct normative horizons in critical theory of society. In this article, I offer an analysis of these two concepts, including their historical and epistemological characteristics, pointing out similarities, differences and the possibilities for their combined use as basis of models of normative social criticism. I argue that the critical horizon of human emancipation emerges in post-Kantian European thought, while the horizon of liberation was developed in Latin American decolonial (...) thinking in the second half of the 20th century. The horizon of emancipation arises with the critique of the primacy of systemic domination, while liberation emerges in the resistance to the primacy of the experience of oppression. The analytical distinction between these two normative horizons can be helpful to better understand both the foundations of epistemic decolonization and the potential for dialogue between the critical perspectives of center and periphery. (shrink)

Educational Theory, Volume 71, Issue 6, Page 717-741, December 2021. -/- Gert Biesta has criticized Anglo-American and German models of emancipatory education. According to Biesta, emancipation is understood in these models as liberation that results from a process in which a teacher transmits objective knowledge to his or her students and cultivates student capabilities. He claims that this so-called modern logic of emancipation does not lead to freedom because it installs inequality, dependency, and mistrust in the pedagogical relationship. In this (...) article, Antti Moilanen and Rauno Huttunen analyze whether German models of emancipatory education share the modern logic of emancipation and if they can escape Biesta's criticisms. For this purpose, they interpret Biesta's critique of the modern logic of emancipation and explicate central ideas related to the German models of critical education. They also compare the modern logic of emancipation to the German one, and they then assess German models of emancipatory pedagogy from the viewpoint of Biesta's criticisms. Moilanen and Huttunen conclude that the German models of emancipatory education present at least a partial alternative to the modern logic of emancipation. Despite this, the German models are based on the idea of education as cultivation. Because Biesta criticizes the theory of education as cultivation, it is possible to conclude that he would not accept the German models of emancipatory education. However, the German models of critical pedagogy provide answers to the following question: how can students achieve independence in the pedagogical relationship? When students take part in designing educational processes, they are summoned to assess the validity of the taught knowledge, and they practice independent decision-making at school; the pedagogical relationship, based on authority, can foster student self-determination. (shrink)

A daring marriage of philosophical theory and practical politics, this collection is the first of Gianni Vattimo's many books to combine his intellectual pursuits with his public and political life. Vattimo is a paradoxical figure, at once a believing Christian and a vociferous critic of the Catholic Church, an outspoken liberal but not a former communist, and a recognized authority on Nietzsche and Heidegger as well as a prominent public intellectual and member of the European parliament. Building on his unique (...) position as a philosopher and politician, Vattimo takes on some of the most pressing questions of our time: Is it still possible, long after Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God, to talk of moral imperatives, individual rights, or political freedom? Are these values still relevant in today's world? Tackling these crucial issues, Gianni Vattimo argues that nihilism is not the absence of meaning but a recognition of a plurality of meanings; it is not the end of civilization but the beginning of new social paradigms. Commonly associated with the pessimistic belief that all of existence is meaningless, nihilism, as a philosophical principle, is far less sensational--it is the ethical doctrine that there are no moral absolutes or infallible natural laws, that "truth" is inescapably subjective. Because the conditions for equality and liberty are not "naturally" given, society must actively create these ideals or it will inevitably fall prey to irrationality, prejudice, and oppression. Vattimo contends that the infighting, timidity, and confusion that have overtaken contemporary liberal thought and politics are the products a prolonged and indulgent mourning over the loss of the transcendental father figure--any institution or power structure that defines truth, knowledge, and reality. Until humanity overcomes its need for external authority--whether it be organized religion, the nation-state, or free-market capitalism--emancipation will remain unattainable. Collecting fourteen of Vattimo's most influential essays on ethics, politics, and law, _Nihilism and Emancipation_ is a provocative reevaluation of meaning, values, and the idea of freedom in Western culture. (shrink)

This reflection on the topic of emancipation stems from an ongoing project in tune with a wider development in pragmatic philosophy. Specifically, the project aims to piece together some of the consequences of pragmatism’s reconstruction of the tradition of philosophical inquiry, from the angle of human imagination. More recently this project has taken a different direction, in light of our critical situation under intensifying anti-democratic forces in the US, but also in many parliamentary democracies. Emancipation from forces that undermine democratic (...) transformation is arguably a goal that anyone gathering under the banner of pragmatism shares. The use of the pronoun ‘our’ in modifying ‘critical situation’ above is intended. It points to the scope of the problem. The problematic situation of ‘intensifying anti-democratic forces’ that sets the agenda for pragmatic inquiry is most aptly termed ‘neoliberal global hegemony’. Neoliberalism is a much-used technical term and its meaning is hotly contested. For the purposes of this paper, then, I would like to lift out several features common to almost all parties in the contest to provide a definition. This description will then be employed for the purposes of determining the character of the contemporary social context in which emancipatory practices take place. Second, by tying this description of the ‘background’ of our practices to the primacy of practical reason thesis, and specifically the role of imagination in practical reason, the pragmatic conception of agency comes into relief. A pragmatic conception of this social context of agency, the contemporary neoliberal imaginary, contributes to articulating prospects for emancipatory practice in a non-abstract sense. An example of experimentalist democratic practices of emancipation responding to crises generated by neoliberal practices is provided by recent efforts in worker co-operatives in Argentina. (shrink)

