Fabian Freyenhagen
Biographic Data
| ID | 4126215 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Fabian Freyenhagen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Fabian |
| FAMILY NAME | Freyenhagen |
| SIGNATURE | FREYENHAGEN F |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Essex |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2268-3565 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 44 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 13 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
“A Minimum of Domination”—The Overt Normative Orientation of Foucault's Work
Answering the charge of ‘crypto‐normativity’ that has long overshadowed Michel Foucault's work, I argue that this work is animated by an overt normative orientation to keep domination to a minimum. This orientation operates both at the level of content and form. It tends to be overlooked or dismissed because critics have certain blinders on about what it is to do philosophy and social critique—or so I suggest. I clarify the important distinction …
Enlightening
The content of Kant’s Enlightenment text has received much critical reception, but the very stance Kant takes as its author has been largely ignored. Similarly, there has been much critical discussion of Horkheimer and Adorno’s “Dialectic of Enlightenment” in terms of the theses they (purportedly) endorse, while their authorial voice has mostly received either no attention or been criticised as problematically rhetorical. In this paper, I take a …
New forms of self and psychic suffering today and their implications for psychoanalysis
Acting Irrespective of Hope
Must we ascribe hope for better times to those who (take themselves to) act morally? Kant and later theorists in the Frankfurt School tradition thought we must. In this article, I disclose that it is possible – and ethical – to refrain from ascribing hope in all such cases. I draw on two key examples of acting irrespective of hope: one from a recent political context and one from the life of Jean Améry. I also suggest that, once we see that it is…
Removing Compliance
This paper probes the format and underlying assumptions of insight conceptualizations and assessment procedures in psychiatry. It does so with reference to the often-neglected perspective of the assessed person. It delineates what the mental steps involved in an insight assessment are for the assessed person, and how they become affected by the context and dynamics of the clinical setting. The paper examines how expectations of compliance in insi…
Honneth on Social Pathologies
Over the last two decades, Axel Honneth has written extensively on the notion of social pathology. He has presented it as a distinctive critical resource of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, in which tradition he places his own work; and as an alternative to the mainstream liberal approaches in political philosophy. In this paper, I review the developments in Honneth's writing about this notion and offer an immanent critique, with a particular fo…
Adorno’s politics
Theodor W. Adorno inspired much of Germany’s 1960s student movement, but he came increasingly into conflict with this movement about the practical implications of his critical theory. Others – including his friend and colleague Herbert Marcuse – also accused Adorno of a quietism that is politically objectionable and in contradiction with his own theory. In this article, I reconstruct, and partially defend, Adorno’s views on theory and (political)…
Adorno's Practical Philosophy
Adorno notoriously asserted that there is no 'right' life in our current social world. This assertion has contributed to the widespread perception that his philosophy has no practical import or coherent ethics, and he is often accused of being too negative. Fabian Freyenhagen reconstructs and defends Adorno's practical philosophy in response to these charges. He argues that Adorno's deep pessimism about the contemporary social world is coupled wi…
Hidden substance
Mental capacity and autonomy are often understood to be normatively neutral – the only values or other norms they may presuppose are those the assessed person does or would accept. We show how mental disorder threatens normatively neutral accounts of autonomy. These accounts produce false positives, particularly in the case of disorders (such as depression, anorexia nervosa and schizophrenia) that affect evaluative abilities. Two normatively neut…
Habermas and Rawls
Habermas and Rawls are two heavyweights of social and political philosophy, and they are undoubtedly the two most written about (and widely read) authors in this field. However, there has not been much informed and interesting work on the points of intersection between their projects, partly because their work comes from different traditions: roughly the European tradition of social and political theory and the Anglo-American analytic tradition o…
Adorno's Ethics Without the Ineffable
I. Introduction There is a perennial problem affecting Adorno's philosophy: it seems to lack the resources to account for the normativity it contains. In an influential article, James Gordon Finlayson has analyzed this problem and offered an intriguing solution to it.1 According to Finlayson, Adorno subscribes to a normative ethics, but this commitment is in tension with his view that we cannot know the good or any positive values (in short, with…
