Das Treffen in Telgte

Transcendental consciousness is described by Kant as “the one single thing” in which “as in the transcendental subject, our perceptions must be encountered.” The unity of that subject depends on intellectual functions. I argue that its singularity is just the same as that of Kant's pre-intellectual “form” of spatiotemporal “intuition.” This may seem excluded by Kant's claim that it is through intellect that “space or time are first given as intuitions.” But while pre-intellectual form is insufficient for space and time as distinct “things,” it is sufficient for the constitution of a “single thing” indifferently construable as both. Contrary to what are typically seen as the main differences between Kant and Hume on identity of “self,” there is thus already a difference in play below the level of either's concern with the sorts of connections available for the combining, or illusion of combining, of manifolds of “impressions” or “ideas.”     

Kant and the Two Principles of Publicity

ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to argue that the principle of “publicity” constitutes a fundamental idea in Kant’s political thought. Publicity provides a central insight that binds together various strands of Kant’s political writings (on issues as diverse as the question of Enlightenment, the right of revolution, historical teleology, reflective judgment, cosmopolitan citizenship, democratic peace, and republican government), and moreover, it offers a much-needed cornerstone for a systematic exposition of his nonexistent political philosophy. Apart from some eminent examples, publicity has been a rather neglected topic in the ever-expanding literature on Kant’s political ideas. Revisiting this notion will make us more attentive to his evocation of the “spirit of republicanism” over and above the letter of the law, and might prompt us to reconsider Kant’s reputation as a classical representative of liberal political thought. Indeed, it should inspire us to situate Kant’s appeal for the “public use of reason” in the vicinity of the republican ideal of political liberty.     

Derrida’s Paralogism of Writing: A Critique of Deconstructive Reasoning

This article is a critique of the flawed logic Derrida employed in articulating his program of a Grammatology for “deconstructing” Western philosophy. I argue that Derrida in several instances built his arguments around what Kant called the “paralogism.” I look at an often cited case in order to substantiate my claim: Derrida’s reading of Saussure, where his argument is based on a paralogism. Derrida misinterprets Saussure by seeing his alleged rejection of graphical writing as a rejection of his own idiosyncratic notion of “writing” (alias différance, trace, generalized writing, etc.), which only corresponds to Saussure’s own notion of “linguistic value,” produced in a system of differences without positive terms.     

PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY'S RETURN

Kojin Karatani's Structure of World History seeks to rescue the philosophy of history and restore to it the relationship between philosophical reflection and historical practice. This connection is particularly pertinent in Karatani's case since he had earlier worked out the philosophical scaffolding of this monumental study in his book Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, which embarked on a “return to Capital once more to read the potential that has been overlooked.” By juxtaposing Marx to Kant and vice versa to discover the importance of exchange over production, he found what was to become the informing principle of his later philosophy of history. While Karatani's accounting of the structure of world history presumes to recount the passage of the world's history from nomadic societies to the present as a condition to rethink “social formations” from a perspective that recalls the form of a stagist philosophy of history attributed to Marx and Engels, he has abandoned its informing principle of the modes of production. Instead, he offers the perspective of modes of exchange, which means waiving any consideration concerning who owns the means of production: the putative “economic base” underlying superstructural representations like the state, religion, and culture upheld by a vulgate tradition of Marxian historical writing and discounted by bourgeois historiography as deterministic. The decision to shift to modes of exchange means rooting the primary mode of exchange taking place first in nomadic societies, rather than forms of production and archaic communal ownership of land. Although his revised scheme still accords priority to the economic, the putative division between base and superstructures still persists, even though the latter are still produced by the former, which is now the mode of exchange. Whereas Marx privileged commodity exchange as dominant, Karatani places greater emphasis on the earliest mode of exchange, which consists of the “pure gift,” associated with early nomadic social formations and reciprocity practices by clans, and seems to offer nomadic/clan communalism as a model that resembles Marx's own strategic linking of the surviving Russian commune and contemporary capitalism. The point to this project is to transcend the hegemonic trinity of capital, nation, and state and satisfy a desire to share with other globalists a vision that aims to overcome the defects of capitalism and the nation‐state and the failure of a Marxian expectation that nation‐states will simply wither away with the final surpassing of capitalism. To this end, Karatani's appeal to Kant offers to inject a moral element absent in the merely economic structure of history that will thus provide the promise of “world peace,” which ultimately requires an abolition of the nation‐state as a condition for realizing a “simultaneous bourgeois revolution” that would finally overcome state and capital and establish a world federation.     

