Piet Strydom
Biographic Data
| ID | 245617 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Piet Strydom |
| GIVEN NAMES | Piet |
| FAMILY NAME | Strydom |
| SIGNATURE | STRYDOM P |
| AFFILIATIONS | University College Cork |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0581-8912 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 129 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Towards a sociology of the future
The aim of this article is a sociology of the future. Since the standard sociological practice of extrapolating from everyday semantics of the future and the time-consciousness of modernity is inadequate, an integrated cognitive sociological perspective allied to critical theory is introduced. It makes visible an essential dimension of social life that is either largely taken for granted, misunderstood or ignored by identifying different levels o…
The critical theory of society
Responding to a call for systematic contributions on the theory of society, the principle aim of this article is to recover and reconstruct the Young-Hegelian core of critical theory's theory of the dialectical development of society and, on that basis, to project its creative research-based continuation by analysing its largely neglected key concept of possibility. A side effect of this theoretical exposition is the exposure in the course of the…
On the origin of the left-Hegelian concept of immanent transcendence
This article pursues the question of the origin of the left-Hegelian concept of immanent transcendence that emerged in the nineteenth century. Whereas some contemporary critical theorists apparently understand the concept as deriving from a religious origin, evolutionary and historical considerations would seem to indicate that more might be involved. Evolutionarily, the origin of the concept can be traced to the civilisation-founding cognitive a…
Habermas's late project of postsecular postmetaphysical thinking
On Habermas’s differentiation of rightness from truth
The metaproblematic of this article is the cognitive structure of morality. In the context of an investigation into Habermas’s theory of validity which respects his strong cognitivism and emphasis on moral knowledge, the focus is on his proposal to treat rightness as ‘justification-immanent’ rather than as ‘justification-transcendent’, as in the case of truth. The imputation of asymmetrical validity bases to rightness and truth is probed in terms…
Infinity, infinite processes and limit concepts
This article seeks to recover a neglected chapter in the historical and theoretical background of social theory in general and critical theory in particular with a view to refining the understanding of the presuppositions of a cognitively enhanced critical social science appropriate to our troubled times. For this purpose, it offers a brief reconstruction of the mathematical-philosophical tradition from ancient to modern times by extrapolating th…
Karl-Otto Apel
Following Karl-Otto Apel's death on 15 May 2017, this obituary gives an overview of his academic and intellectual biography from the perspective of someone who knew him personally
The sociocultural self-creation of a natural category
Following the recent recognition that humans are an active force in nature that gave rise to a new geological epoch, this article explores the implications of the shift to the Anthropocene for social theory. The argument assumes that the emerging conditions compel an expansion and deepening of the timescale of the social-theoretical perspective and that such an enhancement has serious repercussions for the concept of human agency. First, the Anth…
The latent cognitive sociology in Habermas
The aim of this article is twofold: to display some of the fruitful starting points in the later Habermas’ principal monograph for the development of a new kind of cognitive sociology; and to indicate the form of such a sociology by critically extrapolating its major parameters from Habermas’ assumptions regarding immanent transcendence, formal pragmatics and reconstructive sociology. The intended cognitive sociology is conceived as a refinement …
Cognitive fluidity and climate change
This article seeks to enrich the social-theoretical and sociological approach to climate change by arguing in favour of a weak naturalistic ontology beyond the usually presupposed methodological sociologism or culturalism. Accordingly, attention is drawn to the elementary social forms that mediate between nature and the sociocultural form of life and thus figure as the central object of a critical sociological explanation of impediments retarding…
Toward a Global Cosmopolis? On the Formation of a Cosmopolitan Cultural Model
This article offers a critical assessment of the prospects of the emergence of a global cosmopolitan society. For this purpose, it presents an analysis of the different interrelated types of structure formation in the process of cosmopolitisation and the mechanisms sustaining each. It deals with both the generation of a variety of actor-based models of world openness at the micro and meso level and with the reflexive meta-principle of cosmopolita…
Cognition and recognition
