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| Summary | Critical Theory refers to a form of self-reflexive social critique as well as a particular tradition associated with the Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung), a.k.a. the Frankfurt School. Early Frankfurt School theorists combined a Hegelian Marxist social criticism with other emancipatory approaches, such as psychoanalysis and cultural critique, taking a genuinely anti-positivist and interdisciplinary approach. Critical theory was intended to contribute to the “intensification of the struggle with which the theory is connected,” wrote Horkheimer, becoming a material force in the “transformation of society as a whole” (219). Theorists associated with the early Frankfurt School include Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin, while contemporary figures such as Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, Nancy Fraser, and Seyla Benhabib continue the tradition with non-Marxist forms of critique grounded in, for example, communicative reason and social recognition. Today, Critical Theory refers to a broader spectrum of social theorists in poststructuralist, feminist, queer, critical race, disability, and postcolonial theory, such as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, Frantz Fanon, Enrique Dussel, Gayatri Spivak, Giorgio Agamben, Jacque Rancière, and Slavoj Žižek. |
| Key works | Max Horkheimer’s 1937 essay “Traditional and Critical Theory” (in Horkheimer 1972) is a foundational text, outlining the Institute’s interdisciplinary methodology and critique of "traditional" theory. Other important works by early Frankfurt School theorists include Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment; Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia and Negative Dialectics; short works by Walter Benjamin in Illuminations and Reflections, particularly his essays “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and “On Violence”; and Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man and Eros and Civilization. Jürgen Habermas’ two-volume work The Theory of Communicative Action represents a break from the earlier Marxist tendencies of the Institute, laying out a new normative foundation for critique in communicative reason. Axel Honneth, the current director of the Institute for Social Research, has alternatively reconstructed the Hegelian notion of social recognition in his critiques of social injustices and social pathologies in Struggle for Recognition and Freedom’s Right. Seyla Benhabib’s Critique, Norm, and Utopia and Nancy Fraser’s Unruly Practices are also important works in the Frankfurt School tradition. Seminal texts beyond this tradition include, for example, Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, Enrique Dussel’s Ethics of Liberation, Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, and Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer. |
| Introductions | The best scholarly introductions to the Frankfurt School tradition in English are Jay 1996, Held 2013, and Wiggershaus 1994. Jay Bernstein has edited the six-volume collection: The Frankfurt School: Critical Assessment and the publications of the Institute’s journal Zeitscrift für Sozialforschung (1932-1941) are available in a nine-volume set. Notable anthologies on the Frankfurt School and critical theory more generally include Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (eds.), The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner (eds.), Critical Theory and Society, David Rasmussen, The Handbook of Critical Theory, Benhabib, Butler, Cornell, and Fraser, Feminist Contentions; Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell (eds.), Feminism as Critique, William Rehg and James Bohman (eds), Pluralism and the Pragmatic Turn, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, et al. (eds.), Critical Race Theory, Philomena Essed and David Theo Goldberg (eds.), Race Critical Theories, Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds.), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, and two volumes on the “idea of communism”: Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek (eds.),The Idea of Communism, and Slavoj Žižek (ed.), The Idea of Communism, Volume II. |
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Theodor W. Adorno (1,822)
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- Behind the Hype: A Critique of Artificial Reasoning.David Gierscher, Markus Maier & Raphael Ronge - manuscriptLarge Reasoning Models are marketed as systems that ‘think’ before they answer, displaying chains of thought that purport to show their reasoning. Echoing Dreyfus’ Critique of Artificial Reason, this paper critiques this attribution in three steps. First, we trace a genealogy from Leibniz through Turing showing that ‘reasoning,’ understood as formal symbol manipulation, is the founding concept of artificial intelligence – older than the term ‘intelligence’ itself – and supplies the most charitable standard against which such systems can be measured. (...)
- Christina Engelmann, Lena Reichardt, Bea S. Ricke, Sarah Speck, Stephan Voswinkel (Hg.), Im Schatten der Tradition. Eine Geschichte des IfS aus feministischer Perspektive, Berlin (Bertz + Fischer Verlag) 2025. [REVIEW]Lilia Endter - 2026 - Francia-Recensio 2026 (1).
