This article is a discussion of the “discourse on the unthinkable” surrounding potential future democratic engagements with rivers as non-human persons or natural objects. In the context of the Asia–Pacific region, this article suggests that the developments in material philosophy entitled “new materialism” are essential tools in the reconcept…[Read more]

This article explores the diagram found on the recto side of Pierpont Morgan, M. 982, a single leaf from a twelfth-century manuscript held by the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, and believed to originate in the scriptorium of Saint Peter’s Abbey in Salzburg, Austria. The diagram represents knowledge as an ‘ecodiagrammatic’ pattern, depic…[Read more]

Gathering into lively conversation scholars in medieval, early modern and object studies, Inhuman Nature explores the activity of the things, forces, and relations that enable, sustain and operate indifferently to us. Enamored by fictions of environmental sovereignty, we too often imagine “human” to be a solitary category of being. This col…[Read more]

In the context of the global water crisis, we seek an understanding of the histories of water management, their fashioning, and their legacy today. We juxtapose temporally diverse narratives to explore the premodern imaginings that have shaped our inheritance of hydrological thought. Rather than conceptualize their historical influence as a linear…[Read more]

Recent years have seen an infusion of new ideas into material philosophy through the work of the so-called ‘new materialists’. Poignant examples appear within two recent books: the first, Vibrant Matter by Jane Bennett (2010), sets out to “enhance receptivity to the impersonal life that surrounds and infuses us” (2010: 4). The second, Element…[Read more]

This essay develops interrelations and mutual implications foremost among Bernie Sanders’ book Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In, Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’: On Care for our Common Home, and David Fideler’s Restoring the Soul of the World: Our Living Bond with Nature’s Intelligence. It proposes that the evolution of contempla…[Read more]

Studies of ethnic minority peoples in Asia have long focussed on the relations between ethnic minority communities and the modern state and on the role of development in shaping these relations. This paper is concerned with how ethnic minorities respond to the state-led development. While there are numerous studies focussing on the collective…[Read more]

Bans on coal mining have been implemented in two tribal majority states in India’s north-east frontier; Nagaland and Meghalaya. In Nagaland the state government imposed the ban in an attempt to capture control of coal extraction and trade, while in Meghalaya India’s National Green Commission imposed the ban over concern for the environment and…[Read more]

Eine gerechte Verteilung von Gütern reicht nicht aus, um eine Gesellschaft gerecht zu machen. Gerechtigkeitstheorien müssen auch die sozialen Beziehungen in den Blick nehmen: Wirkliche soziale Gerechtigkeit herrscht erst, wenn es Institutionen gibt, die uns die Chance einräumen, soziale Anerkennung zu erfahren.

This is the introductory chapter to the monograph “Recht – Macht – Öffentlichkeit”, which investigates how to include the phenomenological dimension of the life-world in the analysis of the demoratic state. In Jürgen Habermas’s discourse theory of law and democracy there is reason for such an extension, yet it is hard to carry out metho…[Read more]

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]