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Sublimity, negativity, and architecture. An essay on negative architecture through Kant to Adorno
(2015)
Architecture defines and consumes people. It exposes them to a multitude of varieties of different aesthetic engagements. Architecture becomes a lived experience. However, this lived experience is always caught in the inner workings of the social and more specifically within cultural ideology. In modern capitalism, culture pervades every aspect of our lives. It shows its presence everywhere from our own homes to the public streets. Culture is everywhere, and architecture is a tool used for both the benefit and detriment of the “culture industry”. Kant speaks of the sublime as a profound moment of reason realizing its ability to overcome its own limits. In this experience is it possible to be completely ravaged and descend into hades and melancholy? Is there a beauty in this descent? More specifically, can architecture become banal or pedestrian, uplifting or depressing? According to Theodor Adorno, our subjectivity is defined by the constant dialectical struggle between freedom and unfreedom (among other things). It is realizing our freedom in the face of our unfreedom that makes us truly able to attain some form of resistance. The sublime experience can be transformed into a spirit of revelation and beautifully allow us to in a way resist the one-dimensional tendencies of modern capitalism. Architecture, which is immersed in our societal being and contributes to many of our own subjective unfreedoms, comes to define our lives as inhabited space. When does architecture produce a sublime experience? Can architecture’s authentic “aura” stand out amongst the reproduced city and produce a sublime feeling that can be a form of resistance against the culture industry? Does Grand Central Terminal provide the key to an architecturally sublime experience? Using dialectical experience and examining the sublime feeling (in a critique of the Kantian sublime) as the key to breaking through the culture industry’s banal architectural hold on our subjectivity, this essay will examine the experience of the sublime as a key to unfolding resistance in the face of the banality of modern architecture in the city and opening our minds to the Great Refusal through the exploration of Grand Central Terminal.
‘Being with oneself in the other’ is a well-known formula that Hegel uses to characterize the basic relation of subjective freedom. This phrase points to the fact that subjects can only come to themselves if they remain capable of going beyond themselves. This motif also plays a significant role in Hegel’s philosophy of art. The article further develops this motif by exploring the extent to which this polarity of selfhood and otherhood is also characteristic of states of aesthetic freedom. It does not offer an exegesis of Hegel’s writings, but attempts to remain as close as possible to the spirit of Hegel’s philosophy – with some help from Kant and Adorno. The argument begins with some key terms on the general state of subjective freedom in order to distinguish it from the particular role of aesthetic freedom and then, finally, drawing again on Hegel, works out the sense in which aesthetic freedom represents an important variant of freedom.
In my paper, I intend firmly to criticize Taubes' interpretation of Benjamin's Theology as a modern form of Gnosticism (Benjamin as a modern Marcionit). In a positive way, I sustain rather the thesis that Benjamin's Messianism is in close connection with his conception of reason (“the sharpened axe of reason”) and, in particularly, with the paradoxical unity of Mysticism and Enlightenment, which, according to the famous definition of Adorno, distinguishes his thought. As a radically anti-magical and anti-mythical conception of the historical time, Benjamin's Messianism has to be considered as an original synthesis between motifs of the mystical tradition of the Jewish Kabbalah and motifs belonging to the rationalist tradition of the Jewish philosophy. Moving from Cohen's standpoint of a continuity between Maimonides and Kant, I consider therefore the affinity between his messianic conception of history and that of Benjamin. Both, Benjamin and Cohen, share, together with the reference to the a priori of the idea of justice, the reference to the Kantian connection between rationality and hope. Hence originates the non-eschatological Messianism of both. Motives of difference between Cohen and Benjamin’s messianic idea are to be found, conversely, in their different way to consider the idea of "the infinite task" and of its infinite fulfillment in the context of the historical time. Unlike the fundamentally ethical interpretation that Cohen gives of this relationship, Benjamin understands it ontologically in a monadological sense. This explains the constitutive relationship that exists, in Benjamin's philosophy, between Origin, Fragment and Revelation. In the light of this connection, Benjamin's messianic understanding of the historical time exceeds the Scholemian alternative between a restorative and a utopian conception of Messianism. Consequently, the Krausian motto “Ursprung ist das Ziel” (“The Origin is the Goal”) displays its truth in the idea of the messianic fragment or spark.
