M Cooke
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 33290 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | M Cooke |
| NOMBRES | M |
| APELLIDO | Cooke |
| FIRMA | COOKE M |
| AFILIACIONES | University College Dublin |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3168-4375 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 44 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 246 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 44 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1983 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
Criticizing ‘the canon
What makes a body of work ‘canonical’? In his writings over the years Jeffrey C. Alexander offers some phenomenologically convincing answers, each suggesting that the power of canonical texts is simultaneously context-immanent and context-transcending. However, a critical theory of ‘the canon’ cannot confine itself to phenomenological description. A critical theory is necessary due to the social constitution of the meanings of canonical texts. Th…
Decentring and opening the politics of need
Decentring critical theory with the help of critical theory
Our present situation of anthropogenic ecological disaster calls on Western philosophy in general, and Frankfurt School critical theory in particular, to reconsider some long-standing, entrenched assumptions concerning what it means to be a human agent and to relate to other agents. In my article, I take up the challenge in dialogue with the idea of critical theory articulated by Max Horkheimer in the 1930s. My overall concern is to contribute to…
Reenvisioning Freedom
I address the question of human agency from the perspective of critical social theory. Critical social theories seek to change social reality for the better in an ethical-political sense based on a critique of what is wrong with the existing one. Furthermore, they offer a perspective on changing social reality for the better that is attentive to historical, social, and geopolitical contexts. I start from the premise that the salient context today…
Social theory as critical theory
Where is the Good in the World?
Bringing together contributions from anthropology, sociology, religious studies, and philosophy, along with ethnographic case studies from diverse settings, this volume explores how different disciplinary perspectives on the good might engage with and enrich each other. The chapters examine how people realize the good in social life, exploring how ethics and values relate to forms of suffering, power and inequality, and, in doing so, demonstrate …
Immanent Critique of the Immanent Frame
Charles Taylor’s method of philosophical argumentation is distinctive, interlacing historical, ontological, phenomenological, hermeneutical, theistic, and ethical strands. His writings contribute to debates in many domains, including sociology, theology, and political theory, speaking both to his peers in the academy and to wider publics. Often, he assumes the role of socio-cultural critic, diagnosing the features of our contemporary culture and …
Changing hearts and minds
Lafont argues for a participatory version of deliberative democracy that shares key features with other contemporary approaches, while departing from them in decisive ways. It is based on the Rousseauian–Kantian idea of democratic self-legislation, interpreted as the idea that citizens must be able to see themselves as the authors of the laws and public policies to which they are subject. She insists that her specification of the ideal of democra…
Existentially lived truth or communicative reason? Habermas’ critique of Kierkegaard
In Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie (AGP), Habermas introduces Kierkegaard as a counterpoint to Hegel. Kierkegaard rejects Hegel's sublimation of subjectivity into ever-higher stages of knowledge, culminating in the absolute ego and a corresponding absolute knowledge, and asserts instead the importance of existentially lived truth (Habermas, 2019). Like Hegel, he conceives of reason as finite, operating within history, but unlike Hegel, attri…
A Pluralist Model of Democracy
In the history of modernity, ethical conflicts, understood as conflicts between ideas of the good life for humans, have often been seen as a source of social divisiveness and as a threat to individual freedom. I sketch a model of pluralist politics in which encounters between diverging or conflicting ideas of the good life are seen as strengthening rather than threatening social bonds and as conducive rather than hostile to the formation of auton…
Private Autonomy and Public Autonomy
Habermas dialogically recasts the Kantian conception of moral autonomy. In a legal-political context, his dialogical approach has the potential to redress certain troubling features of liberal and communitarian approaches to democratic politics. Liberal approaches attach greater normative weight to negatively construed individual freedoms, which they seek to protect against the interventions of political authority. Communitarian approaches priori…
Ethics and politics in the Anthropocene
The most fundamental challenge facing humans today is the imminent destruction of the life-generating and life-sustaining ecosystems that constitute the planet Earth. There is considerable evidence that the strongest contemporary ecological threat is anthropogenic climate change resulting from the increasing warming of the atmosphere, caused by cumulative CO 2 and other emissions as a result of collective human activity over the past few 100 year…
