On wednesday, november 17, 2004, president george W. Bush awarded the National Humanities Medal to, among others, John Searle. In this beautiful ceremony at the White House, Searle was honored for his “efforts to deepen understanding of the human mind, for using his writings to shape modern thought, defend reason and objectivity, and define debate about the nature of artificial intelligence.¹ ” What is most interesting about the awarding of this prize is not that Searle accepted it but rather what sort of philosophy is endorsed by a president who had both just invaded a country contrary to the desires...

Almost three years after president barak obama’s election, these words by Ellen Meiksins Wood have been confirmed. In spite of Obama’s noble intentions, he not only increased military spending but also intensified the wars in the Middle East. ¹ Also, the recent economic crisis of 2008, like the terrorist atack of 9/11, instead of resulting in an actual change in financial and international relations, produced an intensification of the existing U.S. dominance; that is, these events demonstrated how within the system of metaphysically framed democracies, change is almost impossible. Against this interpretation, many analysts believe that the election of a...

Throughout the history of political philosophy, interpretation and politics have been considered two separate domains. Kant regarded interpretation as the social function that mediates between people and the sovereign, Hobbes conceived it as a subordination to the demands of the state, and Weber saw in politics and interpretation two exclusively different domains of culture. ¹ While interpretation became a central problem of philosophy, psychology, and science by the beginning of the twentieth century, only recently have the political consequences of hermeneutics begun to emerge. For example, in 1982 the interdisciplinary journal Critical Inquiry ran an issue entitled “Politics of Interpretation,”...

Communism was a specter at the time of the Communist Manifesto—a ghost that frightened the upper middle class and the governors of the epoch. And it is still spectral today, because it has lost the ability to frighten the status quo after the complete domination of capitalistic framed democracies. These democracies managed to reduce communism to a residue of the past, a trace of a conquered fear, demonstrated by its complete absence in recent Western electoral politics (especially in the United States). Communism has become a ghost-like presence, and when it is noted at all, it is simply as...