- Philipp Lenhard, Café Marx. Das Institut für Sozialforschung von den Anfängen bis zur Frankfurter Schule, München (C. H. Beck) 2024. [REVIEW]Lilia Endter - 2024 - Francia-Recensio 2024 (4).
- Beyond Punishment, Reward, and Praise: Awareness, Conditioning, and the Structures of Human Control.Mayank Singh - manuscriptThis paper examines punishment, reward, and praise as interconnected mechanisms of social and psychological conditioning rather than as distinct methods of guidance or education. Although commonly regarded as necessary for maintaining order, motivation, and moral development, these practices are argued to operate through different forms of external control: punishment through fear, reward through desire, and praise through approval. From a phenomenological perspective, the study contends that such mechanisms shape behavior by conditioning responses instead of fostering direct understanding. The paper explores (...)
- History's Writing Scene.Pedro Pennycook - forthcoming - Symploke.In this essay, my aim is twofold. On one hand, I take Kant’s political writings seriously by accommodating them amidst his critical works, thus posing a suggestion for (i) how to read the idea that ‘art, once it reaches perfection, once again becomes nature’, as well as how said perfection would entail in humanity’s ultimate moral destiny. On the other hand, I shall argue that an immanent contradiction lies within the vocabulary whereby Kant sketches his philosophy of history. I will (...)Remove from this listExport citationBookmark
- 生成哲学 ——一种非基础主义的结构生成理论.Runlin Cao - 2027 - Dissertation, St Andrews本文提出一种新的哲学框架——生成哲学（Generative Philosophy）。与传统哲学以“世界是什么”为中心的问题意识不同，生成哲学将哲学的基本问题转向“世界如何不断生成”。本文主张，对象、规则、意义与主体都不是先验给定的基础，而是在历史实践与结构生成 过程中不断形成的局部稳定。为了说明这一点，本文提出以“规则不充分决定（Rule Underdetermination）”为底层动力学的生成理论，并将此前发展的三个理论系统统一于同一框架之中：其一，穷尽可能引擎（Exhaustive Possibility Engine）负责穷尽结构空间中的全部可能配置；其二，重铸引擎（Reforging Engine）描述知与行之间持续反馈的元操作机制；其三，“结构占据生成语义理论（GSS–CAO）”则说明意义如何通过历史性的结构占据不断生成与重构。 本文进一步提出一个三层生成模型。第一层是配置场（Configuration Field, CF），它规定有限而稳定的结构可能性；第二层是配置占据场（Configuration Occupation Field, COF），它描述结构位置如何在历史过程中获得不同的语义占据；第三层是动态生成场（DynamicGenerative Field, ΔD），它刻画各种实践机制如何重新组织既有占据，从而推动意义、规则与制度的持续生成。其中，“CAO（Constraint–Action–Opportunity）”只是动态生成场中的一种高张力生成模式， 而非唯一机制；SAR、ARD、RSA、DAR 等排列同样代表不同的生成动力学。 本文的核心论点是：规则不能充分决定实践，而实践不断重塑规则；结构可以保持稳定，而意义始终保持开放。 哲学的任务因此不再是寻找不可动摇的最终基础，而是解释局部稳定如何在不断生成中形成，又如何在新的历史实践中被重新组织。基于这一框架，本文重新理解基础主义、意义、规则、实践与知行关系，并提出一种非基础主义 的哲学图景：世界并不存在一个终完成的秩序，而是在有限结构与开放历史之间持续生成。 生成哲学并不试图建立新的终极基础，也不宣称自身是最后一种哲学。相反，它将自身理解为生成过程中的一种局部稳定，并试图提供一种能够解释哲学自身如何持续生成的理论框架。.
- The Body as Weapon and Threshold: Mishima, Postwar Japan, and the Technological Afterlife of Flesh.Aldo Poblete Varas - manuscriptPolitics thus becomes a moment in the development of intelligence, an intelligence that manifested itself in Mishima from two directions: on the one hand, from the cult of excellence, and on the other, from the complex understanding that from structured experience there can emerge the maximum work, total subtlety. Animality is thus not denied, but accepted in its most noumenal facet, as that which is before and after the human, as that which can open the doors to a different intelligent (...)
