康德哲学及其对马克思主义哲学的意义

康德哲学在西方哲学史上起着“承前启后”的作用。康德在近代哲学史上恰似一个处于贮水池地位的人：以前的哲学皆流向康德,以后的哲学又是从康德这里流出。作为德国古典哲学的开创者,康德哲学的地位和意义是显而易见的。马克思主义哲学中关于“人的主观能动性的原理”和“实践观点”就直接受到了康德哲学的启示,康德哲学在西方哲学史和德国古典哲学中的地位非常重要,其对马克思主义哲学的影响意义更应给予重视。     

When open data and data activism meet: An analysis of civic participation in Cape Town,South Africa

Municipal open data projects are motivated by a desire to democratize data access and knowledge production, strengthen transparency, and advance cities socially and economically. However, their effects and implications are insufficiently analyzed. This paper examines civic engagement in open data in Cape Town, South Africa, the continent's first municipal-level open data initiative. Findings reveal how local civil society organizations have been driving engagement with municipal open data as part of their recent turn towards technology and data-driven forms of public engagement and activism. This analysis highlights the important role of the “smart civil society organization”—occupying a position between the smart city and smart citizen—that is developing significant capacity to produce and share data about the city's informal settlements with stakeholders in government, the private sector, and wider society. Minimal engagement with or recognition of civil society efforts illustrates the limits to the city's philosophy of data openness, which is largely restricted to releasing selected government datasets to the public. The notion of “bi-directional open data” is developed here to characterize emerging possibilities for data openness between governments and the public. This may be particularly relevant for cities like Cape Town with a highly active, capable, and data-literate civil society.     

THE PHILONIC DISTINCTION: GERMAN ENLIGHTENMENT HISTORIOGRAPHY OF JEWISH THOUGHT

Leon Roth's famous question “Is there a Jewish philosophy?” has been the subject of an ongoing controversial debate. This paper argues that the concept of a Jewish philosophy—in the sense of an allegedly continuous philosophical tradition stretching from antiquity to early modernity—was created by German Enlightenment historians of philosophy. Under competing models of historiography, Enlightenment philosophy construed a continuous tradition of Jewish thought, a philosophia haebraeorum perennis, establishing a controversially discussed order of discourse and a specific politics of historiography. Within this historiography, historical and systematical paradigms, values, and patterns kept shifting continuously, opening up perspectives for different, even contradictory accounts of what Jewish philosophy was (and is). With Hegel and his successors, this specific discourse came to a close. Hegel attacks “Jewish thought” as a form of metaphysics of substance—a critique countered by several thinkers who can be referred to as “Jewish Hegelians” (E. Fackenheim). The Jewish Hegelians fully accepted, however, Hegel's account of the “Philonic distinction”: the difference between substance and subject within the conception of the one. This calls attention to the idea that not only the role of the “mosaic distinction” (J. Assmann), the distinction between true and false in religion, should be examined more closely, but also the consequences of the “Philonic distinction” between identity and difference in monotheistic concepts of deity.     

The French Enlightenment attempts to create a philosophy without reason: the case of Diderot and the effect of Helvétius

It is a well-worn, yet astonishingly resilient, cliché that the Enlightenment was the “Age of Reason”. By focusing on Diderot and Helvétius this paper shows that, rather than proceeding in the name of reason, key figures within the progressive philosophy of the French Enlightenment were in fact extremely suspicious of abstract reasoning and attempted to construct a philosophy which purged the faculty of reason entirely from its philosophical anthropology and reduced the mind’s functions to the single faculty of sensation and so to the passions. It is in this sense that philosophy of the French Enlightenment attempted to produce a philosophy without reason. This paper reconstructs this attempt. In doing so it again engages critically with the idea that the philosophy of the Enlightenment was dogmatically rationalist, it provides a historical case study of a period in which philosophy pushed against the limits of its own identity, and it uses this attempt to reflect on the mythological not historiographical service which the cliché of Enlightenment Reason plays for the philosophical identity.     

