Events

In this incisive new work, Eli Friedlander demonstrates that Walter Benjamin’s entire corpus, from early to late, comprises a rigorous and sustained philosophical questioning of how human beings belong to nature. Across seemingly heterogeneous writings, Friedlander argues, Benjamin consistently explores what the natural in the human comes to, that is, how nature is transformed, actualized, […]

In various political and historical contexts, Hegel’s famous master-servant dialectic was used as a philosophical foundation to understand processes of liberation. Various aspects of Hegel’s dialectic were highlighted in order to relate them to our own experience of liberation or the failure of liberation. The result is a corpus of interpretations – such as those […]

Read-ahead. There will be short presentations, but the discussion will be based on written texts:

Do contemporary metaphysicians have an answer to the original Kantian question, an explanation of how their discipline is possible? Or did analytic philosophy return to pre-Kantian, un-critical, so-called ‘dogmatic’ metaphysics without answering the original Kantian critique? And if we return to the original Kantian question, and formulate it in the terms of contemporary metaphysics, does […]

If material is understood as an aesthetic category, it designates the material which is subject to aesthetic transformation. The category of material determines what works of art are made of. Since modernism, however, the question of what is suitable as artistic material and what qualifies it as such has itself become the subject of negotiation […]

In this workshop we will discuss Christoph Menke’s highly anticipated new book with him. On Menke’s account, freedom and domination are indissolubly intertwined, and liberation is not the prehistory of freedom, but freedom’s mode of actualization. This is illustrated by two exemplary liberation narratives: the Exodus narrative from Genesis 2 and the story of Walter White in the television series Breaking Bad.

What does it mean to argue that the human mind can only be understood on the basis of its natural history? It is a common notion that the project of such a natural history aims at a reductive explanation of the human mind. The workshop investigates Kant and the post-Kantian tradition in order to explore a different notion of natural history. With Sabina Bremner, Andrew Cooper, Illit Ferber, Eli Friedlander, Johannes Haag, Matthias Haase, Th. Khurana, Daniele Lorenzini, and others.

What is the significance of philosophical anthropology for Frankfurt School Critical Theory? The workshop discusses the ways in which Critical Theory critiques the project of Philosophical Anthropology and yet may rely on an implicit alternative notion of anthropology.