The CEU Department of Philosophy cordially invites you to a talk

(as part of its Departmental Colloquium series)

by

Robin Celikates (University of Amsterdam)

on

'Recognition and the Politics of Needs'

Tuesday, 1 March, 2010, 4.30 PM, Zrinyi 14, Room 412

ABSTRACT

The claim that human beings need recognition seems intuitively plausible. In the existing literature on both recognition and needs, however, this claim is rarely explicitly spelled out and defended. In my talk I will address some of the problems that contemporary theories of recognition face in explaining the link between needs and recognition. I will first sketch how this link can be conceived and discuss in how far recognition itself can be understood as a basic human need. Starting from the idea that a basic human need is something that it is necessary for humans to have, I will then discuss the implications of understanding recognition as a condition of agency. After having pointed out some of the problems such an understanding of the link between needs and recognition has to confront, I will, in the last step, argue for a negative, minimalist and proceduralist approach that focuses on misrecognition and conceives of recognition as primarily directed at the status of agents as parties in struggles for and over recognition.