Kant’s Critique of Judgment and Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man are generally recognized as crucial documents in the development of modern aesthetics away from rule-based conceptions of objectivity. This paper claims that they are also, in crucial ways, circular. In both Kant and Schiller, aesthetic taste turns out to be grounded in the realm of the social in a way that challenges the idealist notion that aesthetic evaluation and education would—or should—occur against the backdrop of humanity in general, rather than of concrete communities. The threat of conceptual circularity, I claim, is thus directly tied to the ineradicable significance of social circles for the articulation of Kant’s and Schiller’s aesthetics.

In his doctoral dissertation On the Principle of Sufficient Reason, Arthur Schopenhauer there outlines a critique of Euclidean geometry on the basis of the changing nature of mathematics, and hence of demonstration, as a result of Kantian idealism. According to Schopenhauer, Euclid treats geometry synthetically, proceeding from the simple to the complex, from the known to the unknown, “synthesizing” later proofs on the basis of earlier ones. Such a method, although proving the case logically, nevertheless fails to attain the raison d’être of the entity. In order to obtain this, a separate method is required, which Schopenhauer refers to as “analysis,” thus echoing a method already in practice among the early Greek geometers, with however some significant differences. In this essay, I here discuss Schopenhauer’s criticism of synthesis in Euclid’s Elements, and the nature and relevance of his own method of analysis.

This paper attempts to explore the problem of collective identity and its subsequent historical legacies through a reading of Spinoza’s and Freud’s respective accounts of Moses. In working their way through the aggadah (i.e., legend) of Moses, both Spinoza and Freud find the halakhic (i.e., legal) core of collectivity to be expressed in and as social mediation. Moreover, both thinkers discover that the occlusion of this core leads to a collective trauma (in Freud’s sense), the symptom of which is the formation of the ‘theological-political’ (in Spinoza’s sense).

This essay explores the familiar German ideology according to which a revolution in thought would, in varying proportions, precede, succeed, accommodate, and generally upstage a political revolution whose defining feature was increasingly thought to be its founding violence: the slide from 1789 to 1793. Germany thus sets out to quarantine the political threat of revolution while siphoning off and absorbing the revolution’s intensity and energy for thinking as such. The essay holds that this structure corresponds to the psychoanalytic logic of trauma: the dissolution of the event into a missed event, and the hypertrophic investment in the trivial, the non-event, the negligible remainder.

The following article discusses a certain concrete ethical-historical sensibility that opens, in part, in the work of Hegel and serves as an introduction to two figures of spirit beyond Hegel’s onto-theological thought: namely, Frantz Fanon and Gabriel García Márquez. The discussion seeks to introduce a “thinking sensibility,” i.e., an opening toward the articulate understanding of history in and through its singularities. This figures a space for a way of thinking arising in the concrete unfolding of spirits out of singularities that overwhelm any single or universal call for unity. In terms of history, this concerns not a thinking that gives sense to history through concepts, but a thought that from its specificity and situation unfolds diverse articulations, and hence configurations of the senses of spirit or histories.

I argue that in Julia Kristeva’s concept of negativity, conceived of as the recuperation, through transformation, of a traumatic remnant of the past, we can find a parallel to what Theodor Adorno, following Walter Benjamin, calls a mimesis that in its emphasis on non-identity is able to remain faithful to the ban on graven images interpreted materialistically rather than theologically. A connection between negativity and the theological ban on images is suggested in Adorno’s claim that a ban on positive representations of utopia leads to a practice of negating the negative, that is, of exposing the injustices of modern life. Both Adorno and Kristeva discern in contemporary art a capacity to critique modernity and envision a better world, but insist that this art must not represent what it indicates. I also examine Benjamin’s writings on photography in order to argue that a mimesis that respects the ban on graven images moves us beyond the systematic optimism of the Hegelian dialectic, and extends the philosophy of history into the unknown of the unconscious.