Kant on Hobbes,peace, and obedience

Kant's essay ‘On the common saying: “This may be true in theory, but it does not apply in practice”’ contains a chapter ‘On the relationship of theory to practice in political right’ to which he added, in brackets, ‘(Against Hobbes)’. The problem is that Kant leaves his Hobbes-criticism implicit. The main point seems to be the Hobbes's citizens are without any rights. We explore the differences and similarities between Kant's and Hobbes's political views and evaluate the effectiveness of Kant's criticism. We pay attention to Nominalism and Platonism, the idea of happiness in social life, the use and role of the Golden Rule (Categorical Imperative) in political thought, the quest for freedom, and the principle of political non-resistance. Especially freedom of speech is important for Kant as an Enlightenment thinker. This is the only right Kant's citizens may have, independently of the sovereign's will. Our conclusion is that both Kant and Hobbes emphasize peace and order under sovereign power although they do not agree on how such an ideal can be achieved.     

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。     

MOVING BEYOND BIOPOWER: HARDT AND NEGRI'S POST-FOUCAULDIAN SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

I argue in this paper that the attempt by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire and Multitude to “theorize empire” should be read both against the backdrop of speculative philosophy of history and as a development of the conception of a “principle of intelligibility” as this is discussed in Michel Foucault's recently published courses at the Collège de France. I also argue that Foucault's work in these courses (and elsewhere) can be read as implicitly providing what I call “prolegomena to any future speculative philosophy of history.” I define the latter as concerned with the intelligibility of the historical process considered as a whole. I further suggest, through a brief discussion of the classical figures of Kant, Hegel, and Marx, that the basic features of speculative philosophy of history concern the articulation of both the telos and dynamics of history. My claim is that Hardt and Negri provide an account of the telos and dynamics of history that respects the strictures imposed on speculative philosophy of history by Foucault's work, and thus can be considered as providing a post‐Foucauldian speculative philosophy of history. In doing so, they provide a challenge to other “theoretical” attempts to account for our changing world.     

Defending Political Augustinianism: Brague and Taubes on the “Divine” as a Common Conceptual Space

Augustine holds that each society needs to be oriented to “God and the good.” He invidiously compares the earthly city as receptive to the true God with the earthly city as opposed to the true God, and he resolutely holds that only an earthly city oriented to the true God can be genuinely described as just and legitimate. At first glance this “political Augustinianism” hardly seems very attractive to non-believers or defensible in the eyes of modern secular liberals, and yet in this article I wish to defend it and commend it universally, that is, to promote its benefits and critical insights beyond religious circles. I commend an emphasis on “the divine” (to theion), rather than on God (ho theos), as a bridge to God for believers but also, and more importantly in the West's present liberal pluralist context, as a common halting place where believers and non-believers alike can sense “the beyond” (Augustine's “God and the good”) in their midst. I develop my argument that the “divine,” thus understood, can provide us with a common conceptual space where we can abide, converse, and even agree: (i) by engaging with Jacob Taubes who powerfully criticises such an emphasis on the “divine,” (ii) by considering “divine” natural law as a bridge and halting place between immanence and transcendence, and (iii) by reflecting upon the work of Rémi Brague who has recently given powerful support to the importance and utility in the present intellectual climate of the divine (to theion) as a bridge to God (ho theos).     

