Modern German Philosophy Research Articles

Методологические проблемы осмысления связи права и морали

In the article, questions of the methodology of the study of the connection between law and morality appear as a search for its conceptual basis, which would make it possible not to discard, but only to overcome the shortcomings of the dominant stereotyped perception of this connection, formed within the framework of classical and modern German philosophy of law. The essence of the author’s position is that the question of the nature and essence of the connection between law and morality is in the field of comparison of legal and moral consciousness.

«Умная дикция» Адриана Антоновича Франковского в переводе Марселя Пруста

The article discusses Adrian Frankovsky’s method in his Marcel Proust translations in the 1920s–1930s. We analyse translations, their drafts, and Frankovsky’s forewords which were never republished and translation synopses preserved in his archive. The traditional rebuke of Frankovsky for literal rendering of Proust’s syntax is counterposed with a view on the task of translation as hermeneutical, as a “critical mime” of the original (Friedrich Schlegel) that precisely for this reason requires “literal rendering of syntax” (Walter Benjamin) and “supra-philological exactitude” (Gustav Shpet). Frankovsky’s philosophical education and translating experience preceding Proust project (modern German philosophy, Descartes, Oswald Spengler, Heinrich Wölfflin, Henri Bergson, Sigmund Freud, contemporary French prose, primarily Henri de Régnier) made him the adequate and essentially modern Russian translator for Proust. His paratexts to translations reveal his specific approach to fiction: Frankovsky was interested in the lucid, analytic manner of thought, intellectual humour, and irony, i. e., features primarily represented in syntax and historically underdeveloped in the Russian language. His other reference point was the idea of “noble clarity” coined by Mikhail Kuzmin, who appealed to Russian prose writers to learn “the laws of lucid harmony and ordonnance” in the “construction of periods and phrases” from European literature. Underlining in Proust’s prose similar qualities of “amazing, incredible precision,” “extraordinary precision,” “unprecedented precision,” and “the desire to achieve the most possible precision,” Frankovsky parted with the mainstream Proust criticism of his time that focused on the French writer’s minute analysis of involuntary psychological movements and sided with (or, rather, followed) Ernst Curtius and Vladimir Vejdle’s approach focused on intellectual lucidity of Proust’s style. The article presents Frankovsky’s translation method through the analysis of his synopses for four books of À la recherche du temps perdu, which are condensed and purified semantic skeletons of the original and a stylistic prototype of the translation.

Iqbal, Nietzsche, and Nihilism: Reconstruction of Sufi Cosmology and Revaluation of Sufi Values inAsrar-i-Khudî

AbstractWhile the problem of nihilism is derived from a particular historical and intellectual context in Western philosophy, i.e., the pantheism controversy in modern German philosophy and the ideas of Nietzsche, non-Western thinkers also engaged with it and developed responses to it. In this article, I am interested in analyzing Muhammad Iqbal’s (1877–1938), a leading Muslim thinker (a Sufi) from India, engagement with the problem of nihilism and his response to it from a Sufi perspective. Arguing that the existing literature on Iqbal fails to understand the deeper impact of Nietzsche’s ideas on Iqbal’s philosophy and the dramatic role “the problem of nihilism” played in causing changes in Iqbal’s philosophy, or on Iqbal’s intellectual development, in this article, I analyze how Iqbal’s encounter with the ideas of Nietzsche during his study period in Europe between 1905 and 1908 has introduced him to the problem of nihilism in its Nietzschean form, how this led Iqbal to a nihilistic mood/crisis from 1909 to 1913, and then how he later developed a response to nihilism by reconstructing the Sufi cosmology and by revaluating the Sufi values of the pantheistic/Persian type of Sufism – the outcome of which is found in his philosophical poemAsrar-i-Khudî(1915).

