Unpublished Lecture Research Articles

"ИСТОРИЯ НАРОДОВ СССР" Ю.В. ГОТЬЕ В МГИАИ (1936/1937 УЧЕБНЫЙ ГОД)

The article considers in historiographical context the main problems, topics and subjects of the unpublished lecture course “The History of the Peoples of the USSR”, delivered by Academician Yu.V. Gautier at the Moscow State Historical and Archival Institute (MGIAI) in the academic year 1936/37. In the lecture course are seen those priorities and benchmarks which are due to the specifics of the historiographical process of those years, but at the same time are evident many fundamental principles and foundations of understanding of the Russian historical process, typical for historians of the “old school”, forced to adapt their lives to the circumstances of the new historiographical life.

Extreme Exoticism: Japan in the American Musical Imagination, by W. Anthony Sheppard

<i>Extreme Exoticism: Japan in the American Musical Imagination</i>, by W. Anthony Sheppard

‚Arbeit an den Sachen selbst‘. Zu Praxis und Programmatik der Literatursoziologie Karl Viëtors

Abstract This article focuses on Karl Viëtor’s (1892–1951) literary-sociological oriented Baroque research and follows its development up to a generalized literary-sociological research program. Viëtor defines his stance on the sociology of literature by distancing himself from two strands of thought: on the one hand, from different versions of “Geistesgeschichte” (represented e. g. by Fritz Strich, Oskar Walzel, or Emil Ermatinger), and, on the other hand, from various materialistic positions based on the base/superstructure-model (such as those by Franz Mehring or Karl August Wittfogel). First, I will examine Viëtor’s unpublished lecture History of German Literature in the Age of Baroque (Geschichte der deutschen Literatur im Zeitalter des Barock, 1922/1923 until 1937), which is his repository for his baroque publications in the 1920 s, that also inspired in-depth research conducted by his students. Secondly, I will analyze Viëtor’s Program of a Sociology of Literature (Programm einer Literatursoziologie, 1934), a critical examination of relevant contributions by Erich Rothacker and others, both from bourgeois and Marxist backgrounds. In this text, Viëtor outlines the sociology of literature in two ways: as a sociology of literary life and as a sociology of literary works.

“Two Foundings”: An Unpublished Lecture by John H. Schaar

AbstractThis is a reconstruction of John H. Schaar’s first introductory lecture for his course on American political thought taught often at University of California, Berkeley, and University of Ca...

Non-humanist Histories of Life: Grammatology in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract In an influential essay entitled ‘The End of Writing? Grammatology and Plasticity’ (2007), the philosopher Catherine Malabou announces the double end of: first, writing as the metaphorical code of a biological discourse, that of genetics, which has been historically overcome; and second, grammatology as the theory of a generalized and intraregional conception of writing. This article counters Malabou’s announcement by drawing attention to the publication of two significant texts in contemporary French thought: Jacques Derrida’s hitherto unpublished lecture course La Vie la mort: séminaire (1975–1976) (2019), and recent work by biophysicist Henri Atlan, Cours de philosophie biologique et cognitiviste: Spinoza et la biologie actuelle (2018). Through a close reading of these texts, the article demonstrates that the grammatologies elaborated therein come out of a critical engagement with genetics and unfold general accounts of the living that are alternative to the humanist history of life told by genetics. Finally, it argues for grammatology as a key resource for current evolutionary explorations of life.