Feminist theory needs both explanatory-diagnostic and anticipatory-utopian moments in order to be truly critical and truly feminist. However, the explanatory-diagnostic task of analyzing the workings of gendered power relations in all of their depth and complexity seems to undercut the very possibility of emancipation on which the anticipatory-utopian task relies. In this paper, I take this looming paradox as an invitation to rethink our understanding of emancipation and its relation to the anticipatory-utopian dimensions of critique, asking what conception of emancipation (...) is compatible with a complex explanatory-diagnostic analysis of contemporary gender domination as it is intertwined and entangled with race, class, sexuality, and empire. I explore this question through an analysis of two specific debates in which the paradoxical relationship between power and emancipation emerges in particularly salient and seemingly intractable forms: debates over subjection and modernity. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, I argue that a negativistic conception of emancipation offers the best way for feminist critical theory to transform the paradox of power and emancipation into a productive tension that can fuel critique. (shrink)

The article aims to map the contemporary techno-social networks, together with delineation of the algorithmic governmentality, computational unconscious, the epistemic structure of the Eurocentric matrix of power haunted by its own repetition of the constant abyss of horrors, only to search for gestures of resistance. Gestures of resistance, contrary to the false conviction of capitalist realism, can be found everywhere, including in Jordan Peele's Nope (2022). Through a variety of motifs, themes, and cultural and cinematic references, Peele creates a resistance (...) image, i.e., an image that resists the historical trajectory of the violence of the digital colonial matrix of knowledge. In particular with Nope, in which the history of racial violence is disentangled by evoking the relation between the entanglement of capital and epistemic violence embodied in an all-devouring predator UFO. But Nope is also about visualizing silenced histories. Indeed, to strive to capture UFO with the camera is to break away from modernity as a totalizing onto-epistemology and in this register generating a false universal subject of a Man. (shrink)

Divided he falls -- The path to contradiction: redefining emancipation -- Hegel after Freud -- What Hegel means when he says Vernunft -- The insubstantiality of substance: restoring Hegel's lost limbs -- Love and logic -- How to avoid experience -- Learning to love the end of history: freedom through logic -- Resisting resistance, or freedom is a positive thing -- Absolute or bust -- Emancipation without solutions -- Replanting Hegel's tree.

The article describes the obstacles to the emancipation of Roma women in the family and Czech society. The theoretical side deals with the recent changes in gender roles in the Roma family, changes in the position of Roma women and their discrimination as well as the concept of emancipation. The article aims to describe the obstacles a Roma woman must overcome in the course of emancipation. The data are based on qualitative socio-ethnographic research conducted through narrative interviews with 30 women (...) of different ages and classes who identify as Roma and live in three Czech regional capitals. The research sample was compiled using the snowball method. The data collected in the field research were analyzed in Atlas.ti using anchored theory. We identified five main obstacles to the emancipation of Roma woman. They include obstacles emanating from the family and the majority society as well as obstacles caused by the hegemony of masculinity and those emanating from the woman. By gaining an understanding of relations in Roma families, the situation regarding the emancipation of Roma women and the associated barriers may help those who come into daily contact with the Roma minority to take appropriate actions and apply the right interventions. (shrink)

This article contends that Jacques Rancière’s aesthetic understanding of corporeality is central to his interpretation of intellectual emancipation. Concretely, I will argue that Rancière’s aesthetic understanding can be viewed as a torsion of a body that affects its vital arrangements, which thereby open paths for political emancipation. I will support my claim with Rancière’s reading of the plebeian philosopher Gauny, as well as works that have not been sufficiently considered in secondary literature, such as The Nights of Labor and The (...) Ignorant Schoolmaster. My reading will, I maintain, help to question common interpretations of emancipation in Rancière that tend to read this notion either in dichotomous terms or as a merely ephemeral, evental practice with no concrete conditions of possibility and without long-lasting or verifiable effects in the world. (shrink)

