Critical ReviewPub Date : 2023-11-27DOI: 10.1080/08913811.2023.2284042
Casandra Silva Sibilin
{"title":"Education and the Epistemological Crisis in the Age of ChatGPT","authors":"Casandra Silva Sibilin","doi":"10.1080/08913811.2023.2284042","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08913811.2023.2284042","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51723,"journal":{"name":"Critical Review","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-11-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139229311","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Critical ReviewPub Date : 2023-11-24DOI: 10.1080/08913811.2023.2281852
Rainer Forst
{"title":"Who Is Haunted by the Shadow Of God? Dialectical Notes on Michael Rosen’s Narrative of (Failed) Secularization","authors":"Rainer Forst","doi":"10.1080/08913811.2023.2281852","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08913811.2023.2281852","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51723,"journal":{"name":"Critical Review","volume":"130 ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-11-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139240845","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Critical ReviewPub Date : 2023-11-22DOI: 10.1080/08913811.2023.2273628
J. Cherniss
{"title":"Six Variations on Michael Rosen’s The Shadow of God","authors":"J. Cherniss","doi":"10.1080/08913811.2023.2273628","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08913811.2023.2273628","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51723,"journal":{"name":"Critical Review","volume":"518 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-11-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139247743","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Critical ReviewPub Date : 2023-11-13DOI: 10.1080/08913811.2023.2267897
Bernard Yack
{"title":"Taking Freedom Seriously: Kantian Ethics Versus the Ethics of Kant","authors":"Bernard Yack","doi":"10.1080/08913811.2023.2267897","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08913811.2023.2267897","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACTNo understanding of morality has more zealous or influential defenders among academic philosophers than Kant’s. Yet as Michael Rosen demonstrates in The Shadow of God, there is a sense in which Kant’s critics take his conception of freedom more seriously nowadays than his defenders. As a result, contemporary versions of “Kantian ethics” often end up challenging what Rosen calls “the ethics of Kant,” not just the claims of rival moral theories. Rosen supports this surprising conclusion with some powerful arguments, showing that we cannot make sense of Kantian moral philosophy or its extraordinary impact on modern philosophy while detaching it from Kant’s conception of transcendental freedom. But Rosen overstates the continuity between Kant and the Idealist philosophers that he inspired. Thinkers like Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel took Kant’s concept of transcendental freedom far more seriously than defenders of Kantian ethics do today. But precisely because they did so, they felt compelled to address a whole new set of problems, which could be solved only by radically transforming the conception of freedom that they received from Kant.Keywords: HegelKantMichael Rosenalienationmoralityphilosophy of historytranscendental freedom Notes1 Far from being filled with awe at the exalted condition that Kant attributes to freed beings like ourselves, “the only moral emotion” that this image inspires in Wood’s breast “is outrage—that anyone could think supernaturalist superstition a necessary condition for moral decency” (Wood Citation2008, 138; quoted in Rosen Citation2022, 106).2 As Rosen (Citation2022, 232) aptly comments, Kant could never accept an argument like Schiller’s because, for Kant, “morality . . . actually works against nature.”3 I develop this account of the German reaction to Kant in my book The Longing for Total Revolution (Citation1986 [Citation1992], Berkeley). See, in particular, ch. 3, “The Social Discontent of the Kantian Left,” as well the brief outline of my arguments in Yack Citation2021 (“Revisiting The Longing for Total Revolution”).4 At one point, however, Rosen (Citation2022, 67) alters the metaphor, describing Kant’s God as an “enlightened despot,” rather than a constitutional monarch, which, I believe, weakens his point.5 I should probably note that I am currently completing a very un-Kantian defense of moral pluralism in a book, tentatively titled: The Faces of Moral Pluralism: Five Portraits from European Literature.","PeriodicalId":51723,"journal":{"name":"Critical Review","volume":"53 14","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136283074","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Critical ReviewPub Date : 2023-10-04DOI: 10.1080/08913811.2023.2259650
Samuel Goldman