Merleau-Ponty between Philosophy and Symbolism: The Matrixed Ontology by Rajiv Kaushik

Reviewed by: Merleau-Ponty between Philosophy and Symbolism: The Matrixed Ontology by Rajiv Kaushik Bryan Smyth KAUSHIK, Rajiv. Merleau-Ponty between Philosophy and Symbolism: The Matrixed Ontology. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019. xxix + 171 pp. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $32.95 Taking its cue from the Husserlian battle cry “To the things themselves!”, phenomenology aims to plumb and critically unpack the concrete transcendental depths of lived intentional experience. It does this on the basis of a methodological “reduction” that, by suspending ordinary ontological presuppositions, leads back to horizonal apriorities that frame and condition the experience in question. There is nothing reductive about this—Husserl derived his term Reduktion from the Latin reducere without fussing over misleading connotations in English. Indeed, even in Husserl’s own work the precise nature of the reduction grew increasingly elusive as the scope of this transcendental undertaking steadily expanded, through its own internal logic, to encompass corporeal, intersubjective, cultural, historical, and ultimately ontological dimensions. For this reason, and as is well known, the pathways of post-Husserlian phenomenology are manifold and diverse. The most important followers of Husserl tended to be those who did not so much aim to follow him as to cleave to the logic of the project itself, and who, as a result, worked out more radical conceptions of transcendentality that were even further removed from the traditional paradigms of rational subjectivity than Husserl himself was prepared to recognize. Merleau-Ponty represents one such pathway. Indeed, his attempt to rethink the transcendental conditions of experience in terms of the prereflective intentionalities of embodied existence, and how this evolved, over a scant two decades of work before his untimely death, into novel ontological proposals concerning what he termed “flesh” is arguably the most authentically Husserlian way to go beyond Husserl himself. Yet owing to its unfinished status, plus the fact that much of his thinking can be found only in recently published or still unpublished lecture notes, Merleau-Ponty’s work remains imperfectly understood. Most recent [End Page 630] scholarship aims to redress this by drawing upon the recently published material as a way to help elucidate the ontological implications of a Merleau-Pontian phenomenology. Rajiv Kaushik’s new book is precisely this sort of contribution. Drawing especially on Merleau-Ponty’s notes for his 1955 courses at the Collège de France—“Institution in Personal and Public History” and “The Problem of Passivity: Sleep, the Unconscious, Memory”—Kaushik’s main claim is that Merleau-Ponty’s ontology is best understood in terms of a primal institution. This is in effect a redeployment of Husserl’s Urstiftung, and in this Kaushik wants to emphasize the generative sense of a primal instituting. Merleau-Ponty took up and elaborated the idea of institution as a way to go beyond the subjectivism that is implied by analyses of experience undertaken simply in terms of constitution. As Kaushik reminds us, institution is tied to notions of sedimentation and interiorization and in this way provides a more robust framework for grasping the natural and historical conditions of lived experience. Developing indications found in Merleau-Ponty, Kaushik discusses this framework as a kind of diacritical matrix that constellates differences on the basis of a “positive negation.” At the primal level of ontology—that is, the lived significance of being, the sense of the “ontological tissue prior to formal ontology”—institution is articulated as an anonymous symbolic matrix. Experience in general, including critical philosophical reflection, is ultimately situated within a pregiven symbolism that “matrixes” ostensible dualisms (for example, being and nonbeing, materiality and ideality, nature and consciousness, world and language, sense and meaning, and so on), not by imposing identity but by grounding chiasmatic divergence or “dehiscence” concretely. All expression will thus involve a certain repression, but the terms of this symbolism are not set in stone. There is an open-endedness, and what Kaushik calls “matrix events” can occur. But crucially, ontological generativity pertains to a “primordial passivity” that, in virtue of making signification and intentionality possible, lies beyond the reach of reflection. Indeed, Kaushik provocatively suggests that primal symbolism has much in common with dreamless sleep. Lucid recognition of this fundamental limit to phenomenological clarification...

“Religion and the Commonweal in the Tradition of Political Philosophy”: An Unpublished Lecture by Leo Strauss

AbstractThe transcript published here for the first time is of Leo Strauss’s 1963 lecture on, and discussion of, the relation of religion to the commonweal in the tradition of political philosophy....

