Victoria LawsonIn personPracticing Val Plumwood’s Philosophy in the Indoor Spider EncounterWhen you experience physical bodily sensations of fear and disgust, beyond an immediate jump scare, of a spider inside your home, you experience a reaction informed by the separation, both conceptually and physically, of nature and culture in Western society. This separation, according to Val Plumwood, is not just a separation of distinct concepts, of a natural world and a human one, but a chasmic split between radically disparate and homogenised concepts. This informs her account of Western culture as a hegemonic centre – a dominant group forming an exclusive centre of moral and social reasoning – hyper-separating itself from nonhuman animals and the environment. This worldview requires individual maintenance, where experiences that resist conceptual separation elicit not just a physiological, but a conceptual reaction against the mixing of the boundary between nature and culture. I argue that spiders inside the cultural space of the home are an example of this boundary mixing, one in which you can choose to confront your own conceptual belief. This is important, as Plumwood argues the nature/culture dualism has given a conceptual basis for environmental destruction, a destruction which risks the ongoing existence of humans everywhere.
Georg Lukács’ The Destruction of Reason and Max Horkheimer’s The End of Reason both center on the theme of reason, as their titles indicated. However, there is a profound divergence in their intellectual foundations and teleological outlooks. This study examines these divergences through two core lenses: the philosophers’ contrasting attitudes toward Stalinism and their differing conceptions of reason’s prospects. As a consequence, their views on praxis, individuality, and the role of collective vs. individual struggle diverge: Lukacs prioritizes material transformation and collective action, while Horkheimer emphasizes critical reflection and the preservation of individual autonomy. Despite both being considered as foundational figures of Western Marxism, their disagreements reflect deeper tensions within Marxist thought regarding emancipation, rationality, and the relationship between theory and political practice. This paper argues that these differences stem not from contradictory commitments to Marxism, but from distinct responses to 20th-century political realities (e.g., fascism, Stalinist governance) and divergent interpretations of Marxism’s core tenets, particularly regarding the nature of reason and the path to human emancipation.
This paper investigates a fundamental aporia within the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas: how can ethical responsibility endure when infinite responsibility exceeds the finite subject’s capacity to fulfill it? Levinas grounds subjectivity in an asymmetrical responsibility for the Other that precedes freedom, reciprocity, and self-possession. Yet such radical responsibility threatens the subject with ethical exhaustion, shame, and retreat into ontological self-enclosure. Against interpretations that soften Levinasian asymmetry through reciprocity or mutual recognition, this paper argues that asymmetry remains irreducible. At the same time, however, asymmetrical responsibility generates what I call “hopeful asymmetry”: a fragile ethical hope directed toward the Other. Through an analysis of shame, substitution, and diachrony in Levinas’s major works, I argue that this hope functions as the transcendental condition that prevents ethical responsibility from collapsing into nihilistic absurdity. Hope does not resolve impossibility; rather, it suspends impossibility so that ethical responsiveness may continue despite constitutive inadequacy. Ultimately, the paper proposes a new interpretation of Levinasian ethics in which ethical shame becomes bearable only through the irreducible hope awakened by asymmetrical responsibility itself.
Jaeseok Choi is a Jesuit priest and a first-year M.A. student in the Department of Philosophy at Boston College. He received his B.S. in Civil Engineering and his M.S. in Urban Planning from Seoul National University in South Korea. He also holds an M.A. in Philosophy and an M.Div... Read More →
Lacanian critical theory provides invaluable resources for social critique, but must always do so by negotiating between its account of “constitutive” and “constituted” alienation – between the unavoidable forms of alienation involved in entering into socio-linguistic life, and the historical forms of alienation which arise due to particular social conditions. Theorising this connection remains necessary for a historically informed social critique which is nevertheless able to recognise the unavoidable structural forms of alienation of any such human society. Here, Robert Pippin’s Hegelian theorisation of alienation as a failure of self-reflexive social agency provides an important normative framework. Critique thus relies upon a particular image of “human nature”. The “natural” in “human nature”, however, cannot be separated from its emergence from “nature as such, against Pippin’s insistence on the strict separation between nature and spirit. Here, the role of “habit” in G.W.F. Hegel’s account of the transition from “nature” to “spirit” (or “second nature”) thus allows for critique to be grounded in the conditions of life itself. Drawing on findings from philosophical anthropology, and building upon what theorists such as Slavoj Žižek and Catherine Malabou identify as its transformative core, far from being mere unconscious repetition, habit rather represents a heuristic for critical social analysis attendant to the historical and transhistorical forms of social life, one cognisant to the relationship between constitutive and constituted alienation.
In her book, Illness, Havi Carel writes of her own experience, “I quickly learned that when doctors ask ‘How are you?’ they mean ‘How is your body?’” (Illness 48). While this mismatch between the use of ‘you’ here might be excused by most as a mundane confusion of language, this dual role of the self, as both bodily and social, revealed through the doctor/patient relationship, speaks to the heart of a long-lasting intellectual debate within ‘disability studies theory’ regarding how we conceptualise what it means to be disabled. In this paper, I critically evaluate this relationship and look to what the emerging field of ‘disability phenomenology’ can contribute here. In particular, I develop an argument for the reinterpretation and use of Jean-Paul Sartre’s chapter on ‘The Body’ in Being and Nothingness for the field of disability studies. Arguing against Sarah Richmond’s criticisms of his view in her article, “Sartre and the Doctors,” I propose that Sartre provides a foundation for an effective philosophy of disability, explaining the dual role of the body for the disabled subject while being sensitive to their individual conception of selfhood.
Since the 1980s, and especially into the 1990s, the phrase “always already” came to be used well beyond its specialised context in Continental Philosophy, becoming ubiquitous in a range of academic disciplines within the general orbit of poststructuralism, and loosely in connection with the legacy of Heidegger’s Being and Time. In this paper, I want to do three things: (i) trace the conceptual background of the “always already” (immer schon) formulation in Kantian and post-Kantian thought, especially via the phenomenology of Hegel through to Husserl and Heidegger, as well as touching on the phrase’s implicit theological overtones; (ii) consider the terms ‘always’ and ‘already’ very literally as they are used in ordinary language in English in order to then think more about what it means for them to be put together (and how this in turn helps us consider the phrase’s distinct usage in the Phenomenological tradition); and (iii) to argue for the implications of thinking about the ‘always already’ formulation in such a way for engaging both with Indigenous conceptions of temporality and place, and with thephenomenology of Deep Time.
In this paper we propose a critical reading of Robert Brandom’s reading, in A Spirit of Trust, of the final eleven paragraphs of the Spirit chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, especially the crucial paragraph 665 – the discussion of the Kammerdiener, or “moral valet”. We argue that Brandom significantly understates the role that desire plays in Hegel’s account of the institution of normativity. This interpretive disagreement has implications for Brandom’s broader philosophical project, including his critical treatment of the “genealogical” tradition, and his rejection of the “instrumental pragmatist” strand in classical U.S. pragmatism. On our preferred interpretation of the moral valet passage, Hegel’s project in the Phenomenology is closer to both of these post-Hegelian traditions than Brandom’s rational reconstruction acknowledges.
