Related Research Articles
Max Horkheimer was a German philosopher and sociologist who was famous for his work in critical theory as a member of the Frankfurt School of social research. Horkheimer addressed authoritarianism, militarism, economic disruption, environmental crisis, and the poverty of mass culture using the philosophy of history as a framework. This became the foundation of critical theory. His most important works include Eclipse of Reason (1947), Between Philosophy and Social Science (1930–1938) and, in collaboration with Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). Through the Frankfurt School, Horkheimer planned, supported and made other significant works possible.
Theodor W. Adorno was a German philosopher, sociologist, psychologist, musicologist, and composer.
Dialectic, also known as the dialectical method, is a discourse between two or more people holding different points of view about a subject but wishing to establish the truth through reasoned argumentation. Dialectic resembles debate, but the concept excludes subjective elements such as emotional appeal and rhetoric. Dialectic may thus be contrasted with both the eristic, which refers to argument that aims to successfully dispute another's argument, and the didactic method, wherein one side of the conversation teaches the other. Dialectic is alternatively known as minor logic, as opposed to major logic or critique.
The Frankfurt School is a school of social theory and critical philosophy associated with the Institute for Social Research, at Goethe University Frankfurt in 1929. Founded in the Weimar Republic (1918–1933), during the European interwar period (1918–1939), the Frankfurt School initially comprised intellectuals, academics, and political dissidents dissatisfied with the contemporary socio-economic systems of the 1930s. The Frankfurt theorists proposed that social theory was inadequate for explaining the turbulent political factionalism and reactionary politics occurring in 20th century liberal capitalist societies. Critical of both capitalism and of Marxism–Leninism as philosophically inflexible systems of social organization, the School's critical theory research indicated alternative paths to realizing the social development of a society and a nation.
Social theories are analytical frameworks, or paradigms, that are used to study and interpret social phenomena. A tool used by social scientists, social theories relate to historical debates over the validity and reliability of different methodologies, the primacy of either structure or agency, as well as the relationship between contingency and necessity. Social theory in an informal nature, or authorship based outside of academic social and political science, may be referred to as "social criticism" or "social commentary", or "cultural criticism" and may be associated both with formal cultural and literary scholarship, as well as other non-academic or journalistic forms of writing.
Fredric Jameson is an American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist political theorist. He is best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends, particularly his analysis of postmodernity and capitalism. Jameson's best-known books include Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and The Political Unconscious (1981).
Ram Roy Bhaskar (1944–2014) was an English philosopher of science who is best known as the initiator of the philosophical movement of critical realism (CR). Bhaskar argued that the task of science is "the production of the knowledge of those enduring and continually active mechanisms of nature that produce the phenomena of the world", rather than the discovery of quantitative laws, and that experimental science makes sense only if such mechanisms exist and operate outside the lab as well as inside it. He went on to apply that realism about mechanisms and causal powers to the philosophy of social science, and he also elaborated a series of arguments to support the critical role of philosophy and the human sciences. According to Bhaskar, it is possible and desirable for the study of society to be scientific.
In the social sciences there is a standing debate over the primacy of structure or agency in shaping human behaviour. Structure is the recurrent patterned arrangements which influence or limit the choices and opportunities available. Agency is the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices. The structure versus agency debate may be understood as an issue of socialization against autonomy in determining whether an individual acts as a free agent or in a manner dictated by social structure.
The philosophy of social science is the study of the logic, methods, and foundations of social sciences. Philosophers of social science are concerned with the differences and similarities between the social and the natural sciences, causal relationships between social phenomena, the possible existence of social laws, and the ontological significance of structure and agency.
Dialectic of Enlightenment is a work of philosophy and social criticism written by Frankfurt School philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. The text, published in 1947, is a revised version of what the authors originally had circulated among friends and colleagues in 1944 under the title of Philosophical Fragments.
György Márkus was a Hungarian philosopher, belonging to the small circle of critical theorists closely associated with György Lukács and usually referred to as the Budapest School.
