Écrit et cultures dans l'Europe moderne (2006-2016) - links to his courses and seminars while he held the chair, and location for subsequent work especially the Débats d'histoire discussions - once a month starting in December 2015 - during the school year (i.e. through May) with announced intention to restart this school year. Joined for several by Patrick Boucheron who arrived (Dec 2015) as Chartier's regular appointment came to an end.

AJS Volume 98 Number 2 (September 1992): 237-79 -- Habermas's theory breaks with the Continental tradition that has denigrated pragmatism as an Anglo-Saxon philosophy subservient to technocratic capitalism. While Habermas deftly uses pragmatist insights into communicative rationality and democratic ethos, he shows little sensitivity to other facets of pragmatism. This article argues that incorporating the pragmatist perspective on experience and indeterminacy brings a corrective to the emancipatory agenda championed by critical theorists. The pragmatist alternative to the theory of communicative action is presented, with the discussion centering around the following themes: disembodied reason versus embodied reasonableness, determinate being versus indeterminate reality, discursive truth versus pragmatic certainty, rational consensus versus reasonable dissent, transcendental democracy versus democratic transcendence, and rational society versus sane community. -- downloaded via Air to DBOX - added to Evernote

Draft of chapter for upcoming Crisis and Reconfigurations: 100 years since World War 1 collection. Argues that philosophical understanding (or increasingly, study and reading) of the French, British and preKantian German enlightenments, their intellectual origins and ends, has been a retrospective victim of the European horrors set in chain by 1914, despite a growing volume of excellent, countervailing studies (by Rasmussen, Lloyd, Israel, Wade, and others) in the history of ideas.
Research Interests: Critical Theory, Enlightenment, and Philosophy of the Enlightenment

Reviewed Works: The Pragmatic Turn by Richard J. Bernstein; Pragmatism as Transition: Historicity and Hope in James, Dewey, and Rorty by Colin Koopman -- History and Theory, Vol. 50, No. 3 (October 2011), pp. 425-432 -- respectively a summing up of the past half-century of the tradition's history and a possible program for its future development. Bernstein ecumenically considers the achievements of a wide range of thinkers from Peirce, Dewey, and James to Brandom, Putnam, and Rorty, drawing valuable lessons from each, while not sparing criticism of their flaws. Koopman also tries to bridge the gap between what he calls "classicopragmatism" and "neopragmatism," although he finds more to admire in Rorty than in his predecessors. Whereas Bernstein attempts to supplement the pragmatist tradition by turning to Habermas, Koopman finds his inspiration in Foucault. Both authors emphasize the historicist, evolutionary, and transitionalist implications of pragmatism, paying as a result insufficient attention to the historical possibilities of repetition, rupture, discontinuity, and the unexpected event. In terms of the political implications they draw, Koopman advocates a meliorist incrementalism that lacks any real bite, while Bernstein expresses dissatisfaction with the democratic pieties of Rorty's final work, but doesn't really provide a sustained alternative. -- downloaded pdf to Note

Theory: The Newsletter of the Research Committee on Sociological Theory, International Sociological Association, Autumn/Winter 2009, January 2010, Joas item pp 2-3, Strydom pp. 3-5. -- Joas discusses origins of Human Rights -- rejects the French Revolution theory as based on anticlericalism as codified by Kant and equally rejects Human Rights depending on Christianity (what took you 1700 years, eh?) Elaborates Durkheim's theory of process of universalizing sacred (not Weber's sacrilization of Reason) -- but main point is to halt the pissing match between those who insist human rights have no foundation apart from religion and those who view religions as the main violators of human rights. The Strydom piece places his hopes of theoretical renewal in the intersection between the 2 traditions of Left Hegelianism, from Marx and Peirce. It's pretty cryptic beyond a general indication of why immanent transcendence makes sense for social and cultural objects of study.

