Tag: Philosophy
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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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Evil’s Actuality and the Modal Ground of Hope: Kantian Hylomorphism, Anthropological Standpoints, and the Structure of the Good
The lecture delivers an ambitious thesis: that the actuality of evil—conceived as the rational subordination of the moral law to self-love—discloses, in actu, the very modal structure that also makes the good materially possible, and thus gives warrant to hope for its predominance. Its distinctive contribution lies in rethreading Kant’s three guiding questions through a…
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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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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 