The Politics of Memory: History,Biography, and the (Re)-Emergence of Generational Literature in Germany

The existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers is the father of a discourse on the spiritual consequences of the Holocaust. First addressed as the Schuldfrage (the question of guilt) by Jaspers immediately after the Second World War in his famous Heidelberg lecture, it has reappeared in various forms in German life and letters. Post-unification Germany has witnessed the valorization of the German experience of the Second World War. This ongoing re-evaluation has its antecedents in the generational literature of the 1970s and 1980s. Whereas the Vaterliteratur of the 1970s (by authors such as Christoph Meckel, Uwe Timm, and Peter Henisch) was often embedded in a left-wing critique of the establishment, recent contributions to this growing genre (by Marcel Beyer, Stephan Wackwitz, Wibke Bruhns, and Ulla Hahn among others) speak to the issue of collective identity and transgenerational family trauma outside distinct left- and right-wing interpretations of National Socialism. The current writings on the life during the Third Reich (filtered through the experiences of discrete generations) are a confluence of historical writing, memorial literature, biography, and fiction. They are closely related to the discussions that W. G. Sebald initiated in his 1997 lecture series on the silence of German postwar literature with respect to German suffering. The subsequent debate on how to bring closure to this “German suffering” was intensified by Günter Grass's widening of the concept of German victimization beyond the air war controversy in his book Crabwalk (2002). As Grass distinguishes clearly between the various post-World War II generations (and their different perspectives on historical events), the question becomes whether these recent writings will bring about a final so-called “zero hour” in German postwar history.     

7. SPACES,PLACES, AND THE HISTORIANS: A COMMENT FROM A GERMAN PERSPECTIVE

This article discusses from a specifically German point of view the “spatial turn” in history and the approaches of this forum. Many recent interventions have suggested that “space” (as opposed to “time”) was for many years a marginalized category in the German historiographical debate because of the ideological contamination of the category “space” by the Nazis. In the context of the vivid, lively “provincial” or “regional” history practiced in Germany, however, “space” has always played an important role. The debates around the spatial turn nevertheless provide the opportunity for deliberate reconceptualization. This comment proposes a relational understanding of “space” as the core of the new approach and identifies some central elements and terms for it: the differentiation of “spaces,”“places,” and “locations”; movement in space; the division of space in the form of boundaries; finally, the ordering and classification of space in the form of written or visual representations.     

FROM CATASTROPHE TO HOPE

In his recent book, Amir Eshel focuses on over thirty recent German‐, Hebrew‐, and English‐language novels to develop a reading method—the “hermeneutics of futurity”—that would replace moralizing approaches to past traumas, including German guilt over the Holocaust and Israeli denial of Palestinian suffering. Futurity demonstrates how various narratives imagine a future liberated from denial, guilt, and thus traumatic repetition. In so doing Eshel emphasizes human agency to counter the “hermeneutics of suspicion” that has long dominated a great deal of literary theory, and focuses on how novelists construct human choices and their consequences. He covers two generations of German‐language novels spanning the Adenauer era to the present, and two generations of Israeli writers reflecting on 1948 and later, 1967. In order to develop fully the concept of futurity he also writes on recent American and English novels, often with implicitly political themes. The book succeeds in demonstrating the value of how various novelists read the past otherwise in order to reconstruct the present and future. At the same time, Eshel conceives human agency and “choice” so capaciously that the book often neglects the institutional constraints on agency that afflict victims of traumas in particular. His treatment of Martin Walser's controversial fictionalized memoir is exemplary of this problem in an otherwise stimulating work.     

L'«École de l'ETH» dans l'œuvre de Gaston Bachelard

We retrace here spectral presence in the work of Gaston Bachelard which we call «The School of the ETH». We have chosen three fundamental figures: hermann Weyl, Wolfgang Pauli and Gustave Juvet. For the first one, we consider his central and permanent place in the Bachelardian constitution of a philosophy which seeks to be at the height of the new «physical geometry» rigorously constructed in a Riemannian spirit. As for Pauli, we show an unsuspected affinity which is backed up by the remarkable analyses brought to it by philosophy: from the urgent construction of a «quantic metaphysics», founded on the implications of aPauli principle well understood, to the idea of a «metaphysical particle», going on to the decisive and so promising stakes of the «postulate of non-analysis». In the framework of this convergent polyconstruction of the «surrationalist», enterprise, we treat the third figure, less known but equally important, of the mathematician-philosopher Gustave Juvet.     

