In this article, I would like to use the case of Rudolf Eucken to examine how the historiography of philosophy, and especially the interpretation of German Idealism, became a medium of national self-assurance. By referring to the philosophical classics of German Idealism, Eucken, at the end of the 19th century, develops a model of a publicly effective philosophy to which he ascribes the task of contributing to the recovery of unity and strength. My aim is to work out the social (...) background and the social function of this characterisation of the history of philosophy. The thesis I would like to develop is that Eucken, in reaction to his perception of social crises and the inner-scientific questioning of the role of philosophy, attempts to establish philosophy as a fundamental element of the historical discourse and practices of the new German nation state. This historical discourse, into which philosophy attempts to inscribe itself, can be interpreted, following Durkheim’s sociological reflections on religion, as an attempt to sacralise the nation. This reveals the social function of this form of philosophical historiography: it becomes the theology of the new German nation state. (shrink)

I address the question of human agency from the perspective of critical social theory, starting from the premise that, today, such theories must focus on the global ecological disaster. I assume, furthermore, that radical societal change is necessary in order to arrest our current disastrous ecological trajectory. Radical societal change calls for a fundamental re-orientation in values globally, on both an individual and collective level. This entails a thorough-going change in perceptions of what it means to lead an ethically good (...) life, including revision of deepseated conceptions of ethical agency, in particular, the idea of individual freedom. Wearing the hat of an engaged theorist, I propose a re-imagining and rearticulation of freedom as ecologically attuned, self-directing, self-transforming political agency. Taking social institutions as an example, I discuss non-authoritarian authority as a force for forming and transforming ethical perceptions and attribute a similar non-authoritarian potential to critical social theories, in this case a disclosive one. While a change in ethical perceptions will not be sufficient for the required societal transformation, I claim that it is an integral component of it. (shrink)

This article is dedicated to a topic that has been largely neglected in the historiography of philosophy to date: the position of philosophers towards the institution of slavery. Especially in survey works on the history of philosophy, positions on slavery and colonial conquest are not addressed, but have so far only been discussed in a few individual studies. From the beginning of European expansion, however, philosophical and political theories no longer emerged independently of these developments, as the expansion forced reflection (...) on how to deal with the conquered regions and peoples, and thus on the problematic sides of the ‘voyages of discovery’: land grabbing, subjugation and slavery. Such entanglements are briefly explained using John Locke as an example. In view of the “colonial ensnarement of the Enlightenment” (Elberfeld) and the need for a critical examination of it, I propose as a methodological approach to include texts by thinkers of African origin, who had first-hand experiences of the institution of slavery and critically reflected on their own social position, the social and political conditions of their time as well as moral questions. Using three selected Black thinkers, the poet Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784), the abolitionist Olaudah Equiano (1745–1797) and the theologian Jacobus Elisa Johannes Capitein (ca. 1717–1747), I discuss the relevance of texts by former slaves for the historiography of philosophy. (shrink)

Connectedness is a significant element of sociality that occurs not only ideally and ‘leiblich’, but also consists of a material dimension. This is established through the materiality of the human body and points beyond it at the same time. The material aspect of connectedness is not simply social but has a social meaning nonetheless: Materiality has an impact on society and on the quality of human coexistence with the environment. To be able to describe this aspect, we use approaches of (...) feminist (neo-)materialisms. First, a neo-materialist perspective on subjectivity is developed, which, in addition to the immaterial aspects of the social, is also able to grasp the dependence of the development of human bodies on their environment. Connectedness as a material-discursive phenomenon adds a neo-materialist dimension to the established ‘phenomenological’ interpretation of the resonance concept that integrates interactions of repulsion or alienation by understanding feelings of alienation, rejection, or the silencing of the world-relationship as well as a resonant world-relationship always also as agentic cuts of the LeibKörper. (shrink)

The history of the historiography of philosophy in the 19th and 20th centuries is presented. Special emphasis is placed on the research on the history of philosophy for the self-understanding of the discipline of philosophy as well as the ideological implications of this research direction. Against this background, the processes of canonisation of the history of philosophy are illuminated and the mixing of descriptive and normative content is analysed. Finally, the opportunities and risks of a critical historiography of philosophy are (...) discussed. An urgent task of a contemporary and critical historiography of philosophy will be to make its own entanglement in political, social and cultural contexts transparent. (shrink)

Stefan Lang recently published a valuable contribution in the Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie on the discussion between Mendelssohn and Kant on the validity of the ontological proof for the existence of God. The conclusion of his article contrasts with that defended by the author of these pages in an essay published in Kant-Studien a few years ago. Our discrepancy is based on two closely related key issues: firstly, on how to interpret Mendelssohn’s thesis that the absolutely necessary being is both (...) thought and thing; secondly, on the significance and scope to be attributed to Kant’s thesis of the impossibility of an ontological proof of God’s existence. (shrink)

How is philosophical knowledge related to the world in which it is produced – and how should it be related? In the article, “world” refers to the whole of historically established, politically contested and materially constituted practices. Three ideal-type relationships are distinguished: affirmatively in the world, negatively against the world, and with the world. The article argues for the latter because it combines the two decisive insights of the first two relationships: the insight into philosophy’s facticity, i. e., it being (...) bound to the world, and the insight into philosophy’s freedom, i. e., that it can, nevertheless, turn against that world. Political epistemology is needed to explicate any philosophy with the world because it holds together, in a productive tension, minimal materialism as the core of the insight into philosophy’s facticity and the irreducibility of thought as the core of the insight into philosophy’s freedom. (shrink)