ОБСУЖДЕНИЕ ЭССЕ ХАБЕРМАСА "ДИЛЕММА ЗАПАДА. ВОЙНА И ВОЗМУЩЕНИЕ" В ГЕРМАНИИ

In an essay published in April 2022, Jurgen Habermas, 92, the master of modern German philosophy, spoke out against the strengthening of militarist components in German domestic and foreign policy. But, unlike his other works, this essay was almost unanimously rejected by both the intellectual and the socio-political mainstream in Germany. What was the reason?

Concept of Personal Identity

Leibniz's concept of monads had of great importance for the development of the idealistic conception. Through Kant and his "Physical Monadology" she infiltrated into modern German philosophy. However, not only modern idealists referred to the concept of monads. Especially, that many scientific disciplines, which emanated from philosophy, related to the scope of idealistic notions, for example: psychology or sociology. German psychology and its creators have many often referred to monads theory. Freud, Fromm and Jung presented even their own point of views on this topic. Later theories, such as Lowe's theory, also refer to the concept of monads. These relations and the historical connections between monad theory and modern German psycho-philosophy are shown in this work.

Early Modern German Philosophy: 1690–1755, ed. C. Dyck

Early Modern German Philosophy: 1690–1755, ed. C. Dyck

Toril Moi. Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. 304 pp.

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe CI ReviewToril Moi. Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. 304 pp.Robert PippinRobert Pippin Search for more articles by this author Robert B. Pippin is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books on modern German philosophy, including Kant’s Theory of Form (1982); Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (1989) ;and Modernism as a Philosophical Problem (1999); a book on philosophy and literature, Henry James and Modern Moral Life (1999); and two books on film. His most recent books include After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism (2013), and Interanimations: Receiving Modern German Philosophy (2015). He is a past winner of the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award in the Humanities and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 45, Number 2Winter 2019Davidson and His Interlocutors Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/701003 Views: 321Total views on this site © 2019 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century German Thought by Eric S. Nelson

Reviewed by: Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century German Thought by Eric S. Nelson David Chai (bio) Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century German Thought. By Eric S. Nelson. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. Pp. x + 344. Hardcover $114.00. ISBN 978–1-3500–0255-5. Eric Nelson's Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century German Thought opens with the following: "The work before you is an interpretive journey through the historical reception of Chinese and Buddhist philosophy in modern German thought, focusing in particular--albeit not exclusively--on the early twentieth century. Its intent is to describe and analyze the intertextual nexus of intersecting sources for the sake of elucidating implications and critical models for intercultural hermeneutics and intercultural philosophy. The possibility of such a philosophy is confronted by the persistent myth and prejudice that philosophy is and can only be a unique and exclusive Western spiritual achievement" (p. 1). The book is directed by "the question of who can philosophize, and who counts as a philosopher" (p. 2), a quintessential question indeed, but I wonder if it dawned on Nelson that this question never occurred to the people of Asia, rendering it an exclusively Western line of approach. The same can be said when Nelson writes: "The much-needed emancipation of philosophy from ethnocentrism, often cloaked in the language of a false universality, requires what could be called 'a critique of European reason,' or a deconstruction of the Eurocentric conception of rationality, which is simultaneously an internal immanent critique of the dialectic of Western philosophy and an exposure to the exteriority of its--in this case East Asian--others" (p. 3). Is this not also true of the lack of Chinese receptivity towards Western thought for much of its history? Until the arrival of the Jesuits in the 16th century, the Chinese lacked the means to converse with Western philosophy, Buddhism notwithstanding. Of course, Nelson is only concerned with the modern Western reception of East Asian thought, but this doesn't make my point moot. Indeed, if the West can engage the ancient traditions of the East, and be accused of misrepresenting or misconstruing their ideas, why is there no similar criticism being made of the modern Chinese reception of classical Western thought? Perhaps the reason is as Nelson says: "A more genuine encounter and dialogue is constrained and undermined by the colonial and racial history of modern Western philosophy" (p. 5). [End Page 1] Chapter 1 "traces episodes in the story of European Confucianism by exploring historical examples of the role and interpretation of Confucianism in modern German philosophy in general and in early twentieth-century thought in particular" (p. 16). A richly detailed historical and intellectual account, it is necessary for Nelson to provide this as it sets the stage for the analysis that follows in subsequent chapters. Chapter 2 examines Zhang Junmai's (1886–1969) relationship with Rudolf Eucken (1846–1926) and Hans Driesch (1867–1941), and how their life-philosophy influenced Zhang's own intercultural thinking. In light of the social and political chaos engulfing China at the turn of the 19th century, many Chinese intellectuals turned to the West for inspiration and potential solutions to the identity crisis sweeping their country. That Zhang turned to the life-philosopher Eucken and the neo-vitalist Driesch is both surprising and also fascinating because Zhang and Eucken co-authored a book in German in 1922 entitled: Das Lebensproblem in China und Europa (The Problem of Life in China and Europe). Nelson describes their collaborative work as "perceiving affinities between early Greek and Chinese thinking, particularly in their Socratic and Confucian moments, as critical reflection concerning the individual and social-political formation of life through self-cultivation and moral government" (p. 50). Such qualities were absent from the China of Zhang's time, deserted when the Qing empire collapsed a decade beforehand. Zhang, therefore, "articulates a modern Confucian philosophy that has learnt from and is open to learning and adopting from Western modernity, in particular from Kantian philosophy and liberal-constitutional and social democratic political thought, in the formation of a distinctive Chinese modernity achieved through a form of enlightenment suited...