“Only a God Can Resist a God.” Political Theology between Polytheism and Gnosticism

ABSTRACT

Sovereignty – based on a claim to irresistible authority – and “speaking truth to power” (or parrhesia) are evidently opposed and yet they seem to have a strange affinity with one another, at least if one follows Foucault’s last lectures on this motif of political philosophy. This article revisits Hans Blumenberg’s reconstruction of the meeting between the German poet Goethe and the French emperor Napoleon as an example of a parrhesiastic encounter between philosophy and tyranny. The article situates Blumenberg’s discussion of Goethe’s pantheism and polytheism in the context of his ongoing polemic with Schmitt’s conceptions of sovereignty and political theology. It argues that while both Blumenberg and Schmitt seek to offer responses to the Gnostic rejection of worldly power, a reading of Goethe in light of the discourse on parrhesia or frank speech lately revived by Foucault allows for the articulation of republican response to Gnosticism.     

THE CONCEPT “SYSTEM OF PHILOSOPHY”: THE CASE OF JACOB BRUCKER'S HISTORIOGRAPHY OF PHILOSOPHY1

In this essay I examine and discuss the concept “system of philosophy” as a methodological tool in the history of philosophy; I do so in two moves. First I analyze the historical origin of the concept in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thereafter I undertake a discussion of its methodological weaknesses–a discussion that is not only relevant to the writing of history of philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but also to the writing of history of philosophy in our times, where the concept remains an important methodological tool. My first move is to analyze Jacob Brucker's employment of the concept in his influential history of philosophy, Historia critica philosophiae, dating from 1742–1744. To Brucker, a “system of philosophy” is characterized by the following four features: (a) it is autonomous in regard to other, non‐philosophical disciplines; (b) all doctrines stated within the various branches of philosophy can be deduced from one principle; (c) as an autonomous system it comprises all branches of philosophy; (d) the doctrines stated within these various branches of philosophy are internally coherent. Brucker employed the concept on the entire history of philosophy, and he gave it a defining role in regard to two other methodological concepts, namely “eclecticism” and “syncretism,” which he regarded as more or less successful forms of systematic philosophy. My second move is to point out the weakness of the concept of “system of philosophy” as a methodological tool in the history of philosophy. I argue that the interdisciplinary nature of much premodern philosophy makes Brucker's methodological concept “system of philosophy” inadequate, and that we may be better off leaving it behind in our future exploration of premodern philosophy.     

Europe’s Right Step in the Wrong Direction

Abstract

This brief essay attempts to show, through ?i?ek’s interpretation of Hei-degger, how the European Union has also taken (as the German master in the thirties), the “right step in the wrong direction” and how it can change its political error. Following ?i?ek’s view of communism as an opportunity of emancipation for Heidegger, hermeneutics philosophy is presented as the change of direction for the Union, change that will only take place if metaphysics is overcome in the appropriate manner.     

Culture <Emphasis Type="Italic">Versus</Emphasis> Civilisation la Genèse D’une Opposition

Closely linked to the concept of history, the notion of culture becomes a collective singular during the last third of the xviii ^th century. The German idea of culture did not immediately come into opposition with the notion of civilization and both terms were for a long time almost identical in meaning. What does the polemical orientation of the German notion of culture reveal from 1880–1890? First, the crumbling of the idealistic neo-kantian pattern of self-determined cultivated person as an end in itself (the so-called Selbstbildung); second, the growing moral condemnation of the empty spirit of the time. This double process reaches its apogee full of hatred during World War I.     

Dialogue with the Dead: Sebald,Creatureliness, and the Philosophy of Mere Life

The idea of a “dialogue with the dead” strikes us by turns as both impossible and intriguing. Yet, what can be really meant by it is far from clear. This essay attempts to explore this idea in the work of novelist W. G. Sebald. It examines the scope and the meaning of such an interchange in his works and connects this theme to his wider explorations of “creaturely life.” It also links this particular dimension of Sebald's notion of “creaturely” or “bare” life with some of the other major treatments of the same theme in recent literature and philosophy.     