While concurring with Honneth’s reconstruction of reification as a form of forgetfulness, this article questions the way in which he arrives at that conclusion as well as the conceptual status he ascribes to recognition – the instance with reference to which reification is exhibited as distortion or deformation. It argues, first, that Honneth’s dualistic mode of argumentation falls behind the left-Hegelian tradition which he himself seeks to revi…
Towards a Cognitive Sociology for Our Time
This article argues that Habermas and Honneth's respective critical social theories contain elements which, although largely concealed, can be unearthed, consolidated and developed for the purposes of constructing a timely kind of cognitive sociology. The proposed departure attempts to draw out and build on the strengths of both authors, however divergent and opposed their social theories might appear. Amidst all the differences between them, the…
Contemporary Critical Theory and Methodology
Contemporary critical theory’s methodology is currently taking shape under the impact both of transformative internal develops within the discipline, and of external pressures and incentives arising from a series of international debates. In this book, Piet Strydom presents a groundbreaking treatment of critical theory’s methodology, using as a base the reconstruction of the left-Hegelian tradition, the relation between critical theory and pragma…
A Theory of Cognitive Frames for Critical Sociology
Risk Communication
Risk communication, in the full sense of the word, is a discursive event in which speakers advance claims in the face of other responding participants before a general public. The presence of the public leads the participants to evaluate what happens in moral terms, with the result that their claims obtain an unavoidable normative quality and the discursive event takes the form of a public controversy which puts pressure on the participants to co…
Introduction
Cognitive Science and Social TheoryWhereas the cognitive revolution's impact on the social sciences was more indirect than on disciplines like psychology and linguistics, anthropology was nevertheless earlier and more directly affected than sociology.Given the paradigm shift from behaviour to cognition, this can be accounted for by the fact that anthropology to a degree shared a behaviouristic orientation with psychology and linguistics.By contra…
Contemporary European cognitive social theory
Contemporary European cognitive social theory - 1
Intersubjectivity – interactionist or discursive? Reflections on Habermas’ critique of Brandom
This article argues that there is a marked ambivalence in Habermas’ concept of intersubjectivity in that he wavers between an interactionist and a discursive understanding. This ambivalence is demonstrated with reference to his recent critique of Robert Brandom's normative pragmatic theory of discursive practice. Although Habermas is a leading theorist of discourse as an epistemically steered process, he allows his interpretation of Brandom's the…
Discourse and Knowledge
Rom Harré on Social Structure and Social Change
The Problem of Triple Contingency in Habermas
From a certain perspective, Habermas's theory of communicative action is a response, in extension of Mead, Schutz, and Parsons, to the risk of dissension posed by double contingency. Starting from double contingency, both The Theory of Communicative Action and Between Facts and Norms are essentially an elaboration of a solution to this problem in terms of a more fully developed theory of communication than had been available to his predecessors. …
Discourse and Knowledge
By closely analysing the contributions of such theorists as More, Hobbes, Vico, Montesquieu, Ferguson and Millar to the emergence of sociology in its original form, Piet Strydom follows the discursive construction of sociology in the context of the society-wide early modern practical discourse about violence and rights. Parallels with the nineteenth- and twentieth-century discourse on poverty and justice and the contemporary discourse of risk and…
Introduction to Apel
Triple contingency
This paper seeks to show that the proposition of 'double contin gency' introduced by Parsons and defended by Luhmann and Habermas is insufficient under the conditions of contemporary communication societies. In the latter context, the increasing differentiation and organization of communication processes eventuated in the recognition of the epistemic authority of the public, which in turn compels us to conceptualize a new level of contingency. A …
Triple contingency
This paper seeks to show that the proposition of 'double contin gency' introduced by Parsons and defended by Luhmann and Habermas is insufficient under the conditions of contemporary communication societies. In the latter context, the increasing differentiation and organization of communication processes eventuated in the recognition of the epistemic authority of the public, which in turn compels us to conceptualize a new level of contingency. A …
The Challenge of Responsibility for Sociology
Although leading thinkers of the late 20th century, stimulated by new social movements and public debate, have given currency in the 1970s and 1980s to a new version of the normative category of responsibility, sociology has been rather slow in appreciating the significance of this development. It is only in the wake of the Chernobyl accident, particularly in the 1990s, that the new concept has begun to attract the attention of sociologists, yet …
