The idea of the Axial Age was introduced by Karl Jaspers in his 1949 book on The Origin and Goal of History . Its main contention is that comparable yet independent ideas of transcendence emerged between 800 and 200 BCE in China and India (Buddhism and Hinduism), Persia (Zoroastrism), Greece (classical philosophy), and ancient Israel (Judaism). As it has gained greater traction over the past 75 years, this article reconstructs systematically the idea of the Axial Age in four steps: Jaspers’s original formulation with its cosmopolitan intent, Shmuel Eisenstadt's comparative approach to ancient civilisations, Robert Bellah's application of it as part of a general theory of religious evolution , and Jürgen Habermas’s study of the relationships between science, religion, and philosophy as a genealogy of postmetaphysical thinking . It then revisits two of the major criticisms that have been raised against the Axial Age in the works of Eric Voegelin and Jan Assmann. The article demonstrates that both supporters and critics identify that a similar rational core of the idea of the Axial Age lies in the rise of more differentiated relationships between moral and religious justifications, on the one hand, and political legitimacy, on the other.

Michael Rosen’s The Shadow of God offers a rich account of ideas of secularization in the German Idealist tradition. In this short article, I contend that, despite its sophistication, the book misses the extent to which questions about Jewish emancipation were central to these debates. I focus on how, as Hegel misconstrued Judaism as the heteronomous religion of a people of ‘slaves,’ this leads Rosen to neglect some significant antisemitic underpinnings of broader philosophical and sociological arguments on secularization.

Freud completed his last book, on Moses and Monotheism, in 1939, while in his London exile. Its publication was deemed untimely, as its two main theses could be construed as a form of Jewish self-hatred. The first claim questions Moses' Jewish origins and contends that the founder of the Jews was in fact an Egyptian; the second suggests that the Jews killed Moses and then created his myth as a coping mechanism for concealing their terrible deed. In this article, I contend that Moses and Monotheism can be read as Freud's intervention in debates on the 'Jewish Question'. After revisiting Freud's original argument (I), I assess its reception among leading Jewish intellectuals of the 20th century (II). I then use Freud's arguments to look at the two key themes of the Jewish Question: understanding the defining features of Jewish identity (III) and the pervasiveness of antisemitism in Western culture (IV).

Reseña de Daniel Chernilo del libro Si Auschwitz no es nada. Contra el negacionismo, de Donatella Di Cesare. Buenos Aires: Katz Editores, 2023.

Este breve texto resume los presupuestos y tesis principales del programa de investigación de la sociología filosófica. Tomando como punto de partida la tradición de la antropología filosófica de la primera mitad del siglo pasado, la sociología filosófica sostiene que, como especie, los humanos tenemos un conjunto de propiedades antropológicas que hacen posible esa producción y reproducción de lo social. Es decir, se trataría de propiedades generales que si bien se actualizan socioculturalmente mantienen un alto nivel de autonomía en relación con esos contextos. El artículo pasa revista a tres de las dimensiones distintivas de la sociología filosofica: (1) su compromiso con una posición humanista más no antropocéntrica; (2) la justificación postmetafísica de su orientación universalista; (3) la centralidad del concepto de “idea normativa” para capturar la manera en que las ideas morales se despliegan en la vida.

This article looks at the contribution of secularisation debates to a critical theory of society. As the relations between the ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ aspects of modern life grow more vexing, it argues critical theory must eschew its previous secularisation-as-progress metanarrative. Instead, processes of secularisation are better understood as those relationships between public and private beliefs and practices that take place at the boundaries between modern society’s commitment to procedural institutions and substantive value commitments. The article then revisits four different understandings of secularisation that, coming from a variety of intellectual traditions, help us redefine it beyond an exclusive focus on institutional religions: normative questions on the rise and decline of autonomous values; temporal questions on the self-positing of modernity as an historical epoch; political questions on the desacralisation of modern sovereignty and practical questions on the non-technological dimensions of technology. This framework is put to the test in relation to the procedural challenge of democratic fallibility and the substantive challenge of planetary survival.

