Ernesto Laclau has blazed a unique trail in political theory and philosophy since the early 1970s. In so doing, he has articulated a range of philosophical and theoretical currents into a coherent alternative to mainstream models and practices of conducting social and political science.

Praise for First Edition: `This book is highly recommended to a wide range of people as a clear and systematic introduction to phenomenological psychology... the book has set the stage for possible new colloquia between the phenomenological and other approaches in psychology' - Changes `As a trainee interested in matters existential, I have been put off in the past by the long-winded and confusing texts usually available in academic libraries. Thankfully, here is a text that remedies that situation... [it] provides (...) a readable and insightful account' - Clinical Psychology Forum 'Spinelli’s classic introduction to phenomenology should be essential reading on all person-centred, existential and humanistic trainings, and any other counselling or psychotherapy course which aims to help students develop an in-depth understanding of human lived-experience. This book is sure to remain a key text for many years to come' - Mick Cooper, Senior Lecturer in Counselling, University of Strathclyde 'This is by far the most monumental, erudite, comprehensive, authoritative case that Existentialism and Phenomenology (a) have a rightful place in the academy; (b) are tough-minded bodies of thought; (c) have rigorous scientific foundations; (d) bequeath a distinctive school of psychotherapy and counselling; and (e) are just as good as the more established systems of psychology' - Alvin R. Mahrer, Ph.D. University of Ottawa, Canada, Author of The Complete Guide To Experiential Psychotherapy 'This book’s rich insight into the lacunae of modern psychological thinking illustrates the contribution that existential phenomenology can make to founding a coherently mature Psychology that is both fully human(e) and responsibly ‘scientific’ in the best sense of that term' - Richard House, Ph.D., Magdalen Medical Practice, Norwich; Steiner Waldorf teacher. The Interpreted World, Second Edition, is a welcome introduction to phenomenological psychology, an area of psychology which has its roots in notoriously difficult philosophical literature. Writing in a highly accessible, jargon-free style, Ernesto Spinelli traces the philosophical origins of phenomenological theory and presents phenomenological perspectives on central topics in psychology - perception, social cognition and the self. He compares the phenomenological approach with other major contemporary psychological approaches, pointing up areas of divergence and convergence with these systems. He also examines implications of phenomenology for the precepts and process of psychotherapy. For the Second Edition, a new chapter on phenomenological research has been added in which the author focuses on the contribution of phenomenology in relation to contemporary scientific enquiry. He describes the methodology used in phenomenological research and illustrates the approach through an actual research study. The Interpreted World, Second Edition demystifies an exciting branch of psychology, making its insights available to all students of psychology, psychotherapy and counselling. (shrink)

In this hugely influential book, Laclau and Mouffe examine the workings of hegemony and contemporary social struggles, and their significance for democratic theory. With the emergence of new social and political identities, and the frequent attacks on Left theory for its essentialist underpinnings, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy remains as relevant as ever, positing a much-needed antidote against ‘Third Way’ attempts to overcome the antagonism between Left and Right.

To think the relationships which exist between Marxism and psychoanalysis obliges one to reflect upon the intersections between two theoretical fields, each composed independently of the other and whose possible forms of mutual reference do not merge into any obvious system of translation. For example, it is impossible to affirm—though it has often been done—that psychoanalysis adds a theory of subjectivity to the field of historical materialism, given that the latter has been constituted, by and large, as a negation of (...) the validity and the pertinence of any theory of subjectivity . Thus, no simple model of supplement or articulations is of the slightest use. The problem is rather that of finding an index of comparison between two different theoretical fields, but that, in turn, implies the construction of a new field, within which the comparison would make sense.This new field is one which may be characterized as “post-Marxist” and is the result of a multitude of theoretico-political interventions whose cumulative effect in relation to the categories of classical Marxism is similar to what Heidegger called a “de-struction of the history of ontology.” For Heidegger, this “de-struction” did not signify the purely negative operation of rejecting a tradition, but exactly the opposite: it is by means of a radical questioning which is situated beyond this tradition—but which is only possible in relation to it—that the originary meaning of the categories of this tradition may be recovered. In this sense, effecting a “de-struction” of the history of Marxism implies going beyond the deceptive evidence of concepts such as “class,” “capital,” and so on, and re-creating the meaning of the originary synthesis that such concepts aspired to establish, the total system of theoretical alternatives in regard to which they represented only limited options, and the ambiguities inherent in their constitution itself—the “hymen” in the Derridean sense—which, although violently repressed, rise up here and there in diverse discursive surfaces. It is the systematic and genealogical outline of these nuclei of ambiguity which initially allows for a destruction of the history of Marxism and which constitutes post-Marxism as the field of our current political reflection. But it is precisely in these surfaces of discursive ambiguity that it is possible to detect the presence of logics of the political which allows for the establishment of a true dialogue, without complacent metaphorization, between Marxism and psychoanalytic theory. I would like to highlight two points, which I consider fundamental, concerning these discursive surfaces. Ernesto Laclau is a lecturer in the Department of Government and director of the Graduate Program in Ideology and Discourse Analysis at the University of Essex. He is the author of Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory and, with Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics . Amy G. Reiter-McIntosh is a lecturer and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago. (shrink)

