Campus Calendar
12Philosophy Colloquium - Chad Kautzer
Location
Gaylord Hall
main floor of Worner Campus Center, 902 N. Cascade Ave.
(map)
Description
Chad Kautzer will deliver the second lecture in philosophy department’s 2013-14 colloquium series at 3:30 p.m. on Thursday, 12 December 2013, in Gaylord Hall, Worner Student Center. The title of his talk will be, "When Rights Go Wrong: Hegel, Honneth, and Contemporary Social Pathologies."
Now an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado Denver and Director of the Social Justice Minor in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Professor Kautzer received a doctorate in philosophy from Stony Brook University in 2008. His research interests fall within social and political philosophy and the history of philosophy generally, and within Frankfurt School critical theory, critical race and feminist theory, and the philosophy of law and right more specifically. In 2009, Professor Kautzer co-edited Pragmatism, Nation, and Race: Community in the Age of Empire (Indiana University Press) and, in 2004, he edited a special issue of Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice, focusing on law and war. In addition to publishing a number of journal articles, reviews, and translations, he is presently working on a book, titled Radical Philosophy, to be published by Paradigm Publishers in 2014.
Professor Kautzer’s talk at Colorado College will make use of the work of Alex Honneth, a German critical theorist whose recent work Kautzer has been translating into English. Honneth’s latest book, Das Recht der Freiheit (2011), develops a neo-Hegelian theory of social justice that dynamically incorporates negative, reflexive and social forms of freedom, as well as the institutional conditions necessary for their development and reproduction. This account of justice, grounded in relations of mutual recognition, enables the identification of social pathologies or the systemic emergence of normative deficits that (1) frustrate individual efforts to reflexively relate their actions to a larger, normative order and (2) inhibits their ability to recognize the freedom of others as a condition of their own freedom. After an assessment of this project, Professor Kautzer will employ Honneth’s theory to diagnose a contemporary social pathology in the sphere of negative freedom (or legally defined individual rights), which impedes social recognition and contributes to social injustice. This particular social pathology, he will argue, is giving rise to a pernicious form of subjectivity, which he calls self-defensive.