This paper seeks to answer the following question: does it still make sense today to speak of political emancipation, in particular in the sense bequeathed to us by Marx, as emancipation from capitalism? I consider three serious objections to this possibility: the objection that reference to “capitalism” is unduly essentialist in view of the multiplicity of historical situations; the anti-utopian objection according to which the programme of emancipation from capitalism lacks any precise, practical content; and the normative objection that emancipation (...) in and of itself does not specify the norms of the putative post-capitalist society. In the final section of the paper, I attempt to respond to these three objections, and seek to outline the different levels at which something like an emancipatory project, understood as a surpassing of capitalism, can still make sense today. (shrink)

The recent Dutch homo-emancipation policy has identified religious communities, particularly within migrant populations, as a core target group in which to make homosexuality more ‘speakable’. In this article we examine the paradoxical silencing tendencies of this ‘speaking out’ policy on queer Muslim organisations in the Netherlands. We undertake this analysis as the Dutch government is perhaps unique in developing an explicit ‘homo-emancipation’ policy and is often looked to as the model for sexuality politics and legal redress in relation to inequalities (...) on the basis of sexual orientation. We highlight how the ‘speakability’ imperative in the Dutch homo-emancipation policy reproduces a paradigmatic, ‘homonormative’ model of an ‘out’ and ‘visible’ queer sexuality that has also come to be embedded in an anti-immigrant and specifically anti-Muslim discourse in the Netherlands. Drawing on the concept of habitus, particularly in the work of Gloria Wekker, we suggest that rather than relying on a ‘speakability’ policy model, queer Muslim sexualities need to be understood in a more nuanced and intersecting way that attends to their lived realities. (shrink)

This article investigates the work of Žižek and Ernesto Laclau on the topic of Emancipatory politics. Although the positions of each on this topic has recently been criticized by the other, the aim here is to locate the elements that can allow both positions to converge for the purpose of conducting ideological critique of the logic of emancipation and the necessity of utopia. In focusing on this debate, the opposition between populism and class struggle is considered, as well as notions (...) of the universal and the particular as they relate to emancipatory politics and the critique of ideology and hegemony. Finally, the use of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory is assessed in the work of both Laclau and Žižek as a way of positioning historical-political understandings of emancipation and utopia. (shrink)