Discussion about the viability of democracy in what can broadly be called our `postmodern', technologically dominated age, has mainly turned around two central issues: does not the current dispersion and fragmentation of social actors — deriving partly from the overriding presence of the media in our civilization — conspire against the emergence of strong social identities which could operate as nodal points for the consolidation and expansion of democratic practices?; and is not this very multiplicity the source of a particularism (...) of social aims which could result in the dissolution of the wider emancipatory discourses considered as constitutive of the democratic imaginary?The first issue is connected with the increasing awareness of the ambiguities of those very social movements about which so many sanguine hopes were conceived in the 1970s. There is no doubt that their emergence has involved an expansion of the egalitarian imaginary to increasingly wider areas of social relations. However, it has also become progressively clear that such an expansion does not necessarily lead to the aggregation of the plurality of demands around a broader collective will. Even more: does not this fragmentation of social demands make it easier for the state apparatuses to deal with them in an administrative fashion — which results in the formation of all types of clientalistic networks, capable of neutralizing any democratic opening? The control of the media by powerful financial conglomerates is only one aspect — albeit a crucial one — of a far more general phenomenon.As for the second issue, its formulation runs along parallel lines. With the breaking up of the totalizing discourses of modernity, we are running the risk of being confronted with a plurality of social spaces, governed by their own aims and leaving any management of the community — conceived in a global sense — in the hands of a techno-bureaucracy located beyond any democratic control. With this, the notion of a public sphere, to which the very possibility of a democratic experience was always linked, is seriously put into question. (shrink)

On the traditional view, Butler maintains that forgiveness involves a kind of “conversion experience” in which we must forswear or let go of our resentment against wrongdoers. Against this reading, I argue that Butler never demands that we forswear resentment but only that we be resentful in the right kind of way. That is, he insists that we should be virtuously resentful, avoiding both too much resentment exhibited by the vices of malice and revenge and too little resentment where we (...) merely condone the wrongdoer and leave ourselves open to future injury. I argue that this Butlerian approach offers us a more attractive account of forgiveness as a “virtue” than many recent discussions. In the final section, I address Butler’s challenging thesis that forgiveness is an unconditional moral duty. I argue against those who claim that forgiveness is supererogatory (Kolnai/Calhoun) or else merely morally conditional and even morally blameworthy in some cases (Murphy/Hampton/Novitz/Richards). By contrast, I defend a context-sensitive account of forgiveness which recognizes that it takes place on many different levels. I conclude by taking up the difficult issue of whether anybody can be ultimately “unforgivable”, offering some Butlerian and Strawsonian reflections that might help mitigate our judgments about such matters. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie Jahrgang: 97 Heft: 2 Seiten: 135-159.

The paper is concerned with negation in artificial and natural languages. "Negation" is an ambiguous word. It can mean three different things: An operation(negating), an operator (a sign of negation), the result of an operation. The threethings, however, are intimately linked. An operation such as negation, is realizedthrough an operator of negation, i.e. consists in adding a symbol of negation to an entity to obtain an entity of the same type; and which operation it is dependson what it applies to (...) and on what results from its application.I argue that negation is not an operation on linguistic acts but rather anoperation on the objects of linguistic acts, namely sentences. And I assume that the negation of a sentence is a sentence that contradicts it. If so, the negation of a sentence may be obtained, in case the sentence is molecular, by applying the operation of negation not to the sentence itself but to a constituent sentence. To put it in a succinct and paradoxically sounding way we could say that in order to negate a sentence it is sufficient but not necessary to negate it.However that negation applies to sentences is true only for artificial languages, in which the sign of negation is a monadic sentential connective. In natural language, negation applies to expressions other than sentences, namely word sand non-sentential phrases. Still words and not sentential phrases are interesting and valuable only as ultimate or immediate constituents of sentences, as a means of saying (something that can be true or false) and the concern with negation is ultimately the concern with the negation of sentences. So the problem is what sub-sentential and non sentential expressions negation should apply to in order to obtain the negation of the containing sentence. The standard answer is that the negation of a natural language sentence is equivalent to the negation of its predicate. Yet, I argue, predicate negation is necessary but not sufficient, due to the existence of molecular sentences.Finally I notice that if to apply negation to an artificial sentence is to put the negation sign in front of it, to negate the predicate of a natural language sentencemay or may not be to put the negation sign in front of it. (shrink)