Interanimations: Receiving Modern German Philosophy and Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy

Interanimations: Receiving Modern German Philosophy and Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy

Mechanism and materialism in early modern German philosophy

ABSTRACTThe paper focuses on the gradual separation between materialism and mechanism in early modern German philosophy. In Germany the distinction between the two concepts, originally introduced by Leibniz, was definitively stated by Wolff who was the first to provide a definition of the new philosophical term Materialismus, and of the related philosophical sect. In the first part I describe the initial identification of mechanism and materialism in German philosophy between the last decades of the seventeenth century and 1720. Mechanism is here mostly conceived within a monistic metaphysics of body, which refers mainly to Hobbes and to some (unfaithful) interpretations of Spinoza’s pantheism. This tight connection between a mechanical explanation of nature and the Deus sive natura issue leads to a negative judgement on mechanism and its materialistic implications, both charged with a form of more or less explicit atheism. In the second part I describe the gradual emancipation in Germany of mechanism from materialism according to the distinction between a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ materialism. In the third and final part, I sketch the first appearances of the entry ‘materialism’ in the philosophical encyclopaedias of early modern Germany, pointing out the by-then clear distinction between this metaphysical issue and the mechanical claim.

From Reflexivity to Immediacy: Knowledge in Classical and Contemporary German Philosophy

Classical German Philosophy belongs to the heritage of the European philosophical tradition, in which philosophical knowledge is defined as an epistemological reflection. Philosophy reflects on scientific knowledge to demonstrate its possibility. Thus objective knowledge is defined as a system whose principle is subjectivity. Since the 19th century, this concept of knowledge has been questioned as has subjectivity as such. Since then, philosophy in Germany has departed from comprehensive reflection and turned towards matters of detail or issues of application. In this paper I argue that the trend of skepticism about knowledge in modern German philosophy is associated with the radical social upheavals of modernity, but without being accompanied by a critical understanding of these upheavals. The first task is to reconstruct the classical concept of knowledge as it appeared in German philosophy, including its crucial relation to scientific knowledge and to history. The second task is to engage with the observation that this tradition of thought is in danger of being lost today. I will point out the role which the linguistic turn in philosophy has played and the means of deconstructing it.