Self-Efficacious Subjects
Alienation is a central concept in Rosa's critical social theory. Rejecting the idea of freedom as self-determination, he introduces instead self-efficacious subjectivity as the antithesis of alienated agency. He thereby loses sight of a component historically central for theories of alienation: a critically reflective relationship by individual subjects to their own life-activity. Without such a relationship, I argue, subjects may be entrapped b…
Higher goods and common goods
Unintelligible! Inaccessible! Unacceptable! Are religious truth claims a problem for liberal democracies
In liberal democracies it is now a commonplace that public debates in the institutionalized political sphere should involve only arguments and reasons that are in principle intelligible, accessible and acceptable to all citizens. Many political theorists take the view that religious arguments and reasons do not meet these requirements. My article interrogates this widely held position, considering each of the three requirements in turn. Motivatin…
Philosophy and the Social Sciences
Civil obedience and disobedience
This article offers a general framework for thinking about civil disobedience as transformative political action. Positing authority as the mode of power corresponding to obedience, and authority and freedom as internally related, it proposes a model of freedom and political authority as a basis for this framework. The framework is sufficiently general to allow for context-dependent variations – for example, as to whether publicity or non-violenc…
Civil disobedience and conscientious objection
The question of civil disobedience has preoccupied philosophical discourse at least since Thoreau's articulation of disobedience as a form of non-compliance and Rawls' classic definition outlined in the wake of the civil rights and student protest movements of the 1960s. It has become increasingly clear, however, that these classic definitions are being challenged and rethought from a variety of traditions in the wake of contemporary protests. Th…
Truth in narrative fiction
Narrative fiction has the power to unsettle our deep-seated intuitions and expectations about what it means to live an ethically good life, and the kind of society that best facilitates this. Sometimes its disruptive power is disclosive, leading to an ethically significant shift in perception. I contend that the disruptive and disclosive powers of narrative fiction constitute a potential for ethical knowledge. I construe ethical knowledge as a le…
The Theory of Communicative Action After Three Decades
Realism and Idealism
Translating truth
The article considers the role of translation in encounters between religious citizens and secular citizens. It follows Habermas in holding that translations rearticulate religious contents in a way that facilitates learning. Since he underplays the complexities of translation, it takes some steps beyond Habermas towards developing a more adequate account. Its main thesis is that the required account of translation must keep sight of the question…
Cogent Science in Context
Privatization or pluralization
In a widely publicized lecture in 2008, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, expressed his concern that the conception of law and democratic citizenship prevailing in England may lead to ghettoization. The problem, in his view, is that the bulk of the convictions and commitments that define a given citizen’s identity are seen as a matter of individual choice and relegated to the private realm. In diagnosing this problem, Williams tacitly…
A conversation between Axel Honneth, Amy Allen and Maeve Cooke, Frankfurt am Main, 12 April 2010
This a conversation between Axel Honneth, Amy Allen and Maeve Cooke that took place at Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main on 12 April 2010. The conversation begins with some thoughts on the concept of power, in particular, on Foucault's and Arendt's respective interpretations of this concept. It then moves to consider the complex interrelationships between power and recognition, addressing questions such as the relationship bet…
Five Arguments for Deliberative Democracy
Five arguments in favour of deliberative democracy are considered. These focus on its educative power, on its community-generating power, on the fairness of the procedure of public deliberation, on the epistemic quality of its outcomes and on the congruence of the deliberative democratic ideal ‘with whom we are’. The first four arguments are shown to be inadequate. The fifth argument, it is claimed, not only provides the most convincing defence o…
A Secular State for a Postsecular Society? Postmetaphysical Political Theory and the Place of Religion
Authenticity and Autonomy
Etude de la politique de la reconnaissance de l'identite specifique, developpee par C. Taylor a partir d'un lien entre la politique de la difference et l'ideal de l'authenticite, et la reponse apportee par J. Habermas dans le cadre de sa conception de l'etat constitutionnel, fondee sur la distinction entre la moralite et l'ethique. Soulevant le probleme de l'inevitabilite de l'exclusion du liberalisme, l'A. montre que la position de Taylor est su…