This article aims at conceptualising the notion of embarrassment as a negativistic figure of thought that takes the experience of one’s own non-sovereignty as a starting point and emphasises an engagement with situations of not-knowing. This consideration is clarified in discussion with the figure of Socrates or with the philosophical attitude of Socrates. Because the negativistic thrust of the conceptualisation undertaken is reminiscent of irony, the paper then addresses the question of what distinguishes embarrassment understood as a figure of thought (...) from irony. For this purpose, Kierkegaard’s reading of Socratic irony is drawn upon. It is shown that irony is inherently a negativism, which in the last consequence aims at a retention of rights; but this is exactly what embarrassment avoids, because, as the article shows, it is not a negativism of strength, but of weakness. (shrink)

The paper examines the significance of embarrassment for a concept of political publicity. It is critical of how the common interpretation of this apparently social phenomenon as a “milder form of shame” leads to a functionalist interpretation. According to this interpretation, embarrassment regulates given normative structures by initiating or even motivating self-criticism. In contrast, the article shows, first, that embarrassment cannot occur at all in a public sphere that is thought of exclusively in normative terms, and second, that the phenomenon (...) is primordially not reflexive. In embarrassment, one is not immediately “thrown back on oneself” but tries to find a relation to one’s public figure. A philosophical reflection on this pursuit reveals the constitution of normative structures. In this light, embarrassment presents itself as a genuinely political phenomenon. (shrink)

In recent years, calls for philosophy to interact more with the public have grown louder in the German-speaking world as well as elsewhere. Public philosophy, as it were, has a long-standing tradition, reaching back to Enlightenment-era German “Popularphilosophie” and of course to Socrates and the Sophists. This section presents four short articles on some current aspects of the public-philosophy debate: on the overall conditions for transferring content from academic philosophy to the public in Germany; on the relations between philosophers’ mediatic (...) presence and their disciplinary expertise; on 18th-century guidelines for accessible philosophical writing; and on public philosophy as a social practice that is more than mere unidirectional knowledge transfer. (shrink)

This article presents Heidegger’s little-known theory of the organism developed in his 1929/30 lecture The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics and interprets it as an antithesis to Kant’s theory of the organism contained in his Critique of Judgement (1790 and 1792/3). Heidegger drops Kant’s transcendental caveats in favour of a robust ontological understanding of organismic teleology. Moreover, Heidegger’s alternative approach draws attention to the fact that Kant’s notion of a ‘natural end’ (Naturzweck), by being tied to the idea of intelligent design, (...) still places the organism too close to the machine, notwithstanding assumptions of a ‘formative force’ (bildende Kraft) and ‘productive organs’ (hervorbringende Organe). Heidegger, in contrast, analyses organismic purposiveness in terms of an instinctual capacity (triebhafte Fähigkeit) in which an organism’s organs are ontologically grounded as its products, and which explains the specificity of an organism’s wholeness, motility and relation to the world. (shrink)

Tugendhat’s remarks on religion and mysticism are explored in section 5 and 6 of this paper. To this end I outline, in section 1, the role that the criticism of religion has played from its beginnings in philosophy’s self-understanding and its focus on reasoning, which philosophers opposed to the non-reasoning justification of religion. In section 2, I consider philosophy’s relation to empirical statements and to the empirical sciences; in section 3, I discuss Tugendhat’s substitution of anthropology for metaphysics; and in (...) section 4, his moral theory. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore how bio-hybrid forms can be created and combined starting from organic forms. The thesis put forward is epistemological: the combinatorial practice of bionics, biomimetics, biorobotics, and all design strategies inspired by nature is not based on a kind of biomimetic inspiration, i. e., on a kind of imitation of nature, but on a practice of translation. To develop this thesis, I focus on the practices of contemporary biorobotics, first examining the practice of translating natural forms (...) into technical artefacts as developed by Raoul Heinrich Francé at the beginning of the 20th century, secondly, analysing the production of robots capable of replicating complex locomotion systems and, finally, investigating the interaction between robots and living organisms (fish). In the last part of the paper, I reflect on the philosophical payoff and broader conditions of possibility for this translational practice. I discuss when and to what extent a translation of biological forms into biotechnical ones is acceptable and point out the notion of form that underlies this practice. Moreover, I draw attention to the need to philosophically investigate what happens between different domains of knowledge – and especially between science and technology. This article is thus an invitation to philosophers to develop a philosophy in the interstices of knowledge production. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to provide a basic understanding of the phenomenon of embarrassment by connecting two general questions. Starting with two illustrative examples, it first examines how the phenomenon could be described and what different aspects can be identified. Apart from having an obvious affective or emotional aspect and being embodied in various forms of expression, embarrassment can be considered as having a social aspect because of its close connection to the social setting of a situation. Furthermore, (...) it seems to have an atmospheric quality in that it is experienced not only by the embarrassed person but also by all those present. Secondly the role that embarrassment plays in the context of a person’s life is addressed. Though it is experienced as unpleasant, it can be understood as a form of adequately responding to certain social situations structured by ambiguity. (shrink)