This article traces some modern conceptions of memory in history (Halbwachs, Nora), indirectly comparing them with the ancient poetic tradition of so-called “catalogue poetry.” In the discussion of memory and oblivion, I argue that history encompasses multiple histories rather than constituting one single teleological and universal history. Every history is produced by a historical narrative that follows and interprets what may be called the historical proper, which comprises lists of names of people, things, or events that have to be kept and transmitted within a history. The historical and the narrative within a history are relatively independent, insofar as the narrative that interprets the historical may in principle change, whereas the historical has to be preserved, which is the primary task of historical memory. Historical being, then, is being remembered within a history.

This article aims at making Heidegger’s understanding of history fruitful for a consideration of history that both takes into account the complexity and multitude of historical lineages and also pays attention to smaller historical events. After revisiting Heidegger’s understanding of history in terms of a history of being and our being-historical, the author brings into play the notion of rhythm. She thinks of rhythms of history in terms of durations of historical configurations of things and events in relation to their beginnings and endings (their rhythmic caesura), and in relation to other historical confi gurations. This leads to an understanding of history in terms of being-historical that does not simply indicate things happening in time, but instead focuses on the happening that determines how things appear and are deployed.

This paper explores Dilthey’s radical transformation of epistemology and the human sciences through his projects of a critique of historically embodied reason and his hermeneutics of historically mediated life. Answering criticisms that Dilthey overly depends on epistemology, I show how for Dilthey neither philosophy nor the human sciences should be reduced to their theoretical, epistemological, or cognitive dimensions. Dilthey approaches both immediate knowing (Wissen) and theoretical knowledge (Erkenntnis) in the context of a hermeneutical phenomenology of historical life. Knowing is not an isolated activity but an interpretive and self-interpretive practice oriented by situated reflexive awareness (Innewerden) and self-reflection (Selbstbesinnung). As embedded in an historical relational context, knowing does not only consist of epistemic validity claims about representational contents but is fundamentally practical, involving all of human existence. Empirically informed Besinnung, with its double reference to sense as meaning and bodily awareness, orients Dilthey’s inquiry rather than the “irrationalism” of immediate intuition or the “rationalism” of abstract epistemological reasoning.

This paper investigates the fragmentation required of the philosophy of history in light of three key moments in its formation: German Idealism’s desire to see freedom realized in the world, the death of God, and the disasters of the twentieth century. I argue that Walter Benjamin and Maurice Blanchot respond to these threads of the philosophy of history with revolutionary imperatives that belong to no program or project, imperatives that both reorganize and destructure the work of education, affirmations of transience and unmediated violence. I argue, following their lead, that any philosophy of history today must begin in a refusal of state power and the mediated violence of contemporary forms of community.

It is not at once evident what is meant by “the question of the history of philosophy.” This essay sets forth a way of looking at that question by locating it on the path taken by Nietzsche’s consideration of the question of the philosophy of history.

In this paper, the thematic context for Fichte’s early concern with the character of the forms of intuition, and specifically inner intuition, is adumbrated. This context is provided by means of a brief exposition of Kant’s doctrine of time as the form of inner sense, and its dual role; its positive role in the “order of (synthetic) cognition” or ordo cognoscendi, and its negative role in the critique of Seelenlehre or “doctrine of the soul.” It is then argued, on this basis, that Fichte’s critique of Kant’s doctrine can serve as a principle for our understanding both of the context for, and the content of, Fichte’s early, propaedeutic writings, and thus of the character of the development of post-Kantian theoretical philosophy and doctrine of knowledge. The paper develops in three parts; through (1) an introduction, in which the importance of the theme to the development of German idealism is intimated, to (2) an exposition of the basic theses of Kant’s Sinnenlehre in the Critique of Pure Reason, and to (3) a summary of Fichte’s critique thereof, as this is set out in the Grundriss.