Increasing global competition has intensified the use of informal sector workforce worldwide. This phenomenon is true with regard to India, where 92% of the workers hold precarious jobs. Our study examines the dynamics of workplace dignity in the context of Indian security guards deployed as contract labour by private suppliers, recognising that security guards’ jobs were marked by easy access, low status, disrespect and precariousness. The experiences of guards serving bank ATMs were compared with those working in large reputed organisations. (...) The former reported loss of dignity though their inherent self-worth remained partially intact, whereas the latter reclaimed dignity despite the precarious working conditions and the absence of unions. Guards from large reputed organisations evolved strategies by which they took advantage of the client’s vulnerabilities, developed ‘thick’ relationships at work and immersed themselves in 'doing dignity work' to ensure that they are not disposable. ‘Doing dignity work’ was a visible device which involved actions that met or went beyond the norms laid down by the client and was used by security guards to limit the extent of their precariousness. Since the opportunity to reclaim dignity was facilitated by large reputed clients’ adherence to legal regulations, we see implications of the study for the moral economy. (shrink)

La visión tradicional del pensamiento crítico (PC) fundada en un enfoque racionalista ha sido puesta en duda a partir de fines del siglo pasado por la ‘segunda ola’ del PC, la cual, a pesar de no ser un movimiento del todo definido, ha incluido aspectos como la imaginación, la creatividad y el trabajo cooperativo en su comprensión y en su aplicación a la enseñanza. Paralelamente, perspectivas actuales en psicología moral como el modelo ‘intuicionista social’ propuesto por Jonathan Haidt, representan un (...) desafío al modelo racionalista de la moral que suponen gran parte de las éticas normativas canónicas. Siendo que tanto el PC como el fundamento moral representan factores fundamentales en la enseñanza de ética, se hace explicito que esta última precisa también ser revisada. Es por ello que el presente trabajo analiza una perspectiva del PC alternativa a la tradicional basada en el potencial aporte de la metacognición y del modelo intuicionista social, con el fin de abrir nuevas vías de investigación para la actualización del fundamento moral que se supone en la enseñanza de ética. Para ahondar en ello, se ejemplificará la relevancia y aplicabilidad de la metacognición en la enseñanza de ética con situaciones vinculadas a la actual pandemia por Covid-19. (shrink)

Originally published in English in 1980, _Rhetoric as Philosophy _has been out of print for some time. The reviews of that English edition attest to the importance of Ernesto Grassi’s work. By going back to the Italian humanist tradition and aspects of earlier Greek and Latin thought, Ernesto Grassi develops a conception of rhetoric as the basis of philosophy. Grassi explores the sense in which the first principles of rational thought come from the metaphorical power of the word. (...) He finds the basis for his conception in the last great thinker of the Italian humanist tradition, Giambattista Vico. He concentrates on Vico’s understanding of imagination and the sense of human ingenuity contained in metaphor. For Grassi, rhetorical activity is the essence and inner life of thought when connected to the metaphorical power of the word. (shrink)

El artículo pretende analizar la metodología de los programas de investigación de Imre Lakatos a la luz de la ciencia contemporánea. Tomando como base las encuestas realizadas a un grupo de físicos del CERN, se constata que las sugerencias de Lakatos sobre el progreso en la ciencia, esto es, sobre cómo determinar el carácter progresivo o no de un programa de investigación, entran en colisión con la práctica cientí? ca. La conclusión es que el modelo lakatosiano no es un marco (...) adecuado para entender qué factores informan de facto el juicio de los investigadores sobre la progresividad de un programa de investigación. (shrink)

Heidegger's affirmation is categorical: “… the thinking expressed in Being and Time is against humanism”. Heidegger's thesis is not only categorical, it is also polemical. He maintains that the humanist conception does not grasp man's essence, and it is for this reason that he is opposed to humanism, which is a doctrine that “has not thought profoundly enough of man's humanitas.

