Reparative Critique in Jamesian Pragmatism, Foucauldian Genealogy, and Contemporary Political Philosophy

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dc.contributor.advisorKoopman, Colin
dc.contributor.authorSheehey, Bonnie
dc.date.accessioned2019-09-18T19:34:06Z
dc.date.available2019-09-18T19:34:06Z
dc.date.issued2019-09-18
dc.description.abstractMy dissertation develops and defends a concept of reparative critique that presses critical philosophy beyond its affinities with negative judgment. In the wake of Post-Kantian philosophy, critique has become associated with the work of negative judgment that aims to denounce or condemn some object or position. Unlike forms of negative critique, which are guided by affects of suspicion and paranoia, reparative critique is informed by a range of affects like hope, care, and concern that highlight the transformative dimension of critical inquiry. I advance the argument of the dissertation toward two main aims. In Part One, I defend and flesh out the practice of reparative critique by turning to the work of two figures from the history of philosophy: William James and Michel Foucault. These figures are exemplary, I argue, for the way they engage critique as a reparative exercise. In the introduction I situate these thinkers’ contributions to critique by way of the signal and originating work on philosophical critique by Immanuel Kant. In spite of their differing philosophical backgrounds and concerns, James and Foucault offer varieties of reparative critique that cohere along the conceptual lines of action, affect, and transformation. I reinterpret Foucault’s genealogy and James’s pragmatism in two separate chapters to develop the agential, affective, and transformative dimensions of reparative critique. In Part Two of the dissertation, I draw on the historical precedents supplied by James and Foucault to put reparative critique to work for contemporary political philosophy. In the first of these chapters, I use the frame of recent debates over the status of ideal theory in political philosophy and argue that reparative political critique must be realist, rather than idealist, in orientation. I then deploy this realist method of reparative critique in the chapters that follow to analyze the problem of racial bias and discrimination posed by the operation of power in digital technologies like predictive policing algorithms.en_US
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/1794/24964
dc.language.isoen_US
dc.publisherUniversity of Oregon
dc.rightsAll Rights Reserved.
dc.subjectaffecten_US
dc.subjectcritiqueen_US
dc.subjectMichel Foucaulten_US
dc.subjecttechnologyen_US
dc.subjectWilliam Jamesen_US
dc.titleReparative Critique in Jamesian Pragmatism, Foucauldian Genealogy, and Contemporary Political Philosophy
dc.typeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
thesis.degree.disciplineDepartment of Philosophy
thesis.degree.grantorUniversity of Oregon
thesis.degree.leveldoctoral
thesis.degree.namePh.D.

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