Avoiding Authoritarianism
Critical social theories look critically at the ways in which particular social arrangements hinder human flourishing, with a view to bringing about social change for the better. In this they are guided by the idea of a good society in which the identified social impediments to human flourishing would once and for all have been removed. The question of how these guiding ideas of the good life can be justified as valid across socio‐cultural contex…
Ethics and politics in the Anthropocene
The most fundamental challenge facing humans today is the imminent destruction of the life-generating and life-sustaining ecosystems that constitute the planet Earth. There is considerable evidence that the strongest contemporary ecological threat is anthropogenic climate change resulting from the increasing warming of the atmosphere, caused by cumulative CO 2 and other emissions as a result of collective human activity over the past few 100 year…
Resurrecting the Rationality of Ideology Critique
Realism and Idealism
Beyond Dignity and Difference
Revisiting Taylor's 1992 account of the politics of recognition, I argue that he is right to discern a strand in contemporary politics that goes beyond the demand for recognition of dignity. Against Taylor I contend that this is best understood as a concern not for recognition of difference but for the value of something that is not universally shared, such as a particular ethical conception, cultural tradition or religious belief and practice. U…
Redeeming Redemption
Critical social theory has an uneasy relationship with utopia. On the one hand, the idea of an alternative, better social order is necessary in order to make sense of its criticisms of a given social context. On the other hand, utopian thinking has to avoid ‘bad utopianism’, defined as lack of connection with the actual historical process, and ‘finalism’, defined as closure of the historical process. Contemporary approaches to critical social the…
Translating truth
The article considers the role of translation in encounters between religious citizens and secular citizens. It follows Habermas in holding that translations rearticulate religious contents in a way that facilitates learning. Since he underplays the complexities of translation, it takes some steps beyond Habermas towards developing a more adequate account. Its main thesis is that the required account of translation must keep sight of the question…
Self-Efficacious Subjects
Alienation is a central concept in Rosa's critical social theory. Rejecting the idea of freedom as self-determination, he introduces instead self-efficacious subjectivity as the antithesis of alienated agency. He thereby loses sight of a component historically central for theories of alienation: a critically reflective relationship by individual subjects to their own life-activity. Without such a relationship, I argue, subjects may be entrapped b…
The Weaknesses of Strong Intersubjectivism
The article deals with Habermas's intersubjective approach to critical social theory, focusing on his intersubjective accounts of truth, justice and democratic legitimacy. Distinguishing between stronger and weaker versions of an intersubjective account, it draws attention to Habermas's recent move from a strong intersubjective, constructivist, interpretation of truth to a weaker, non-constructivist, one. It then looks at his refusal to make a si…
A conversation between Axel Honneth, Amy Allen and Maeve Cooke, Frankfurt am Main, 12 April 2010
This a conversation between Axel Honneth, Amy Allen and Maeve Cooke that took place at Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main on 12 April 2010. The conversation begins with some thoughts on the concept of power, in particular, on Foucault's and Arendt's respective interpretations of this concept. It then moves to consider the complex interrelationships between power and recognition, addressing questions such as the relationship bet…
Between ‘Objectivism’ and ‘Contextualism
One of the principal challenges facing contemporary social philosophy is how to find foundations that are normatively robust yet congruent with its self-understanding. Social philosophy is a critical project within modernity, an interpretative horizon that stresses the influences of history and context on knowledge and experience. However, if it is to engage in intercultural dialogue and normatively robust social critique, social philosophy requi…
Habermas, Autonomy and the Identity of the Self
Decentring critical theory with the help of critical theory
Our present situation of anthropogenic ecological disaster calls on Western philosophy in general, and Frankfurt School critical theory in particular, to reconsider some long-standing, entrenched assumptions concerning what it means to be a human agent and to relate to other agents. In my article, I take up the challenge in dialogue with the idea of critical theory articulated by Max Horkheimer in the 1930s. My overall concern is to contribute to…
Existentially lived truth or communicative reason? Habermas’ critique of Kierkegaard
In Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie (AGP), Habermas introduces Kierkegaard as a counterpoint to Hegel. Kierkegaard rejects Hegel's sublimation of subjectivity into ever-higher stages of knowledge, culminating in the absolute ego and a corresponding absolute knowledge, and asserts instead the importance of existentially lived truth (Habermas, 2019). Like Hegel, he conceives of reason as finite, operating within history, but unlike Hegel, attri…
Civil obedience and disobedience
This article offers a general framework for thinking about civil disobedience as transformative political action. Positing authority as the mode of power corresponding to obedience, and authority and freedom as internally related, it proposes a model of freedom and political authority as a basis for this framework. The framework is sufficiently general to allow for context-dependent variations – for example, as to whether publicity or non-violenc…
Are ethical conflicts irreconcilable
The discussion starts with the fact of ethical disagreement in contemporary liberal democracies. In responding to the question of whether such conflicts are reconcilable, it proposes a normative model of deliberative democracy that seeks to avoid the privatization of ethical concerns. It is argued that many contemporary models of democracy privatize ethical matters either because of a view that ethical conflicts are fundamentally irreconcilable o…
Reenvisioning Freedom
I address the question of human agency from the perspective of critical social theory. Critical social theories seek to change social reality for the better in an ethical-political sense based on a critique of what is wrong with the existing one. Furthermore, they offer a perspective on changing social reality for the better that is attentive to historical, social, and geopolitical contexts. I start from the premise that the salient context today…
Changing hearts and minds
Lafont argues for a participatory version of deliberative democracy that shares key features with other contemporary approaches, while departing from them in decisive ways. It is based on the Rousseauian–Kantian idea of democratic self-legislation, interpreted as the idea that citizens must be able to see themselves as the authors of the laws and public policies to which they are subject. She insists that her specification of the ideal of democra…
Higher goods and common goods
Truth in narrative fiction
Narrative fiction has the power to unsettle our deep-seated intuitions and expectations about what it means to live an ethically good life, and the kind of society that best facilitates this. Sometimes its disruptive power is disclosive, leading to an ethically significant shift in perception. I contend that the disruptive and disclosive powers of narrative fiction constitute a potential for ethical knowledge. I construe ethical knowledge as a le…
A space of one’s own
The value of a negatively defined private space is defended as important for the development of personal autonomy. It is argued that negative liberty is problematic when split off from its connection with this ideal. An ethical interpretation of personal autonomy is proposed according to which a private space is one of autonomy’s preconditions. This leads to a conceptualization of privacy that is fruitful in two respects: it permits an account of…
Realizing the post-conventional self
Ibn Khaldun and Language
Equality, Political Order and Ethics
Habermas, Autonomy and the Identity of the Self
Realizing the post-conventional self
Are ethical conflicts irreconcilable
The discussion starts with the fact of ethical disagreement in contemporary liberal democracies. In responding to the question of whether such conflicts are reconcilable, it proposes a normative model of deliberative democracy that seeks to avoid the privatization of ethical concerns. It is argued that many contemporary models of democracy privatize ethical matters either because of a view that ethical conflicts are fundamentally irreconcilable o…
Authenticity and Autonomy
Etude de la politique de la reconnaissance de l'identite specifique, developpee par C. Taylor a partir d'un lien entre la politique de la difference et l'ideal de l'authenticite, et la reponse apportee par J. Habermas dans le cadre de sa conception de l'etat constitutionnel, fondee sur la distinction entre la moralite et l'ethique. Soulevant le probleme de l'inevitabilite de l'exclusion du liberalisme, l'A. montre que la position de Taylor est su…
A space of one’s own
The value of a negatively defined private space is defended as important for the development of personal autonomy. It is argued that negative liberty is problematic when split off from its connection with this ideal. An ethical interpretation of personal autonomy is proposed according to which a private space is one of autonomy’s preconditions. This leads to a conceptualization of privacy that is fruitful in two respects: it permits an account of…
Between ‘Objectivism’ and ‘Contextualism
One of the principal challenges facing contemporary social philosophy is how to find foundations that are normatively robust yet congruent with its self-understanding. Social philosophy is a critical project within modernity, an interpretative horizon that stresses the influences of history and context on knowledge and experience. However, if it is to engage in intercultural dialogue and normatively robust social critique, social philosophy requi…
Five Arguments for Deliberative Democracy
