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, […]

CPKP talk, followed by a discussion and reception. The event will also be available on Zoom. Request the link at sickenberger@uni-potsdam.de

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 […]

CPKP talk, followed by a discussion and reception. The event will also be available on Zoom. Request the link at sickenberger@uni-potsdam.de

One of the distinctive Kantian doctrines is that human reason has an interest to possess ultimate explanations that make everything intelligible according to principles. When uninhibited by a critique of reason these interests yield the illusory pretensions to attain theoretical knowledge about the transcendental ideas of reason, such as God, the world-whole, the soul and […]

Thomas Khurana – Absoluter Idealismus der Rezeption: Eine Einleitung Lara Ostaric – Spontaneity, Receptivity in Schelling’s, Schopenhauer’s Conception of Creative Agency Alexey Weißmüller: „Das absolut-Concrete, die Nacht des Selbst“ Bemerkungen zu Hegel und dem Schacht Birgit Sandkaulen – Die absolute Reflexion und ihre Kritik in drei Modellen Christoph Menke und David Wellbery – Ästhetischer Idealismus […]

The idea of the conference is to bring together scholars who can shed light on the philosophy of nature in the epoch between  XVIII and XIX century Germany, which saw classical German philosophy, romantic Naturphilosophie as well as natural sciences all embarking upon the exploration of natural phenomena. All these philosophical movements and individual thinkers […]

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

More than fifty years after his death, the legacy of Theodor W. Adorno is still highly controversial. Many see him as a philosopher of uncompromising negativity, of gnostic darkness, and also of all-encompassing, standardless criticism. Even among the wider public, the image of the thinker of totalizing despair, of “there is no right life in […]

According to the well-known Hegelian dictum, philosophical knowledge seeks to recognize the rationality in conditions that have already gained their full actualization: it paints »gray on gray.« In Negative Dialektik, Adorno takes exception to Hegel’s claim, because it would seem to prohibit the possibility of critique: »Consciousness,« he writes, »could not despair at all over what […]

If it is true that the mind is a socially distributed power, then the form of the mind seems to depend essentially on the structure of our social interaction. Against this background, the question arises as to what social structure characterizes the computing machines that increasingly determine our social life and behaviour. This question can […]

CPKP Talk followed by a reception in House 11

Abstract: In my talk I explore the philosophical grounds of Benjamin’s aesthetics by relating them to the legacy of Kant and German Idealism. In particular I will focus on his relatively unknown early theory of painting. In so doing I wish to rethink not only such philosophical concepts as intuition, imagination, form, construction and space, but also relate them […]

FINES HOMINIS LECTURE “TOWARDS A NEW FOUNDATION FOR PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY”, to be held ad University of Potsdam (April 18, 2024 16-18h – Universität Potsdam, Haus 11, Raum 0.09) Philosophical Anthropology, sometimes confused with a theoretical humanism both by its supporters and adversaries, has been torn in the 20th century between naturalistic and historicist tendencies. It […]

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 […]

Thinking, Socrates once taught, is “the mind’s conversation with itself”, addressing these words to a pupil in the midst of conversation. In one of Cavell’s takes on this scene, he describes the teaching of later Wittgenstein, one of his own foremost mentors, as a continuous re-staging of the lesson that “philosophy does not speak first”. […]

Talk followed by a discussion and a wine reception

In her lecture, Bremner shows that the paradigm form of alienation for Marx is not the alienation of labor, but a radicalized form of conceptual abstraction that serves, on Marx’s analysis in Capital, as a transcendental condition of possibility for the capitalist economic form. She analyzes Marx’s critique of this condition by comparing it to Rousseau’s […]

Heidegger claimed that Western philosophy ended, failed even, in the German Idealist tradition. In The Culmination, Robert B. Pippin explores the ramifications of this charge through a masterful survey of Western philosophy, especially Heidegger’s critiques of Hegel and Kant. Pippin argues that Heidegger’s basic concern was to determine sources of meaning for human life, particularly those that had been obscured by Western philosophy’s attention to reason. The Culmination offers a new interpretation of Heidegger, German Idealism, and the fate of Western rationalism. At our book symposium, we will critically discuss Pippin’s forthcoming book.

With Sabina Bremner, Anton Ford, Eli Friedlander, Matthias Haase, Alec Hinshelwood, Thomas Khurana, Karen Ng, Christoph Schuringa, Michael Thompson, Lea Ypi and others.

In her CPKP talk, Zhang Shuangli will explore the interrelation of Hegelian Marxism and Marxist Hegelianism. Regarding “Hegelian Marxism”, she will start from the reconstruction of Georg Lukacs’ articulation of Hegelian Marxism in History and Class Consciousness, and then investigate as to how this framework has been differently adapted by German critical theorists (especially Horkheimer, […]

Recently, there has been increasing interest in the relation between epistemic injustice and the concept of recognition. The main idea is that practices of silencing and epistemic exclusion have consequences that go well beyond the epistemic dimension and that influence our social practices of giving respect, esteem, and love. The conference is part of the […]

In recent years, there has been a wave of thoughtful and considered critical responses to scientific naturalism and more ‘liberal’ varieties of naturalism. However, the multitude of such possible avenues to tackle the issue of naturalism and the breadth of human life – as opposed to more ‘technical’ matters – appears to lack unity. This conference, therefore, aims is to bring together researchers from a number of these various camps, whose ultimate interests in the topic are geared towards critically reflecting on the deeper significance of the naturalism debate for human life itself.

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 […]

THE POLITICS OF BEGINNINGS At a moment when many suggest that the end of an era has been reached, and when struggles against climate change, exploitation, neocolonialism, patriarchy, and racism proliferate, what role can Arendt’s account of political beginnings play in the conceptualization of a new time? Arendt has been celebrated as a key theorist […]

CPKP Talk by our Senior Humboldt Fellow Anton Ford (University of Chicago), followed by a wine reception.

With Moran Godess-Riccitelli, Johannes Haag, Naveh Frumer, Benjamin Pollock, Thomas Khurana, Paul Franks, Gilad Nir, James Conant

We live in a time of past revolutions and failed attempts at liberation. At the same time – or precisely because of this – the concepts of liberation and revolution retain a political potential for our present. But how exactly are we to understand the relationship between revolution and liberation? Can true liberation be realized […]

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.

This international conference will articulate the “Anthropocene” as a philosophical problem. It will determine the extent to which the current crisis challenges our philosophical self-conception and offer avenues for overcoming the this self-conception. More importantly, it aims to develop conceptions of a new politics of nature. With Andreas Malm, Christoph Menke, Rupert Read, Oxana Timofeeva, Slavoj Žižek, and others.

The FINES HOMINIS LECTURE 2022 will be held by Prof. Andrea Kern (Leipzig). The lecture addresses the question what it means to lead the life of an “I”. Following Hegel, it develops a conception of a self-conscious form of life according to which the reality of such a form of life is at stake in every moment of thinking. This is what it means that the concept of the human being is not the concept of something finite, but of something “absolute”.

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.

Hardly any thought is as defining for Kantian and post-Kantian thought as the idea of the unity of freedom and law. At crucial points, however, this very same tradition argues for the counter-idea: that the reality of autonomy in the human being requires a freedom from and against the law. What is the relation between these two ideas and how can they be reconciled? With Brady Bowman, Peter Dews, Michelle Kosch, Andrews Reath, Francey Russell, and others.

What is at stake in the contrast between a phenomenological approach to the living being and a “logical” approach? In this lecture, Robert Pippin will defend Heidegger’s claim that Hegel leaves unexplained the original availability of the living/nonliving distinction in human experience.

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.