Tag: history
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Philosophy of Right: Reconstitution
Preface One hears, even from those who appear most intent on taking philosophy seriously, the familiar refrain that form is something external, indifferent to the matter itself, and that everything depends only on the “thing” or “content.” One further hears the vocation of the writer—especially the philosophical writer—defined as the discovery of truths, the stating…
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The Discipline of Civilization: Sloterdijk on Domestication, Spheres, Europe, and Philosophical Distance
In the provided interview-documentary philosophy is treated less as a storehouse of doctrines than as a contested social function: a practice that owes an account of its utility, its authority, and its freedom under modern conditions. Within a carefully edited alternation of interviewer prompts, narrated contextualization, and Sloterdijk’s own self-characterizations, the film constructs a description…
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The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free
At the center of The War on Warriors lies a problem that is neither narrowly political nor merely institutional but existential: the degradation of the very principle by which a republic sustains the moral and functional distinction between those who defend it and those who are defended by it. The book examines the dissolution of…
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Origins of Modern Japanese Literature
Origins of Modern Japanese Literature analyses the historical constitution of “modern literature” by treating it as an institutional and epistemic formation whose apparent self-evidence is produced through determinate operations of perception, language, and social organization. Karatani’s distinctive contribution is in a method that reconstructs “origins” as effects of inversion: the modern system retroactively posits the…
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From Stanford to Harvard: Campus Conflict as a Proxy for Civilizational Legitimacy
At the inaugural Conservative and Republican Student Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Peter Thiel—introduced by the host as a prominent technology entrepreneur and investor—used his keynote to revisit a set of campus conflicts from his years as a Stanford student in the late 1980s and early 1990s, arguing that those disputes anticipated larger and more enduring…
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The University Against the Future: Peter Thiel on Stagnation, Risk, and the Return of Total Control
At a Stanford Academic Freedom Conference in early November 2022, Peter Thiel was introduced by Stanford faculty member Russell Berman as a technology entrepreneur and investor with an unusually visible public profile, associated with PayPal, Palantir, Founders Fund, and early involvement in Facebook. Berman situated Thiel’s presence within a longer arc of campus controversies and…
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The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State
Michael Steinberger’s The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State offers a rare, methodically reported, philosophically alert portrait of a firm whose practical vocation consists in rendering heterogeneous worlds legible to power. Its contribution lies in treating Palantir’s rise neither as a purely technical success story nor as…
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Peter Thiel at Cambridge Union
Peter Thiel appeared at the Cambridge Union on May 8, 2024, for a talk and extended discussion that combined institutional critique, political economy, and a characteristic skepticism toward fashionable explanatory frames. Speaking as a technology entrepreneur and investor—known for co-founding PayPal and Palantir and for early involvement with Facebook—Thiel used the setting to revisit arguments…
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Hegel’s World Revolutions
Richard Bourke’s Hegel’s World Revolutions claims that Hegel’s historical and political philosophy yields its central diagnostics only when reconstructed through the sequence of revolutions that, in Hegel’s account, generate modern freedom while repeatedly placing it at risk. Bourke’s distinctive contribution lies in combining source-driven intellectual history with conceptual analysis in order to reinsert Hegel into…
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‘Opera’s Second Death’ by Slavoj Žižek & Mladen Dolar
Opera’s Second Death is not simply a philosophical reflection on opera, but as a sustained theoretical experiment in which opera is treated as a privileged site for thinking some of the most intractable problems of modern philosophy: death and repetition, enjoyment and loss, subjectivity and its dissolution, the relation between symbolic order and bodily excess,…
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Cosmopolitan Right at the Borderline: Strict Hospitality, Material Interdependence, and the Juridical Conditions of Peace
Roberta Picardi’s lecture advances a precise scholarly stake: it seeks to determine, within Kant’s Perpetual Peace and the juridical architecture presupposed by it, what cosmopolitan right is as a peace-promoting factor when its content is explicitly restricted to “universal hospitality.” The distinctive contribution consists in a methodical narrowing that refuses two familiar assimilations at once:…
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The Outside Within: Kant’s Unjust Enemy as an Institution of Peace Through Exclusion
Petar Bojanić’s lecture intervenes in a persistent fault-line of modern practical philosophy: the way juridical language, political theology, and strategic reasoning converge upon a figure—the “unjust enemy”—that promises to secure peace by authorizing destruction. Its distinctive scholarly contribution lies in a reconstruction that is simultaneously genealogical and diagnostic: it treats hostis iniustus less as a…