Freudo-Marxism is a loose designation for philosophical perspectives informed by both the Marxist philosophy of Karl Marx and the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud. It has a rich history within continental philosophy, beginning in the 1920s and 1930s and running since through critical theory, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and post-structuralism.
The positivism dispute was a political-philosophical dispute between the critical rationalists and the Frankfurt School in 1961, about the methodology of the social sciences. It grew into a broad discussion within German sociology from 1961 to 1969. The naming itself is controversial, since it was the Frankfurt School proponents who accused the critical rationalists of being positivists—while the latter considered themselves to be opponents of positivism.
The critique of ideology is a concept used in critical theory, literary studies, and cultural studies. It focuses on analyzing the ideology found in cultural texts, whether those texts be works of popular culture or high culture, philosophy or TV advertisements. These ideologies can be expressed implicitly or explicitly. The focus is on analyzing and demonstrating the underlying ideological assumptions of the texts and then criticizing the attitude of these works. An important part of ideology critique has to do with “looking suspiciously at works of art and debunking them as tools of oppression”.
Thomas McCarthy is John Shaffer Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Northwestern University. Before joining Northwestern in 1985, he taught for four years at Munich University and for thirteen years at Boston University. After retiring from Northwestern in 2006, he served for three years as William H. Orrick Visiting Professor at Yale University. Over the course of his academic career, McCarthy's work was supported by grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Early in his career he wrote and taught principally in the philosophy of logic and mathematics and then in the philosophy of the social sciences. Subsequently, and for the bulk of his career, he worked in the general area of critical, social and political theory, and in particular on the work of Jürgen Habermas, of which he is widely regarded as one of the foremost English-language interpreters. During his last decade of teaching, McCarthy focused on theoretical issues in the history of racist and imperialist thought, and particularly on their interweaving in theories of progress and development.
In Marxist philosophy, reification is the process by which human social relations are perceived as inherent attributes of the people involved in them, or attributes of some product of the relation, such as a traded commodity.
A critical theory is any approach to social philosophy that focuses on society and culture to attempt to reveal, critique, and challenge power structures. With roots in sociology and literary criticism, it argues that social problems stem more from social structures and cultural assumptions than from individuals. It argues that ideology is the principal obstacle to human liberation. Critical theory finds applications in various fields of study, including psychoanalysis, sociology, history, communication theory, philosophy and feminist theory.
Marxist philosophy or Marxist theory are works in philosophy that are strongly influenced by Karl Marx's materialist approach to theory, or works written by Marxists. Marxist philosophy may be broadly divided into Western Marxism, which drew from various sources, and the official philosophy in the Soviet Union, which enforced a rigid reading of Marx called dialectical materialism, in particular during the 1930s. Marxist philosophy is not a strictly defined sub-field of philosophy, because the diverse influence of Marxist theory has extended into fields as varied as aesthetics, ethics, ontology, epistemology, social philosophy, political philosophy, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of history. The key characteristics of Marxism in philosophy are its materialism and its commitment to political practice as the end goal of all thought. The theory is also about the struggles of the proletariat and their reprimand of the bourgeoisie.
Chinese Marxist philosophy is the philosophy of dialectical materialism that was introduced into China in the early 1900s and continues in Chinese academia to the current day.
Marxist cultural analysis is a form of cultural analysis and anti-capitalist cultural critique, which assumes the theory of cultural hegemony and from this specifically targets those aspects of culture which are profit driven and mass-produced under capitalism.
References
- ↑ Bhaskar, R. (2008) [1975], A Realist Theory of Science (Routledge 'With a new introduction' edition), Abingdon: Routledge.
- ↑ Adorno, T. (1982), Prisms, MIT Press: Cambridge.
- ↑ "Immanent critique as the core of critical theory." British Journal of Sociology Vol. 32, No. 3, p. 333 (1981)
- ↑ Sociological Perspectives: Vol 33, No. 1, "Critical Theory," p. 5 (1990)