From Organismic Biology as History and Philosophy to the History and Philosophy of Biology—the Work of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger in the German Context**

In this paper, I ask about the broader context of the history and philosophy of biology in the German-speaking world as the place in which Hans-Jörg Rheinberger began his work. Three German philosophical traditions—neo-Kantianism, phenomenology, and Lebensphilosophie—were interested in the developments and conceptual challenges of the life sciences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their reflections were taken up by life scientists under the terms theoretische Biologie (theoretical biology) and allgemeine Biologie (general biology), i. e., for theoretical and methodological reflections. They used historical and philosophical perspectives to develop vitalistic, organicist, or holistic approaches to life. In my paper, I argue that the resulting discourse did not come to an end in 1945. Increasingly detached from biological research, it formed an important context for the formation of the field of history and philosophy of biology. In Rheinberger's work, we can see the “Spalten” and “Fugen”—the continuities and discontinuities—that this tradition left there.     

HISTORY AND KAIRÓS

The recent wave of interest in the “theological‐political” has focused scholarly attention on the constellation of ideas associated with “messianic time.” The term kairós belongs to this constellation, and Giacomo Marramao's brief but ambitious text of the same name both proposes and performs a “kairological” reconfiguration of the close relationship between philosophy and time. Marramao's argument for the productive potential of “cosmic disorientation” and contingency will merit the attention of historians interested in Benjamin's blend of messianism and historical materialism, and of anyone who is intrigued by the prospect of a messianism without apocalypticism.     

20世纪西方分析或批判的历史哲学

分析或批判的历史哲学的兴起,一方面批判了思辨的历史哲学,另一方面将历史哲学研究的重点从解释历史的性质转移到解释历史知识的性质上来。这极大地推进了史学理论的发展,也为历史学确立了更为稳固的根基。德国历史哲学家狄尔泰、文德尔班、李凯尔特继承德国历史主义传统,从文化科学与自然科学相异的角度来分析历史知识的性质;克罗齐、柯林武德也遵循了这个传统。分析学派罗素、波普尔、亨佩尔等人,则从语言逻辑的角度来分析理解历史的方式和历史知识的可能性。这两个方向共同构成了20世纪西方历史哲学的主流,进一步深化了人们对自我的认识。     

L’impossible constitution d’une théorie générale des machines ?

Three projects on the theories of machines are presented: “mecanology” of the architect Jacques Laffite (1932) inspired by biological evolution; “mecanical analysis ” of Louis Couffignal, a specialist in computing machines (1938), which pre figures functional analysis, and the algebraic theory of machines by the mathematician Jacques Riguet (beginning of the 1950’s). During those years, the three men are members of the Circle of Cybernetic Studies. The article focuses on the dialogue between projects, the axes of unification and divergence, and the styles, strategies and postulates of these three candidates, for generalization converging toward the reference constituted by cybernetics.     

魏玛共和国犹太人的德国认同

魏玛共和国犹太人在政治、文化和宗教生活方式上都表现出高度的德国认同。德国犹太人的这种国家认同既有重要的历史基础,也是现实的需要和客观环境压力的结果。魏玛共和国犹太人的德国认同突出表现在两个方面:一是将犹太教、犹太文化限定于宗教和文化的而非民族的层面,从而减少其与"德国国家认同"的冲突;二是强调犹太人与德国主流民族、语言、文化和历史的紧密关系。犹太人的德国认同对其族群产生了重要影响:犹太族群中发展出了对东方犹太人的歧视;排斥犹太复国主义;低估反犹主义的危害,以致对大规模地迫害、屠杀犹太人缺乏预见性等。     

Cosmopolitisme et transferts culturels le cas des Juifs allemands

During the XIX^th century, the socio-economic rise and cultural assimilation of the German Jews generated two contradictory tendencies: on the one hand, their integration into the German nation, which they pursued willingly; and, on the other, their cosmopolitanism, which resulted from their location at the center of a socio-economic network on a continental scale and a wide migratory movement. The Jews thus contributed to the development of a cultural concept ofMitteleuropa as opposed to the geopolitical and expansionist concept upheld by Pan-Germanism. German-Jewish cosmopolitanism found its expression on different levels: in the religious field, the school of the «Science of Judaism» (Wissenschaft des Judentums) became a model for the modernisation of Jewish culture in most European countries: in the economic field, emancipated German Jews consolidated their financial and commercial transnational network, which existed from the age of the «Court Jews» (Hofjuden); in the political field, radical German Jews played a leading role in the diffusion of Marxism as a universalist intellectual current, crossing national borders. Generally speaking, German Jews played a pivotal role in a process of cultural transfers stretched on more than a century. After Nazism came to power, German-Jewish cosmopolitanism took the way of exile, trying to preserve the legacy ofAufklärung.