{"title":"Searching for the Arc of History: The Secularization of American Politics","authors":"Samuel Goldman","doi":"10.1080/08913811.2023.2259650","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08913811.2023.2259650","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACTMichael Rosen’s The Shadow of God includes an account of historical theodicy, which is the idea that the arc of history justifies the ways of God. Formulated by the German Idealists, its American expositors influenced the ideas of the nineteenth-century American theologian and activist Theodore Parker. As the orginator of the phrases “arc of history” and “government of the people, by the people, and for the people,” Parker’s influence extends to presidents and Supreme Court justices, demonstrating the long and influential afterlife of the German philosophical discourses that Rosen explores. But examining this afterlife also challenges the assumption that we can discern the arc of history without the monotheistic presuppositions present in Parker.Keywords: KantHegelSchleiermacherParkerKingObamaBushLincolntheodicyrace Notes1 Rosen (Citation2022, 45) argues not simply that religions can be rational or Socratic, but that Socratism is, itself, “religious.”2 “Oval Office Redesigned,” https://www.nbcwashington.com/local/oval-office-redesigned/1877556/3 Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_l6gn.pdf4 Rosen (Citation2022, 4-5) distinguishes his own Nietzschean image of “the shadow of God” from Schmittian secularization on the grounds that the latter indicates discontinuity as well as continuity. This difference does not seem very great to me. As with Nietzsche’s critique of modern science, the overall argument of Political Theology is precisely that modern adaptations of religious concepts make no sense because they are stripped of their original meaning and removed from their original context. True, Schmitt hints that we might be able to return to the original meaning by embracing religious faith, whereas Nietzsche sees this as impossible for any honest person. Despite his professions of Catholic piety, however, it is doubtful that Schmitt took this step himself and it is simply unclear whether he regarded it as a serious option for others.","PeriodicalId":51723,"journal":{"name":"Critical Review","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135591673","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Critical ReviewPub Date : 2023-05-09DOI: 10.1080/08913811.2023.2204656
S. Fuller
{"title":"Shaken Not Stirred: The Name of the Game in the Post-Truth Condition","authors":"S. Fuller","doi":"10.1080/08913811.2023.2204656","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08913811.2023.2204656","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The post-truth condition is just as much about naming a meta-game as winning it. This condition can be tracked across Western intellectual history from the Homeric epics to popular culture. The common thread is that players are more likely to succeed in this meta-game if they have a certain consistency of character, which Thomas More called “integrity.” The presence of integrity means that the historical losers have often had an advantage in defining for subsequent generations the name of the game because the steadfastness of their characters may make them be regarded as the agents of history, for better or worse. Further, naming the game tends to be stabilized by a variety of mental and material conditions, including “modal power”—control over what people think is and is not possible. Modal power is related to both Machiavellian politics and Kantian transcendentalism, and to the phenomenon of “truthiness.” The character of the post-truth player is epitomized by Thomas More, the “man for all seasons,” who remained consistent as he moved between multiple games, and ultimately to his execution.","PeriodicalId":51723,"journal":{"name":"Critical Review","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-05-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48789115","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Critical ReviewPub Date : 2023-04-03DOI: 10.1080/08913811.2023.2248737
Shterna Friedman
{"title":"Jeffrey Friedman: In Memoriam","authors":"Shterna Friedman","doi":"10.1080/08913811.2023.2248737","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08913811.2023.2248737","url":null,"abstract":"For those who have been reading Critical Review over the years, the journal is synonymous with Jeffrey Friedman, who founded it in and edited it until his sudden death in December . Trained as an intellectual historian at the University of California, Berkeley, and then as a political theorist at Yale University, Friedman founded it when he was still a graduate student at Berkeley with the goal of putting various philosophical and political ideologies in conversation to scrutinize both their strongest and weakest arguments. It was, as one early ad in the New York Review of Books put it, the place where Marxists and libertarians could talk to one another. As Friedman’s interests evolved over the years, so did the journal, but he always treated Critical Review as a forum for critical intellectual debate. As he saw it, no single ideology captures the full complexity of the economic, social, and political spheres. Yet while casting a critical eye on all orthodoxies, he willingly published debates between scholars with radically different perspectives. As Friedman conceived it, the broad mission of the journal was to both model and promote an open society where participants would be selfconscious enough of their own fallibility that they would eagerly question their own premises, while also paying scrupulous attention to competing claims. This broad mission led Friedman to adopt, as its corollary, a subsidiary mission: to determine the best tools for analyzing the sources, nature, and effect of human fallibility in the face of the complexity of contemporary society. It was thus, from the beginning, interdisciplinary in orientation, as Friedman sought to canvass and evaluate the tools from such fields as economics, history, sociology, philosophy, and political science. Starting in the s, when Friedman entered graduate school in political science,","PeriodicalId":51723,"journal":{"name":"Critical Review","volume":"35 1","pages":"iii - v"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42179523","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}