Comparative Historiography: Problems and Perspectives

Just like history, historiography is usually written and analyzed within one spatio-temporal setting, traditionally that of a particular nation-state. As a consequence, historiography tends to localize explanations for historiographical developments within national contexts and to neglect international dimensions. As long as that is the case, it is impossible to assess the general and specific aspects of historiographical case studies. This forum, therefore, represents a sustained argument for comparative approaches to historiography. First, my introduction takes a recent study in Canadian historiography as a point of departure in order to illustrate the problems of non-comparative historiography. These problems point to strong arguments in favor of comparative approaches. Second, I place comparative historiography as a genre in relation to a typology that orders theories of historiography on a continuum ranging from general and philosophical to particular and empirical. Third, I put recent debates on the “fragmentation” of historiography in a comparative perspective. Worries among historians about this fragmentation—usually associated with the fragmentation of the nation and the advent of multiculturalism and/or postmodernism—are legitimate when they concern the epistemological foundations of history as a discipline. As soon as the “fragmentation” of historiography leads to—and is legitimated by—epistemological skepticism, a healthy pluralism has given way to an unhealthy relativism. As comparison puts relativism in perspective by revealing its socio-historical foundations, at the same time it creates its rational antidote. Fourth, I summarize the contributions to this forum; all deal—directly or indirectly—with the historiography of the Second World War. Jürgen Kocka's “Asymmetrical Historical Comparison: The Case of the German Sonderweg” examines the so-called “special path” of Germany's history. Daniel Levy's “The Future of the Past: Historiographical Disputes and Competing Memories in Germany and Israel” offers a comparative analysis of recent historiographical debates in Germany and Israel. Sebastian Conrad's “What Time is Japan? Problems of Comparative (Intercultural) Historiography” analyzes the conceptual linkage between Japanese historiography and specific interpretations of European history. Richard Bosworth's “Explaining ‘Auschwitz’ after the End of History: The Case of Italy” charts in a comparative perspective the changes since 1989 in Italian historiography concerning fascism. All four articles support the conclusion that next to the method of historical comparison is the politics of comparison, which is hidden in the choice of the parameters. Analyses of both method and politics are essential for an understanding of (comparative) historiography.     

A vision of Ireland, 1967: John Montague’s aisling ghéar

More than fifty years after its publication as a broadsheet ballad, John Montague’s “The Rape of the Aisling” (1967) retains its satirical force. Whilst not the first instance in Irish writing to acknowledge sexual abuse of young people by priests (two years earlier John McGahern’s The Dark had been banned partly on the grounds of its rendering of clerical malfeasance), Montague’s rough ballad nonetheless places sexual abuse at the very heart of its assault on the Catholic Church’s baleful influence on a society on the cusp of dramatic social change. By adopting, and radically adapting, that most malleable of literary forms – the aisling or dream-vision poem – Montague seems to suggest that in mid-twentieth-century Ireland it is not the “Saxon occupier” who poses a risk to Republican ideals. Now, it is members of a home-grown patriarchy, the “access-all-areas men in black” who abuse and rape children and young people in their care, who seek to compromise the Proclamation’s promise to cherish “all of the children of the nation equally”.     

Globalization and the closing of the universe of discourse: the contemporary relevance of Marcuse's “Marxism”1

This paper assumes that there is something in the logic of the capitalist mode of production such that, in the words of Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto, it “must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere,” giving a “cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.” It assumes, that is, that there is an inherent tendency in capitalism to seek to globalize. Further, it is argued that one can plausibly claim that the capitalist mode of production has succeeded, or is succeeding, in globalizing against the countervailing forces of the managing state and organized labor. It is argued that this development represents, to use Marcuse's words, something like a “closing of the universe of discourse” or a “paralysis of criticism” and the emergence of a “society without opposition,” but in a context, in crucial respects, fundamentally different from that analysed by Marcuse in the 1960s.     

The Religion of the Secularists

Both “religion” and “secularism” are constructs distinctive of the West. They both arise from the peculiar history of Christianity. Hence the double face of modern “religion.” It may cover any inherited cultic practice, safeguard ethnic values, and be respected under multiculturalism. But at the same time it may refer to the intellectual and moral commitments which mark us off socially from others, annoying the secularists. Julian, the first modern‐type secularist, reacted against the Constantinian establishment of the “new religion” by ordering the priests of the old Hellenic cults to adopt the Christian style of social indoctrination to outclass those vulgar innovators. But the Fall of Rome produced the intellectual masterpiece of Augustine which redefined the saeculum and set the framework of modern secularity. Augustine had perceived reality in three dimensions: cosmic, social, and personal. At each level the rationalising logic of Aristotelian science had fixed the pattern of things, by analogy. The whole must be coherent if it is to be true. But the empiricism of Jerusalem had delivered a universe open to change and likely to end. In society power was no longer the proof of virtue. The heart itself was deceptive. Twenty‐first century secularism insists upon such experimental truth, social choice and passionate commitment. This holy trinity is our legacy from the “new” religion.     

Engels and the question about cities

In his 1969 Trevelyan Lectures, Franco Venturi argued that Kant's response to the question “What is Enlightenment?” has tended to promote a “philosophical interpretation” of the Enlightenment that leads scholars away from the political questions that were central to its concerns. But while Kant's response is well known, it has been often misunderstood by scholars who see it as offering a definition of an historical period, rather than an attempt at characterizing a process that had a significant implications. This article seeks (1) to clarify, briefly, the particular question that Kant was answering, (2) to examine – using Jürgen Habermas’ work as a case in point – the tension between readings that use Kant's answer as a way of discussing the Enlightenment as a discrete historical period and those readings that see it as offering a broad outline of an “Enlightenment Project” that continues into the present, and (3) to explore how Michel Foucault, in a series of discussions of Kant's response, sketched an approach to Kant's text that offers a way of reframing Venturi's distinction between “philosophical” and “political” interpretations of the Enlightenment.     