The problem of the nature of values and the relation between values and rationality is one of the defining issues of twentieth-century thought and Max Weber was one of the defining figures in the debate. In this book, Turner and Factor consider the development of the dispute over Max Weber's contribution to this discourse, by showing how Weber's views have been used, revised and adapted in new contexts. The story of the dispute is itself fascinating, for it cuts across the major political and intellectual currents of the twentieth century, from positivism, pragmatism and value-free social science, through the philosophy of Jaspers and Heidegger, to Critical Theory and the revival of Natural Right and Natural Law. As Weber's ideas were imported to Britain and America, they found new formulations and new adherents and critics and became absorbed into different traditions and new issues. This book was first published in 1984 by Routledge. -- Research Interests: Ethics, Political Theory, Continental Philosophy, Max Weber (Philosophy), Social and Political Philosophy, and Max Weber

Conclusion -- Now back to a general problem with this book, especially the chapters on the culture industry and anti-semitism: the attempts to tie all these otherwise valuable analyses to the Enlightenment do not work, except under the strained analogy with positivism that surfaces here and there. And as usual, the stray remarks on science and mathematics are all wrong. The most general inadequacy of the book is indicated in its title. The title is incomplete, for the dialectic as I see it is the dialectic of enlightenment and something else. Or perhaps the dialectic of the hidden contradictions in Enlightenment thinkers. But I don't see a true dialectical understanding of Enlightenment here. As I've said, in other works Horkheimer and Adorno show great perspicacity in their grasp of the positivism-lebensphilosophie dichotomy. As I understand Dialectic of Enlightenment so far, I believe they got it wrong. Irrationalism is blamed on the dark side of the Enlightenment, but I see it differently: rationalism and irrationalism coexist in a contradictory ideological and social totality. Enlightenment is only one half of the equation, not an appropriate label for the ideological dynamic as a whole. -- downloaded page as pdf to Note

Dossier(s) : Pierre Bourdieu et la culture Classes sociales et inégalités : portrait d’une France éclatée -- Mots-clés : Bourdieu | critique | sociologie | institutions | pragmatisme | épistémologie | domination | classes sociales | théorie politique -- Le sociologue Luc Boltanski revient sur ses deux publications les plus récentes : "Rendre la réalité inacceptable" et "De la critique". Après avoir situé ces ouvrages dans sa trajectoire intellectuelle, l’entretien procède à une explicitation des concepts centraux de De la critique puis évoque des pistes pour renouveler la critique à un moment historique qui est celui de l’apogée du capitalisme et de l’État mais aussi de leur crise et de la crise de leur relation. -- Cet entretien a été réalisé avec l’aide d’Arnaud Esquerre et de Jeanne Lazarus (membre du conseil de rédaction de La Vie des idées). La version écrite est la transcription de la conversation orale. Elle ne constitue pas un texte indépendant même si certaines précisions ont pu être apportées par rapport à l’entretien vidéo. -- 1st part translated into English -- downloaded French pdf to Note

Unpublished preliminary study for "Towards a New Cognitive Social Science" (book in progress) -- In this paper, I take as my starting point Norman Fairclough’s treatment of critical social analysis as a form of dialectical reasoning. While generally concurring with this equivalency despite a host of smaller disagreements on which I do not dwell, I venture to fill in a largely blank space in his argument by focusing on the internal workings of dialectical reasoning. The reference point for the core of my argument is the fact that Fairclough regards critical social analysis as based on epistemological dialectics which forms part of a larger set of relations, yet passes over the explication of the place and role of this basic form of dialectics in this constellation in favour of focusing on its practical dialectical nature. The point is, however, that an adequate grasp of practical dialectics requires the simultaneous consideration of the principal operative features of epistemological dialectics, not just in critical social analysis but more basically still also in social life itself. My proposal is that this could be done by introducing the inferential stance in order to consider what I call the dialectics of inference or inferential dialectics. This perspective forms part of a broader cognitive sociological approach that focuses on the cognitive processes – of which discourse is but one – on which the construction and structuring of society depend and which pervade the latter’s every fibre. -- Key words: Abduction, Badiou, Brandom, cognitive sociology, critical realism, critical social analysis, Critical Theory, deduction, dialectics, Fairclough, Hegel, induction, inference, Peirce, reasoning, social theory -- downloaded pdf to Note