Five arguments in favour of deliberative democracy are considered. These focus on its educative power, on its community-generating power, on the fairness of the procedure of public deliberation, on the epistemic quality of its outcomes and on the congruence of the deliberative democratic ideal ‘with whom we are’. The first four arguments are shown to be inadequate. The fifth argument, it is claimed, not only provides the most convincing defence o…
The Weaknesses of Strong Intersubjectivism
The article deals with Habermas's intersubjective approach to critical social theory, focusing on his intersubjective accounts of truth, justice and democratic legitimacy. Distinguishing between stronger and weaker versions of an intersubjective account, it draws attention to Habermas's recent move from a strong intersubjective, constructivist, interpretation of truth to a weaker, non-constructivist, one. It then looks at his refusal to make a si…
Redeeming Redemption
Critical social theory has an uneasy relationship with utopia. On the one hand, the idea of an alternative, better social order is necessary in order to make sense of its criticisms of a given social context. On the other hand, utopian thinking has to avoid ‘bad utopianism’, defined as lack of connection with the actual historical process, and ‘finalism’, defined as closure of the historical process. Contemporary approaches to critical social the…
Avoiding Authoritarianism
Critical social theories look critically at the ways in which particular social arrangements hinder human flourishing, with a view to bringing about social change for the better. In this they are guided by the idea of a good society in which the identified social impediments to human flourishing would once and for all have been removed. The question of how these guiding ideas of the good life can be justified as valid across socio‐cultural contex…
Re-Presenting the Good Society
A proposal for negotiating the tension between an anti-authoritarian impulse and a guiding idea of context-transcending validity in critical social theory. Contemporary critical social theories face the question of how to justify the ideas of the good society that guide their critical analyses. Traditionally, these more or less determinate ideas of the good society were held to be independent of their specific sociocultural context and historical…
The Ethics of Post‐Holocaust Art
The article deals with ethical questions relating to artistic responses to catastrophe. Its starting point is James E. Young's thesis that post‐Holocaust art must renounce the traditional redemptory promises of art. Against this, drawing on the work of Theodor W. Adorno, it makes the case for art's redemptory dimension. Whereas Young and Adorno disagree with regard to the idea of redemption, they agree in their approval of a certain kind of negat…
Resurrecting the Rationality of Ideology Critique
A Secular State for a Postsecular Society? Postmetaphysical Political Theory and the Place of Religion
The Point of Discourse
Beyond Dignity and Difference
Revisiting Taylor's 1992 account of the politics of recognition, I argue that he is right to discern a strand in contemporary politics that goes beyond the demand for recognition of dignity. Against Taylor I contend that this is best understood as a concern not for recognition of difference but for the value of something that is not universally shared, such as a particular ethical conception, cultural tradition or religious belief and practice. U…
Privatization or pluralization
In a widely publicized lecture in 2008, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, expressed his concern that the conception of law and democratic citizenship prevailing in England may lead to ghettoization. The problem, in his view, is that the bulk of the convictions and commitments that define a given citizen’s identity are seen as a matter of individual choice and relegated to the private realm. In diagnosing this problem, Williams tacitly…
A conversation between Axel Honneth, Amy Allen and Maeve Cooke, Frankfurt am Main, 12 April 2010
This a conversation between Axel Honneth, Amy Allen and Maeve Cooke that took place at Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main on 12 April 2010. The conversation begins with some thoughts on the concept of power, in particular, on Foucault's and Arendt's respective interpretations of this concept. It then moves to consider the complex interrelationships between power and recognition, addressing questions such as the relationship bet…
Power and critical theory
Translating truth
The article considers the role of translation in encounters between religious citizens and secular citizens. It follows Habermas in holding that translations rearticulate religious contents in a way that facilitates learning. Since he underplays the complexities of translation, it takes some steps beyond Habermas towards developing a more adequate account. Its main thesis is that the required account of translation must keep sight of the question…
Cogent Science in Context
Realism and Idealism
The Theory of Communicative Action After Three Decades
Sociology (38 obras) · Philosophy (33 obras) · Political science (31 obras) · Philosophy (30 obras) · Epistemology (28 obras) · Law (28 obras) · Law (24 obras) · Politics (22 obras) · Critical Theory and Philosophy (21 obras) · Political Philosophy and Ethics (15 obras)