Inaudible and invisible: epistemic injustice and the failure of recognition as a single intersubjective relation. Pain as particularly illuminating case.

Pretension as Epistemic Performance: Madness, Genius, and the Verdict of Uptake in Don Quixote

Background: Readers of Don Quixote have long divided between two verdicts: the knight is mad, or the knight is a martyr to a disenchanted world. Both readings assume that the truth of his acts lies inside the acts themselves; this paper argues that it lies in the world’s answer. Methods: The paper develops pretension as an epistemic category and constructs a three-term reading grammar — frame, uptake, and aftermath — through Austin, Butler, Goffman, Schechner, and related theories of performance and recognition. It applies this grammar to two structurally opposed scenes in Cervantes’s novel: the inn where Quixote is dubbed a knight and the windmill plain where his wager is refused, and a third, where the verdict is neither granted nor refused but held in dispute. Analysis: At the inn, the keeper grants sanction without belief: the rite is completed, the designation acquires social currency, and Quixote leaves with a standing conferred by others. On the plain, Sancho refuses endorsement of the frame, and the same kind of wager returns to Quixote as error and madness. Conclusion: Madness and genius are not simply differences of content or psychology; they are also verdicts rendered by audiences before whom claims are staged. The paper extends this structure to scholarship itself, where knowledge is never ratified privately but waits on uptake. Novelty: The article reclaims pretension from its moral weight and proposes it as a technical term for performance with consciousness of performance, tested by social uptake.

Burdens of Human Reason and Metaphysical Illusion: A Dialectical Essay on Immanuel Kant and Advaita Vedānta

Kant once described reason as a wanderer that finds, in the end, no permanent resting place, only a vantage from which to survey its own limits. This essay begins from that unsettled image and follows it into a second tradition that reaches a strikingly similar impasse from the opposite direction. Reading Kant's account of transcendental illusion alongside Advaita Vedānta, and drawing on K. C. Bhattacharyya and A. C. Mukerji as careful Indian interlocutors of the first Critique, the essay argues that both traditions diagnose reason's demand for the unconditioned as self-defeating, whether directed at the self, the world, or the absolute. The two paths diverge, however, in what follows from this shared limit. Kant converts the impasse into a postulate of practical faith securing moral freedom, while Advaita Vedānta converts it into a soteriological opening toward mokṣa. In both cases, reason must finally stand on faith to climb beyond itself.

Two truths and one aporia: a Madhyamaka model of agency in dialogue with Western philosophy of action

A Will to Interpret: Embodied Moral Reflexivity Under Misrecognition

This article reinterprets Pierre Bourdieu's theory of practice as a framework for understanding the moral struggles of marginalised actors in everyday contexts. Growing scholarship has emphasised that moral practices encompass not only intentional and deliberative reasoning but also automatic, instant and embodied reactions. Building on this literature, this article demonstrates how morality, as moral habitus and embodied dispositions, can subtly influence the dominant morals and norms throughout individual negotiations with habitus. In particular, it reframes Bourdieu's notion of practical reflection as a will to interpret —a pre‐reflective, practically oriented process of moral orientation that arises from embodied dissonance under conditions of misrecognition. Based on this concept, the article identifies two key sites where Bourdieu's theory contributes to moral struggles: (a) the experiential gap produced by hysteresis and (b) the development of new moral languages among marginalised actors. Ultimately, it calls for greater attention to the subtle, slow and often unnoticeable forms of resistance that unfold in everyday life, quietly reshaping moral landscapes from within.

Contingencies of the Self: Rorty's Pragmatic Blessing and Günther Anders' Existential Curse

ABSTRACT:This essay offers a comparative analysis of Richard Rorty's and Günther Anders' respective accounts of self-contingency, focusing on how each thinker links contingency with freedom and the consequences this has for the concept of the self. While Rorty, from a pragmatic standpoint, frames contingency as a source of strength and self-creation—as seen in his notions of the "strong poet" and "liberal ironist"—Anders, drawing from phenomenological and existential traditions, depicts it as a burden that contributes to powerlessness and existential disorientation. The analysis draws on Rorty's Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity and his lecture Hope in Place of Knowledge, contrasting them with Anders' early philosophical anthropology in The Unworldliness of Man. The focus also lies on certain aspects that – according to Rorty – stand for each of the two traditions. This is in order to identify possible reasons how the linking of the same concepts can lead to such differing outcomes. By re-evaluating Anders' work through a pragmatic lens, this essay suggests that there is a possibility of a more hopeful and action-oriented reading of his philosophy.

Neither Answered Nor Absorbed: The Irreducible Antinomy of Personal Address and Impersonal Ground in the Theology of Recovery

A previous study argued that the spiritual trajectory of the Twelve Steps, read alongside the Hasidic recovery of relational address, resolves the ancient quarrel between a personal God who is addressed as Thou and an impersonal Infinite into which the self is absorbed; it proposed that Hasidism reorients mystical depth toward relational responsibility rather than dissolution.¹ The present essay revisits and partly recants that conclusion. It argues that the resolution was premature, and that the deepest honesty available to the theology of recovery is not synthesis but the steady inhabitation of an antinomy that cannot be closed. Drawing on William James’s account of the wider self through which saving experiences arrive, Martin Buber’s insistence on the irreducibility of encounter, Elliot R. Wolfson’s apophatic phenomenology of identity-in-difference, and the Chabad doctrine that the divine Essence transcends the categories of being and non-being, the essay reads Step Eleven’s movement from a transcendent Higher Power toward ‘conscious contact’ not as a passage from transcendence to immanence but as the moment at which the two grammars—address and ground, Thou and depth—become simultaneously unavoidable and mutually irreducible. The recovering self does not discover that it is God, nor that God is merely the floor of its own interiority; it discovers that it cannot say which, and that its sobriety, and its capacity to remain present at the bedside of another’s suffering, depend on not deciding. The argument is developed through the author’s framework of hermeneutic medicine and therapeutic tzimtzum and is offered as a contribution to philosophy of religion, Jewish mystical studies, consciousness studies, and the still-unwritten theology of recovery.