- From Development to Revolution: Hume, Kant and the Critical Turn in the Concept of Progress.Giovanni Battista Soda - 2026 - Jus Cogens.The concept of progress constitutes one of the most controversial philosophical legacies of the Enlightenment, especially for the tradition of critical theory. Re¬cently, Jaeggi has vindicated its validity as a thick, normative-descriptive concept and suggested that progress had been developed in these terms in the philosophies of history of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. In the essay, I take up this insight and ask when this became so, tracing the birth of the critical force of the concept of progress in (...)
- Meta-Cognitive Mapping of Scientific Inquiry: A Structural-Constructivist Analysis of the Core Emotion Framework Operators in Empirical Research.Jamel Bulgaria & Chénglán Xǔ - manuscriptThis paper develops a structural constructivist account of scientific reasoning by mapping the ten functional operators of the Core Emotion Framework (CEF) onto a unified meta cognitive lifecycle of empirical inquiry. Drawing on the CEF’s tripartite somatic cognitive architecture—Head, Heart, and Gut centers—the analysis argues that scientific investigation is not a disembodied process of pure calculation, but a dynamically regulated sequence of somatic cognitive transitions. Using textual evidence such as the claim that “scientific inquiry is… guided by a systematic sequence (...)
- 理性的断裂与生活的症状——论洛夫克拉夫特.厚泽 杨 - manuscript摘要：在近二十年的人文学术话语中，洛夫克拉夫特的文学文本日益成为一种理论症候。本文采用阿尔都塞意义上的"症候阅读"方法，结合拉康—齐泽克的精神分析本体论框架，考察洛夫克拉夫特的&q uot;宇宙恐怖"如何暴露了现代理性精神自我确立过程中的内在否定性。文章依次分析了康德式划界的倒置、黑格尔辩证法的失效、存在主义"共存"方案的幻象性质，以及思辨实在论的方 法论困境，揭示上述哲学策略在面对洛夫克拉夫特式"实在界"时的各自限度。在此基础上，文章引入"战间期"的历史语境作为中介，论证"宇宙冷漠"并非 不可改变的本体论事实，而是垄断资本主义时代物化逻辑的症候性表达。最终，文章主张"穿越幻象"的政治维度与"热爱生活"的存在论—伦理学决断构成了对洛夫克拉夫特所提出 之问题的真正回应。.
- Option and Cadence in Balenciaga.Aldo Poblete Varas - manuscriptIf we are to speak of a Humanity 2.0, it will occur within the grammatological regimes of a history liberated from its thundering fatum: war at the core of high culture, a symbol of progress, and the neutralization of retro-machinery. It is the sign of matters echoing the symbol on the table, the acephalous potency of black metal, the infinite river of a horizontal course, all bound together by the new materiality of terminal and automated flows. Total rejection of naïve (...)
- When Self-Care is Not Neoliberal: Insights from Black, Decolonial, and Disability Feminisms.Shivani Radhakrishnan - 2026 - Hypatia.Feminist theorists have critiqued the twenty-first-century turn towards self-care as neoliberal, arguing that personal wellness masks the welfare state’s destruction. I clarify an ambiguity in the argument against self-care’s purported neoliberalism, distinguishing three strands of critique: that self-care is too individual, that self-care is too commercial, and that self-care involves a shift in who is responsible for the reproduction of subjects, from the state to the individual. It is in the Foucauldian critique of self-care as responsibilizing that arguments against self-care’s (...)
- The Depth of the Present and the Question of Ultimate Reality: A Phenomenological Inquiry into Disclosure and the Inexhaustibility of Experience.Mayank Singh - manuscriptThis paper challenges the assumption that reality possesses an ultimate foundation, final truth, or metaphysical endpoint that can be reached through inquiry. Through a phenomenological investigation of lived experience, it argues that consciousness encounters not an ultimate reality but an inexhaustible depth that continuously unfolds through presence. Human beings frequently approach existence through intervention, interpretation, and pursuit, seeking certainty, completion, and final answers. Yet phenomenological reflection reveals that reality discloses itself most clearly when consciousness ceases chasing conclusions and becomes attentive (...)
