homunculus (from Latin, ‘little man’), a miniature adult held to inhabit the brain (or some other organ) who perceives all the inputs to the sense organs and initiates all the commands to the muscles. Any theory that posits such an internal agent risks an infinite regress (sometimes called the homunculus fallacy), since we can ask whether there is a little man in the little man’s head, responsible for his perception and action, and so on. Many familiar views of the mind and its activities seem to require a homunculus. For instance, models of visual perception that posit an inner picture as its product apparently require a homunculus to look at the picture, and models of action that treat intentions as commands to the muscles apparently require a homunculus to issue the commands. It is never an easy matter to determine whether a theory is committed to the existence of a homunculus that vitiates the theory, and in some circumstances, homunculi can be legitimately posited at intermediate levels of theory: ‘Homunculi are bogeymen only if they duplicate entire the talents they are rung in to explain. If one can get a team or committee of relatively ignorant, narrow-minded, blind homunculi to produce the intelligent behavior of the whole, this is progress’ (Dennett, Brainstorms, 1978). Theories (in philosophy of mind or artificial intelligence or cognitive science) that posit such teams of homunculi have been called homuncular functionalism by William Lycan. D.C.D. Horkheimer, Max (1895–1973), German philosopher, the leading theorist of the first generation of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Both as director of the Institute for Social Research and in his early philosophical essays published in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, Horkheimer set the agenda for the collaborative work of the Frankfurt School in the social sciences, including analyses of the developments of state capitalism, the family, modern culture, and fascism. His programmatic essays on the relation of philosophy and the social sciences long provided the philosophical basis for Frankfurt School social criticism and research and have profoundly influenced Habermas’s reformulation of Frankfurt School critical theory. In these essays, such as ‘The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Tasks of an Institute for Social Research’ (1931), Horkheimer elaborated a cooperative relation between philosophy and the social sciences through an interdisciplinary historical materialism. His ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’ (1937) develops the distinction between ‘critical’ and ‘traditional’ theories in terms of basic goals: critical theories aim at emancipating human beings rather than describing reality as it is now.
In the darkest days of World War II Horkheimer began collaborating with Adorno on The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1941), in which they see the origins of modern reason and autonomy in the domination of nature and the inner self. This genealogy of modern reason argues that myth and enlightenment are inseparably ‘entwined,’ a view proposed primarily to explain the catastrophe in which Europe found itself. While Horkheimer thought that a revised notion of Hegelian dialectics might lead beyond this impasse, he never completed this positive project. Instead, he further developed the critique of instrumental reason in such works as Eclipse of Reason (1947), where he argues that modern institutions, including democracy, are under the sway of formal and instrumental rationality and the imperatives of self-preservation. While he did little new work after this period, he turned at the end of his life to a philosophical reinterpretation of religion and the content of religious experience and concepts, developing a negative theology of the ‘completely Other.’ His most enduring influence is his clear formulation of the epistemology of practical and critical social inquiry oriented to human emancipation. See also CRITICAL THEORY, FRANKFURT SCHOO. J.Bo.