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Full-Text Articles in Politics and Social Change
How Secular Should Democracy Be? A Cross-Disciplinary Study Of Catholicism And Islam In Promoting Public Reason, David Ingram, David Ingram
How Secular Should Democracy Be? A Cross-Disciplinary Study Of Catholicism And Islam In Promoting Public Reason, David Ingram, David Ingram
Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works
I argue that the same factors (strategic and principled) that motivated Catholicism to champion liberal democracy are the same that motivate 21st Century Islam to do the same. I defend this claim by linking political liberalism to democratic secularism. Distinguishing institutional, political, and epistemic dimensions of democratic secularism, I show that moderate forms of political and epistemic secularism are most conducive to fostering the kind of public reasoning essential to democratic legitimacy. This demonstration draws upon the ambivalent impact of Indonesia’s Islamic parties in advancing universal social justice aims as against more sectarian policies.
The Public Sphere As Site Of Emancipation And Enlightenment: A Discourse Theoretic Critique Of Digital Communication, David Ingram, Asaf Bar-Tura
The Public Sphere As Site Of Emancipation And Enlightenment: A Discourse Theoretic Critique Of Digital Communication, David Ingram, Asaf Bar-Tura
Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works
Habermas claims that an inclusive public sphere is the only deliberative forum for generating public opinion that satisfies the epistemic and normative conditions underlying legitimate decision-making. He adds that digital technologies and other mass media need not undermine – but can extend – rational deliberation when properly instituted. This paper draws from social epistemology and technology studies to demonstrate the epistemic and normative limitations of this extension. We argue that current online communication structures fall short of satisfying the required epistemic and normative conditions. Furthermore, the extent to which Internet-based communications contribute to legitimate democratic opinion and will formation depends …
Of Sweatshops And Human Subsistence: Habermas On Human Rights, David Ingram
Of Sweatshops And Human Subsistence: Habermas On Human Rights, David Ingram
Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works
In this paper I argue that the discourse theoretic account of human rights defended by Jürgen Habermas contains a fruitful tension that is obscured by its dominant tendency to identify rights with legal claims. This weakness in Habermas’s account becomes manifest when we examine how sweatshops diminish the secure enjoyment of subsistence, which Habermas himself (in recognition of the UDHR) recognizes as a human right. Discourse theories of human rights are unique in tying the legitimacy of human rights to democratic deliberation and consensus. So construed, their specific meaning and force is the outcome of historical political struggle. However, unlike …
Foucault And Habermas, David Ingram
Foucault And Habermas, David Ingram
Philosophy: Faculty Publications and Other Works
The article is a comprehensive comparison of Foucault and Habermas which focuses on their distinctive styles of critical theory. The article maintains that Foucault's virtue ethical understanding of aesthetic self-realization as a form of resistance to normalizing practices provides counterpoint to Habermas's more juridical approach to institutional justice and the critique of ideology. The article contains an extensive discussion of their respective treatments of speech action, both strategic and communicative, and concludes by addressing Foucault's understanding of parrhesia as a non-discursive form of truth-telling.