Interanimations: receiving modern German philosophy

Interanimations: receiving modern German philosophy

Religion et philosophie en Allemagne. Le droit de la confession

From ca. 1785 onwards the presentation of the Augsburg Confession to Emperor Charles V on 25 June 1530 has been the primitive scene of German philosophy and the Augsburg Confession itself its Bill of Rights. I hereby reconsider the traditional issue of the Lutheran confessionalization of modern German philosophy, emphasizing the political and legal dimension of this process and its philosophical implications.

The Problem of Historical Consciousness of Young People in Contemporary German Philosophy

The article is devoted to the peculiarities of consideration of the problem of historical consciousness of the youth in modern German philosophy. The article analyzes the basic models of historical consciousness of the youth, established in German philosophy and social sciences and humanities in the late XX and beginning of the XXI centuries. The comparative analysis of static and dynamic models was conducted. The article emphasizes the idea that the problem of historical consciousness of young people is of prime importance in the contemporary studies of historical consciousness . Historical consciousness of the youth is transforming into a self- concept from a separate aspect of the study of historical consciousness. The most important feature of all the attempts of philosophical understanding of the phenomenon of historical consciousness of young people in Germany is a close connection with pedagogy and didactics of history. The article notes that the focus on the narrative approach to the understanding of the nature, structure and features of the transformation of historical consciousness contributed to epistemological and psychological aspects of the studies of historical consciousness of young people, as well as to the desire to consider it especially in the individual context.

Critical Thinking in its Contexts and in Itself

The nature of critical thinking remains controversial. Some recent accounts have lost sight of its roots in the history of philosophy. This article discusses critical thinking in its historical and social contexts, and in particular, for its educational and political significance. The writings of Plato and Aristotle are still vital in considering what makes certain kinds of thinking and certain kinds of knowledge distinctive. But neither Plato nor Aristotle theorised critical thinking in its specificity, that is, by differentiating it from other kinds of thinking and by outlining its features. It was only with German Idealism, as part of the European Enlightenment, that philosophy achieved a level of self-reflection and engagement that broadened, deepened and made radical the logos of Socrates and Plato. In the encounter between Modern German and Ancient Greek philosophy we can see that there are different kinds of reason, the most politically and existentially significant of which runs through critical thinking, which we can only ever experience as critical dialogue. The logos of dialectical reason is uncompromising in its pursuit of truth and ‘the good life’, and as such, demands courage from those who pursue it.

Some reflections on Wouter Hanegraaff's Esotericism and the Academy

The article presents some critical remarks on the recent book by Wouter Hanegraaff. There are three criticisms: his concept of ‘Platonic Orientalism’ because it doesn't correspond to the way in which we tend to read the theme of the Orient in late Antiquity today; the fact that the attention of the author is concentrated mainly on the perspective of the history of modern (German) philosophy and neglects other areas; and some problems posed by its radical historicist perspective.

RE‐ASSESSING THE MEANING OF THOUGHT: HANS URS VON BALTHASAR'S RETRIEVAL OF GREGORY OF NYSSA

[In order to counter the dominance of subjectivity in modern German philosophy since Kant, the young Hans Urs von Balthasar appealed to the theocentric epistemology of Gregory of Nyssa. By means of a study of Balthasar's Présence et Pensée: Essai sur la philosophie religieuse de Grégoire de Nysse, the purpose of this essay will be to elucidate Balthasar's interpretation of the meaning and orientation of thought according to Gregory of Nyssa's epistemology. After an initial presentation of Balthasar's contention that for Gregory of Nyssa God qua Being (to einai) serves as the constitutive source of thought and, therefore, the necessary orientation for any philosophical reckoning of the meaning of thought, the following issues are addressed: 1.) The meaning of thought as erotic and egressive, 2.) the interpretation of imago dei in relation to thought, 3.) the Incarnation and the ultimate horizon of thought.]

Leibniz or Thomasius?

The point of this study is to reconsider the roots of German idealism in pre-Kantian German modern philosophy of the seventeenth and early eighteenth 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 Auftlarung, with the aim of rethinking Kant's own contribution.

