The humanities and humanistic social sciences are being defunded and are in decline. Book readership more generally is falling precipitously. Text is being replaced by images and photographs. Elaborate philosophical argument is ceding to 280-character broadsides. There are many contributing factors, including technological innovation, geopolitical economic pressures, looming crises like climate change, the pandemic, and nuclear proliferation that are wearing on the younger generations—even, perhaps, an invigorated politicization of Gen Z impatient with theory and focused on action. Is critical theory up to the task today of advancing social transformation? If so, must it change, and how?In this essay, Bernard E. Harcourt describes ten key features of the current condition of critical theory and addresses three dimensions necessary for a full articulation of a vision for its future: methodological, substantive, and strategic. Regarding the latter dimension, the strategic, Harcourt proposes three interventions: first, reorganizing the teaching, transmission, and production of contemporary critical thought within the university and higher education; second, turning to new forms of visual communication in order to seize the potential of our new digital age; and third, returning the critical field to the public sphere through open, public, and inclusive public programming. Along all three dimensions, the overarching goal is to continue to push contemporary critical thought toward an engaged form of critical praxis, or what might be called “critique and praxis.”

"In any case, I hate everything that merely instructs me without augmenting or directly invigorating my activity." It is with those words of Goethe that Nietzsche opened his untimely meditations on the value of history. Today, history has been eclipsed by the genealogical method, within critical circles. Foucault's genealogical approach now dominates historically inflected critique. But not all genealogical work today encourages praxis or directly invigorates our activity. In part because of its proliferation and now ubiquity, genealogy has essentially become what history was in the nineteenth century. It is crucial now that we assess the value of genealogical critique. The proper metric against which to evaluate genealogical writings is whether they contribute to transforming ourselves, others, and society. In this essay, I propose that we use the term "critical genealogy" to identify those genealogical practices that nourish our activity and thereby advance the ambition of critical philosophy.It is time, once again, that we test whether our historical critiques are productive or demobilizing. It is imperative that we knock on them to determine which are hollow and which are robust—which discourage and which nourish action. It is time, once again, that we do philosophy with a hammer.

Many philosophers, political theorists, and legal scholars caution that we are entering a post-truth age or a post-truth society in which alternative facts, pseudo-facts, and fake news now masquerade as actual evidence, and propaganda and political spin are replacing reasonable public discourse. A number of best-selling books, philosophical texts, and journal articles document the phenomenon of truth decay and attribute it to factors including new digital technologies, social media, a decline of trust in scientists, and greater political polarization. This chapter evaluates the argument that we are entering a post-truth era. First, it assesses the political efficacy of the argument as a strategic and rhetorical matter. Second, it weighs the substantive merits of the argument. In the process, the chapter addresses issues surrounding the importance of truth and its relationship to power and trust in contemporary politics.

Many philosophers, political theorists, and legal scholars caution that we are entering a post-truth age or a post-truth society in which alternative facts, pseudo-facts, and fake news now masquerade as actual evidence, and propaganda and political spin are replacing reasonable public discourse. A number of best-selling books, philosophical texts, and journal articles document the phenomenon of truth decay and attribute it to factors including new digital technologies, social media, a decline of trust in scientists, and greater political polarization. This chapter evaluates the argument that we are entering a post-truth era. First, it assesses the political efficacy of the argument as a strategic and rhetorical matter. Second, it weighs the substantive merits of the argument. In the process, the chapter addresses issues surrounding the importance of truth and its relationship to power and trust in contemporary politics.

irruption. And it defies any conventional notion of progress. Although we like to imagine that a philosophical advance represents enduring progress from more rudimentary times, more often it overcomes an obstacle in the moment. It confronts a new problem. It finds a new way out. Philosophical methods evolve, but that does not mean that earlier approaches are wrong or no longer operative. Nor does it mean that those earlier approaches gave birth to better ones. They addressed a different time. They faced a different conjuncture. They resolved a discrete problem. They served a special purpose. And often, they unveiled one illusion only to expose another. Indeed, a philosophical praxis from an earlier time may be just as performative today, perhaps even more so. It depends on the situation it confronts. We may need it just as badly, or even more than we did at an earlier time. The exigencies of a new crisis may demand a return—though even that is never simply a repetition. To believe otherwise would be to buy into a speculative philosophy of history that has no purchase today. We have long A PREFACE TO PHILOSOPHICAL PRAXIS

This concluding chapter argues that the common actuarial tools used by researchers in predicting future dangerousness/violations are counterproductive. Throughout their use of strategies such as racial profiling, the researchers themselves produce racial distortion in the prison system. The findings unfortunately diverge from effective crime prevention philosophies, and bias the public's conception of fair and just punishment. The primary means through which racial distortion emanates, the chapter explains, is when a profiled group is less elastic or less responsive to policing. The chapter calls for an embrace of randomization by making justice determinations independent (blind) to predictions of future dangerousness. This orientation simply means that criminal justice should get out of the business of making decisions based on (highly imperfect, and counterproductive) predictions of future dangerousness, and instead (for example) randomly sample from among suspects where there is probable cause.

Examines the “counter-” move in Balibar’s thought, analysing it not in the Kantian or Hegelian sense of a synthesis that resolves an antinomic opposition (not the least of which, because the particle “contre-” functions differently than the particle “anti-”), but rather as an original counterpoint that itself becomes so powerful as to liberate itself from the oppositional relationship and transform itself into a free-standing concept, intervention, or even mode of governmentality. It is not an opposition that leads to a synthesis, but instead to a stage of “perfection” that (1) merely indexes its former counter-partner, and (2) becomes a fully independent concept, all to itself, that does not incorporate its opposition and is no longer a reaction against anything.