The transition toward sustainability and the adjustment to climate change should involve the reduction of consumption behavior and the need to maintain social practices of frugality. This paper investigates the influences of consciousness for sustainable consumption, materialism, and the consideration of future consequences on frugal behaviors. Four-hundred-and-forty-four individuals responded to an instrument investigating these variables. Results of a structural model revealed that materialism significantly and negatively influenced the three dimensions of CSC: economic, environmental, and social. The consideration of distant future (...) consequences positively and significantly affected the economic dimension of CSC. Frugal behavior received significant and positive influences from the three CSC dimensions and from consideration of distant future consequences. The model explained 46% of variance in frugal behavior, revealing the importance of awareness of the consequences of resource consumption and the CFC has on promoting a moderate consumption of resources. (shrink)

Political violence does not end with the last death. A common feature of mass murder has been the attempt at destroying any memory of victims, with the aim of eliminating them from history. Perpetrators seek not only to eliminate a perceived threat, but also to eradicate any possibility of alternate, competing social and national histories. In his timely and important book, Unchopping a Tree, Ernesto Verdeja develops a critical justification for why transitional justice works. He asks, “What is the (...) balance between punishment and forgiveness? And, “What are the stakes in reconciling?” Employing a normative theory of reconciliation that differs from prevailing approaches, Verdeja outlines a concept that emphasizes the importance of shared notions of moral respect and tolerance among adversaries in transitional societies. Drawing heavily from cases such as reconciliation efforts in Latin America and Africa—and interviews with people involved in such efforts—Verdeja debates how best to envision reconciliation while remaining realistic about the very significant practical obstacles such efforts face Unchopping a Tree addresses the core concept of respect across four different social levels—political, institutional, civil society, and interpersonal—to explain the promise and challenges to securing reconciliation and broader social regeneration. (shrink)

Temporal ontology is concerned with the ontological status of the past, the present and the future, with presentism and eternalism as main contenders since the second half of the last century. In recent years several philosophers have argued that the presentism/eternalism dispute is not substantial. They have embraced, one may say, deflationism. Denying or downplaying the meaningfulness of tenseless language and wielding the so-called triviality objection have been their main argumentative tools. Other philosophers have opposed this trend, thereby holding fast (...) to what could be named substantialism. Their leading defensive strategy has consisted in bringing to the fore tenselessness or unrestricted quantification in an attempt to resist the triviality objection. Despite this reaction, the past few years have hosted a new wave of deflationism, wherein the triviality objection and qualms about the legitimacy of tenselessness and unrestricted quantification still loom large. This paper counters this trend, by providing a new clarification of tenseless predication, unrestricted quantifiers and their role in rescuing substantialism from the triviality objection. A crucial ingredient is this: the appeal to unrestricted quantifiers and to tenseless predication are not alternative strategies, but rather two sides of the same coin, since substantialism requires quantifiers that are both tenseless and unrestricted. (shrink)

¿Por qué construír al pueblo es la principal tarea de una política radical? -- Una ética del compromiso militante -- ¿Vida nuda o indeterminación social? -- ¿Puede la inmanencia explicar las luchas sociales? Crítica a Imperio.