The conception of subjectivity that dominates the Western philosophical tradition, particularly during the Enlightenment, sets up a simple dichotomy: either the subject is ultimately autonomous or it is merely a causally determined thing. Fichte and Freud challenge this model by formulating theories of subjectivity that transcend this opposition. Fichte conceives of the subject as based in absolute activity, but that activity is qualified by a check for which it is not ultimately responsible. Freud explains the behavior of the self in terms of biological drives and social pressures, yet both forces are actively interpreted by the subject itself. The tensions that arise from these very different approaches show that both Fichte and Freud are trying to overcome this deeply imbedded dichotomy between freedom and determinism. Although some would respond to these tensions by trying to forge a Hegelian synthesis, such a resolution covers over the paradoxical nature of finite subjectivity.

The present paper traces the trajectory of the development of Husserl’s phenomenology from its incipient eidetic phase over the transcendental to the lifeworld-phenomenological, and ascertains that, in spite of all their complexities, the idea of Zu den Sachen selbst is the very objective of all those ‘phenomenological’ investigations. The search after the ‘immediately given’ (Vorgegebenheiten) finally discovers that the concrete cultural life-worlds are the authentically ‘immediately pre-given’ and all kinds of knowledge and sciences (higher cultural configurations) are nothing but idealizations of those floor-like concrete life-worlds. Phenomenology previously as rigorous first science is now re-oriented as phenomenology as rigorous (i.e., transcendental) regional studies. Transcendental regional studies (i.e., life-world phenomenology), I’d like to argue, is the very key to the resolution of the ambiguities of the concept of life-world as well as the key to the understanding of the vague future direction of phenomenological philosophizing that Husserl himself left open.

This essay makes two claims. The first, exegetical, point shows that there are Husserlian elements in Gadamer’s hermeneutics that are usually overlooked. The second, systematic, claim takes issue with the fact that Gadamer saw himself in alliance with the project of the later Heidegger. It would have been more fruitful had Gadamer aligned himself with Husserl and the Enlightenment tradition. Following Heidegger in his concept of “effective history,” Gadamer risks betraying the main tenets of the Enlightenment by shifting the weight from subjectivity to effective history as the “agent” in history. This is not a wholesale dismissal of Gadamer’s project, however. The problem in Gadamer’s effective history can be remedied by insisting, with Husserl, on the subjective character of effective history. Gadamer was right to criticize Husserl’s idea of a transcendental genesis, but went too far in giving up the idea of human subjectivity as the agent in history.

The point of this study is to reconsider the roots of German idealism in pre-Kantian German modern philosophy of the seventeenth and early eight eenth centuries, or in pre-Enlightenment philosophy, which paved the way for the Enlightenment. Considered for far too long as depending solely on Leibniz and stigmatized as dogmatic—all too often it is referred to and summed up as “Leibnizo-Wolffian”—modern German philosophy appears, under close examination, to bear the mark of scepticism. This scepticism is precisely embodied by Thomasius, who is in many ways the father of German modern philosophy and a contemporary opponent of Leibniz. The aim of this paper is to reconsider the important series of philosophical transformations from Leibniz to Kant. I will be arguing that the pervasive nature of scepticism in the thought of Thomasius and his followers enabled the striking spread of Hume’s philosophy in modern German philosophy, Wolff included. In this way, I hope to contribute to understanding the sources of modern philosophy through what can be called, with Foucault in mind, an archaeology of the Aufklärung, with the aim of rethinking Kant’s own contribution.

Building on the research of Manfred Kuehn, the author argues that, whatever influence the Scottish Common Sense Philosophy of Thomas Reid may have had on the development of Immanuel Kant’s refutation of idealism, it was filtered through the thinking of Kant’s largely forgotten German contemporary, Johann Nicolaus Tetens. While the importance of Tetens for understanding Kant is examined in connection with only one idea, the aim is to demonstrate that Tetens is a figure worthy of serious historical consideration.