‘First Philosophy and its Metacritique: The Case of Karl-Otto Apel’, unpublished paper presented to the philosophical society Cogito, University College Cork, 10 December 1982 -- [after noting the recurring battle between metaphysics and anti metaphysics, most recently the strange bedfellows of conservative, liberal and radical from Heidegger to Rorty to Derrida proposes a 4-fold rather than binary model] This quadruple constellation has been in evidence ever since the classical Greek period and can be traced back to the existence side by side of everyday language embodying common sense, the paradigmatically regulated language of science which tends to monopolise rationality as such, philosophical language which claims to embody noetic rationality, and finally the claim of metacritical enlighteners to be able to expose the presuppositions of philosophy and thus to clarify the concept of rationality in its broadest conceivable sense. Accordingly, the following four poles can be seen most basically to determine the dispute between the representative of first philosophy and their metacritics: -- (1) "dogmatic first philosophy", including every form of philosophy of common-sense which elevates conventional forms of language use, cognition and action to the status of criterion of argumentation; (2) "self-critical first philosophy" in the sense of all forms of transcendental philosophy which regard common sense as well as science as explicandum and deduce general conditions for them from an irreducible, final and immutable criterion; -- (3) "dogmatic metacitique" in the sense of the scientistic critique of philosophy which on the basis of a determinate concept of science as final criterion implicitly or explicitly seeks the dissolution of both dogmatic and self-critical forms of first philosophy; -- and, finally, (4) "dialectical metacritique" as that form of critique of philosophy which takes in its stride all the above-mentioned types of philosophy. -- downloaded pdf to Note

This article explains the nature and significance of radical institutionalism. Radical institutionalism does not represent a break with the institutionalist paradigm, but an attempt to move it beyond its outmoded, Ayresian philosophical foundation. Radical institutionalism involves the introduction of three new elements into the contemporary stream of institutionalist works. These three new elements include an emphasis on Veblenian fundamentals, a shift in research interests, and a reconsideration of the philosophical foundations of inquiry. -- interesting institutional bibliography -- downloaded pdf to Note

Benjamin, whose dizzyingly varied career skirted the edges of the Frankfurt collective, receives the grand treatment in “Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life” (Harvard), by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, who earlier edited Harvard’s four-volume edition of Benjamin’s writings. The Frankfurt School never presented a united front.... One zone in which they clashed was that of mass culture. Benjamin saw the popular arena as a potential site of resistance, from which left-leaning artists like Charlie Chaplin could transmit subversive signals. Adorno and Horkheimer viewed pop culture as an instrument of economic and political control, enforcing conformity behind a permissive screen. The “culture industry,” as they called it, offered the “freedom to choose what is always the same.” A similar split appeared in attitudes toward traditional forms of culture: classical music, painting, literature. Benjamin, in his resonant sentence linking culture and barbarism, saw the treasures of bourgeois Europe as spoils in a victory procession, each work blemished by the suffering of nameless millions. -- Between them, Adorno and Benjamin were pioneers in thinking critically about pop culture—in taking that culture seriously as an object of scrutiny, whether in tones of delight, dismay, or passionate ambivalence. The worst that one Frankfurt School theorist could say of another was that his work was insufficiently dialectical. The word “dialectic,” as elaborated in the philosophy of Hegel, causes endless problems for people who are not German, and even for some who are. In a way, it is both a philosophical concept and a literary style. --It “mediates,” to use a favorite Frankfurt School word. And it gravitates toward doubt, demonstrating the “power of negative thinking,” as Herbert Marcuse once put it. Such twists and turns come naturally in the German language, whose sentences are themselves plotted in swerves, releasing their full meaning only with the final clinching action of the verb.-- Although Marx was central to their thought, they were nearly as skeptical of Communist ideology as they were of the bourgeois mind-set that Communism was intended to supplant. “At the very heart of Critical Theory was an aversion to closed philosophical systems,” Martin Jay writes, in his history “The Dialectical Imagination” (1973).

