Digital media technology, when deployed in ways that cultivate shared learning communities in which students and teachers are empowered to participate as partners in conjoint educational practices, can transform the way we teach and learn philosophy. This essay offers a model for how to put blogging and podcasting in the service of a cooperative…[Read more]

This article traces what Schürmann calls the “double comprehension of being” in Kant in which the sense of being as pure givenness is said to be recognized but denied by Kant as his thinking undertakes its Copernican turn. Schürmann insists that this can be heard in the ambiguous ways the German terms “Position” and “Setzung” are used in Kant.…[Read more]

A critical discussion of the account of social externalism and ideology critique in Sally Haslanger’s “Resisting Reality.”

A chapter giving an overview over the theory of value in the work of John McDowell and issues related to it.

Study of the form censorship took in two variant editions of Carl Albrecht Bernoulli’s Franz Overbeck und Friedrich Nietzsche: Eine Freundschaft 2 vols. (Jena: E. Diederichs, 1908)

This paper argues that liberal theories of justice cannot satisfactorily deal with institutional power. They set out to compare different institutional structures based on criteria which presume an institution-independent ontology of rights and goods. But as soon as it is acknowledged that many properties of goods and rights which are normatively…[Read more]

This is a syllabus for my MA course “Power, Oppression and Justice”, taught at the University of Groningen in 2016.

This working paper examines the notion of “immanent critique”, a central methodological commitment of critical theories of society. In the first part, I distinguish immanent critique – a critique which reconstructs norms immanent in a social practice which point beyond the normative self-understanding of its members – from both external and…[Read more]

Although the critique of reification is a core commitment of critical theories, there is no widely accepted account of its normative foundation. In Lukács’s original analysis, this foundation is provided by a strong concept of practice which is, however, not acceptable from a contemporary point of view. I argue that the systematic character of re…[Read more]

Artikel „Ideologiekritik“ (erscheint in Quante, Michael; Schweikard, David: Marx-Handbuch. Metzler: 2015, S. 238–252)

This is my syllabus for a minor course – an introduction to social and political philosophy at the University of Groningen.

This is a syllabus for a social and political philosophy course for Honours students, taught in 2016 at the University of Groningen

Recent disclosures suggest that many governments apply indiscriminate mass surveillance technologies that allow them to capture and store a massive amount of communications data belonging to citizens and non-citizens alike. This article argues that traditional liberal critiques of government surveillance that center on an individual right to…[Read more]

According to Jürgen Habermas, his Theory of Communicative Action offers a new account of the normative foundations of critical theory. Habermas’ motivating insight is that neither a transcendental nor a metaphysical solution to the problem of normativity, nor a merely hermeneutic reconstruction of historically given norms, is sufficient to cl…[Read more]