Volume 62, Issue 1 - Schwerpunkt: Philosophische Edition

The central idea of this paper is that our contemporary historical awareness which is increasingly turning towards the future is accessible to philosophical reflection. This raises the question whether we need a new Philosophy of History which refers less to the past, but rather aims primarily at present and future problems. If thereby a moral responsibility for future generations is addressed, Philosophy of History then goes hand in hand with Future Ethics. By means of this programme I expressly follow the Philosophy of History since the European Enlightenment. This entails an ethical perspective since progress in history is not simply predicted, but is more or less explicitly declared as desirable tendency.

After a short history of the Akademie-Ausgabe der Werke Immanuel Kants, it is shown that the edition is incomplete in some essential parts: The central topic of the first part of the article is the Opus postumum. Here we have a new critical transcription which differs not only in the composition but even in many details. The second project is focused on Nachschriften of Kant’s lectures on Physische Geographie. The three volumes will show that Kant continually actualized the material for this complex area of problems, for which he presented the outlines of a new academic discipline (as he did too in his Anthropology). The other central topic is the new edition of the three Critiques. The second part of the article demonstrates principle steps of critical editing using the example of Kant’s third Critique, the Critique of Judgment.

The edition of the Corpus Hegelianum by disciples and friends of Hegel (1832 ff.) was an enormous achievement. It nevertheless shows grave shortcomings due to its instrumental usage in the disputes of that time. Thus since 1968 the Corpus is being replaced by the new edition “Hegel: Gesammelte Werke”. This edition contains Hegel’s published and posthumous works (vols. 1-22) as well as the transcripts of his lectures (vols. 23-30, in several fascicles). Taking Hegel’s “Lecture on the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit” as an example, part II of this paper presents the transcripts as conveying an abundance of novel texts, which, furnished with explicative annotations, can give us new insights into the ‘Berliner Hegel’.

Philosophical editions comprise part of the basic research within the humanities. The commission for the edition of Schelling’s work was founded in 1968 in the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and sees itself as a research centre overarching several institutions. The commission’s academic events are necessary in order to establish and maintain a productive relationship between philology and philosophy. This is why in the last three years alone the Schelling commission has arranged five conferences. One of the most important series of the historicocritical edition of Schelling’s work is dedicated to the literary bequest, whose analysis, compilation, and later publication is of great interest to the research on Schelling.

It is widely believed that we might be able produce life out of nonliving substances if we possessed the relevant knowledge. Thus synthetic biology is said to be on the way towards artificial life. But this is nonsense: “artificial life” cannot be thought. The idea that biological organisms could be produced reflects a misunderstandig of the concept “life”. Life is formally characterized by the fact that that which in the case of artifacts is three distinct activities - being something, producing it, and using it - is one. For a living being, to be is to be the source of its own activity through its own activity. Hence, if there is an activity of producing distinct from being what is produced - as would have to be the case in artificial life - what is thus produced is not life.

Artefacts are made whereas living entities generate themselves: the extent to which this distinction seems obvious is the extent to which it tends to transform the relation between living entities on the one hand and artefacts on the other into a contradiction, a tendency which in consequence conceals the intricate dialectics between φύσις and τέχνη. The aim of this paper is to develop the dialectical relations between life - in terms of living entities - and artefacts from a constructivist point of view. The explication of the functionalistic structure of an Aristotelian concept leads to a constructivist reconstruction of the epistemic relation between living entities and artefacts on the one hand and living entities and organisms on the other hand. The resulting argumentation avoids some restrictions of Aristotelian approaches as well as of their modern counterpart (i. e. synthetic biology).

In this interview, Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka reply to some questions and objections to their book Zoopolis (Oxford 2011). A distinctive feature of their approach is the idea that domesticated animals should be seen as cocitizens of our political community. Donaldson and Kymlicka discuss how this view of animal citizenship relates to issues regarding the right to vote, the right to political representation, and rights to residence and membership. The authors also explore how their political account of animal rights theory relates to theories of multiculturalism as well as conflicts between individual and group rights. Addressing these issues, they argue, requires attending to the agency of animals themselves, and not just treating them as passive moral patients.

My “Letter” collects some facts concerning the 20th century history of Hungarian Philosophy as a basis for understanding its situation now. Progressive and conservative systems of thought dominated the first half of the century alternately, until the post-war communist regime refused to tolerate independent thinking. The new regime after 1956 was unpredictably hostile or tolerant towards philosophical dissenters. All this resulted in a multifaceted philosophical life in the period after 1989. Its basic tendency has been a historical approach issuing in various disciplines like phenomenology and hermeneutics, analytical philosophy, postmodern thought, philosophy of religion, while ethics and aesthetics became disciplines in their own right. The “Letter” maps out some of the institutional bases of philosophizing as well as some of the dangers threatening independent philosophy.

In his critical review of Recht und Gewalt Andreas Fischer-Lescano has suggested that the critical insight into the paradoxical entwinement of law and violence should lead towards the utopian idea of a “transcendence” of law. The response to Fischer-Lescano rejects this idea as a false leveling of the - decisive normative - difference between law and society. This difference is the condition of possibility of law’s critical and hence transformative relation to society. The response thus defends the idea, brought forward in Recht und Gewalt by way of an interpretation of Benjamin’s formula of the Entsetzung of law, that the break with law’s fateful violence cannot consist in the “transcendence” but rather the “depotenciation” of law.