Kant and Theodicy: A Search for an Answer to the Problem of Evil by George Huxford

Reviewed by: Kant and Theodicy: A Search for an Answer to the Problem of Evil by George Huxford Matthew C. Altman George Huxford. Kant and Theodicy: A Search for an Answer to the Problem of Evil. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020. Pp. xxiii + 149. Cloth, $90.00. A theodicy attempts to reconcile the existence of evil (or really any imperfection) with the belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God. Hume, among others, thought that they were incompatible, and he used it as an argument against God's existence. Leibniz claimed that this was the best of all possible worlds because metaphysical evil is unavoidable and moral and physical evil lead to greater goods. Kant, however, has mostly been left out of the conversation. George Huxford seeks to correct this. The problem of evil is as difficult as it sounds. In the first place, there are several kinds of evil that would seem to need explanation, including physical or natural evil (suffering), metaphysical evil (limitation), moral evil (sin), and injustice (the fact that evil people often thrive and good people often suffer). There are at least three different kinds of responses to the problem. One approach is a theoretical, speculative, "doctrinal" (123), or "philosophical" theodicy (xviii–xix), which attempts to infer knowledge of God's reasons for acting. Another response is fideism, which appeals to nonrational faith that God must know best. A third approach is practical or "authentic" theodicy (124), which derives God's existence and ultimate justice on moral grounds. The most common philosophical theodicies include the limited-view defense (we cannot know God's purposes); the instrumental, net-good, postponement, or higher-purpose defense (something good comes from evil); and the free-will defense (we, not God, are responsible for sin). Huxford's attempt to explain these varied approaches, combined with the fact that Kant's theodical positions change throughout his career, lead to a dense and sometimes confusing exegesis. Huxford explains and evaluates Kant's different answers to the problem in the pre-Critical, early Critical, and late Critical periods. In the pre-Critical period, Kant defends a philosophical theodicy and adopts a Leibnizian approach. Suffering is not evil per se, because it does not involve judgment or desert; it is rather the result of natural law. Metaphysical evil is merely limitation, not positive evil. And moral evil is attributable not to God but to human beings' misuse of their freedom. Huxford says that this argument [End Page 333] does not succeed in answering the problem of evil, since God is still indirectly responsible for evil in deciding to create a finite world, one in which God knows we will act wrongly. In the early Critical period, Kant does not explicitly defend a philosophical theodicy, but his writings, especially unpublished lecture notes, seem to indicate that he continued to believe in the best possible world approach (with some elements of the limited-view and instrumental defenses), even though such a claim transcends the limits on human knowledge that Kant establishes in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787). In the late Critical period, especially in "On the Failure of All Attempted Philosophical Theodicies" (1791), Kant argues against many different philosophical theodicies. According to Huxford, not every argument succeeds, but he says that Kant can rule out speculative theodicies as a class because they are predicated on insight into God's reasoning based on our experience of the world. Since we can have no knowledge regarding noumena, that is impossible. Instead, Kant proposes his authentic theodicy: we can rationally justify practical faith in God as a holy being, acting necessarily in accordance with what reason and morality require. Although we cannot know why God acts, we can trust in God's moral wisdom to do what is best. Huxford concludes that Kant's mature view fails as a theodicy because it does not actually explain the compatibility of God and evil. Huxford's limited focus on theodicy, his frequent use of textual evidence, and his division of the book into Kant's three periods provide good insights into Kant's philosophical development. Huxford often relies on minor texts and texts that were unpublished during Kant's lifetime...