Empty, Useless, and Dangerous? Recent Kantian Replies to the Empty Formalism Objection
Like two heavyweight boxers exchanging punches, but neither landing the knock-out blow, Kantians and Hegelians seem to be in a stand-off on what in contemporary parlance is known as the Empty Formalism Objection. Kant's ethics is charged with being merely formal and thereby failing to provide the kind of specific guidance that any defensible ethical system should have the resources to provide. Hegel is often credited with having formulated this o…
Taking reasonable pluralism seriously
The later Rawls attempts to offer a non-comprehensive, but nonetheless moral justification in political philosophy. Many critics of political liberalism doubt that this is successful, but Rawlsians often complain that such criticisms rely on the unwarranted assumption that one cannot offer a moral justification other than by taking a philosophically comprehensive route. In this article, I internally criticize the justification strategy employed b…
Reasoning Takes Time
Consider the following objection of Bennett to Kant: The least swallowable part of Kant's whole theory of freedom is the claim that the causality of freedom is not in time. This follows from Kant's doctrine that time is an appearance, and anyway the theory of freedom needs it: it is because the noumenal cause of an event is not in time, and thus is not itself an event, that it escapes the causality of nature. Kant is unembarrassed: ‘Inasmuch as i…
Honneth on Social Pathologies
Over the last two decades, Axel Honneth has written extensively on the notion of social pathology. He has presented it as a distinctive critical resource of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, in which tradition he places his own work; and as an alternative to the mainstream liberal approaches in political philosophy. In this paper, I review the developments in Honneth's writing about this notion and offer an immanent critique, with a particular fo…
Adorno’s politics
Theodor W. Adorno inspired much of Germany’s 1960s student movement, but he came increasingly into conflict with this movement about the practical implications of his critical theory. Others – including his friend and colleague Herbert Marcuse – also accused Adorno of a quietism that is politically objectionable and in contradiction with his own theory. In this article, I reconstruct, and partially defend, Adorno’s views on theory and (political)…
Taking reasonable pluralism seriously
The later Rawls attempts to offer a non-comprehensive, but nonetheless moral justification in political philosophy. Many critics of political liberalism doubt that this is successful, but Rawlsians often complain that such criticisms rely on the unwarranted assumption that one cannot offer a moral justification other than by taking a philosophically comprehensive route. In this article, I internally criticize the justification strategy employed b…
Empty, Useless, and Dangerous? Recent Kantian Replies to the Empty Formalism Objection
Like two heavyweight boxers exchanging punches, but neither landing the knock-out blow, Kantians and Hegelians seem to be in a stand-off on what in contemporary parlance is known as the Empty Formalism Objection. Kant's ethics is charged with being merely formal and thereby failing to provide the kind of specific guidance that any defensible ethical system should have the resources to provide. Hegel is often credited with having formulated this o…
Adorno's Ethics Without the Ineffable
I. Introduction There is a perennial problem affecting Adorno's philosophy: it seems to lack the resources to account for the normativity it contains. In an influential article, James Gordon Finlayson has analyzed this problem and offered an intriguing solution to it.1 According to Finlayson, Adorno subscribes to a normative ethics, but this commitment is in tension with his view that we cannot know the good or any positive values (in short, with…
Reasoning Takes Time
Consider the following objection of Bennett to Kant: The least swallowable part of Kant's whole theory of freedom is the claim that the causality of freedom is not in time. This follows from Kant's doctrine that time is an appearance, and anyway the theory of freedom needs it: it is because the noumenal cause of an event is not in time, and thus is not itself an event, that it escapes the causality of nature. Kant is unembarrassed: ‘Inasmuch as i…
Adorno's Ethics Without the Ineffable
I. Introduction There is a perennial problem affecting Adorno's philosophy: it seems to lack the resources to account for the normativity it contains. In an influential article, James Gordon Finlayson has analyzed this problem and offered an intriguing solution to it.1 According to Finlayson, Adorno subscribes to a normative ethics, but this commitment is in tension with his view that we cannot know the good or any positive values (in short, with…
Empty, Useless, and Dangerous? Recent Kantian Replies to the Empty Formalism Objection
Like two heavyweight boxers exchanging punches, but neither landing the knock-out blow, Kantians and Hegelians seem to be in a stand-off on what in contemporary parlance is known as the Empty Formalism Objection. Kant's ethics is charged with being merely formal and thereby failing to provide the kind of specific guidance that any defensible ethical system should have the resources to provide. Hegel is often credited with having formulated this o…