- Power, reasons and ideology: On the epistemology and metaphysics of noumenal power.Matteo Bianchin - 2026 - In Anastasia Marinopoulou, Critical theory and the political. Manchester: Manchester University Press. pp. 173-191.Forst’s theory of noumenal power is designed to model power relations as driven by reasons. In this chapter, I maintain that it fares well with both agential and structural powers, yet contend that adjustments are needed to meet two demands it places on critical theory. First, a demand for diagnosing domination. Forst advances a conception of domination as arbitrary power that answers this demand, yet it is unclear how noumenal power can accommodate arbitrariness. I suggest that introducing a distinction between (...)Find it on Amazon.com (collection)Remove from this list Direct download (2 more)Export citationBookmark
- Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions.Fredric Jameson - 2005 - London and New York: Verso.In an age of globalization characterized by the dizzying technologies of the First World, and the social disintegration of the Third, is the concept of utopia still meaningful? Archaeologies of the Future, Jameson’s most substantial work since Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, investigates the development of this form since Thomas More, and interrogates the functions of utopian thinking in a post-Communist age. The relationship between utopia and science fiction is explored through the representations of otherness (alien life (...)
- Seeing Beyond Social Structures: A Phenomenological Inquiry into Conditioning, Identity, and the Illusion of Institutional Reality.Mayank Singh - manuscriptHuman civilization is organized through numerous social structures, including capitalism, religion, patriarchy, constitutional democracy, nationalism, class systems, and other institutional frameworks. While these structures are often treated as objective realities, this paper argues that they are fundamentally products of collective thought and psychological conditioning. Through a phenomenological investigation, it is proposed that human beings rarely encounter these structures through direct perception. Instead, they experience them through identification, attachment, and inherited patterns of thought. -/- The paper distinguishes between conceptual understanding and (...)
- Existence, Economic Conditioning, and the Responsibility of Reproduction: A Phenomenological and Ethical Inquiry.Mayank Singh - manuscriptThis paper examines the relationship between existence, economic conditioning, and reproductive responsibility. It argues that the obligation to earn, compete, produce, and survive within economic systems is not an intrinsic feature of existence itself but a consequence of historically developed social arrangements. Human beings enter a world whose economic, political, cultural, and institutional structures predate their birth and were not chosen by them. Consequently, many burdens commonly regarded as personal responsibilities originate in inherited systems rather than in existence itself. The (...)
- Survival Before Conditioning: A Phenomenological Inquiry into Unconditioned Existence, Reproduction, and Relational Awareness.Mayank Singh - manuscriptHuman civilization largely confuses survival with psychological conditioning. From childhood onward, individuals are educated not merely to survive biologically, but to conform psychologically to systems of identity, authority, morality, competition, nationalism, religion, reproduction, and symbolic continuity. This paper phenomenologically investigates the distinction between direct survival and conditioned existence. It argues that survival in its primordial structure is immediate, relational, practical, reproductive, and perceptual, whereas conditioning emerges through accumulated psychological constructions imposed upon consciousness through thought, memory, fear, comparison, and social continuity. (...)
- Solidarity in Anti-GBV Praxis: Positing a Schelerian/ Frommian Conception of Solidarity Against GBV.Kayleigh Timmer - 2026 - Symposion: Theoretical and Applied Inquiries in Philosophy and Social Sciences 13 (1):117-138.This paper posits a new approach to solidarity against GBV, drawing from phenomenology and critical theory. Pumla Dineo Gqola proposes that directly interfering in acts of gender-based violence (GBV) is necessary to stem the tide of GBV. I argue that a particular type of solidarity is needed for this mode of praxis, termed direct interference, to be effective. This type of solidarity can be found in the works of phenomenologist Max Scheler and critical theorist Erich Fromm, who both argue that (...)
- From Civilization to Consciousness: A Macro-Micro Inquiry into Conditioning, Identity, and Human Fragmentation.Mayank Singh - manuscriptModern civilization frequently interprets its crises as political instability, technological misuse, economic inequality, social conflict, or relational breakdown. Yet beneath these visible manifestations may exist a deeper continuity operating across all dimensions of human life: psychological conditioning. This article presents a macro–micro phenomenological inquiry into how the same underlying movement of thought, identification, fear, and continuity expresses itself collectively as civilization and individually as identity, attachment, and psychological conflict. -/- Rather than treating politics, technology, democracy, relationships, anthropocentrism, and consciousness as (...)