From the logic of ideas to active-matter materialism: Priestley’s Lockean problem and early neurophilosophy

ABSTRACT

Empiricism is a claim about the contents of the mind: its classic slogan is nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu, “there is nothing in the mind (intellect, understanding) which is not first in the senses.” As such, it is not a claim about the fundamental nature of the world as material. I focus here on in an instance of what one might term the materialist appropriation of empiricism. One major component in the transition from a purely epistemological claim about the mind and its contents to an ontological claim about the nature of the world is the new focus on brain–mind relations in the eighteenth century. Here I examine a Lockean trajectory as exemplified in Joseph Priestley’s 1777 Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit. However, Locke explicitly ruled out that his inquiry into the logic of ideas amounted to a “physical consideration of the mind.” What does it mean, then, for Priestley to present himself as continuing a Lockean tradition, while presenting mental processes as tightly identified with “an organical structure such as that of the brain” (although he was not making a strict identity claim as we might understand it, post-Smart and Armstrong)? One issue here is that of Priestley’s source of “empirical data” regarding the correlation and indeed identification of mental and cerebral processes. David Hartley’s theory in his 1749 Observations on Man was, as is well known, republished in abridged form by Priestley, but he discards Hartley’s “vibratory neurophysiology” while retaining the associationist framework, although not because he disagreed with the former. Yet Hartley was, at the very least, strongly agnostic about metaphysical issues (and it is difficult to study these authors while bracketing off religious considerations). One could see Locke and Hartley as articulating programs for the study of the mind which were more or less naturalistic (more strongly so in Hartley’s case) while avoiding “materialism” per se; in contrast, Priestley bit the (materialist) bullet. In this paper I examine Priestley’s appropriation and reconstruction of this “micro-tradition,” while emphasizing its problems.     

Ruinismo: the Catholic Church in Italy from ‘mediation culture’ to the Cultural Project

It is only seven years since Monsignor Camillo Ruini resigned from his role as President of the Italian Episcopal Conference (CEI), yet it feels much longer. The tempestuous events that marked Silvio Berlusconi's decline, on one hand, and the election of Pope Francis to the Holy See, on the other, have made such an impression on recent Italian history that seems to leave no time for reflection on what has happened over the last twenty years. This article explores how, during this time, Cardinal Ruini has re-fashioned the relations between the Catholic Church and Italian politics, following a pattern that has come to be known as ‘ruinismo’. The essay follows the development of the theological-political line of the Conference, from the “mediation” of the “Catholic Party”, the Christian Democrats (DC), to the “policy of presence” of politically committed Catholics, defined in these terms by the ecclesiastical congress in Loreto in 1985 and fully carried out under Ruini's management, with the backing of Berlusconi's governments. The aim is to establish whether and to what extent the “Ruinian” rule may be regarded as the consequence of mainstream Catholic politics of the 1980s and, equally, as a response to the cultural and political transformation brought about by the upheavals of the corruption scandals of 1989–91. Only from this long-term perspective is it possible to determine whether Ruini's exit has brought an end to ruinismo.     

Qu(e)erying Sex and Gender in Archaeology: a Critique of the “Third” and Other Sexual Categories

In this paper, I will recover the issue of the “third gender” in archaeological analysis in order to argue that the use of a “third,” despite what it may appear at first sight, does not challenge the logic inherent in gender and sexual binaries, that is, the use of universal, ahistorical, and stagnated categories. As an alternative, I will rely on Almudena Hernando’s genealogical work on gender and identity, as well as on Lucía Moragón-Martínez’s arguments regarding corporeality, to state that in “oral societies” (like prehistoric ones), body and person cannot be ontologically distinguished and, as a consequence, the anatomical features that we categorize as “sex” can neither be thought nor defined abstractly. I will further examine the implications of this claim in relation to the sex–gender fluidity that can be seen in those oral societies, formerly pigeonholed into the third gender category. In addition, I will analyze current literature developed by gender archaeologists in order to show the strengths and limitations of my proposal in relation to recent works on the topic.