Science, normativity and skill: Reviewing and renewing the anthropological basis of critical theory

Philosophy and Social Criticism

Volumn 37, Issue 2, 2011, Pages 139-165

  Moss, Lenny ^a,b   Pavesich, Vida ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF EXETER   (United Kingdom)

^b CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Arnold gehlen; Critical theory; Hubert dreyfus; J rgen habermas; Max horkheimer; Philosophical anthropology; Science studies; Skill

Indexed keywords

EID: 79952464432     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: 1461734X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0191453710387064     Document Type: Article

References (57)

1. Kevin Amidon, 'Diesmal die Biologie! Max Horkheimer, Richard Thurnwald, and the Biological Prehistory of German Sozialforschung', New German Critique 104 (2008): 103-137.
2. Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays (New York: Herder & Herder, 1972).
3. Ibid., p. 4.
4. Max Horkheimer, 'Traditional and Critical Theory', in ibid.
5. Ibid., p. 201.
6. Max Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected EarlyWritings (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1993).
7. Ibid., p. 11.
8. Amidon, 'Diesmal die Biologie', p. 113.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., p. 115.
11. Mechanistic materialism was addressed in the first volume of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung by Franz Borkenau entitled "On the Sociology of the Mechanistic Interpretation of the World'; and race theory was challenged in the second volume in an article by Paul Ludwig Landsberg entitled "Race Ideology and Race Science' (Amidon, "Diesmal die Biologie', pp. 119-20).
12. Ibid., p. 122.
13. Lenny Moss, What Genes Can't Do (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
14. Joachim Fisher has gone to considerable effort to distinguish the School or "Paradigm' of Philosophical Anthropology (capitalized), meaning principally the work of Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner and Arnold Gehlen, from the longer tradition of the "discipline' of hilosophical anthropology.
15. Fisher 'Exploring the Core Identity of Philosophical Anthropology through theWorks ofMax Scheler, Helmuth Plessner, and Arnold Gehlen', Iris 1 (2009):153-170.
16. Max Horkheimer, 'Remarks on Philosophical Anthropology', in Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and Social Science, p. 155.
17. Ibid., p. 161.
18. Joel Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia: Studies in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), p. 1.
19. Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor Adorno (London: Macmillan, 1978), p. 90. A
20. Dorno's first Habilitationsschrift, which he did not submit, concerned the resolution of Kant's paralogism between the transcendental ego and empirical psychology via Freud.
21. Horkheimer, 'Remarks on Philosophical Anthropology', pp. 49-111.
22. Ibid., pp. 111-29.
23. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. J. Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1976), p. 57.
24. Horkheimer and Adorno accepted Freud's theories of the drives, repression and the unconscious, but they rejected the notion of a "timeless' unconscious and Freud's later hypostatization of a "destruction drive', on the grounds that these concepts obscured how suffering and destructive behavior stem from needs thwarted by the lack of social possibilities. They also rejected revisionist Freudianism, or ego psychology, as promoting adjustment to the status quo, or as Adorno put it: a "false reconciliation with a false society'.
25. Drive theory was central to Freud's account of the human organism, and he claimed in the Three Essays on Sexuality that he was never satisfied with his formulation of it. Yet, in Civilization and its Discontents, trans. J. Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton, 1962), p. 88, he describes it as "so indispensable to the whole structure that something had to be put in its place'.
26. Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia, p. 152;
27. Jessica Benjamin, 'The End of Internalization: Adorno's Social Psychology', Telos 32 (1977): 42-64,
28. Reprinted in The Frankfurt School: Critical Assessments, vol. 3, ed. Jay Bernstein (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 132.
29. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1955), pp. 40-1.
30. Jürgen Habermas, 'Dual-Layered Time: Personal Notes on Philosopher Theodor W. Adorno in the '50s', Logos 2(4) (2003), see: www.logosjournal.com
31. Jürgen Habermas, 'Science and Technology as Ideology', in Jürgen Habermas, Toward a Rational Society (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1979), p. 84.
32. Quoted by Habermas in ibid. Habermas takes the material from Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1984). No page number is provided by Habermas for the Marcuse reference.
33. Habermas, L 'Science and Technology as Ideology', p. 87.
34. Ibid., p. 88.
35. Willian Rehg, Cogent Science in Context (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009).
36. Joel Whitebook, 'The Problem of Nature in Habermas', Telos 40 (1979): 41-69; reprinted in J. Bernstein (ed.) The Frankfurt School: Critical Assessments, vol. 4 (New York: Routledge, 1994).
37. Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
38. See, for example, the article in C. Knappert and L. Malafouris (eds) Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach (New York: Springer, 2008).
39. Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991)
40. Donna Haraway, When Species Meet: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003).
41. Tim Ingold, 'When ANT meets SPIDER: Social Theory for Arthropods', in Knappett and Malafouris, Material Agency, pp. 209-216.
42. Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature, (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
43. Evelyn Fox Keller, The Century of the Gene (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
44. Lenny Moss, 'One, Two (Too?), Many Genes?', The Quarterly Review of Biology 78 (2003): 57-67.
45. Lenny Moss, 'Redundancy, Plasticity, and Detachment: The Implications of Comparative Genomics for Evolutionary Thinking', Philosophy of Science 73 (2006): 930-946.
46. Maynard Olson, 'Molecular Evolution '99 - When Less is More: Gene Loss as an Engine of Evolutionary Change', American Journal of Human Genetics 64 (1999): 18-23.
47. Moss, 'Redundancy, Plasticity, and Detachment', 936.
48. ibid., p. 944.
49. Mary Jane West-Eberhard, Developmental Plasticity and Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
50. E. O. Wilson and B. Hölldobler, 'Eusociality: Origin and Consequences', Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 102 (2005): 13367-13371
51. D. S. Wilson and E. O. Wilson, 'Rethinking the Theoretical Foundations of Sociobiology', Quarterly Review of Biology 82 (2007): 327-348.
52. Alessandro Ferrera, Reflective Authenticity: Rethinking the Project of Modernity (London: Routledge, 1998).
53. Hubert L. Dreyfus and S. E. Dreyfus, Mind Over Machine (New York: Free Press, 1986).
54. Martha Nussbaum,'Capabilities as Fundamental Entitlements: Sen and Social Justice', Feminist Economics 9 (2003): 33-59 (37).
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid., p. 36.
57. Ibid., p. 41.