- The Cage Called Freedom: The Illusion of Democracy, Authority, and Psychological Conditioning.Mayank Singh - manuscriptModern civilization repeatedly defines itself through the language of freedom, democracy, individuality, constitutional rights, and human progress. Yet beneath these external structures there may exist a deeper continuity of psychological conditioning inherited across generations. This paper presents a comprehensive philosophical and phenomenological inquiry into the relationship between civilization, authority, democracy, conditioning, identity, and the human experience of freedom. -/- The study argues that humanity has lived for thousands of years under systems of centralized authority including monarchy, dictatorship, tribal hierarchy, religious (...)
- Who Must Prove Their Right to Exist? Existential Interrogation, Survival Permission, and the Justification of Power.Suji Choi - manuscriptThis paper analyzes modern power not only in terms of what it prohibits, but in terms of what it repeatedly requires human beings to prove. To this end, it proposes the concept of existential interrogation. Existential interrogation refers to a form of power that emerges when not merely a specific action or role, but one’s survival, recognition, speech, and possibility of failure as a whole are subordinated to repetitive, asymmetrical, and humiliating conditions. This paper builds on existing discussions of the (...)
- Apokalypse-Blindheit Reread: Toward an Acceleration that Has Earned its Name.Shuaizhi Cheng - manuscriptGünther Anders's 1956 Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (vol. 1) is read almost everywhere as a closing diagnosis: human beings can make more than they can imagine and imagine more than they can feel, and that asymmetry, the Stufenbau, is structural and unbridgeable. I argue that the 1956 text carries two strata its reception has not reconciled. Alongside the structural Stufenbau there is a bridging stratum, present in Anders's chapter on the plasticity of feeling and the cultivation of moral imagination, and (...)
- Equality, Respect, Individuality, and Social Existence: An Existential Inquiry into Human Relationship.Mayank Singh - manuscriptHuman civilization has continuously attempted to construct social order through morality, ideology, law, religion, politics, and systems of authority. Yet despite centuries of intellectual, spiritual, and political development, humanity remains psychologically fragmented. Conflict, loneliness, comparison, domination, attachment, and fear continue to shape human relationships. This paper investigates the existential roots of social disorder by examining the nature of attachment, isolation, individuality, equality, respect, and collective conditioning. -/- The paper argues that human beings have learned how to organize society structurally but (...)
- The Psychological Reflection of Consciousness: Identity, Thought, and the Dissolution of the “I”.Mayank Singh - manuscriptThis paper explores the proposition that the psychological “I” is not an independent entity but a reflective construct generated through consciousness identifying with thought, memory, sensation, and social conditioning. Technology, politics, violence, ideology, and modern systems of civilization are approached not as isolated crises, but as materialized projections of an unobserved psychological process. The central argument is that humanity’s deepest conflict emerges from the inability to observe thought before identification occurs. Once thought is mistaken for reality, consciousness fragments into competing (...)
- Loneliness, Desire for Union, and the Psychological Loop of Relationship.Mayank Singh - manuscriptThis paper investigates the repetitive psychological structure underlying human relationship through the existential cycle: -/- loneliness → desire for union → temporary escape → return of thought → separation → loneliness. -/- It argues that much of what humanity calls love, intimacy, romance, emotional attachment, and sexual relationship emerges from an inward movement seeking escape from existential loneliness. Human beings attempt to dissolve psychological isolation through emotional connection, sexual union, symbolic attachment, and dependency upon another person. Yet because this movement (...)
- The Womb, Shame, and the Continuity of Being: Toward an Existential Critique of Sexual Morality.Mayank Singh - manuscriptThe vagina occupies a paradoxical position within human civilization. Biologically, it is among the primary passages through which life emerges into the world; existentially, it signifies continuity, birth, vulnerability, intimacy, and embodiment. Yet across religious, political, and cultural structures, it has repeatedly been transformed into an object of taboo, shame, moral anxiety, possession, and metaphysical fear. This paper investigates the contradiction between the natural facticity of the body and the symbolic violence imposed upon it through civilization. -/- Drawing from existential (...)