Copland’s Styles

This article examines the relationship between Aaron Copland’s activities as composer and as pedagogue in order to illuminate the fraught midcentury relationship between musical modernism and middlebrow culture. I situate his unpublished lecture notes and music appreciation books within the middlebrow context and trace their connections with the works he composed during this period. At the center of my investigation is the contentious midcentury category of “style,” which implicated both Copland’s music and his pedagogy in ways that illuminate middlebrow cultural appreciation at large. Challenging long-standing modernist depictions of the middlebrow as the straightforward commercialization of high culture, I excavate characteristic middlebrow commitments to compromise, novelty, and breadth that proved even more unsettling to midcentury hierarchies than mass culture’s supposedly shameless pandering. By emphasizing Copland’s commitment to a canon of modern “styles,” in composition as in music appreciation, I draw out underlying tensions between his “middlebrow” approach to modern music and a “higher,” purer form imagined by Arnold Schoenberg and Theodor W. Adorno. At the same time, I show how these distinctions often threatened to collapse. On a broader methodological level, I chart a middle course between “social” conceptions of the middlebrow—as a means of marketing, distributing, and teaching high art to a mass audience—and “aesthetic” discussions of it as a compositional style. By examining the reciprocity between Copland’s pedagogy and music, I ultimately suggest that the problem which middlebrow culture posed to high modernism lay not just in its ability to mediate between high and low, modernism and mass culture, but also in the challenges it posed to fantasies of aesthetic immediacy and autonomy.

“The Great Burden” of Religion

This article aims to reread Jonas’s famous lecture on “Heidegger and Theology” linking it with a still unpublished lecture course on Being and Time Jonas held in 1967 at the New School for Social Research. From the reading of Heidegger’s masterwork, Jonas takes the idea of the “burdensome” character of the existence, which he interprets in terms of a “polarity” between man and his “other” (other men, God, world). Such a polarity is for Jonas the very essence of “religion” (as religamen) and of responsibility. From this vantage point, “Heidegger and Theology,” with its sharp criticism of the theological appropriation of Heidegger’s post-turn philosophy, appears to be a strong defense of the burden of “polarity,” as developed in Being and Time, against its removal by the thought of Being: a Being which is nothing but a mirror image of Dasein. Partially reconsidering his views on Heidegger’s Gnosticism, Jonas turns (the earlier) Heidegger against (the later) Heidegger himself.

Through History and Technique: Pier Luigi Nervi on Architectural Resilience

Along with his professional work as engineer, architect and builder, Pier Luigi Nervi (1891–1979) was also an adjunct professor at the University of Rome and a prolific writer. Through his writings, his views on architectural history can be traced and framed as part of a wider discourse concerning what he termed architectural ‘constants’. Moreover, his interest in the architecture of the past led him to identify what could be defined as ‘architectural resilience’, that is, an ever-evolving relationship between building forms, techniques and materials. Seeing technique as preceding form, he examined structural elements that resisted the passage of time and outlasted building typologies and styles. Combining Nervi’s published and unpublished lecture notes with his personal collections of architectural postcards, photographs and his writings, this article explores Nervi’s search for a stile di verita (truthful style) through the lens of architectural resilience. With its focus on the resilience of structural elements, the article also places the engineer’s use of reinforced concrete in the particular historicity of this material and in the longer continuum of construction history.

A Goy Who Studies Torah. Two Unpublished Sources by Ernst Simon and Gershom Scholem on the Spiritual Legacy of Franz Rosenzweig

Abstract In the early 1930s, Franz Rosenzweig’s work was celebrated, criticized and questioned for its relevance within the specific cultural, religious and philosophical preoccupations of the inhabitants of pre-state Israel. This could be seen in nuce at the opening of the Schocken Library in Jerusalem in December 1936 that was marked by a celebratory conference dedicated to the memory of Franz Rosenzweig. The evening featured a collection of four lectures held in Hebrew by eminent German-Jewish scholars: Ernst Simon, Julius Guttmann, Hugo Bergmann and Gershom Scholem. Simon and Scholem’s lectures in particular put forward two strikingly different views on Rosenzweig’s possible Nachleben in the yishuv. The article is followed by Scholem’s hitherto unpublished lecture (both in the original Hebrew and in English translation) and Simon’s German summary of his own contribution that evening.