Humanist Antiformalism as a Theopolitics of Race: F.H. Jacobi on Friend and Enemy

Humanist Antiformalism as a Theopolitics of Race: F. H. Jacobi on Friend and Enemy Jeffrey S. Librett (bio) there arose in his soul the plan for a work which...would display...humanity as it is. 1 Introduction In the following, I retrace the close connections among humanism, antiformalism, and stereotypical representations of religiocultural and racial identity in the German Counterenlightenment thinker, F. H. Jacobi. The critical reconstruction of this moment in the history of “humanity” is of some importance, because in a number of recent contributions to the historiography of modern German philosophy, an always laudable attitude of suspicion with respect to the claims of Enlightenment reason has given rise to an inadequate—because excessively credulous—reading of Counterenlightenment faith, and especially of Jacobi. This sympathetic reading has been insufficiently attentive to the metaphysical and cultural-political difficulties that I examine here, and which remain inseparable from the eighteenth-century German irrationalist vision of a community of friends rooted in a spiritual humanity beyond all restrictive, material forms. 2 Jacobi’s problematic contribution to the polemics around the definition of the human between the Enlightenment and Romanticism can best be [End Page 233] situated in a preliminary manner by means of a very brief reconsideration of the Enlightenment paradigm he contests at the outset of his career. The German Enlighteners make a concerted effort to characterize the essence of the human in terms of rational freedom. Since the most prominent Enlighteners, especially Lessing, Kant, and Mendelssohn, see clearly that rationality places certain formal limits on total freedom (in the sense of anarchic disorder) and that conversely freedom in its purest state would necessarily burst the bounds of reason, one can assume that they are well aware of the significant internal tension inherent in the notion of free rationality or law-governed freedom. Nonetheless, from their perspective this tension cannot be renounced because anarchy appears not as freedom but as heteronomy (as enslavement to the laws of contingent nature), while reason without freedom is irrationality itself, insofar as domination makes self-determined transparency impossible. For the Enlighteners, in one way or another, the internal self-harmonization of free rationality is the infinite project of a humanity in the process of becoming. The German Counterenlightenment—of which Jacobi is perhaps the most extreme representative—vigorously contests this conception of humanity, rejecting the notion that rationality is necessary for, and ultimately in harmony with, radical freedom. Instead, the opponents of Enlightenment insist that irrationality—as faith, cultural particularity, and/or imaginative-affective excess—is the very touchstone of the freedom of the will, which for them becomes the distinguishing trait of the human essence. 3 Jacobi’s entire project, as I retrace it here, attempts to present a version of this position. Although Jacobi argues for irrational freedom as the essence of the human, he by no means sees himself as participating in a merely intellectual or theoretical discussion. Rather, he is trying to wage discursive warfare. Jacobi explicitly attempts, in making this argument, to distinguish between the absolute friend and the absolute enemy of mankind (as of God), the absolute friend and the absolute enemy as such. In Jacobi’s discourse, if humanity consists in irrational freedom, then only the friend of such freedom is the friend as such; the enemy of this freedom, the enemy of humanity, is the enemy tout court. 4 But the absolute enemy does not merely set limits to freedom. Beyond this, he situates himself on the limit between the establishment of such limits and their suspension or denial. For the open enemy of freedom is, from Jacobi’s point of view, relatively unthreatening and easy to contest: this enemy cannot secretly infiltrate the space of the friends of humanity. Similarly, the merely nonhuman, insofar as it keeps its distance, is a potentially friendly opponent, since it gives definition to “the human.” In contrast, the most treacherous, most inimical enemy is the “human” being who both—apparently—affirms freedom and tacitly denies it by subjecting it to rational constraints. This truly absolute and indeed satanically monstrous enemy of humanity is the one who occupies and undermines the border between humanity and nonhumanity, turning each into the other...

Modern German Philosophy

Modern German Philosophy