In the nineties, Habermas redirected his political writings to the post-national constellation (global and European) and the possibilities of a society politically integrated through transnational democracy (or post-national democracy). This thematic reorientation took place on two fronts. The first one is the global transnational democracy, which includes the impacts of the economic globalization on national democracies, as well the proposal for a political Constitution for a pluralistic world society, based on a constitutionalization of international law. The second one is the European transnational democracy, which includes the redefinition of the political profile of European welfare state for an economic liberal profile, as well the paradox of democratic technocracy operated by European institutions and the proposal to overcome the decoupled technocratic policy model. This paper will address only this last topic, describing the reasons of the democratic deficit and the consequent delay of European political Union. Despite numerous reforms, the technocratic policies have not eliminated the discrepancy between centralization and democratization, and mistakenly indicate another direction further reinforcing the problem of European undemocratic institutions. In contrast, Habermas argues that the democratic deficit could only be overcome replacing the technocratic approach by a deeper democratization of European institutions.
The subject matter of this article is Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition as it has been exposed in his more recent book, Das Recht der Freiheit. Throughout the paper his attempts to describe injustices within modern capitalist societies using the notions of pathologies and anomie will be analyzed and criticized, especially from the viewpoint of their inability to deal with processes and contexts of disrecognition (Aberkennung). With help of this category, Honneth’s diagnosis regarding the moral progress in modern societies, as well as his notion of second order disorders, as injustices will be confronted and, hopefully, complemented.
The central aim of this dissertation is the defense of the metaphysical thesis of Physicalism against two anti-physicalist arguments, namely, the conceivability arguments and the knowledge argument. Both arguments confront Physicalism with apparently incompatible facts about consciousness, in particular, the so-called subjective character of consciousness. Both arguments depart from epistemic premisses to arrive at metaphysical conclusion that physicalism is false. This step will be justified through an inferential connection between conceivability and metaphysical possibility. The hypothesis is that the set of physicalist responses known as the Phenomenal Concept Strategy is the most promising way to respond to the anti-physicalist arguments. In this dissertation I have critically assed the so-called Phenomenal Concept Strategy and I have defended it from new formulated objections.
Historical scholarship on the sixteenth-century neo-scholastic debate about American Indians generally centers on the thought of Francisco de Vitoria. Focusing on Alfonso de Castro’s short treatise Utrum indigenae (1543), this paper challenges both an exclusive concentration on Vitoria as well as the received contention that the thought of the School of Salamanca rendered a single, unified view of Amerindians. In Utrum indigenae, Castro argued that American Indians should be instructed in liberal arts and theology thus constructing a strikingly different image of the peoples of the New World as compared to accounts by Vitoria or Francisco Suárez. While the historian Martin Nesvig has recently proposed an Erasmian humanist contextualization of Castro’s treatise, I argue that the image of American Indians presented in Utrum indigenae testifies to an alternative, novel way of writing about American Indians from within the framework of the School of Salamanca which has so far remained unnoticed.
The practical aim of this work is twofold. Firstly, it is to construct a theory of language based on historical-materialist premises, i.e. a theory which stresses the sociality and historicity of language, and finds in them the fundamental characteristics which make language one of the central phenomena of human life. Such a theory is inherently counterposed to the dominant theories and philosophies of language in the last century, be they Saussurean, idealistic, structuralist, psychologistic or Chomskyan etc. It also rejects vulgar materialistic accounts of language, where language is seen merely as a “reflection” of the economic base of society, as well as the version proposed in Stalin’s short pamphlet, Marxism and Linguistics, which sees language merely as a means of communication, regardless of society or class, therefore neutralised and consequently branded irrelevant for Marxist theory. In short, the first aim would be showing what language is not and what it cannot be by showing what it is.
The second aim is related to Marxist theory in general. Following the presuppositions of this work, a Marxist account of language proves to be an immensely important field of research for Marxism. The reasons are fairly simple, if one is willing to accept them: language is a certain type of social practice, it is related to the way people act, which also means that it is interconnected with consciousness, i.e. to the way people think and to the content of their thought. Language is ideological and political; it is an element of class rule and class struggle. Thus, understanding language should be of utmost importance for any socialist revolutionary project, as ideological struggle is central not only to a revolutionary period, but, perhaps even more, to a period where revolution is not even in sight. I do not wish to derogate other Marxist fields of research, but, on the contrary, to simply insist on their equal importance. Ideological phenomena should not be a secondary or inferior object of research to strictly economic phenomena, or vice-versa. In reality, those phenomena form a dialectic unity; only if theory follows suit, can a pregnant Marxist philosophy be formed.