Introduction
Cognitive Science and Social TheoryWhereas the cognitive revolution's impact on the social sciences was more indirect than on disciplines like psychology and linguistics, anthropology was nevertheless earlier and more directly affected than sociology.Given the paradigm shift from behaviour to cognition, this can be accounted for by the fact that anthropology to a degree shared a behaviouristic orientation with psychology and linguistics.By contra…
The Ontogenetic Fallacy
Since the emergence of neo-evolutionism in the 1960s, various critiques of the theory of social or socio-cultural evolution have been forwarded, including notably those of Immanuel Wallerstein, Alain Touraine and Anthony Giddens who decisively reject the idea of evolution. Within this context, Jürgen Habermas's theory of socio-cultural evolution has also become a specific object of critique, the best known in the English-speaking world being, per…
The Problem of Triple Contingency in Habermas
From a certain perspective, Habermas's theory of communicative action is a response, in extension of Mead, Schutz, and Parsons, to the risk of dissension posed by double contingency. Starting from double contingency, both The Theory of Communicative Action and Between Facts and Norms are essentially an elaboration of a solution to this problem in terms of a more fully developed theory of communication than had been available to his predecessors. …
The sociocultural self-creation of a natural category
Following the recent recognition that humans are an active force in nature that gave rise to a new geological epoch, this article explores the implications of the shift to the Anthropocene for social theory. The argument assumes that the emerging conditions compel an expansion and deepening of the timescale of the social-theoretical perspective and that such an enhancement has serious repercussions for the concept of human agency. First, the Anth…
The critical theory of society
Responding to a call for systematic contributions on the theory of society, the principle aim of this article is to recover and reconstruct the Young-Hegelian core of critical theory's theory of the dialectical development of society and, on that basis, to project its creative research-based continuation by analysing its largely neglected key concept of possibility. A side effect of this theoretical exposition is the exposure in the course of the…
Intersubjectivity – interactionist or discursive? Reflections on Habermas’ critique of Brandom
This article argues that there is a marked ambivalence in Habermas’ concept of intersubjectivity in that he wavers between an interactionist and a discursive understanding. This ambivalence is demonstrated with reference to his recent critique of Robert Brandom's normative pragmatic theory of discursive practice. Although Habermas is a leading theorist of discourse as an epistemically steered process, he allows his interpretation of Brandom's the…
Collective Learning
The latent cognitive sociology in Habermas
The aim of this article is twofold: to display some of the fruitful starting points in the later Habermas’ principal monograph for the development of a new kind of cognitive sociology; and to indicate the form of such a sociology by critically extrapolating its major parameters from Habermas’ assumptions regarding immanent transcendence, formal pragmatics and reconstructive sociology. The intended cognitive sociology is conceived as a refinement …
Cognitive fluidity and climate change
This article seeks to enrich the social-theoretical and sociological approach to climate change by arguing in favour of a weak naturalistic ontology beyond the usually presupposed methodological sociologism or culturalism. Accordingly, attention is drawn to the elementary social forms that mediate between nature and the sociocultural form of life and thus figure as the central object of a critical sociological explanation of impediments retarding…
Risk Communication
Risk communication, in the full sense of the word, is a discursive event in which speakers advance claims in the face of other responding participants before a general public. The presence of the public leads the participants to evaluate what happens in moral terms, with the result that their claims obtain an unavoidable normative quality and the discursive event takes the form of a public controversy which puts pressure on the participants to co…
Hermeneutic Culturalism and its Double
Proceeding from the debate opened by Beck, Giddens and Lash, this article seeks to clear the way for a more consistent and coherent concept of reflexivity in relation to the cultural-symbolic foundations of society. Seeing that Lash in his contribution to the debate inadvertently raises a key problem, i.e. the board cognitive problem, the paper develops a critique of his hermeneutic culturalism. It focuses on the disparity between the position ex…
The Contemporary Habermas
On the origin of the left-Hegelian concept of immanent transcendence
This article pursues the question of the origin of the left-Hegelian concept of immanent transcendence that emerged in the nineteenth century. Whereas some contemporary critical theorists apparently understand the concept as deriving from a religious origin, evolutionary and historical considerations would seem to indicate that more might be involved. Evolutionarily, the origin of the concept can be traced to the civilisation-founding cognitive a…