University of the Pacific - McGeorge School of Law -- This chapter will appear in a forthcoming book on hermeneutics. After providing a hermeneutical phenomenology of legal practice that locates legal interpretation at the center of the rule of law, the chapter considers three important hermeneutical themes: (1) the critical distinction between a legal historian writing aboout a law in the past and a judge deciding a case according to the law; (2) the reinvigoration of the natural law tradition against the reductive characteristics of legal positivism by construing human nature as hermeneutical; and. (3) the role of philosophical hermeneutics in grounding critical legal theory rather than serving as a quiescent acceptance of the status quo, as elaborated by reconsidering the famous exchanges between Gadamer, Ricoeur and Habermas. -- I argue that these three important themes are sufficient to underwrite Gadamer's famous assertion that legal practice has exemplary status for hermeneutical theory. -- downloaded pdf to Note

Re Adorno lectures on Kant 1st Critique - difference between Adorno’s treatment of Kant and ..German histories of philosophy .. which be traced back at least to Hegel, always saw Kant as a thinker who represented a *break* with the Enlightenment. .. By treating Voltaire and Kant united in an attack on “dogmatic” approaches to metaphysics, Adorno advances an interpretation of ..Kant and the Enlightenment that — like Cassirer — stressed the extent to which the Enlightenment was a European movement and that German thinkers were a part of it. ?.German universities were still home to scholars who, between 1933-1945 labored very hard to distinguishn the profound and German Kant from the superficialities of the French Enlightenment, the political stakes ..should not be minimized. ..Adorno concludes that 1st Critique and Candide ..were united in a common endeavor. --"...a catastrophe for the history of German thought ..the cliche that labels enlightenment ‘superficial’ or ‘facile’. ?..the effect of the Romantic, and ultimately theological, belittling of enlightenment was to ensure that much of the enlightened thought that flourished in Germany actually assumed the shape imagined by the obscurantists." -- "..I am ..using the term ‘enlightenment’ in the comprehensive meaning given to it in DofE... to describe the general trend of Western demythologization that may be said to have begun ..with..Xenophanes... ..to demonstrate the presence of anthropomorphism. ?.. objectivity, existence and absolute dignity have been ascribed to a whole series of assertions, doctrines, concepts and ideas of whatever kind, which in reality can be reduced to the products of human beings. ?..what the language of psychology would call mere projections, and since it is merely man that has produced these concepts from within himself they are not entitled to any absolute dignity." This “comprehensive” sense of enlightenment .. provides the project that the 1st Critique allegedly carries forward.

Current accounts of the capitalist and Protestant origins of the democratic public sphere are inconsistent and speculative. This empirical account explains the transition in political communication from norms of secrecy to appeals to public opinion. Popular communicative change in the English Revolution anticipated, in practice, the democratic theory of the public sphere when printing transformed a traditional instrument of communication-the petition. Petitions had medieval origins and traditions that upheld norms of secrecy and privilege in political communication. Economic and technical properties of printing-namely, heightened commercialism and the capacity to reproduce texts-demolished these norms by changing the scope and content of communication by petition. This practical innovation appears in all factions in the revolution. But among radical groups, the political use of printed petitions led to novel theories and to democratic speculation on constitutional provisions that would ensure the authority of public opinion in politics. This analysis contradicts key assumptions on communicative change that fuel pessimistic assessments of the modern public sphere in post-modernism and critical theory. -- downloaded pdf to Note

During the 1960s and 1970s, institutionalists and behavioralists in the discipline of political science argued over the legitimacy of the institutional approach to political inquiry. In the discipline of philosophy, a similar debate concerning institutions has never taken place. Yet, a growing number of philosophers are now working out the institutional implications of political ideas in what has become known as "non-ideal theory." My thesis is two-fold: (1) pragmatism and institutionalism are compatible and (2) non-ideal theorists, following the example of pragmatists, can avoid a similar debate as took place between institutionalists and behavioralists by divulging their assumptions about institutions. -- downloaded pdf to Note

Builds on recent critique of "ideal" theory -- Can Rawlsian theory provide us with an adequate response to the practical question of how we should proceed in the face of widespread and intractable disagreement over matters of justice? Recent criticism of ideal theorizing might make us wonder whether this question highlights another way in which ideal theory can be too far removed from our non-ideal circumstances to provide any practical guidance. Further reflection on it does not show that ideal theory is redundant, but it does indicate that there is a need for a non-ideal theory that does not consist simply in an account of how to apply the principles which are yielded by ideal theory to non-ideal circumstances in the light of what is feasible and an assessment of the costs of implementation. Indeed any non-ideal theory that can adequately address this question will have to be partially autonomous, drawing on a notion of legitimacy that is rather different to the one which lies at the heart of Rawlsian ideal theory. -- downloaded pdf to Note

