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Recognition and the Human Life-Form
Beyond Identity and Difference
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Book Description
What is recognition and why is it so important? This book develops a synoptic conception of the significance of recognition in its many forms for human persons by means of a rational reconstruction and internal critique of classical and contemporary accounts.
The book begins with a clarification of several fundamental questions concerning recognition. It then reconstructs the core ideas of Fichte, Hegel, Taylor, Fraser, and Honneth and utilizes the insights and conceptual tools developed across these chapters for developing a case for the universal importance of recognition for humans. It argues in favour of a universalist anthropological position, unusual in the literature on recognition, that aims to construe a philosophically sound basis for a discourse of common humanity, or of a shared human life-form for which moral relations of recognition are essential. This synthetic conception of the importance of recognition provides tools for articulating deep intuitions shared across cultures about what makes human life and forms of human co-existence better or worse, and thus tools for mutual understanding about the deepest shared concerns of humanity, or of what makes us all human persons despite our differences.
Recognition and the Human Life-Form will appeal to readers interested in philosophical anthropology, social and political philosophy, critical theory, and the history of philosophy. It also provides ideas and conceptual tools for fields such as anthropology, education, disability studies, international relations, law, politics, religious studies, sociology, and social research.
Table of Contents
Foreword
1. Preliminary Questions
2. Fichte: Recognition and Personhood
3. Hegel: Recognition and ‘Spirit’ or the Human Life-Form
4. Charles Taylor and Nancy Fraser: Recognition, Identity, and Inclusion
5. Axel Honneth: The Recognition Paradigm Between Universalism and Historicism
6. Recognition, the Human Life-Form, and Full-Fledged Personhood
Author(s)
Biography
Heikki Ikäheimo is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at UNSW Sydney, Australia. He is specialized in Hegel, recognition, personhood, social ontology, and critical social philosophy. His previous publications include the monographs Anerkennung (2014) and Self-Consciousness and Intersubjectivity (2000), the co-edited volumes Handbuch Anerkennung (2021), Recognition and Ambivalence (2021), Recognition and Social Ontology (2011), and Dimensions of Personhood (2007), as well as numerous articles and book-chapters.
Reviews
"Ikäheimo develops a distinctive and cogent case for the centrality of recognition to our nature as social animals and grounds it in a highly sophisticated analysis of the philosophical foundations of the concept of recognition. The resulting account of the complex, multifaceted, nature of social recognition is a significant contribution to the field."
Cillian McBride, Queen’s University Belfast, UK
"It takes an unusual combination of philosophical talents to accomplish what is so splendid and original about this book: presenting an overview of the origins and further elaborations of the German notion of 'recognition' by simultaneously outlining a systematic account of recognition’s role in the human form of life. Ikäheimo’s synthesis of conceptual history and systematization is at the same time hermeneutically sensitive and analytically rigorous, knowledgeable both of the history of German Idealism and of the current debates on human nature. For anyone interested in the richly layered role of recognition in human life this well-written and strongly argued book is a must-read."
Axel Honneth, Columbia University, USA
"Ikäheimo’s book proves his outstanding competence regarding one of the most influential theories in modern social philosophy: mutual recognition. He is both expert in its main sources—German idealism, critical theory, and pragmatism—and well versed with modern psychological and sociological evidence. Perhaps the most important achievement of the book is a justification of the universal claim to recognition on the basis of a constant human form of life, constituted by social cooperation under shared norms, aimed at future well-being and the development of 'full-fledged personhood'."
Ludwig Siep, University of Münster, Germany