- Partisan Genealogy: Foucault's Critique of Penal Power.Eli B. Lichtenstein - forthcoming - State University of New York Press.Presents a partisan model of genealogy by reinterpreting Foucault in the context of anti-prison struggles and his engagement with Marxism.
- Post-Scriptum sobre as Sociedades de Controlo: Do Mundo Moderno ao Pós-Moderno.Tomás Correia - 2024 - Revista Minerva Universitária.
- O Método Foucaultiano e o seu Papel na Construção da Verdade.Tomás Correia - 2025 - Political Observatory.A abordagem foucaultiana à epistemologia rejeita verdades absolutas e enfatiza a construção contingente do saber. Diferente do estruturalismo clássico, que encara fenómenos como subordinados a estruturas fixas, Foucault propôs uma abordagem genealógica para analisar discursos, práticas e relações de poder. O conhecimento não é neutro, mas moldado por mecanismos de poder que influenciam a sua legitimidade. A genealogia foucaultiana, inspirada nas obras de Nietzsche, procura desvendar a forma como diferentes narrativas históricas são construídas e como sustentam verdades socioculturalmente aceites. Nesse (...)
- (Bio)Politics & (Bio)Power: Reconfiguring Michel Foucault’s “Dispositifs” for Contemporary Research.Tomás Correia - 2025 - Brolly. Journal of Social Sciences 6 (3):9-25.The term “biopolitics”exemplifies the fluidity of scientific concepts when granted epistemic autonomy, adapting to diverse academic and public discourses. It has been widely—often imprecisely—employed across disciplines such as philosophy, political science, sociology, history, medicine, and gender studies, leading to a fragmented and highly contested conceptual landscape. This paper seeks to recover Michel Foucault’s original articulation of biopolitics, focusing on his dispersed and indirect treatment of the term. Foucault’s work serves as the foundation for applying the prefix “bio”to notions of politics (...)
- The Continuity of Conditioning and the Fear of Independent Thought.Mayank Singh - manuscriptHuman civilization presents itself as progressive, intelligent, and evolving, yet beneath its technological and institutional advancement there may exist a deeper psychological continuity rooted in conditioning. This paper examines how human consciousness is shaped through inherited systems of belief, authority, fear, comparison, imitation, and psychological dependence. It argues that much of human existence operates through repetition rather than direct perception, resulting in a civilization that reproduces conditioned patterns across generations. -/- Moving beyond social criticism, this inquiry approaches conditioning existentially. It (...)
- The System You Escape Still Lives Inside You: Fear, Conditioning, and Why Control Survives After Freedom.Vladisav Jovanovic - manuscriptThis paper examines freedom, control, conditioning, obedience, rebellion, and internalized authority through the Structural Intelligence framework. Its central claim is that leaving a controlling family, institution, religion, workplace, or social environment does not by itself produce freedom, because the governing pattern often survives inside the person as internalized control. The paper argues that systems persist not only through external domination but through the installation of fear, role-performance, substitute controllers, and premature compliance that continue operating after outer exit. It develops this (...)
- Economy, Conditioning, and the Psychological Reality of Money.Mayank Singh - manuscriptThis paper explores the relationship between economy, psychological conditioning, and human consciousness. It argues that economy is not merely an external system of exchange, production, and distribution, but also a psychological structure rooted in fear, desire, comparison, and the conditioned movement of the mind. Modern civilization has transformed money from a practical medium of exchange into a psychological authority that shapes identity, survival, and human relationship. Through this transformation, economy becomes inseparable from consciousness itself. -/- The paper further investigates how (...)
- A Respect-Based Approach to Vulnerability.Stefano Pinzan - 2026 - Philosophy and Social Criticism 1:1-18.This paper examines the role of emotions in recognizing others’ vulnerability and motivating care practices, proposing a Kantian model centered on the emotion of respect. The argument develops through a critical engagement with Michael Slote’s empathy-based approach, which assigns empathy a central role in perceiving vulnerability and generating moral motivation. I argue that approaches grounded exclusively in empathy risk producing asymmetric and unbalanced moral relationships. As an alternative, I propose shifting the focus from empathy to respect. The paper first analyzes (...)