Rom Harré on Social Structure and Social Change
Towards a sociology of the future
The aim of this article is a sociology of the future. Since the standard sociological practice of extrapolating from everyday semantics of the future and the time-consciousness of modernity is inadequate, an integrated cognitive sociological perspective allied to critical theory is introduced. It makes visible an essential dimension of social life that is either largely taken for granted, misunderstood or ignored by identifying different levels o…
On Habermas’s differentiation of rightness from truth
The metaproblematic of this article is the cognitive structure of morality. In the context of an investigation into Habermas’s theory of validity which respects his strong cognitivism and emphasis on moral knowledge, the focus is on his proposal to treat rightness as ‘justification-immanent’ rather than as ‘justification-transcendent’, as in the case of truth. The imputation of asymmetrical validity bases to rightness and truth is probed in terms…
Infinity, infinite processes and limit concepts
This article seeks to recover a neglected chapter in the historical and theoretical background of social theory in general and critical theory in particular with a view to refining the understanding of the presuppositions of a cognitively enhanced critical social science appropriate to our troubled times. For this purpose, it offers a brief reconstruction of the mathematical-philosophical tradition from ancient to modern times by extrapolating th…
Karl-Otto Apel
Following Karl-Otto Apel's death on 15 May 2017, this obituary gives an overview of his academic and intellectual biography from the perspective of someone who knew him personally
Introduction to Apel
Collective Learning
Metacritical Observations on a Reductive Approach to Critical Theory
The Ontogenetic Fallacy
Since the emergence of neo-evolutionism in the 1960s, various critiques of the theory of social or socio-cultural evolution have been forwarded, including notably those of Immanuel Wallerstein, Alain Touraine and Anthony Giddens who decisively reject the idea of evolution. Within this context, Jürgen Habermas's theory of socio-cultural evolution has also become a specific object of critique, the best known in the English-speaking world being, per…
Triple contingency
This paper seeks to show that the proposition of 'double contin gency' introduced by Parsons and defended by Luhmann and Habermas is insufficient under the conditions of contemporary communication societies. In the latter context, the increasing differentiation and organization of communication processes eventuated in the recognition of the epistemic authority of the public, which in turn compels us to conceptualize a new level of contingency. A …
Hermeneutic Culturalism and its Double
Proceeding from the debate opened by Beck, Giddens and Lash, this article seeks to clear the way for a more consistent and coherent concept of reflexivity in relation to the cultural-symbolic foundations of society. Seeing that Lash in his contribution to the debate inadvertently raises a key problem, i.e. the board cognitive problem, the paper develops a critique of his hermeneutic culturalism. It focuses on the disparity between the position ex…
The Contemporary Habermas
The Challenge of Responsibility for Sociology
Although leading thinkers of the late 20th century, stimulated by new social movements and public debate, have given currency in the 1970s and 1980s to a new version of the normative category of responsibility, sociology has been rather slow in appreciating the significance of this development. It is only in the wake of the Chernobyl accident, particularly in the 1990s, that the new concept has begun to attract the attention of sociologists, yet …
Discourse and Knowledge
By closely analysing the contributions of such theorists as More, Hobbes, Vico, Montesquieu, Ferguson and Millar to the emergence of sociology in its original form, Piet Strydom follows the discursive construction of sociology in the context of the society-wide early modern practical discourse about violence and rights. Parallels with the nineteenth- and twentieth-century discourse on poverty and justice and the contemporary discourse of risk and…
Introduction to Apel
The Problem of Triple Contingency in Habermas
From a certain perspective, Habermas's theory of communicative action is a response, in extension of Mead, Schutz, and Parsons, to the risk of dissension posed by double contingency. Starting from double contingency, both The Theory of Communicative Action and Between Facts and Norms are essentially an elaboration of a solution to this problem in terms of a more fully developed theory of communication than had been available to his predecessors. …
Discourse and Knowledge
Rom Harré on Social Structure and Social Change
Contemporary European cognitive social theory
Contemporary European cognitive social theory - 1
Intersubjectivity – interactionist or discursive? Reflections on Habermas’ critique of Brandom