When we consider the social and political disarray of the moment, we are forced to recognize how hard it is, in periods of crisis, to clarify the changes taking place. So it is an urgent and necessary task to return to Michel de Certeau's work, whose central aim is to clarify the transformations that abruptly emerge during times of crisis, transformations that undermine our most tenacious assumptions. Certeau's project is the work of constant reconnaissance. He expressed his need to elucidate (...) what he would call `generating flashes'. The meaning of that need for inventive distancing can be informed by psychoanalysis. From this perspective, the obligation to clarify the most heterogeneous ruptures appears as the echo of an ancient need to express the desire to be with the Other. But Certeau's attitude provoked incomprehension and irritation, so much so that in order to correctly approach his legacy we must first explain the different reception Certeau's texts receive in French-speaking countries compared with, say, the USA. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Introduction: Emancipation from Metaphysics? Natural History, Natural Philosophy and the Study of Nature from the Late Renaissance to the EnlightenmentTinca Prunea-Bretonnet and Oana MateiThis special issue is devoted to the analysis of the relationship between natural history, natural philosophy, and the metaphysics of nature in the early modern period up to the mid-eighteenth century. It considers the evolving dynamics among these disciplines as well as the role played by (...) natural history in modern hermeneutics and aesthetics. The collected papers examine how early modern natural history acquires a growing importance in the study of nature, while observation and experiment gain epistemic priority among experimental philosophers. In the early modern and modern periods the critique of systems of natural philosophy and of Cartesian metaphysics goes hand-in-hand with the prioritization of experimental facts and collected data. The latter become the first, indispensable step in the process of knowledge acquisition. This is the case for Francis Bacon and his followers, who establish natural and experimental history as [End Page 549] the preliminary step and the foundation for natural philosophy. Baconian natural history consists of a vast collection of observations and experiments from which, by induction, the experimenter is able to provide axioms and general rules of nature. These axioms and general rules constitute the foundation on which natural philosophy would be built. According to this approach, theoretical claims must be supported by experimental evidence, while natural philosophical theories, alert to the dangers of speculation, are inferred, by induction, from natural and experimental history (Anstey 2005, pp. 215–42; Anstey 2020; Anstey and Jalobeanu 2022, pp. 222–37; Anstey and Vanzo 2012, pp. 499–518; Corneanu et al. 2012; Jalobeanu 2015; Serjeantson 2014, pp. 681–705). Laws and principles are thus to be admitted in the study of nature, but only if founded on experimentally verified facts. This perspective seems to reject speculation and abstract systems and to contest their role in natural philosophy altogether. However, in spite of its influence on eighteenth-century thinkers, this approach to natural history would not go uncontested.In the eighteenth century these transformations were accompanied by a new emphasis on metaphysics in the study of nature. While natural history was still largely regarded as preliminary to natural philosophy and continued to play a significant role in knowledge acquisition, Enlightenment philosophers elaborated new methods which rehabilitated metaphysical principles in the study of nature and promoted competing perspectives reassessing their pre-eminence (Anstey 2020). Two rival perspectives seem to compete on the philosophical scene: on the one hand, experimental thinkers justifying the theoretical autonomy of natural philosophy and emphasizing the prevalence of mathematical and empirically-oriented methodologies; on the other hand, novel approaches to the theory of principles arguing for the foundational role of metaphysical (a priori) principles and of speculative disciplines, such as metaphysical cosmology. This special issue explores the tension between the new role conferred to metaphysical disciplines and the study of nature, including a particular focus on the writings of Maupertuis, d’Alembert, and Kant. Our aim is to nuance the familiar narrative that inscribes Kant in the metaphysical tradition of Descartes and Wolff and opposes the latter to an experimental lineage comprising post-Newtonian thinkers such as Condillac, d’Alembert, and Maupertuis (Leduc 2015, pp. 11–30; contrast with Anstey 2018, pp. 131–50).In order to shed new light on these transformations and tensions, the collected papers address the complex interplay between natural history, natural philosophy, and the metaphysics of nature. Particular attention is devoted to the different methodologies in use starting with the late Renaissance and leading up to the mid-eighteenth century. We examine not only conceptions arguing for a decisive role played by observation [End Page 550] and experiment, but also more speculative treatments of the study of nature, where principles and metaphysical standpoints reclaim a foundational function, albeit through a revised definition of metaphysics and a novel understanding of the role of speculative disciplines, such as cosmology.Andreas Blank’s paper, “Protestant Hermeneutics and the Persistence of Moral Meanings in Early Modern Natural Histories,” examines the divergences in the symbolic interpretations of animals proposed in hermeneutics and in natural histories of the sixteenth and seventeenth... (shrink)

Like Frege's distinction of sense and force in semantics, the central distinction of pragmatics is that between perlocutions and illocutions. All speech acts theorists offer a version of this distinction, including Habermas in his theory of communicative action. However, whether or not there is such a distinction at all remains an essentially disputed issue. In this paper I consider the importance of this distinction for analyzing both ideology and rhetoric, but in particular for analyzing one species of rhetorical speech for (...) the purpose of changing beliefs, that engaged in by the social critic. To make these substantive points, I must first consider important recent criticisms of Habermas's distinction, especially those of Erling Skjei and Allen Wood. While I agree with the core of both criticisms, I still think the distinction can be made along the lines that Strawson proposed. I argue that there is not a completely disjunctive, mutually exclusive set of properties defining each type of speech act. There are, and must be, overlapping, nontrivial features common to both. These common features are in fact crucial to the analysis of the sort of speech engaged in by social critics and emancipators. To show this, I argue for the existence of an intermediate class that I call "communicative perlocutions." This class, in turn, overcomes the traditional, Platonic enmity to rhetoric which ought not be imported unquestioned into the philosophy of language or the justification of rational social criticism. (shrink)

Abstract:Liberal thinkers of the Enlightenment understood that surplus moral constraints, imposed by invalid moral norms, are a serious limitation on liberty. They also recognized that overcoming surplus moral constraints — what we call proper de-moralization — is an important dimension of moral progress. Contemporary philosophical theorists of liberty have largely neglected the threat that surplus moral constraints pose to liberty and the importance of proper de-moralization for human emancipation. This essay examines the phenomena of surplus moral constraints and proper de-moralization, (...) utilizing insights from biological and cultural evolutionary thinking. (shrink)

