Naturalism and Social Philosophy

Martin Hartmann is professor of philosophy at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland. He focuses on political philosophy, social philosophy, philosophy of trust, Critical Theory, and the philosophy of emotions. He has published books on trust, John Dewey, the philosophy of emotions and articles on Critical Theory, pragmatism, trust, David Hume, Adam Smith, and the philosophy of emotions. Arvi Särkelä is a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zürich, Switzerland. He focuses on social philosophy, philosophy of culture, philosophy of nature, and the history of philosophy. He has published many articles on Adorno, Dewey, Hegel, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. He is the author of the book Immanente Kritik und soziales Leben: Selbsttransformative Praxis nach Hegel und Dewey and co-editor of John Dewey, Sozialphilosophie (with Axel Honneth), John Dewey and Social Criticism (with Federica Gregoratto and Just Serrano) and Pathologies of Recognition (with Arto Laitinen).

If often denied and repressed, the Anthropocene has returned naturalism to the center of the possibility of social philosophy. In this splendid and timely series of essays, the classical defenders of naturalism in social theory—from Hegel and Nietzsche through to Dewey, Beauvoir, Wittgenstein, Adorno and Horkheimer—are provided with emphatic elaboration and defense. Singularly and collectively, these essays demonstrate the defining characteristics of the kind of naturalism necessary for a Critical Theory of society today.

• Contemporary PerspectivesChapter 1: Naturalism and Social Philosophy: An Introduction, Martin Hartmann and Arvi SärkeläPART I: Second Nature and Forms of Life: Naturalistic Key Concepts in Social Philosophy Chapter 2: Second Nature: The Profound Depths of a Philosophical Key Term, Axel HonnethChapter 3: The Stage of Difference: On the Second Nature of Civil Society in Kant and Hegel, Thomas KhuranaChapter 4: 1880: First Philosophical Critique of Adaptationism: Nietzsche, Reader of Herbert Spencer, Barbara StieglerChapter 5: Experimentalism, Naturalism, and the Grounds of Social Critique, Steven LevineChapter 6: From Naturalism to Social Vitalism: Revisiting the Durkheim-Bergson Debate on Moral Obligations, Louis CarréPART II: Embodiment and Social Life: Action, Gender, and WorkChapter 7: The Dual Mode of Social Interaction: Habit, Embodied Cognition, and Social Action, Italo TestaChapter 8: Sex, Gender, and Ambiguity: Beauvoir on the Dilaceration of Lived Experience, Mariana TeixeiraCha