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  1. The Sociologist of Knowledge in the Positivism Dispute.Iaan Reynolds - 2023 - Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory 24 (1):133-155.
    This paper studies the conflict between critical rationalism and critical theory in Karl Popper and Theodor Adorno’s 1961 debate by analyzing their shared rejection of Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge. Despite the divergences in their respective projects of critical social research, Popper and Adorno agree that Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge is uncritical. By investigating their respective assessments of this research program I reveal a deeper similarity between critical rationalism and critical theory. Though both agree on the importance of critique, they (...)
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  2. Critical Phenomenology and Phenomenological Critique.Delia Popa & Iaan Reynolds - 2021 - Studia Universitatis Babeş-Bolyai Philosophia 66 (1):7-20.
    Phenomenological critique attempts to retrieve the lived experience of a human community alienated from its truthful condition and immersed in historical crises brought by processes of objectification and estrangement. This introductory article challenges two methodological assumptions that are largely shared in North American Critical Phenomenology: the definition of phenomenology as a first person approach of experience and the rejection of transcendental eidetics. While reflecting on the importance of otherness and community for phenomenology’s critical orientation, we reconsider the importance of eidetics (...)
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  3. The Dialectic of Progress and the Cultivation of Resistance in Critical Social Theory.Iaan Reynolds - 2021 - Social Epistemology: A Journal of Knowledge, Culture, and Policy 1:1-12.
    Beginning with the influential discussion of the dialectic of progress found in Amy Allen’s The End of Progress, this paper outlines some difficulties encountered by critical theories of normative justification drawing on the early Frankfurt School. Characterizing Adorno and Horkheimer’s critical social theory as a dialectical reflection eschewing questions of normative foundations, I relate their well-known treatment of the dialectic of enlightenment reason and myth to their critique of capitalist society as a negative totality. By exploring the concepts of historical (...)
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  4. Critique Without Normative Foundations: Response to Vogelmann and Prusik.Iaan Reynolds - 2022 - Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 11 (8):8-17.
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  5.  85
    Beyond the Death-Drive: Psychoanalysis and Social Critique.Delia Popa & Iaan Reynolds - forthcoming - In Dustin Byrd & Seyed Javad Miri (eds.), Sigmund Freud as a Critical Social Theorist: Psychoanalysis and the Neurotic in Contemporary Society. Leiden: Brill.
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  6. The Critique of Social Reason in the Popper-Adorno Debate.Iaan Reynolds - 2023 - History of the Human Sciences 36 (3-4):260-282.
    This paper examines the differences and affinities between Karl Popper’s critical rationalism and Theodor Adorno’s critical theory through renewed attention to the original documents of their 1961 debate. While commentaries often describe the Popper-Adorno encounter as a theoretical disappointment, I reveal a confrontation between conceptually opposed programs of social research. Though both theorists are committed to critique as a political and epistemological struggle for human freedom, their conceptions of this struggle are starkly different. In the original seminar papers, we find (...)
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  7. Immediacy and Experience in Lukács' Theory of Reification.Iaan Reynolds - 2021 - Metodo: International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy 9 (2):89-119.
    This paper studies the relationship between consciousness and social existence in Georg Lukács’ early Marxist works through a consideration of his concept of reification. Understanding reification as the process underlying capitalist society’s immediate form of objectivity, I designate dereification as the cultivation of a mediated form of consciousness. In order to better understand the experiential aspects of this cultivation, I supplement my reading of Lukács’ theory of reification with attention to Walter Benjamin’s treatment of experience in capitalist society. I argue (...)
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  8. Violence, Education, and the Tradition of the Oppressed in Benjamin and Du Bois.Iaan Reynolds - 2023 - Radical Philosophy Review 26 (1):41-65.
    This paper discusses two thinkers who locate the possibility of revolutionary historical change in political projects oriented toward the formation of subjects and cultivation of sensibility. I begin by considering the relationship between historical violence and education in the works of Walter Benjamin. After introducing the provocative association of education with divine violence found in “Toward the Critique of Violence,” I expand on Benjamin’s conception of pedagogical force. Highlighting the centrality of education in Benjamin’s early work, I argue that his (...)
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  9. Climate Change and the Irrational Society.Larry Alan Busk & Iaan Reynolds - 2023 - Theory and Event 26 (3):559-575.
    This essay considers the catastrophe of anthropogenic climate change in relation to two possible critical-theoretic dispositions. The first, represented by an emblematic passage from Adorno, retains the hope for the realization of a “rational society.” The second, represented by a complementary passage from Foucault, enjoins critical theory to abandon any ambition toward criticizing or transforming society at a totalizing level. We argue that the unfolding climate catastrophe demands a conception of critical theory more in line with the first disposition, and (...)
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  10. Abstraction and Self-Alienation in Mannheim and Husserl.Iaan Reynolds - 2023 - In Andrej Božič (ed.), Thinking Togetherness: Phenomenology and Sociality. Institute Nova Reijva for the Humanities. pp. 31-44.
    In this paper, I explore the approaches to methodological abstraction and self-alienation developed respectively in Karl Mannheim’s early sociology of intellectuals and in Edmund Husserl’s late transcendental phenomenology. In Mannheim’s early and experimental works, the resistance to abstraction and alienation is located in a stratum of intellectuals able to meaningfully combine diverse cultural currents in a social process of cultivation (Bildung). In Husserl, to contrast, this resistance is grasped as a constant crisis in the methods of pursuing philosophical truth. While (...)
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  11. Ambivalent Identifications: Narcissism, Melancholia, and Sublimation.Delia Popa & Iaan Reynolds - 2022 - Consecutio Rerum: Rivista Critica Della Postmodernità 11 (6):161-186.
    Beginning with Freud’s treatment of identification as an ambivalent process, we explore identification’s polarization between narcissistic idealization and melancholic division. While narcissistic identification can be seen as a strategy adopted by the ego to avoid the educational development of its drives and to maintain itself either in whole or in part in an infantile state, melancholic identification activates a tension between the ego-ideal and the real ego at the expense of the latter. After discussing the ambivalence of identification, we review (...)
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  12.  34
    Revisiting the Frankfurt School's Engagements with Phenomenology. [REVIEW]Iaan Reynolds - 2024 - PUNCTA: Journal of Critical Phenomenology 7 (3).
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  13. Love, Mourning, and the Speculative Philosophy of Praxis. [REVIEW]Iaan Reynolds - 2023 - Radical Philosophy Review 23 (1):169-173.
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  14. Review of Duy Lap Nguyen, Walter Benjamin and the Critique of Political Economy: A New Historical Materialism. [REVIEW]Iaan Reynolds - 2023 - Marx and Philosophy Review of Books 2023.
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  15. Review of Charles A. Prusik, Adorno and Neoliberalism: The Critique of Exchange Society. [REVIEW]Iaan Reynolds - 2021 - Marx and Philosophy Review of Books.
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  16. Review of Sebastian Truskolaski, Adorno and the Ban on Images. [REVIEW]Iaan Reynolds - 2021 - Marx and Philosophy Review of Books.
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