- Ambient Crisis and Immanent Praxis: The Politics of Exhausted Time (17th edition).Shea Hale - forthcoming - Problematique.This paper examines a shift in the concept of crisis from a bounded event to an ambient condition that permeates everyday life. Drawing on Marxist and contemporary critical theory, including Karl Marx, Gilles Deleuze, and Jonathan Crary, I argue that crisis no longer appears primarily as a discrete rupture that clarifies contradictions, but persists as a diffuse and normalized background shaping perception, affect, and action. The concept of ambient crisis names this shift while emphasizing its temporal extension into what the (...)Remove from this listExport citationBookmark
- The Eeriness of Liminal Spaces in The Stanley Parable.Shea Hale - 2025 - The Garden of Ideas 4 (2):5-14.This paper develops a phenomenological account of liminal space aesthetics through an analysis of "The Stanley Parable". Drawing on Mark Fisher’s account of the eerie as a disturbance of presence or absence, I argue that the game’s empty office aesthetics function as paradigmatic liminal spaces that stage a crisis of agency. The player’s navigation of repetitive corridors, predetermined choices, and cyclical endings produces an experiential confrontation with constrained freedom, framed through Janet Murray’s concept of agency and extended by Martin Heidegger’s (...)
- Black Feminist Thought and the New Materialist Turn: Understanding the Paradigm Shift in Contemporary Black Feminist Studies.Naomi Simmons-Thorne - 2026 - Hypatia:1-22.Black feminist studies has undergone a paradigm shift in recent years, marked by a pivot from critical theories like intersectionality and identity politics to new materialist themes like social death and the body. Linked to the broader “new materialist turn,” this intellectual movement has insisted on the limits of ideology critique and negative theorizing, urging positive theories which account for complex assemblages between bodies, objects, and the nonbuilt environment. Against this backdrop, black feminist scholars have begun calling for parallel theories, (...)
- You Can't Spell Opinion without I: Toward a Hegelian Critical Theory of Opinion.Eric-John Russell - 2025 - Hegel Bulletin 46 (3):462-488.We naturally tend to think of our own opinions as akin to the coins we carry around in our pockets, transferable and yet inalienable. We may share or alter them, yet in form they remain fundamentally our own, sacrosanct as registers of our very sense of self. Hegel was aware of this relationship between opinion and subjectivity, and regarded such a bond as one of the great accomplishments of modernity itself. Yet for Hegel, excessive estimation of inwardness comes at a (...)
- Shadow-writing.Gavin Keeney - 2026 - Substack.A retrospective analysis of the significance of shadows ….
- Die historische Instituierung der Erfahrung als gemeinsamer Nenner kritischer Theorie. Ein Argument im Anschluss an Merleau-Ponty.Vanessa Ossino - 2025 - Journal Phänomenologie 64 (Krisis und Kritik):24-35.This paper argues that Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concept of institution (Stiftung) opens a productive interface between phenomenology and critical social philosophy. The central thesis is that critical theory, despite its internal heterogeneity, shares a common denominator: the conviction that subjectivity and experience are always already entangled in socio-historical and socio-material structures. Merleau-Ponty's notion of institution is shown to address this entanglement by reconceiving history as an open, diacritical process — neither deterministic nor sovereignly constituted — in which horizons of meaning are (...)
- Las aventuras de la modernidad. La teoría crítica de Bolívar Echeverría.Osvaldo Montero Salas - 2026 - Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires: Biblos.¿Qué es la modernidad y hasta dónde se extiende su promesa emancipadora? Tomando como brújula la obra del pensador ecuatoriano-mexicano Bolívar Echeverría, Las aventuras de la modernidad replantea esta pregunta con la precisión conceptual y la audacia política que exige nuestro tiempo. El autor rescata un Marx poco frecuentado y activa una teoría crítica situada que busca ir más allá de los enfoques tradicionales. A lo largo de tres movimientos –genealogía del proyecto moderno, diagnóstico de su subsunción capitalista y examen (...)
- Mislearning Through Obedience: The Illusion of Understanding in Conditioned Systems.Mayank Singh - manuscriptModern systems of education and social conditioning often equate disciplined behavior with genuine understanding. This paper argues that such an equation is fundamentally flawed. By inserting obedience as a mediating force between control and understanding, institutions create a false perception of learning. Obedience shapes behavior but does not cultivate awareness. As a result, individuals emerge as functionally efficient yet inwardly unexamined—capable of repetition, but not perception. This paper explores how obedience leads to mislearning, producing followers rather than thinkers, and knowledge (...)