This article argues that there is a marked ambivalence in Habermas’ concept of intersubjectivity in that he wavers between an interactionist and a discursive understanding. This ambivalence is demonstrated with reference to his recent critique of Robert Brandom's normative pragmatic theory of discursive practice. Although Habermas is a leading theorist of discourse as an epistemically steered process, he allows his interpretation of Brandom's the…
Introduction
Cognitive Science and Social TheoryWhereas the cognitive revolution's impact on the social sciences was more indirect than on disciplines like psychology and linguistics, anthropology was nevertheless earlier and more directly affected than sociology.Given the paradigm shift from behaviour to cognition, this can be accounted for by the fact that anthropology to a degree shared a behaviouristic orientation with psychology and linguistics.By contra…
Risk Communication
Risk communication, in the full sense of the word, is a discursive event in which speakers advance claims in the face of other responding participants before a general public. The presence of the public leads the participants to evaluate what happens in moral terms, with the result that their claims obtain an unavoidable normative quality and the discursive event takes the form of a public controversy which puts pressure on the participants to co…
A Theory of Cognitive Frames for Critical Sociology
Towards a Cognitive Sociology for Our Time
This article argues that Habermas and Honneth's respective critical social theories contain elements which, although largely concealed, can be unearthed, consolidated and developed for the purposes of constructing a timely kind of cognitive sociology. The proposed departure attempts to draw out and build on the strengths of both authors, however divergent and opposed their social theories might appear. Amidst all the differences between them, the…
Contemporary Critical Theory and Methodology
Contemporary critical theory’s methodology is currently taking shape under the impact both of transformative internal develops within the discipline, and of external pressures and incentives arising from a series of international debates. In this book, Piet Strydom presents a groundbreaking treatment of critical theory’s methodology, using as a base the reconstruction of the left-Hegelian tradition, the relation between critical theory and pragma…
Toward a Global Cosmopolis? On the Formation of a Cosmopolitan Cultural Model
This article offers a critical assessment of the prospects of the emergence of a global cosmopolitan society. For this purpose, it presents an analysis of the different interrelated types of structure formation in the process of cosmopolitisation and the mechanisms sustaining each. It deals with both the generation of a variety of actor-based models of world openness at the micro and meso level and with the reflexive meta-principle of cosmopolita…
Cognition and recognition
While concurring with Honneth’s reconstruction of reification as a form of forgetfulness, this article questions the way in which he arrives at that conclusion as well as the conceptual status he ascribes to recognition – the instance with reference to which reification is exhibited as distortion or deformation. It argues, first, that Honneth’s dualistic mode of argumentation falls behind the left-Hegelian tradition which he himself seeks to revi…
The latent cognitive sociology in Habermas
The aim of this article is twofold: to display some of the fruitful starting points in the later Habermas’ principal monograph for the development of a new kind of cognitive sociology; and to indicate the form of such a sociology by critically extrapolating its major parameters from Habermas’ assumptions regarding immanent transcendence, formal pragmatics and reconstructive sociology. The intended cognitive sociology is conceived as a refinement …
Cognitive fluidity and climate change
This article seeks to enrich the social-theoretical and sociological approach to climate change by arguing in favour of a weak naturalistic ontology beyond the usually presupposed methodological sociologism or culturalism. Accordingly, attention is drawn to the elementary social forms that mediate between nature and the sociocultural form of life and thus figure as the central object of a critical sociological explanation of impediments retarding…
Infinity, infinite processes and limit concepts
This article seeks to recover a neglected chapter in the historical and theoretical background of social theory in general and critical theory in particular with a view to refining the understanding of the presuppositions of a cognitively enhanced critical social science appropriate to our troubled times. For this purpose, it offers a brief reconstruction of the mathematical-philosophical tradition from ancient to modern times by extrapolating th…
Karl-Otto Apel
Following Karl-Otto Apel's death on 15 May 2017, this obituary gives an overview of his academic and intellectual biography from the perspective of someone who knew him personally
Epistemology (28 works) · Sociology (28 works) · Philosophy (25 works) · Critical Theory and Philosophy (15 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Critical Realism in Sociology (11 works) · Social science (11 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Social and Cultural Dynamics (7 works) · Anthropology (6 works)