Despite the postmodern image of a smooth and borderless world, physical barriers currently represent one of the most important instruments of political articulation of the statal space. However, several ethical and political problems arise from it. This paper presents a philosophical critique of teichopolitical rationalities, namely, the politics of walls. The first section analyses two ancient teichopolitical paradigms. The second section analyses the wall as an element that nullifies the image of a global borderless world. The third section deals with (...) the wall as a protective instrument of the statal body. The fourth section highlights the ethical and political problems produced by walls. In the fifth section we argue that walls represent a spectacularized form of sovereignty. In the conclusions I summarize the results and suggest that teichopolitical logics foment a feeling of paranoia on a global level. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 31.4 (2001) 3-10 [Access article in PDF] Can Immanence Explain Social Struggles? Ernesto Laclau Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000. In a recent interview 1 Jacques Rancière opposes his notion of "people" (peuple) 2 to the category of "multitude" as presented by the authors of Empire. As is well known, Rancière differentiates between police and politics, the first being the logic of (...) counting and assigning the population to differential places, and the second the subversion of that differentiating logic through the constitution of an egalitarian discourse which puts into question established identities. "The people" is the specific subject of politics, and this term presupposes a sharp division in the social body which cannot be led back to any kind of immanent unity. Empire, on the contrary, makes immanence its central category and the ultimate ground of the multitude's unity.The main lines of Rancière's critique provide a good starting point for what we have to say about the book. The immanentism of Hardt and Negri would be linked, according to Rancière, to their Nietzschean/Deleuzian ethics of affirmation, which does away with any reactive or negative dimension. Empire would belong, in that respect, to the whole tradition of modern political philosophy, which is profoundly metapolitical: "the kernel of metapolitics is to lead back the precarious artifices of the political scene to the truth of an immanent power which organizes beings in a community and identifies the true community with the grasped and sensible operation of this truth" ["Peuple ou multitudes" 96]. From Hardt and Negri's rejection of any inherent negativity in political subjects, it follows that the power inherent in the multitude has to be a disruptive power, "lodged in all states of domination as its ultimate content, a content destined to destroy all barriers. 'Multitudes' have to be a content whose continent is Empire" ["Peuple ou multitudes" 97]. Disruptive forces operating through a purely immanent movement are what Marxist theory called "productive forces," and there would be, according to Rancière, a strict homology between the place of productive forces and that in which multitudes, as described in Empire, act. Rancière points out that productive forces should not necessarily be understood in any narrow productivist sense: there has been a constant widening of the concept from the strict economism of classical Marxism, to the recent attempts to introduce in it the ensemble of scientific and intellectual abilities, passing through the Leninist attempt to supplement via political intervention a role that productive forces refused to fulfill.I think that Rancière has rightly stressed what I see as the main source of several weaknesses of Empire, including a central one: that within its theoretical framework politics become unthinkable. So I will start from a discussion of its notion of immanence and move later to various other theoretical and political aspects of the book. [End Page 3]Let us start with the authors' discussion of the origins of European modernity. While the usual insistence is on the secularization process, that process would be, "in our view... only a symptom of the primary event of modernity: the affirmation of the powers of this world, the discovery of the plane of immanence. 'Omne ens habet aliquod esse proprium'—every entity has a singular essence. Duns Scotus' affirmation subverts the medieval conception of being as an object of analogical, and thus dualistic predication—a being with one foot in this world and one in a transcendent realm" [Empire 71]. Duns Scotus's insistence on the singularity of being would have initiated an assertion of immanence that the authors describe as a process whose representative names would have been Nicholas of Cusa, Pico della Mirandola, and Bovillus—other names quoted are Bacon and Occam—and whose point of arrival is Spinoza. "By the time we arrive at Spinoza, in fact, the horizon of immanence and the horizon of the democratic political order coincide completely. The plane of immanence is the one on which the powers of singularity are realized and the one on which the truth of the new... (shrink)

The study of complex systems, although an interdisciplinary endeavor, is considered as an integrating part of physical sciences. Contrary to the historical fact that the field is already mature, it still lacks a clear and unambiguous definition of its main object of study. Here, I propose a definition of complex systems based on the conceptual clarifications made by Edgar Morin about the bidirectional non-separability of parts and whole produced by the nature of interactions. Then, a complex system is defined as (...) the system where there is a bidirectional non-separability between the identities of the parts and the identity of the whole. Thus, not only the identity of the whole is determined by the constituent parts, but also the identity of the parts are determined by the whole due to the nature of their interactions. This concept allows, as shown in the paper, to derive some of the main properties that such systems must have as well as to propose its mathematical formalization. (shrink)

This paper tries to demonstrate that some passages of Pliny's Naturalis historia on metallurgical materials are influenced by the Stoic philosopher Posidonius' view that surfaces possess a physical existence. Indeed, Pliny reports that copper surfaces are material, both acting towards drawing a patina to themselves, and being acted upon; i.e. they are both chemically modified by air and fire, and subject to mechanical removal. Also relatable to Posidonius, namely to his view of the interaction between soul and body, is Pliny's (...) account of lead and tin, which can be united thanks to the action they mutually exert on each other, since each metal holds together both itself and what is outside itself. A further influence from the ‘aetiologist’ Posidonius is also betrayed in the care Pliny exercises in describing not only metal corrosion and soldering, but also their causes. Both the scientific and the philosophical imports of these passages are compared with passages by Plato and Plutarch on metallurgical subjects; they are also discussed in the light of the theories on ‘mixture’ propounded by Aristotle and by the Old Stoics. It is shown that Pliny's account compares favorably with Posidonius' doctrine, whereas it is at striking variance with the other ancient reports. Introduction Philosophical and literary evidence 2.1 Pliny 2.2 Posidonius 2.3 Plato and Plutarch Discussion Conclusion. (shrink)

In 2005 the new Governor of Puerto Rico appointed a panel of experts to evaluate the healthcare system of Puerto Rico and make recommendations. Among other things, the panel recommended the creation of an advisory board on bioethics for the commonwealth of Puerto Rico.