Taking reasonable pluralism seriously
The later Rawls attempts to offer a non-comprehensive, but nonetheless moral justification in political philosophy. Many critics of political liberalism doubt that this is successful, but Rawlsians often complain that such criticisms rely on the unwarranted assumption that one cannot offer a moral justification other than by taking a philosophically comprehensive route. In this article, I internally criticize the justification strategy employed b…
Habermas and Rawls
Habermas and Rawls are two heavyweights of social and political philosophy, and they are undoubtedly the two most written about (and widely read) authors in this field. However, there has not been much informed and interesting work on the points of intersection between their projects, partly because their work comes from different traditions: roughly the European tradition of social and political theory and the Anglo-American analytic tradition o…
Adorno's Practical Philosophy
Adorno notoriously asserted that there is no 'right' life in our current social world. This assertion has contributed to the widespread perception that his philosophy has no practical import or coherent ethics, and he is often accused of being too negative. Fabian Freyenhagen reconstructs and defends Adorno's practical philosophy in response to these charges. He argues that Adorno's deep pessimism about the contemporary social world is coupled wi…
Hidden substance
Mental capacity and autonomy are often understood to be normatively neutral – the only values or other norms they may presuppose are those the assessed person does or would accept. We show how mental disorder threatens normatively neutral accounts of autonomy. These accounts produce false positives, particularly in the case of disorders (such as depression, anorexia nervosa and schizophrenia) that affect evaluative abilities. Two normatively neut…
Adorno’s politics
Theodor W. Adorno inspired much of Germany’s 1960s student movement, but he came increasingly into conflict with this movement about the practical implications of his critical theory. Others – including his friend and colleague Herbert Marcuse – also accused Adorno of a quietism that is politically objectionable and in contradiction with his own theory. In this article, I reconstruct, and partially defend, Adorno’s views on theory and (political)…
Honneth on Social Pathologies
Over the last two decades, Axel Honneth has written extensively on the notion of social pathology. He has presented it as a distinctive critical resource of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, in which tradition he places his own work; and as an alternative to the mainstream liberal approaches in political philosophy. In this paper, I review the developments in Honneth's writing about this notion and offer an immanent critique, with a particular fo…
Acting Irrespective of Hope
Must we ascribe hope for better times to those who (take themselves to) act morally? Kant and later theorists in the Frankfurt School tradition thought we must. In this article, I disclose that it is possible – and ethical – to refrain from ascribing hope in all such cases. I draw on two key examples of acting irrespective of hope: one from a recent political context and one from the life of Jean Améry. I also suggest that, once we see that it is…
Removing Compliance
This paper probes the format and underlying assumptions of insight conceptualizations and assessment procedures in psychiatry. It does so with reference to the often-neglected perspective of the assessed person. It delineates what the mental steps involved in an insight assessment are for the assessed person, and how they become affected by the context and dynamics of the clinical setting. The paper examines how expectations of compliance in insi…
New forms of self and psychic suffering today and their implications for psychoanalysis
“A Minimum of Domination”—The Overt Normative Orientation of Foucault's Work
Answering the charge of ‘crypto‐normativity’ that has long overshadowed Michel Foucault's work, I argue that this work is animated by an overt normative orientation to keep domination to a minimum. This orientation operates both at the level of content and form. It tends to be overlooked or dismissed because critics have certain blinders on about what it is to do philosophy and social critique—or so I suggest. I clarify the important distinction …
Enlightening
The content of Kant’s Enlightenment text has received much critical reception, but the very stance Kant takes as its author has been largely ignored. Similarly, there has been much critical discussion of Horkheimer and Adorno’s “Dialectic of Enlightenment” in terms of the theses they (purportedly) endorse, while their authorial voice has mostly received either no attention or been criticised as problematically rhetorical. In this paper, I take a …
Epistemology (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Critical Theory and Philosophy (7 works) · Political science (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Law (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Politics (5 works) · Philosophical Ethics and Theory (4 works)