Non-compact Newton boundary and Whitney equisingularity for non-isolated singularities

In an unpublished lecture note, J. Briançon observed that if {ft} is a family of isolated complex hypersurface singularities such that the Newton boundary of ft is independent of t and ft is non-degenerate, then the corresponding family of hypersurfaces {ft−1(0)} is Whitney equisingular (and hence topologically equisingular). A first generalization of this assertion to families with non-isolated singularities was given by the second author under a rather technical condition. In the present paper, we give a new generalization under a simpler condition.

Slicing the cortex to study mental illness: Alois Alzheimer's pictures of equivalence.

Alois Alzheimer (1864-1915) was a German physician who specialized in psychiatry, and who is today known for the first description of a-in his own words-peculiar ailment (eigenartige Erkrankung), which was named after him. In his time, however, he was foremost recognized for his work in refining histopathological techniques and thereby contributing to the methodological arsenal for differential diagnosis in clinical psychiatry. In his laboratory that was based at the renowned Munich Psychiatric University Clinic led by Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926), Alzheimer, his assistants, and students conserved, prepared, and studied slices of deceased patients' brains under the microscope. How could histological postmortem research better clinical diagnoses? Against what norm should the pathologies be compared? What was the normal brain in a context of highly invasive preparation techniques and the artifacts that they produced? In an unpublished lecture series, Alzheimer explicitly addressed these questions and framed them in terms of practical problems and possible solutions: where to get normal brains from; how animal studies could help to enlighten the normal brain and infectious mental disorders; how the study of hereditary idiocy might yield knowledge about normal brain development and general brain pathology. This chapter offers a close reading of parts of Alzheimer's lectures, his habilitation thesis, and his programmatic opening paper of a journal that he cofounded. These sources provide us with an introduction into the making of the normal and the pathological brain in histopathology that focuses more on problems and controversies than providing an undisputable, easy-to-use framework. I examine the premises of Alzheimer's conceptualization of "pictures of equivalence" (Aequivalentbilder) to elucidate how the epistemological gap between postmortem research and clinical psychiatry was managed in this particular context. The excavation of this historical epistemology not only fills a gap in the rich history of brain research that has mostly focused on brain localization theory, of which Alzheimer and Kraepelin were skeptical. It also provides a case study for how "the normal" and "the pathological" were put to work, and were, literally, pictured. In conjunction with the other chapters of this volume, this contribution thereby raises the historiographical and philosophical question of what to include into an assessment of the making and use of models of the brain.

F. A. Hayek and the Economic Calculus

This article offers a revisionist account of certain episodes in the development of F. A. Hayek's thought. It offers a new reading of his 1937 paper, “Economics and Knowledge,” that draws on unpublished lecture notes in which he articulated more fully the distinctions he made in the paper between a “pure logic of choice,” or the economic calculus, and an “empirical element,” which he would later call the competitive market order. Next, the essay shows that Hayek continued to try to develop his ideas about the role of the economic calculus through the 1950s and early 1960s, an effort that has been missed because it never led to any published work. Finally, the article examines Hayek's attempt to articulate a theory of the market process, one that would be at the same level of generality as the economic calculus, in lectures he gave at the University of Virginia. He never developed a full-fledged formal theory, but his failed efforts still bore fruit in leading him to his contributions on spontaneous orders and the (verbal) theory of complex phenomena. This work anticipated contributions by others who were more technically trained.

F. A. Hayek and the Economic Calculus

The paper offers a revisionist account of certain episodes in the development of F. A. Hayek's thought. It offers a new reading of his 1937 paper, Economics and Knowledge, that draws on unpublished lecture notes in which he articulated more fully the distinctions he made in the paper between a pure logic of choice, or the economic calculus, and an empirical element, which he would later call the competitive market order. Next, the paper shows that Hayek continued to try to develop his ideas about the role of the economic calculus through the 1950s and early 1960s, an effort that has been missed because it never led to any published work. Finally, the paper examines Hayek's attempt to articulate a theory of the market process, one that would be at the same level of generality as the economic calculus, in lectures he gave at the University of Virginia. He never developed a full-fledged formal theory, but his failed efforts still bore fruit in leading him to his contributions on spontaneous orders and the (verbal) theory of complex phenomena. This work anticipated contributions by others who were more technically trained.