- From Knowing to Seeing: An Inquiry into Education, Consciousness, and Freedom.Mayank Singh - manuscriptThis paper presents a phenomenological inquiry into the nature of education by examining the relationship between knowledge, perception, and consciousness. It challenges the conventional view that learning is primarily the accumulation of information, arguing instead that such accumulation, when unexamined, leads to psychological conditioning that obstructs direct perception. By distinguishing between “knowing” as repetition and “seeing” as immediate awareness, the paper explores how authority, language, memory, and identity mediate human understanding. It further critiques modern educational systems for institutionalizing comparison, evaluation, (...)
- (reseña) GANDLER, S. (coord.), Teoría Crítica: imposible resignarse. Pesadillas de represión y aventuras de emancipación (2016). [REVIEW]Jordi Magnet Colomer - 2018 - Oxímora. Revista Internacional de Ética y Política 12:253-260.reseña del libro GANDLER, Stefan (coord.). Teoría Crítica: imposible resignarse. Pesadillas de represión y aventuras de emancipación. Ciudad de México: Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro y Miguel Ángel Porrúa, 2016.
- (reseña) A. Jappe, J. Maiso, J. M. Rojo: Criticar el valor, superar el capitalismo (2015). [REVIEW]Jordi Magnet Colomer - 2015 - Oxímora. Revista Internacional de Ética y Política 7:337-342.reseña del libro JAPPE, Anselm; MAISO, Jordi; ROJO, José Manuel. Criticar el valor, superar el capitalismo. Madrid: Enclave de Libros, 2015.
- PARTICIPATORY SELECTIVITY AS ONTOLOGICAL ACQUIESCENCE: A Critique of Praxis Anti-Capitalism in Advanced Capitalism.Jimmy Mahardhika - manuscriptThis article argues that anti-capitalist practices within advanced capitalism amount, in the main, not to structural negation but to participatory selectivity: a mode of engagement in which the subject filters forms of involvement within an otherwise unchanged systemic structure. Rather than refusing capitalism as an ontological horizon, the subject refuses only those forms of participation deemed incongruent with its avowed values. Such prac- tices therefore reproduce capitalism whilst sustaining a claim to opposition. To describe this condition, the article introduces the (...)
- Curiosity, Repetition, and the Burden of Knowledge: A Phenomenological Inquiry.Mayank Singh - manuscriptThis paper examines the relationship between curiosity, knowledge, and repetition through a phenomenological lens. It argues that curiosity arises independently of answers and functions as the primary movement of awareness toward the unknown. In contrast, when curiosity diminishes, knowledge transforms into repetition, losing its vitality and becoming a psychological burden. The study explores how childhood inquiry is gradually replaced by social conditioning, leading to imitation rather than understanding. It proposes that authentic knowledge emerges only when curiosity is sustained without the (...)
- Unconfiscated Interiority: Sisyphus and the Inward Incompleteness of Domination.Lisandro Latorre Lafourcade - manuscriptThe myth of Sisyphus is usually read as an image of punishment, futility, and absurd repetition. This paper argues that such a reading, while correct, is incomplete. The gods determine the external structure of Sisyphus’s labor, but they do not thereby become identical with the full first-person reality of the one condemned to perform it. To capture this distinction, I introduce the concept of unconfiscated interiority: the non-coincidence between externally imposed domination and lived self-relation. The paper’s central claim is not (...)
- Clothing, Reflection, and the Fragmentation of Consciousness: A Phenomenological Inquiry.Mayank Singh - manuscriptThis paper investigates the phenomenological structure of consciousness through the metaphors of clothing, reflection, and embodiment. It argues that what is commonly identified as consciousness is, in fact, a reflective movement of thought—the mind—rather than the totality of lived awareness. The study distinguishes between functional and psychological dimensions of clothing, showing how identity, appearance, and cognitive processes act as layers that obscure direct experience. It further examines the relationship between mind and body, emphasizing that clothing originates as an adaptive necessity (...)
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