Tuesday, June 22, 2010
The Summer of Maimon
Monday, June 14, 2010
Hegelian Analysis of the Tea Party
My hypothesis is that what all the events precipitating the Tea Party movement share is that they demonstrated, emphatically and unconditionally, the depths of the absolute dependence of us all on government action, and in so doing they undermined the deeply held fiction of individual autonomy and self-sufficiency that are intrinsic parts of Americans’ collective self-understanding.
...
Tea Party anger is, at bottom, metaphysical, not political: what has been undone by the economic crisis is the belief that each individual is metaphysically self-sufficient, that one’s very standing and being as a rational agent owes nothing to other individuals or institutions. The opposing metaphysical claim, the one I take to be true, is that the very idea of the autonomous subject is an institution, an artifact created by the practices of modern life: the intimate family, the market economy, the liberal state. Each of these social arrangements articulate and express the value and the authority of the individual; they give to the individual a standing she would not have without them.
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The issue here is a central one in modern philosophy: is individual autonomy an irreducible metaphysical given or a social creation? Descartes famously argued that self or subject, the “I think,” was metaphysically basic, while Hegel argued that we only become self-determining agents through being recognized as such by others who we recognize in turn. It is by recognizing one another as autonomous subjects through the institutions of family, civil society and the state that we become such subjects; those practices are how we recognize and so bestow on one another the title and powers of being free individuals.All the heavy lifting in Hegel’s account turns on revealing how human subjectivity only emerges through intersubjective relations, and hence how practices of independence, of freedom and autonomy, are held in place and made possible by complementary structures of dependence. At one point in his “Philosophy of Right,” Hegel suggests love or friendship as models of freedom through recognition. In love I regard you as of such value and importance that I spontaneously set aside my egoistic desires and interests and align them with yours: your ends are my desires, I desire that you flourish, and when you flourish I do, too. In love, I experience you not as a limit or restriction on my freedom, but as what makes it possible: I can only be truly free and so truly independent in being harmoniously joined with you; we each recognize the other as endowing our life with meaning and value, with living freedom. Hegel’s phrase for this felicitous state is “to be with oneself in the other.”
Hegel’s thesis is that all social life is structurally akin to the conditions of love and friendship; we are all bound to one another as firmly as lovers are, with the terrible reminder that the ways of love are harsh, unpredictable and changeable. And here is the source of the great anger: because you are the source of my being, when our love goes bad I am suddenly, absolutely dependent on someone for whom I no longer count and who I no longer know how to count; I am exposed, vulnerable, needy, unanchored and without resource. In fury, I lash out, I deny that you are my end and my satisfaction, in rage I claim that I can manage without you, that I can be a full person, free and self-moving, without you. I am everything and you are nothing.
This is the rage and anger I hear in the Tea Party movement; it is the sound of jilted lovers furious that the other — the anonymous blob called simply “government” — has suddenly let them down, suddenly made clear that they are dependent and limited beings, suddenly revealed them as vulnerable. And just as in love, the one-sided reminder of dependence is experienced as an injury. All the rhetoric of self-sufficiency, all the grand talk of wanting to be left alone is just the hollow insistence of the bereft lover that she can and will survive without her beloved. However, in political life, unlike love, there are no second marriages; we have only the one partner, and although we can rework our relationship, nothing can remove the actuality of dependence. That is permanent.
Many philosophy blogs were irritated by Simon Critchley's inaugural post on the NY Times The Stone, but it looks as if the blog is heading in the right direction now with Bernstein's post and posts by other philosophers like Peter Singer, Nancy Sherman, and Arthur Danto.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
New Kant Journal
Kant Studies Online publishes articles written in English on all aspects of Kant’s works including historically informed studies, applications of Kantian thought to contemporary problems, the relationship between Kantian and Neo-Kantian thinking, and detailed scholarly works on interpretation of Kant’s works. It will also include review articles of secondary works on Kant. An issue of the journal will be deemed to exist whenever an accepted article is published. The journal is edited by Gary Banham in association with an editorial board and is published in the spirit of the open access movement. Whilst its target audience is academic philosophers and students it aims to attract non-academic readers by making all its material freely available without restriction.
Friday, May 28, 2010
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Define Self-Positing!
Self-positing is the very activity in which the I is constituted as an I by virtue of reflexively self-reverting into itself so to immediately become intuitively aware of its own reflexive activity involved in the self-ascription of representations in judgment.
Sunday, May 2, 2010
NY German Idealism Workshop
Date: Friday, May 7th
Location: The New School for Social Research, 6 East 16th St., Wolff
Conference Room (906/913)
Time: 4:30–6:30
I will actually be at the New School, but won't make the meeting because I will be defending my dissertation at the same time.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Midwestern Study Group of the North American Kant Society (CFP)
October 23-24, 2010
London, Ontario, Canada
Keynote Speaker: Angelica Nuzzo (Brooklyn College, CUNY)
The deadline for submissions is July 1, 2010. Papers should not exceed 25 double-spaced pages. All submissions should be prepared for blind review and should be accompanied by an abstract of no more than 300 words. Papers read at any other NAKS meeting may not be submitted.
Monday, March 22, 2010
The Relevance of Romanticism (Conference)
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
NY German Idealism Workshop
The NY German Idealism Workshop is meeting on Friday, March 26th: "A Dialogue on Fichte and Recognition" with Jay Bernstein (The New School for Social Research) and Fred Neuhouser (Barnard College). Both are featured in the recent publication, The Philosophy of Recognition: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Hans-Christoph Schmidt am Busch and Christopher Zurn (Lexington, 2010). Prof. Bernstein will give a short presentation of his paper, "Recognition and Embodiment: Fichte's Materialism" (see attached) to which Prof. Neuhouser will respond.