Reviewed work(s): (1) A Third Concept of Liberty: Judgment and Freedom in Kant and Adam Smith by Samuel Fleischacker; *--* (2) Philosophy in a Time of Lost Spirit: Essays on Contemporary Theory by Ronald Beiner; *--* (3) The Orders of Discourse: Philosophy, Social Science, and Politics by John G. Gunnell; *--* (4) Speech and Political Practice: Recovering the Place of Human Responsibility by Murray Jardine; *--* (5) The Claims of Common Sense: Moore, Wittgenstein, Keynes and the Social Sciences by John Coates; *--* (6) Human Judgment and Social Policy: Irreducible Uncertainty, Inevitable Error, Unavoidable Injustice by Kenneth R. Hammond

Downloaded pdf to Note

Downloaded pdf to Note

Downloaded pdf to Note

Radical criticisms of liberalism's method of legal adjudication focus on its excessive formalism, its tendency to foster indeterminacy, and its naive maintenance of the separation of political from legal concerns. I examine these arguments as they appear in the work of Carl Schmitt, on the Right, and the Critical Legal Studies (CLS) movement, on the Left. Jurgen Habermas has recently attempted to refute the positions of these most scalding twentieth-century critics of liberal adjudication. I argue that by so extensively engaging these theorists, and in fact liberalism itself, on their own grounds, Habermas has abandoned some of the distinctive strengths of what he previously practiced as a critical social theory in his new reflexive or discourse theory of law.

Downloaded pdf to Note

Avant-propos (pp. 9-10) *-* PART 1 *-* A-t-on besoin du vrai ? Le défi pragmatique *-* *-- (1) Qu'est-ce que le pragmaticisme ? (pp. 13-21) Charles Sanders Peirce and Jacques Poulain. *-- (2) Le partage de l'héritage anticartésien de C.S. Peirce : D. Davidson, H. Putnam et R. Rorty (pp. 23-52) Jacques Poulain. *-- (3) Dewey entre Hegel et Darwin (pp. 53-71) Richard Rorty and Patrick Sauret. *-- (4) Wittgenstein, la vérité et le passé de la philosophie (pp. 73-93) Hilary Putnam and Patrick Sauret. *-* PART 2 *-* Historicisme ou essentialisme ? L'alternative épistémologique. *-- (5) L'état de la théorie du langage chez Richard Rorty (pp. 97-109) Henri Meschonnic. *-- (6) Des tournants historiques (pp. 111-120) Jonathan Rée. *-- (7) La réalisation linguistique de la vérité (pp. 121-141) Aldo G. Gargani and Patrick Sauret. *-* PART 3 Les fins de l'histoire pragmatique : la justice libérale et le Bien communautaire *-* *-- (8) Les limites du libéralisme. De l'éthique politique aux États-Unis aujourd'hui (pp. 145-157) Axel Honneth and Patrick Sauret. *-- (9) Les Lumières et l'esprit juif ou la raison des vaincus (pp. 159-175) Reyès Maté and Catherine Ballestero. *-- (9) Vérité, contingence et modernité (pp. 177-194) Albrecht Wellmer and Marie-Noëlle Ryan. *-* PART 4 *-* Le « bonheur » de l'homme pragmatique *-* *-- (10) L'esthétique pragmatique de Rorty (pp. 197-208) Rainer Rochlitz. *-- (11) L'esthetique postmoderne du rap (pp. 209-228) Richard Shusterman

List of 10 books starting with Schmitt and Benjamin, then late 20thC angles from philosophy (eg critical theory), history (older works like King's Two Bodies), cultural studies. And an attack on postmodernism undermining rationality. Winds up with Mark Lilla criticism of dismantling the walls constructed post wars of religion and Reformation between politics and religion. Smith has a comment on each category he has selected.

Rajchman wrote a review of Habermas' "modernity" unsubtly titled "Habermas' Complaint" ie Portnoy