Metaphorical Transcendence: Notes on Levinas's Unpublished Lecture on Metaphor

ABSTRACT In his published work, Levinas only mentions metaphor for the sake of dismissing its relevance to his ethics of transcendence. Metaphor is aligned with the poetic imagery and the rhetorical devices that weave together an ontology of immanence, whereas transcendence is said to occur through an immediate encounter with the other. But Levinas's unpublished lecture “La Métaphore” is of interest precisely because it troubles this distinction through the notion of a “metaphorical transcendence.” Although Levinas abandons this terminology after his lecture, this article suggests that an implicit, but unavowed, operation of metaphor persists in the guise of his ethics of substitution.

Framing Rawls's Democratic Vision

In this essay I draw from Rawls's archived papers to set out several too often under-appreciated elements of Rawls's distinctively democratic vision.Many readers of Rawls’s published works assume that what most distinguishes his work is his substantive conception of justice. To be sure, it is in certain respects distinctive. But even some of its most distinctive elements – e.g., the difference principle, the lexical ordering of principles of justice and the idea of the basic structure as the first subject of justice – had been anticipated. Some readers find most distinctive the larger (and allegedly shifting) argumentative context of Rawls’s work, whether the universalist and metaphysically ambitious Kantian contractualist framework alleged to frame his early work or the historicist and arguably relativist Hegelian hermeneutic framework alleged to frame his later work. For those exploring Rawls’s archived unpublished papers, lecture notes and letters, what emerges as most distinctive is a consistently maintained set of methodological and meta-philosophical commitments constituting and framing a democratic vision. In this short essay, I briefly sketch a few of these.

Eliot and Bergson: “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” and the Intractability of Dualism

In 1910–1911, T. S. Eliot studied Henri Bergson’s books and attended his lectures in Paris. Initially fascinated by Bergson’s ideas, Eliot experienced what he called a “conversion” to Bergsonism, but as shown by poetry and prose written during and after the lectures, he quickly became disillusioned. This essay discusses the Bergsonian claims that intrigued Eliot in the winter of 1910–1911, the skepticism revealed in “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” and other poems dated March 1911, and the critique presented in a previously unpublished lecture for the Harvard Philosophical Club in December 1913. Eliot concludes that dualism is intractable, for the material and moral realms cannot be merged. This conclusion, formative in his intellectual development, is illuminating in regard to his poetry and criticism. It is also suggestive in regard to the more general modernist motif regarding the difficulty of making connections.

Fractional Laplacians on domains, a development of Hörmander's theory of μ-transmission pseudodifferential operators

Let P be a classical pseudodifferential operator of order m∈C on an n-dimensional C∞ manifold Ω1. For the truncation PΩ to a smooth subset Ω there is a well-known theory of boundary value problems when PΩ has the transmission property (preserves C∞(Ω¯)) and is of integer order; the calculus of Boutet de Monvel. Many interesting operators, such as for example complex powers of the Laplacian (−Δ)μ with μ∉Z, are not covered. They have instead the μ-transmission property defined in Hörmander's books, mapping xnμC∞(Ω¯) into C∞(Ω¯). In an unpublished lecture note from 1965, Hörmander described an L2-solvability theory for μ-transmission operators, departing from Vishik and Eskin's results. We here develop the theory in Lp Sobolev spaces (1<p<∞) in a modern setting. It leads to not only Fredholm solvability statements but also regularity results in full scales of Sobolev spaces (s→∞). The solution spaces have a singularity at the boundary that we describe in detail. We moreover obtain results in Hölder spaces, which radically improve recent regularity results for fractional Laplacians.