Este breve comentario ofrece tres reflexiones al artículo ’Provocaciones y tensiones del Antropoceno: hacia una geologización de lo social’, de Manuel Tironi y Beltrán Undurraga. En primer lugar, se discute la idea de ’claroscuro’ que los autores utilizan para abordar sociológicamente el Antropoceno. Segundo, se critica la definición algo débil del concepto mismo de Antropoceno, que corre el riesgo de disolver buena parte de sus rendimientos más significativos. Finalmente, se toma distancia de su llamado a la ’sociología chilena’, desde una perspectiva tanto local como global.

This is an interview with Gerard Delanty. It discusses his intellectual trajectory and involvement in social theory and in particular explores his approach to critical theory. The interview also focuses on his editorship of the European Journal of Social Theory, now celebrating its 25th anniversary and the 100th issue

In his “The Garden of the Forking Paths,” Argentinean storyteller Jorge Luis Borges devises an ever-growing maze of diverging and converging paths. While the underlying structure of these paths is the explicit object of his quest, the protagonist becomes increasingly aware that, in fact, his quest mirrors such big questions as the nature of space and time. We use this provocative image to kick off our much more modest quest on the current state of sociological theories of normativity that have become salient in the past three decades. What once seemed to be the specific object of critical theory, as it has constantly shown a special sensibility towards normative issues, is now a pressing theme in various theoretical traditions, and perhaps the very universe in which divergent sociological worlds concatenate with each other. We focus on three traditions that have made clear progress in explicitly analysing what is the normative: Neo-Durkheimianism, Neo-pragmatism, and Critical Realism. We identify their more salient aspects and reflect on their similarities and differences. We conclude that, to all three, normative ideals are congealed in social “facts” that cannot be explained, naturalistically or mechanistically, in causal terms. Equally, they all make apparent the autonomy of normative ideals in the structure of human agency by focusing on different aspects of it. Finally, we reflect on the different temporal dimension on which they focus: spaces of ritualism to past normative commitments (Neo-Durkheimians); spaces of reasons to present problematic events (Neo-pragmatism); and spaces of aspirations to imagined future states (Critical Realism).

The question 'what is a human being?' is as old as philosophy itself, but over the past century we witness a major change in the way this question has been raised in the humanities and the social sciences. In this chapter, Chernilo reconstructs the trajectory of this question in five periods: the rise of philosophical anthropology in the 1920s and 1930s, the debate between Sartre and Heidegger at the end of World War Two, the anti-humanist critique between the 1960s and the 1990s, the contemporary posthuman turn and recent attempts at renewing anthropological enquiries. Chernilo contends that most and normative questions of the present are ultimately underpinned by specific ideas of the human.

El debate sobre el antropoceno se encuentra entre los programas científicos más ambiciosos de los últimos 15 o 20 años. Su argumento principal es que, desde un punto de vista geológico, los seres humanos deben ser entendidos como la principal fuerza natural por lo que nuestra era geológica actual está dominada por la actividad humana. Lentamente, el antropoceno se ha transformado en una meta-narrativa contemporánea que busca hacer sentido del “sistema-tierra” en su conjunto y que ofrece una visión distópica antes que progresiva: puesto que la explotación de los recursos naturales del planeta ha llegado a un punto de no retorno, debemos cuestionarnos la posibilidad de la continuidad de la vida humana. Mi objetivo en este artículo es explorar las nociones implícitas de lo humano - del antropos - que se mobilzan en el debate sobre el antropoceno. Lo hago en dos momentos. Primero, despliego los argumentos principales del debate sobre el Antropoceno con un énfasis especial en intentar desentrañar sus ideas implícitas de lo humano. Segundo, utilizo mi enfoque de la sociología filosófica para destacar algunas de las limitaciones y contradicciones de las ideas de agencia, reflexividad y responsabilidad que están a la base del debate del Antropoceno.