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War as Self-Conscious Negativity: Contradiction, Mediation, and the Practical Work of Drawing Limits
Yuval Kremnitzer’s lecture intervenes in a familiar moral certainty—war’s futility—by converting that certainty into a determinate philosophical problem: the mismatch between war’s overwhelming gravity and the thinness of the concepts and speech-forms through which modern publics try to grasp it. Its distinctive contribution lies in treating this mismatch as more than a rhetorical discomfort. The…
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Ewiger Friede on the Earth’s Surface: Aesthetic Testimony, Historical Complicity, and the Inherent Negativity of Peace in Kant
Anna Enström’s lecture proposes a reorientation of the contemporary reading of Kant’s peace theory by binding Zum ewigen Frieden to an aesthetic and material reflection on surfaces: the textual surface of the essay, the earthly surface that grounds Kant’s cosmopolitan right, and the historically sedimented surface of Europe’s war architecture as it reappears in Elle-Mie…
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Perpetual Peace as Rational Capacity: Nature, Antagonism, and the Exercise of Reason in Kant’s Political Philosophy
The lecture Kant on Perpetual Peace as Capacity proposes that Kant’s idea of perpetual peace must be grasped neither as a naturally given condition of human coexistence nor as a merely regulative horizon that forever eludes realization, but as a rational capacity whose very being consists in its exercise under historically and politically concrete conditions.…
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Hostility, Personhood, and Commerce: Reconstructing Kant’s Cosmopolitan Right to Be Spared Hostile Treatment
The lecture advances a precise and demanding thesis: that Kant’s sparse formulation of cosmopolitan right in the third definitive article of Toward Perpetual Peace contains, once read through the lens of his practical philosophy, a normatively complex and structurally ambivalent right not to be treated with hostility. Corinna Mieth’s contribution lies in reconstructing this right…
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War in Kant’s Political Philosophy: Alexei N. Krouglov on the Limits of a Pacifist Reading
Alexei N. Krouglov’s lecture examines Kant’s understanding of war in order to clarify, and partly correct, the widespread image of Kant as a straightforward pacifist whose treatise Perpetual Peace anticipates the international order of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Krouglov argues that this reception is one-sided: alongside the tradition that reads Kant as a prophetic…
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Žižek’s Quantum History: A New Materialist Philosophy
Žižek’s Quantum History: A New Materialist Philosophy stakes its claim on a double front: it proposes a reconstruction of materialism adequate to contemporary quantum physics and, inseparably, a reconstruction of historical and political agency under conditions in which no neutral standpoint outside quantum indeterminacy and symbolic distortion is available. The book’s distinctive contribution lies in…
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Beckett, Lacan, and the Gaze
The book advances the claim that Beckett’s visual universe can be described neither through a general theory of “modernist perception” nor through a simple psychoanalytic allegory of seeing, but only by reconstructing the specific way in which the gaze functions as an impersonal, structuring dimension where subject and world fail to meet. In forming a…
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Beckett, Lacan, and the Voice
Brown’s Beckett, Lacan and the Voice stakes its claim on a very precise terrain: it proposes that Beckett’s entire œuvre can be re-read if one takes seriously the Lacanian thesis that the voice is a specific psychoanalytic object—neither pure sound nor mere vehicle of meaning, but the residue of language that both grounds and unravels…
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Susan James presents ‘When does Truth Matter? The Politics of Spinoza’s Philosophy’
This lecture explores a central tension in Baruch Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus: how can theology and philosophy be both strictly independent and yet arranged in a clear hierarchy of cognitive and ethical excellence? Written in the highly charged political and religious climate of the Dutch Republic, the Theological-Political Treatise was a polemical intervention in defence of…
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Aaron Garrett presents ‘Knowing the Essences of State in Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus’
Spinoza’s political philosophy is often treated as detachable from his metaphysics and epistemology, as though the Ethics and the Theological-Political Treatise (TTP) addressed fundamentally different projects. This talk challenges that division. Reading the Ethics together with the TTP and the Political Treatise, it argues that Spinoza’s political theory is organised around a robust, though rarely…
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Catherine Malabou presents ‘Before and Above: Spinoza and Symbolic Necessity’
In the Theological-Political Treatise, Baruch Spinoza elaborates a daring conception of revelation in which God is nothing other than the immanent order of nature, and prophecy is rooted in the imagination rather than in a privileged speculative intellect. Prophets do not receive transparent concepts but vivid images and signs shaped by their temperament, prior beliefs,…
Simon Gros 