Care and Disability: Friends or Foes

This chapter argues that critical disability theory and an ethics of care, rather than offering opposing ways to think about disability, can be allies in crafting a theoretical foundation for providing care and assistance for disabled people. It recognizes the importance of taking seriously objections to care theory and to thinking of disabled people as dependents. Yet it urges that disability theorists forgo adopting the dominant liberal conceptions of the value of independence and the stigma of dependence and embrace a robust fully normative ethic of care that is compatible with the rights and dignity of disabled people.

The back and forth between Habermas and postmodernism

This paper aims to investigate the dialogue between some postmodern thinkers (mostly Lyotard, Rorty and Vattimo) and Habermas’ criticism in light of a different conception of dialogue itself. Therefore, we shall first give an account of how Habermas establishes his neomodern discourse (1985) in a very close dialogue with the key concepts of postmodernism: the subject and its social role, language and the concept of philosophical truth and the postmodernist view of history (Lyotard, 1979, Vattimo, 1974, 1985, 2009; Rorty, 1989; Bauman, 1993). Secondly, dialogue will be addressed as a structural difference between Habermas’ universal normative ethic of discourse (together with Karl-Otto Apel, 1983) and the postmodern local and linguistic pluralism, emancipated from any metaphysical ratio. In the end, it will be argued that philosophy ought to be dialogical in line with Habermas’ view, within the foundation and normativity of dialogue. Postmodernist dialogue in philosophy and in society displays instead many shortcomings if understood as a pluralist linguistic game of interpretation.

Religion und Politik. Plädoyer für offenen Religionsunterricht

A religious-pedagogical openness is rooted in a non-fundamentalist understanding of religion and politics-that is, in a modest religion and in a properly political approach to politics. The departure from “totalism”-in terms of a Trinitarian image of God as well as a political ethos-corresponds to the differentiation of “the political” (as the principle of democratic exchange) from politics (as a strategy of societal engagement). Religion neither elevates nor instantiates secular action, because it remains fundamentally open and finds itself entangled in unbelief beyond the reach of absolutist belief. “Political politics” is thus grounded in a non-normative ethic, and ultimately in an ethic of self-alienation (Oliver Marchart) that takes into account human failings. In every (political) justification there remains a plausible, unavailable remainder. Theological discourse about a groundless justification corresponds to a politics of forgiveness (Hannah Arendt).

Discourse and Development of Economic Knowledge

Mechanisms of transformation of knowledge in economic science are considered in the article. The author analyses the sphere of labor motivation in the Soviet political economy. He demonstrates the possibilities of statistical distribution analysis in studying discourse practices, reveals stages of development and mechanisms of discourse formation in the Soviet political economy. The question about the limits of the normative ethic approach in economic research is also risen in the article.