Date: Friday, March 26th
Time: 4:30–6:30
Location: Philosophy Hall, Room 716, Columbia University
For a copy of Jay Bernstein's paper email Karen Ng:
(karen.ng92@gmail.com).
Saturday, January 30, 2010
International Summer School in German Philosophy
Professor Markus Gabriel (Bonn University) will organize and teach the seminar, with Professors Paul Franks (University of Toronto) and Espen Hammer (Temple University) giving keynote addresses.
One of the aims of the summer school is to argue that the thinkers of Post-Kantian Idealism defend a new ontology, one which lays out the conditions of possibility for transcendental, higher-order thought. Despite Kant’s negative verdict on ontology, these conditions appear
precisely ontological as soon as the existence of the alleged transcendental subject is confirmed. Since the world cannot be reduced to a strictly ”external world” in the Cartesian sense, the
conditions of possibility for referring to determinate objects in the world come to be conceived as themselves determinate objects in the world. With this re-evaluation of the status of ontology in mind, we will read key texts by Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, with specific attention to the relation between epistemology and ontology. Through this ”ontologized” reading, we will attend to certain essential claims of each thinker: Hegel’s thinking not only substance as subject, but the subject as substance, the later Fichte’s re-introducing the notion of being into his Wissenschaftslehre, and finally, Schelling’s ontology of ”ground”, ”existence” and the ”will” in his Freiheitsschrift and Weltalter.
The Summer School will be organized seminar-style, emphasizing group discussion and close readings of key texts of German Idealism (Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel).
The Summer School will run June 14-25, 2010, and all discussions will be in English. Please send your application in English (CV and short letter of intent) to idealism2010@uni-bonn.de by March 10. There are some stipends (€ 800-1000) available, which cover travel expenses and part of the accommodation. To apply for a stipend, please send your CV and a short letter of intent that explains your need for financial support. Please note that there is no registration fee for the summer school.
Other information--including a description of the syllabus, and information about stipends--can be found on the website: http://www.idealism.uni-bonn.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Georgia State and Post-Kantian Philosophy
Friday, December 4, 2009
NY German Idealism Workshop
Date: Friday, December 11th
Location: The New School for Social Research, 6 East 16th St. Room 906
Time: 4:00-6:00pm
please email karen.ng92@gmail.com for a copy of the paper.
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Is Obama a Kantian?
Maybe this is the influence of Rahm Emanuel, who happened to admire Hegel and "the nineteenth-century German thinkers" during his student days.
(Thanks to David Wood for the tip)
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
NY German Idealism Workshop, Nov. 20th
“Kant’s Spontaneous Thinker and (More) Spontaneous Agent.” Robert Howell (SUNY Albany) will respond.
Date: Friday, November 20th
Location: Columbia University, Philosophy Hall, Room 716
Time: 4:30-6:30pm
Light refreshments will be served.
To receive a copy of Kitcher's paper in advance, email Matt Congdon at matt.congdon@gmail.com
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Hegel and Herder
For the many readers in the NY area, Katie Terezakis, a graduate of the New School and now at Rochester Institute of Technology, will give a talk October 15, 2009 at Columbia University: "Meaning and Authority in the Thought of J.G. Herder".
Thursday, October 1, 2009
German Idealism Workshop
Allegra de Laurentiis (Stonybrook) will be giving a paper entitled, "Garve, Kant and Hegel on the Right and the Useful in International Politics." Martin Stone (Cardozo and The New School) will respond.
Date: Friday, October 16th
Location: The New School, 80 Fifth Ave., Rm. 529
Time: 4-6pm
Light refreshments will be served.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
New SEP Articles
Kant's Transcendental Arguments
Kant's Views on Space and Time
Peter Frederick Strawson
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Thursday, August 27, 2009
The Relevance of Romanticism (CFP)
The Relevance of Romanticism
A conference sponsored by the Greater Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium (GPPC)
April 16-17, 2010
Villanova University
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:
Manfred Frank, Universität Tübingen
With the recent increase of interest in philosophical romanticism, it seems appropriate to ask the question, why romanticism now. What were the philosophical questions and concerns of Romanticism, and why do they seem particularly apt for contemporary philosophical and non-philosophical discussions? What is the value of Romanticism as a philosophical movement, both within the history of philosophy, and for philosophy today? Is Romanticism a fundamentally distinct movement, which offers something to the history of philosophy or to contemporary philosophical discussions, which other movements (Idealism, for example) do not? Can we speak of “philosophical Romanticism” at all? What is philosophical about Romanticism?
The conference is dedicated to raising and attempting to answer some of these questions, in light of the work of the two keynote speakers, Manfred Frank and Frederick Beiser. We are seeking papers which address the theme of philosophical Romanticism and its relevance, from a historical or a contemporary perspective. Interdisciplinary approaches to the relationship between philosophical Romanticism and other disciplines (art, science, literature, theology) are also welcome. Papers should exhibit some familiarity with the works of Manfred Frank and/or Frederick Beiser, and, to some degree, engage with their contributions to the field.
In addition to the keynote addresses, Manfred Frank and Frederick Beiser will participate in a roundtable discussion with the conference participants.
dalia.nassar@villanova.edu.