Argumenta – Journal of Analytic Philosophy

This essay engages Catherine Malabou’s provocation that the life sciences can provide a materialist theory of thought (plasticity) that can reimagine agency, identity, and freedom. Paying particular attention to the science of epigenetics and its potential rethinking of origins and history in the name of a radical futurity, I argue that in fact it shows that plasticity is the very mode by which power is enacted and reproduced, specifically anti-black notions of race. I conclude with a brief discussion of Zakkiyah Jackson and her theory of plasticity, to show that…

I describe my engagement with Habermas’s ideas, and sketch a way of reading of Hegel that I take to be consonant with the deepest lessons I have learned from Habermas. I read Hegel as having a social, linguistic theory of normativity, and an exclusively retrospective conception of progress and the sense in which history exhibits teleological normativity.

It is argued that one of Hegel’s main strategies in overcoming the opposition between nature and spirit is to recognize a realm of “spiritualized nature” that has a distinctive ontological character of its own, one that, though it is rooted in nature, must be understood in essentially historical terms. It is argued that for Hegel the activity of work is premised upon a commitment to the independent standing of such spiritualized nature and its historical character, and a detailed reading of Hegel’s account of the slave’s work in the Phenomenology…