The case for an eco-emancipatory politics to release the Earth from human domination and free us all from lives that are both exploitative and exploited Human domination of nature shapes every aspect of our lives today, even as it remains virtually invisible to us. Because human beings are a part of nature, the human domination of nature circles back to confine and exploit people as well—and not only the poor and marginalized but also the privileged and affluent, even in the (...) world’s most prosperous societies. Although modern democracy establishes constraints intended to protect people from domination as the arbitrary exercise of power, it offers few such protections for nonhuman parts of nature. The result is that, wherever we fall in human hierarchies, we inevitably find ourselves both complicit in and entrapped by a system that makes sustainable living all but impossible. It confines and exploits not only nature but people too, albeit in different ways. In Eco-Emancipation, Sharon Krause argues that we can find our way to a better, freer life by constraining the use of human power in relation to nature and promoting nature’s well-being alongside our own, thereby releasing the Earth from human domination and freeing us from a way of life that is both exploitative and exploited, complicit and entrapped. Eco-emancipation calls for new, more-than-human political communities that incorporate nonhuman parts of nature through institutions of representation and regimes of rights, combining these new institutional arrangements with political activism, a public ethos of respect for nature, and a culture of eco-responsibility. (shrink)

This paper explores the status of symbolic representation in the work of the Left Hegelians Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feuerbach. Hegel believed, contrary to his Romantic contemporaries, that symbols were too ambiguous to serve as means of philosophical communication; and as his followers turned against religion, they radicalized Hegel's critique of Romantic symbolism in the name of an emancipatory impulse toward clarity and full possession of the object of meaning. While Bauer insisted that the possibility of human emancipation depended on (...) overcoming the otherness of symbolic representation, Feuerbach reintroduced the symbolic as a crucial dimension of his humanist theory of religion and his account of embodied subjectivity. (shrink)

The modern idea of emancipation is linked to the goal of overcoming dependencies and domination. However, as argued in the article, negative dialectics of emancipation must also be problematized. The project of emancipation, as it was formulated in the Age of Enlightenment, was often particular and was associated with the establishment of new forms of domination. Especially the project of liberation from the constraints of nature through technical development led to the domination of nature. In view of the ecological crisis, (...) the dark side of this project is becoming apparent today. The ecological base of human development is at risk. It is therefore necessary to pursue the idea of a reflexive emancipation, which also takes nature into account in order to enable a sustainable technology development. Emancipatory Technology Studies should therefore support an emancipatory technology policy which promotes a positive dialectical movement that overcomes the contrast between submission to nature and technical mastery of nature. (shrink)

The recent Dutch homo-emancipation policy has identified religious communities, particularly within migrant populations, as a core target group in which to make homosexuality more ‘speakable’. In this article we examine the paradoxical silencing tendencies of this ‘speaking out’ policy on queer Muslim organisations in the Netherlands. We undertake this analysis as the Dutch government is perhaps unique in developing an explicit ‘homo-emancipation’ policy and is often looked to as the model for sexuality politics and legal redress in relation to inequalities (...) on the basis of sexual orientation. We highlight how the ‘speakability’ imperative in the Dutch homo-emancipation policy reproduces a paradigmatic, ‘homonormative’ model of an ‘out’ and ‘visible’ queer sexuality that has also come to be embedded in an anti-immigrant and specifically anti-Muslim discourse in the Netherlands. Drawing on the concept of habitus, particularly in the work of Gloria Wekker, we suggest that rather than relying on a ‘speakability’ policy model, queer Muslim sexualities need to be understood in a more nuanced and intersecting way that attends to their lived realities. (shrink)

Epistemologies of the South explores “a set of inquiries into the construction and validation of knowledge born in struggle, of ways of knowing developed by social groups as part of their resistance against the systematic injustices and oppressions caused by capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy” . The author, Boaventura de Sousa Santos—Professor of Sociology at the University of Coimbra and Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin–Madison—is one of the leading intellectuals of the World Social Forum , the network of (...) organizations from the “global South” that challenge the current dominant order, and whose activities are often informed by experiences, aspirations and understanding that lie outside of the comprehension of the world as provided by mainstream scientific, economic and social theories. Through the WSF, Santos has made profound contact with the knowledge, forms of knowledge , their strengths and limitations, and the practices infor .. (shrink)

Amidst the current profusion of research on consciousness, discussions of the historic origins of the topic are frequently overlooked. At the beginning of the nineteenth century in the West, the nature of consciousness was barely understood, nor differentiated from its esoteric and religious contexts. By the end of the century, however, novel ideas about the structure of consciousness were proposed by Janet, James, and the Society for Psychical Research. This article proposes that these discoveries were intrinsically linked to popular nineteenth-century (...) explorations of unorthodox religious experiences and trance states. Operating outside mainstream religious, medical, and academic settings, alternative spiritual and medical sub-cultures such as Mesmerism, Mind Cure, Spiritualism, Transcendentalism and Orientalism provoked scientific discourse about consciousness that advanced the field. Examining these developments sheds light on the current renaissance in consciousness research and its relation to popular interest in states of consciousness, meditation and powers of mind. (shrink)